Dr. Joseph Warren died a martyr in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. To the enemy, his death was worth the death of 500 men, at least according to British Gen. Thomas Gage.
The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill by John Trumbull. Courtesy Wadsworth Athenaeum.
Warren was one of the key leaders of the patriot movement. So passionate was Warren’s dedication to the cause of liberty that he told his mother in the weeks before the battle,
Where danger is, dear mother, there must your son be. Now is no time for any of American’s children to shrink from any hazard. I will set her free or die.
Or maybe he had a death wish.
When the British taunted that the patriots wouldn’t fight, he declared, “I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!”
Joseph Warren
Joseph Warren was born June 11, 1741, in Roxbury, Mass., a prosperous farmer’s son. After graduating from Harvard he practiced medicine and surgery in Boston.
Marrying an heiress helped him acquire a stellar list of clients, including John Adams and his family. He once saved 7-year-old John Quincy Adams’ finger from amputation.
Warren also had Loyalist patients: the children of Thomas Hutchinson, British Gen. Thomas Gage and his wife Margaret. Some believe Joseph Warren had an affair with Margaret Gage after his own wife died. She may have tipped him off about the British plans to raid Concord and arrest Hancock and Adams.
Son of Liberty
Joseph Warren was gregarious, charming and a powerful speaker who enlisted in the patriot cause.
He played a leading role in the fight for independence, joining Sam Adams and John Hancock in the Sons of Liberty. In 1775, he won election as president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. In addition to practicing medicine in Boston, he gave speeches, wrote newspaper essays and authored the Suffolk Resolves, a bold declaration of resistance to British authority.
As a good friend of Paul Revere, he enlisted Revere and William Dawes to take their famous midnight ride.
Joseph Warren
On the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Joseph Warren sneaked out of Boston and led militia in harassing the British returning to the city. A musket ball struck his wig, nearly killing him. That’s when he told his mother he wouldn’t shrink from danger.
Warren returned to Boston, where he organized soldiers for the siege of Boston and negotiated with Gage.
Bunker Hill
On June 13, colonial leaders learned the British planned to send troops to take the unoccupied hills surrounding the besieged city. That night, 1,200 colonial troops stealthily occupied Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, on which they built an earthworks overnight.
Warren showed up the next day and asked Gen. Israel Putnam where the heaviest fighting would be. Commissioned a major general in the Massachusetts militia, he insisted on fighting as a private because he had no military experience.
Battle of Bunker Hill by Howard Pyle.
During the battle on June 17 he fought behind the earthworks until the patriots exhausted their ammunition. He stayed there to give the militia time to escape while the British made their final assault. A British officer recognized him and shot him in the head. Joseph Warren died instantly.
The British stripped his body and stabbed it beyond recognition, then threw him into a shallow grave with another patriot killed in the battle. Paul Revere later identified his body.
Inexpressible Grief
The next day his friend James Warren (no relation) wrote a letter to his wife, Mercy Otis Warren, about the battle and Joseph Warren’s death. The British, he wrote,
…are reinforced but have not Advanced, so things remain at present as they were we have killed many men & have killed & wounded about [six] hundred by the best accounts I can get. Among the first of which to our inexpressible Grief is my Friend Doctor Warren who was killd. it is supposed in the Lines on the Hill at Charlestown in a Manner more Glorious to himself than the fate of Wolf on the plains of Abraham. Many other officers are wounded and some killd. it is Impossible to describe the Confusion in this place, Women & Children flying into the Country, armed Men Going to the field, and wounded Men returning from there fill the Streets.
Had Warren lived, said Loyalist Peter Oliver in 1782, George Washington would have been ‘an obscurity.’
Of Joseph Warren, military historian Ethan Rafuse wrote, “No man, with the possible exception of Samuel Adams, did so much to bring about the rise of a movement powerful enough to lead the people of Massachusetts to revolution.”
* * *
Click here to order your copy today.
This story about Joseph Warren was updated in 2024.
19 comments
ewwwww!!
Hey I know that picture!
My family says that the name Warren is in our Lane relatives line because one of the Lanes was “standing right next to Dr. Warren when he died.” I wonder if it is possible to see Mr Lane in this painting?
[…] John Warren, whose brother Joseph had perished at Bunker Hill, made an assessment of the town after the British […]
[…] patriot in the American struggle for independence. A major general in the continental army, he died fighting with the militia at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Well known to the British, his death celebrated by […]
[…] we remember Warren as one of the first martyrs in the Revolutionary War after he volunteered for militia duty and was […]
[…] The Warren home was a frequent gathering place for such patriot leaders as Sam Adams, his cousin John and Mercy’s brother-in-law, Joseph Warren. […]
[…] trained from a young age in the patriotism of the American Revolution. John Hancock, John Adams and Joseph Warren congregated in his father's office. On the day before his 17th birthday, he refilled the china […]
[…] the Revolution he fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. He served in the Continental Army for seven years without a scratch. One of his daughters kept a […]
[…] was one thing of which she was certain: Their dear friend Dr. Joseph Warren had been killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill. John Quincy […]
[…] at the same time Grimshaw alleged the Lodge was founded with help from the Irish military lodge. Warren’s death June 17 of that year during the battle of Bunker Hill shut Hall off from that opportunity, Alleyne said. Hall also sought out several other options, […]
[…] to forget that it came at a steep cost—and not just to the Americans, who lost the incomparable Joseph Warren that day, but to the British and their Loyalist allies, who died in their hundreds. In The Break, […]
[…] British shot and killed Warren during the Battle of Bunker Hill. They then buried him in a mass grave without his uniform or […]
[…] At a time when only 20,000 people lived in Boston, overflowing crowds came to hear James Otis, Joseph Warren, John Hancock and Samuel Adams denounce the tea tax, impressment and the Boston […]
The part of the British officer, Major John Small should be noted in the painting. Small is shown deflecting a bayonet away from General Warren, who had been a friend before the hostilities broke out. Small returned to Great Britain after the war. Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Small_(British_Army_officer)
How interesting! Thank you for sharing.
[…] schools in America. Harvard Medical School, established in 1782 by John Warren, younger brother of Joseph Warren, Aaron Dexter and Benjamin […]
[…] the late 1760s, Revere formed a close friendship with Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston. The two men were members of the Masons, and they each had an interest in politics. Over the next […]
[…] Revere talks in his memoirs about meeting John and the other Sons of Liberty, like Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren, to start a revolution. The tavern isn’t exactly where it was back in the day, but absent the […]
Comments are closed.