The most important battle plan of the New England theatre of the American Revolution. It depicts in great detail the American and British fortifications and lines at the time of the British occupation of Boston. One of less than a dozen extant copies and one of only a very few signed in manuscript by Pelham. The “Mapping of Boston” described it as “One of the most beautiful maps of Boston ever produced … an invaluable source of information about the late eighteenth century Boston area”.

Henry Pelham was the son of the engraver Peter Pelham and Mary Singleton Copley, the mother of the famous American portrait artist John Singleton Copley. It is believed that Henry Pelham received lessons in the arts from his famous half-brother who was eleven years his senior. One of Copley’s most well known early portraits ‘Boy with Squirrel’ uses Pelham as the subject. Pelham worked in Boston before the Revolution as a portrait painter. He is described as “a man of personality, a constant companion in his younger days to his ‘brother [John Singleton] Copley’, and an artist to whom has never been accorded, in New England, the place to which his talents and position entitle him” (Slade).

Although like many an ardent Loyalist, the massacre of five Bostonians at the hands of the British on 5 March 1770 prompted Pelham to produce a sketch of the scene with the intention of publishing a print. Apparently before engraving and printing it, Pelham allowed the fellow Boston engraver Paul Revere to study it. A few days later, Revere engrave his famous “Bloody Massacre” broadside, prompting Pelham to send him an angry letter on 29 March 1770 accusing him of plagiarism: “When I heard that you was cutting a plate of the late Murder, I thought it impossible as I knew you was not capable of doing it unless you coppied it from mine and as I thought I had entrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of honour and Justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and trust I reposed in you … If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonourable Actions you could well be guilty of” (Pelham to Revere, 29 March 1770, quoted in Brigham).

Pelham would publish an engraving based on his original sketch a few days later. The broadside, entitled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power”, is virtually identical to Revere’s. Quite how Revere responded is not recorded, he may even have compensated Pelham for the work. However plagiarism was rife in the eighteenth century and previous few cite their source. Revere who was an undoubted patriot merely saw a wonderful insightful image and saw an opportunity to spread the word in print. He was an engraver, not an artist, and would not have been able to come up with the image himself. Pelham’s skills as an artist however are most certainly evident here in this beautiful map.

Pelham began work on it during the summer of 1775, following the Battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. In a letter to John Singleton Copley’s wife Susanna in London, Pelham reveals: “My business is entir[e]ly ceased. I have not now a single day’s business. But to fill up time I have begun a Survey of Charlestown, for which I have permission from Gen’l Gage and Gen’l Howe, who were polite eno’ to grant me a general Pass directed to all Officers commanding Guards for going to and returning from Charlestown. Gen’l How[e], to assist me in the labori[o]us part of Measuring, has kindly put a Sarjant and his 2 Men under my Commd. This Plan when finished will give a good Idea of the late battle [i.e. Bunker Hill] and I propose sending Home a Coppy to be engraved …” (Henry Pelham to Susanna Copley, 23 July 1775, quoted in “Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham”, 1739-1776 [hereafter Copley-Pelham], pp. 344-7). Interestingly, on the final published map the engraver misdates the Battle of Bunker Hill, showing the fort with the notation “Storm’d June 17, 1777” instead of 1775.

Besides his own surveys, Pelham apparently had access to those by Archibald Robertson, Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Engineers. Pelham evidently finished his work during the winter of 1776. He wrote to Copley on 27 January of that year detailing both his map and the toll taken by war on their beloved city: “My next [letter] perhaps will be accompanied with a plan of Boston and Charlestown which I have been surveying with the Country for three or four miles round this town. In this plan I lay down all the works which are erected to confine the Troops and Torrys to the narrow limitts we now range in: I don’t think if I had Liberty I could find the way to Cambridge, tho I am so well acquainted with the Road. Not a Hillock 6 feet High but what is entrench’d, not a pass where a man could go but what is defended by Cannon; fences pulled down, houses removed, Woods grubed up, Fields cut into trenches and molded into Ramparts, are but a part of the Changes the country has gone thro. Nor has Boston been free from the Effects of War. An hundred places you might be brought to and you not know where you were. I doubt if you would know the town at all …. there not a Tree, not an house, not even so much as a stick of wood as large as your hand remains. The very Hills seem to have altered their form …” (Copley-Pelham, pp. 367-8).

The plan was likely completed by Pelham sometime in March 1776 as indicated by the notation on the map showing the American “New Works” on Dorchester Heights. After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the British reinforced their position in Boston, with the American troops laying siege to the city. When the American troops entrenched themselves on Breed’s Hill overlooking the city, British forces attacked the elevated position. The June 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, although a victory for the British in that captured a key defensive position, came at a costly price with losses of nearly one third of their troops. Having captured that position, the remaining elevated position overlooking the city was Dorchester Heights. George Washington arrived in Boston in July 1775 and immediately recognized the strategic advantage of those hills. However, without enough fire power to hold the position, he resisted occupying the heights for fear that the British would immediately attack as they did on Bunker Hill. By the end of February 1776, however, Henry Knox arrived at Boston with the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga, which had been captured by Benedict Arnold the previous spring. Washington’s plan to break the British occupation was then unfurled. First, he established a battery in Cambridge on Lechmere’s Point, shown on the Pelham plan as a redoute on “Lechmere’s Farm”, with a second battery at Roxbury. Firing commenced from these positions on 2 March, and repeated for the following two nights. On the third night, under the diversionary firing from those batteries, Washington moved on Dorchester Heights, working throughout the night to fortify the position. Days later, realizing his outmatched position, Howe agreed to withdraw from Boston, giving George Washington his first victory of the American Revolution. “Pelham’s finished map shows these fortifications and the lines of fire emanating from them. But it also shows the towns surrounding Boston — what are now East Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Brookline, Roxbury, and Dorchester — in glorious detail with all the roads and every house. Pelham evidently did not obtain this information about the adjacent countryside from the Des Barres charts, for the two differ in some details, such as the number and location of houses. Perhaps Pelham surveyed all this countryside himself … [H]is map remains an invaluable source of information about the late eighteenth century Boston area — many of the roads are now modern streets and some of the houses still exist” (Mapping Boston). There are 16 lettered references keyed to churches, meeting houses and government buildings in central Boston and scale of miles in the lower margin. A Trompe l’oeil upper left is of a pass issued by James Urquhart to allow Pelham “to take a plan of the town’s of Boston & Charlestown and of the rebel works round those places”, held in place by a realistic depiction of a draftsman’s compass.

Soon after the British withdrew from Boston, Pelham left America to join his half-brother Copley in London as an American ex-patriot. The imprint suggests that Pelham himself saw the map onto the press, overseeing the engraving by Francis Jukes. One item of particular note in the engraving is the use of the newly invented process of aquatint. The Pelham map is among the most famous of all the maps of the American Revolution and is highly praised by authorities. Nebenzahl wrote: “Very good and extensive information including British and American fortifications in Charlestown and in and about Boston, with their lines of fire.” Deak adds: “Topographically accurate and handsomely executed, the plan of Boston Harbour by Henry Pelham was made for British intelligence purposes during the period when Boston was under siege. It is an unusually fine and comprehensive survey and, as such, constitutes an important document of the Revolutionary period”. These authorities cite just 12 known impressions, of which half are signed as is the present example. We could locate 8 of these: Library of Congress, Boston Public Library, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clements Library, Mount Vernon, American Antiquarian Society and the National Archives, London.

Brigham, ‘Paul Revere’s Engravings’, pp. 52-56; Deak, ‘Picturing America’ 148; Guthorn, ‘British Maps of the American Revolution’ 87-1; Krieger and Cobb; editors, ‘Mapping Boston’, p. 185; Nebenzahl, ‘Bibliography of Printed Battle Plans of the American Revolution’ 20; Phillips, ‘List of Maps of America’, p. 151; ‘Realms of Gold’ 699; Reps, ‘Boston by Bostonians’ in ‘Boston Prints and Printmakers’, fig. 26; Ristow, p. 244; Ristow, ‘Cartography of the Battle of Bunker Hill’, p. 278; Seller and Van Ee 935; Slade, ‘Henry Pelham, the Half-Brother of John Singleton Copley’ in the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, volume 5, pp. 193-211 (Boston: 1898); Stokes, ‘American Historical Prints’ B110.