During the First Continental Congress, the delegates universally approved a document read before them which opened with the audacious claim that “there are certain rights, to which we are entitled, in common with all mankind.” This document went on to list offenses of the British Crown and Parliament, admonishing the American colonies to “withhold all commercial intercourse with Great Britain” and raise local militias.
A year later, an article published in the Boston Evening Post argued that Americans were “compelled by the great law of nature to strike a decisive blow” against Great Britain, and “publish a manifesto to the world showing the necessity of dissolving their connection” with that nation.
The author of these writings was not Thomas Jefferson, though Jefferson would later draw on them in penning the Declaration of Independence.
The same day the above article was published, an orator armed with a pair of pistols and dressed in a Roman toga delivered a fiery speech in Boston’s Old South Meeting House. He declared before a large crowd, “Our enemies are numerous and powerful—but we have many friends, determining to be free, and Heaven and Earth will aid the resolution.”
This rhetoric could have been delivered by Patrick Henry or lifted from a pamphlet by Thomas Paine. But the orator was neither of these men. His speech, delivered in March 1775, reverberated through the colonies and contributed to the outbreak of war a month later.
A Humble Beginning
Joseph Warren was born in 1741 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the son of an apple farmer. He showed an affinity for learning early on, graduated from Harvard, studied medicine, and opened a medical practice in Boston. He developed important connections while treating the city’s citizens. As family physician to the Adams family, he even saved the broken forefinger of 7-year-old John Quincy from amputation.
Warren became more political as tensions with Britain mounted. Revolutionary organizer Samuel Adams noticed the young doctor and took him under his wing. Under Adams’s mentorship, Warren was soon playing an active leadership role in the Sons of Liberty. He tended to individuals wounded in the Boston Massacre and helped organize the Boston Tea Party.
Reviled by the British, Warren’s charisma nevertheless endeared him to his fellow colonials. He drew on his sea of personal contacts he established as a doctor to build a spy network that informed him of British operations. Thanks to this network, Warren learned of the plans to seize the powder stocks in Concord and of the bounty for John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington in April 1775. As the British soldiers began their march, it was Warren who tasked Paul Revere with embarking on his famous Midnight Ride to warn the countryside (along with William Dawes, who took another route).
He was more than a mere armchair committeeman. Upon hearing that a skirmish had broken out on the Lexington Green, Warren packed up his things and raced to participate. In the thick of the fight during the Battle of Lexington and Concord, a bullet grazed his head according to some sources, and shot off a lock of his hair.
Bunker Hill
Following Lexington and Concord, Warren became the most important patriot leader on the ground. While his collaborators were in Philadelphia, he coordinated armed colonists to besiege the British bottled up in Boston. Thanks, again, to his spy network, he learned the exact time and place that the British general Thomas Gage was planning an attack.On June 14, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress made Warren a major general. The day after, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted George Washington commander of the Continental Army. Each governmental body would learn of the other’s decision only after the bloodiest battle of the entire war was over.
The Battle of Bunker Hill is a misnomer—the colonials actually fortified a position on the adjacent Breed’s Hill. At this point, they still amounted to little more than a ragtag, motley crew of farmers and shopkeepers. Many of them were the same “minutemen” whom Gage had underestimated at Lexington and Concord two months earlier. Still, this was a pitched battle, not a running skirmish, and the colonials were frightened.
Gen. William Howe, Gage’s top subordinate newly arrived from Britain with thousands of fresh reinforcements, was confident this armed mob could be easily defeated. He formulated an aggressive strategy involving marching up the hill and using his superior numbers to storm the redoubt.
On June 17, Howe moved in. Gazing out at the British warships dotting Massachusetts Bay and the disciplined formations of red troops, the exhausted colonials knew they were outmatched. Some of the defenders started to desert as cannon fire from the ships exploded around them.
At this critical moment, Warren’s arrival on the scene caused an outburst of cheering among the men and averted further desertion. In his gentleman’s array of silver-dappled white waistcoat and breeches, he stood out like a sore thumb to British spyglasses. Gen. Israel Putnam and Col. William Prescott, the top colonial officers, both attempted to give up their command to Warren, but he refused. He would fight as a common soldier.
Gen. Howe—also leading his men in person—ordered the first wave of attack. The colonial militiamen allowed them to march within close range, then mowed them down with a musket volley. Warren had the best marksmen aim at the British officers, whose brilliant red uniforms were made from a higher-quality fabric than those of the rank and file, making them easy targets. A second wave attacked but was again repelled.
Then the final wave commenced. The British, stepping over bodies like “logs of wood,” stormed the redoubt under the support of artillery fire. The colonials, having run out of ammunition, met the charging bayonets with musket butts, stones, and fists. Warren was wounded but continued fighting, rallying the men at first and then covering them as they retreated. Then after leaving the redoubt—one of the last men to do so—he was fatally shot.
More Than a Martyr
The loss of Warren’s organizational competence was a severe blow to the patriot cause. George Washington, who admired Warren, had to sort through the disarray when he arrived to take command of the Continental Army two weeks after the battle. One of the many broken pieces to be picked up was the intricate spy network centered around Warren. Upon becoming aware of this, Washington would work to build up his own.
In the years throughout and immediately following the war, Warren’s memory continued to be revered, if more as a symbol of martyrdom than for any concrete contributions. In his diary, John Quincy Adams recorded an occasion in 1786 when some of his Harvard classmates gathered for a memorial meal on Breed’s Hill, setting up their table over “the very spot where the immortal Warren fell.” Adams himself did not attend, having witnessed the battle firsthand with his mother, Abigail, from a high vantage point near his home. He always attributed his ability to write to the medical magic that Warren worked in saving his finger as a child.
Though he did not live to see the colonies joined into a nation, Warren’s dream of an independent America was carried out by his successors. Not the least of Warren’s continued legacy is, of all things, the apple variety that bears his name—the Warren Russet, first grown by his father and still cultivated by direct descendants to this day. And as an apple orchard requires constant upkeep, so does the freedom Warren helped bequeath. He himself worded it best in the climactic lines of his second Boston Massacre Oration: “On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn.” It is a question that may still be asked of those living today.
