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Thomas Gage

The Enigma of Dr. Benjamin Church

One man’s traitor is often another man’s patriot, depending on who does the labeling. Frequently the victor in a war dictates the label. But often the label is not that simple and clear. Such is the case of Dr. Benjamin Church, often called “America’s First Traitor.” The problem comes from the fact that “America” did not exist at the time of his alleged treason.

Dr. Benjamin Church

Benjamin Church

Benjamin Church was born in Newport, Colony of Rhode Island, British America, on Aug. 24, 1734. A Mayflower descendant through his ancestor Elizabeth Warren Church, his heritage was steeped in the founding of the New World. His father was a merchant. His grandfather, Col. Benjamin Church, played a prominent role in King Philip’s War and led the force that hunted down and killed King Philip.

Col. Benjamin Church, ca 1675

Being the son of a prominent, well-to-do family, much would have been expected of him. He went to Boston Latin School to prepare for Harvard, from which he graduated in 1754. He studied medicine in British America for a time before continuing the study in London. In England that he met and married his wife, Hannah Hill. After his return to Boston, he started a highly successful medical practice and was known for his medical and surgical skills.

By the 1760s Church began to be seen as a supporter of the burgeoning movement in Colonial America that would eventually lead to revolution. He became a prominent member of the Whig Party and was an intimate of Dr. Joseph Warren and Samuel and John Adams. The narrow telling of the story of the American Revolution has long fostered the myth that the intended purpose of the of the Patriot movement was dissolution of the union with England. But this is completely false. Most individuals who espoused the Patriot cause were not seeking to break their English bonds but to have perceived grievances redressed within the existing system. Open, armed rebellion was not a general cause celebre before 1775.

A Leading Patriot

Residing in Boston, Church became a trusted confidant of many of the prominent patriots. In the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, he treated some of the wounded and examined Crispus Attucks’ body. He was a skilled orator, and three years after the Massacre, he gave a spirited oration commemorating the event.

The Boston Massacre, engraving by Paul Revere

Church’s involvement in Massachusetts politics culminated in his 1774 election to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Thereafter, he became a prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety. To all outward appearances, Benjamin Church was a leading patriot, deeply involved in the cause. Church commanded such respect that in July 1775 the nascent Continental Congress appointed him the first director general and chief surgeon of the new Medical Department.

However, sometime in early 1775, Church began to spy for the British military, with direct links to Gen. Thomas Gage. It is not clear how much information passed between them before the fatal shots on Lexington Green. His motives are still not clear.

General Thomas Gage (John Singleton Copley)

Certainly, the British paid him, and he did maintain a lavish lifestyle that required a large income. Was money the primary motivation for his ostensible change of heart? Or did he grow disenchanted with n increasingly militant patriot cause? Or was it a combination of greed and disenchantment?

The Coded Letter

There is even some suggestion, without any real proof, that he was a closet Tory. It is not likely that the truth will ever be known. The one thing to remember – often conveniently overlooked – is that treason can be a two-way street. Under British law, the law of the land in the colonies, patriots plotting against the government hovered on the borders of treason. When they began an armed conflict against the government, then they openly committed treason under the British law that governed them.

Church passed his messages to General Gage through a series of messengers. Then in October 1775, one of Church’s former mistresses gave a coded message to a Rhode Island patriot, who turned it over to Gen. Nathanael Greene instead of passing it along. Greene then sent it onward to General Washington.

Washington had the coded letter given to two men good at puzzles. They independently deciphered the message and came up with identical results. The letter provided details of ammunition, recruiting, American strength, New York artillery and Bunker Hill casualties. It was a damning missive.

Nathanael Greene

The former mistress, described as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” was arrested and brought to Boston. Through her interrogation and clues from the letter, its author was identified as Dr. Benjamin Church. Church was immediately arrested and brought before the war council. He admitted to sending the letter, but professed innocence of any evil intent. Church claimed he sent it as a ruse to fool the enemy about the Americans’ real situation. He further claimed that nothing in the letter could not be gleaned from public documents and knowledge.

Despite his smooth talk, his lengthy protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears.

Church’s code. Photo courtesy National Park Service.

The Dilemma of Benjamin Church

The problem came when it was time to decide how to deal with him. It was one thing to call his conduct treason, but another to give it the force of law. In open rebellion, the Colonies could not simply fall back on British law and the articles of war adopted in Philadelphia said nothing about treason or espionage. In fact, under the current legal conditions, his actions did not rise legally to a crime of any kind. The easiest thing for Congress to do was strip Church of his appointment as Surgeon General and to turn Church over to the Massachusetts to decide his fate.

Church appeared before the Massachusetts House of Representatives to plead his innocence in an hour-long oration. Again, it fell on deaf ears. The House expelled him. But Massachusetts had the same legal problem as the Continental Congress. It had no laws governing treason, so it could not pass sentence. Congress simply ordered Washington to send him under arrest to Connecticut for indefinite confinement.

He was confined in a damp, dark cell, and specifically denied pen, ink and paper. He won a brief parole when several physicians attested to his poor health in confinement. But this release did not last long, as rioters sacked his Boston house. He returned to prison for his own protection. Efforts to use him in a prisoner exchange also failed. In 1778 he was released and sent in exile to Martinique. However, he never reached his destination as his ship was lost at sea. His wife and children made their way to London. There, the King granted her a £150 pension, over £30,000 today.

Treason or Not?

For 150 years, the single intercepted letter served as the only real proof of Church’s “treason.” Then definite proof emerged in General Gage’s papers showing that he spied for the British since at least the early part of 1775. Among the information passed on by him: the existence of Patriot arms in Concord. And the British paid him for all the information he gave them.

The question remains, however: Did he commit treason? Information passed to British authorities before April 19, 1775, when the Revolution broke out, would not have risen to the level of treason. Everyone was a British subject at the time so he could not have committed treason against any government.

It can be argued that he betrayed the trust of others. But that is not a crime. After April 19, 1775, from a British standpoint, the rebels committed treason against the Crown. So Church’s spying for British authorities, whether for money or not, served as patriotism to the mother country. Furthermore, at the time of his arrest, the colonies, while in open rebellion, had not declared independence.

Certainly, his contemporaries faced a quandary about what to do with him. Dangerous to the patriot cause, certainly, so they could not simply let him go free. But they didn’t find him guilty of anything.

Traitor or patriot? It depends on your point of view.

Bill Utley has a B.A. in History from Syracuse University and an M.A. in Criminal Justice from the University of New Haven. He has co-authored a book on the French history of Fort Niagara. Retired from the U.S. government, he is an Army veteran and Dr. Benjamin Church’s fifth cousin, seven times removed.

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How George Washington Recruited a Whole New Army Under British Noses

George Washington had a problem he believed no one had ever encountered before. On January 1, 1776, the Continental Army would disappear unless Washington recruited enough men to replace it.

Somehow, he managed.

It wasn’t quite like that.

His ragtag fighting force, strung out along the hills surrounding Boston, had bottled up British troops despite having little gunpowder, inferior weapons and no heavy artillery. Nearly all enlistments expired on December 31. But somehow Washington recruited a whole new army within firing range of the world’s most powerful fighting force.

On Jan. 4, 1776, he wrote a letter to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, to explain.

“It is not in the pages of History perhaps, to furnish a case like ours, to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six months together without — and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance, of Twenty off British regiments, is probably more than ever was attempted.”

George Washington Recruited by Congress

The Continental Congress authorized a standing army on June 14, 1775, and the next day named George Washington “captain general” of American fighting forces.

It took nine days for Washington to ride from Philadelphia to Cambridge, delayed by public demonstrations along the way. He arrived on July 2, 1775, 15 days after the Battle of Bunker Hill. He knew little about the battle, though he learned along the way that 1,000 British troops had perished during the conflict. They were still encamped on top of the hill, peppering the Americans with artillery fire.

Washington was dismayed at what he saw. Few soldiers had uniforms or tents, and they lived in shantytowns of lumber and cloth. Some lived in vacated Tory homes, in one case, 250 men to a house. They hadn’t dug latrines and the camps stank.

The officers were not only ignorant and quarrelsome but scandalously disobedient, wrote Washington’s aide Joseph Reed to Elias Boudinot on Aug. 13, 1775. “Many had proven themselves notorious cowards.”

It took him a week to find out how many men he commanded.

He thought he had 20,000. He had 16,500 and only 14,000 were fit for duty. The rest were sick or wounded. The british had 6,000, but he figured they could form a fighting force of 12,000 if they armed slaves and Loyalists left in Boston.

“We are in an exceeding dangerous situation,” he wrote to his friend Richard Henry Lee on July 10.

Gunpowder

In early August, Washington learned the shocking truth about his gunpowder supply. During a war council, he was told his men barely had enough gunpowder for eight, maybe nine rounds each.

For a half hour, Washington sat in silence before speaking again, reported one of his generals, John Sullivan.

From then on, Washington didn’t dare order a morning or evening gun fired. When the British bombarded his forces with cannonade he couldn’t order their fire returned.

General Gage by John Singleton Copley

Fortunately, the enemy couldn’t believe how bad things were, according to the journal of Elias Boudinot. A member of the Committee of Safety of Massachusetts knew the secret, wrote Boudinot. He deserted and went over to Gen. Thomas Gage, the British commander, and told him.

“The fact was so incredible that General Gage treated it as a stratagem of war and the informant as a spy, or coming with the express purpose of deceiving him and drawing his army into a snare, by which mean we were saved from having our quarters beaten up,” wrote Boudinot.

“Few people know the predicament we are in,” wrote Washington to his friend Joseph Reed.

Had they known, the American Revolution might have ended right then and there.

Countermoves

On November 16, Washington ordered a 25-year-old former bookseller named Henry Knox, a colonel, to ask Congress for cannon. If he couldn’t get any, he should go to Fort Ticonderoga, captured in May, to retrieve the heavy artillery.

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

He also sent two men – his muster-master general, Stephen Moylan, and Col. John Glover — to outfit privateers to capture unarmed enemy supply ships. On November 29, Capt. John Manley, commanding the privateer Lee, captured the British brigantine Nancy, along with thousands of musket, shot and a cannon.

Washington also knew about a lightly guarded cache of gunpowder in the British colony of Bermuda. So he asked Rhode Island Gov. Nicholas Cooke to send an armed vessel to the island to capture it. Cooke obliged, sending Abraham Whipple on the mission.

But the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. Congress also sent an armed vessel to Bermuda to steal the British store of gunpowder there. Bermudans who shared the colonies’ displeasure with Britain stole enough gunpowder to quadruple Washington’s supply. When Whipple arrived, the powder was already on its way to Washington.

The Army Dwindles

On October 31, King George III delivered a speech to Parliament declaring the Americans in open rebellion and asking for more troops to put down the uprising.

King George III

Winter was coming. Washington’s army had few blankets and no winter clothing. Enlistments started to expire on December 1 and every man could leave on January 1.

The patriotic fervor that inspired thousands to rush to Boston had worn off. Men started to flock back home. Whole regiments packed up and left.

By late November, Washington had only 3,500 men. “Could I have foreseen what I have, & am like to experience, no consideration upon Earth should have induced me to accept this Command,” he wrote in a Nov. 28, 1775 letter to Joseph Reed.

How Washington Recruited an Army

Enlistments came in slowly. News of the army’s harsh condition had spread. Washington, too, had introduced discipline: the lash, the pillory and the court martial.

And so the army offered a signing bonus: a dollar, big money in those days.

Joseph Plumb Martin described the allure of a dollar on a drum head.

A dollar deposited upon the drum head was taken by some one as soon as placed there, and the holder’s name taken, and he enrolled . . . My spirits began to revive at the sight of the money offered; the seeds of courage began to sprout . . . O, thought I, if I were but old enough to put myself forward, I would be the possessor of one dollar, the dangers of war notwithstanding.

Some enlistees tried to game the system, waiting until the last minute to enlist in the hopes the army in its desperation would raise the bounty.

On New Year’s Eve Washington had 9,650 men – about half of what Congress authorized.

Nathanael Greene

To minimize disruption, Washington asked the men who enlisted for 1776 to join their new regiment a few days before the new year. He asked dismissed soldiers to stay longer and called up militias to reinforce the army.

On Jan. 1, 1776, Washington ordered the soldiers who didn’t reenlist to their parade grounds. They were then sent home, leaving by the hundreds and thousands.

Gen. Nathanael Greene lost three-fourths of his brigade and had fewer than 700 men.

Slowly, the Continental Army returned to its strength of 1775. The British stayed put, failing to take advantage of their enemy’s weakened position. By March, Henry Knox would arrived with his noble artillery train, and the British would soon evacuate.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Capture of Nathan Hale, a Hidden History Surfaces After 224 Years

More than two centuries after Nathan Hale was hanged, a sharp-eyed librarian discovered the hidden truth about his capture.

Nathan Hale has long been a legend, the martyred hero of the American Revolution. Librarian James Hutson found out that another legendary American tricked Hale into revealing his spy mission.

Nathan Hale by Bela Pratt (Washington, D.C.)

Hutson in 2000 was chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress when the library received an unexpected gem: a history of the American Revolution written by a Connecticut Loyalist, Consider Tiffany. The Tiffany family had held the manuscript for generations when G. Bradford Tiffany donated it to the Library of Congress.

And in that manuscript James Hutson learned that none other than Robert Rogers captured Nathan Hale.

Robert Rogers

Robert Rogers was an Indian fighter well known to this day for his daring exploits as commander of Rogers Rangers. Described as ‘subtil and deep as hell itself,’ Rogers was a master of deceptions and ambushes.

The U.S. Army Rangers adopted his rules for guerilla warfare. Kenneth Roberts celebrated Rogers in his novel, Northwest Passage, later made into a film starring Spencer Tracy.

Gen. Thomas Gage

Some people, like Thomas Gage, couldn’t stand Robert Rogers. He gambled and sold himself out as a soldier. After the French and Indian War ended, Rogers was tried for treason, but exonerated.

He ran up debts from his gambling and landed in prison. After his release he went to London to capitalize on his fame. Then in 1775 he returned to America, looking to sell his services to the highest bidder.

What Might Have Been

If George Washington hadn’t avoided Robert Rogers, Nathan Hale might have survived the war. Hale and Rogers were both in the Boston area during the Siege of Boston.

Rogers was staying in Medford, Mass., 20-odd miles from his birthplace.

Hale served with Connecticut forces besieging Boston. He befriended Washington’s comrades Israel Putnam and Charles Lee.

Rogers tried to get an appointment with Washington at his headquarters in Cambridge. Washington kept his distance and asked Gen. John Sullivan to interview Rogers in Medford. Sullivan talked to the guerilla fighter twice and advised Washington to shun him.

Rogers eventually ended up with the British fleet off the Long Island coast, because British Gen. William Howe commissioned him to raise a battalion of rangers.

Nathan Hale, Miscast Spy

Historians conclude it was folly to send Nathan Hale to Long Island on a spy mission.

First of all, he came from Connecticut. Many Connecticut Loyalists had fled the rebel government or wanted to fight for the British. Connecticut Tory Moses Dunbar, for example, went to the gallows after signing up with the British army on Long Island.

Secondly, Nathan Hale had a Loyalist cousin, Samuel Hale, who served as a soldier with General William Howe’s forces in the New York area.

Thirdly, Hale stood out in a crowd because of his unusual height and his face scarred by gunpowder burns.

Finally, Nathan Hale was a rank amateur. He knew nothing about espionage, had no training, no code words, no secret ink. He simply went as a sacrificial lamb to a place where a Loyalist would likely recognize him.

Consider Tiffany

Consider Tiffany was a storekeeper in Barkhamsted, Conn., and a feisty Loyalist. He spent 15 months under house arrest. During, or soon after, the American Revolution, Tiffany wrote a history of the war that he never published.

The Library of Congress wanted to acquire the manuscript, wrote Hutson. That’s because no good New England Tory histories exist describing the American Revolutionary period.

About Nathan Hale, historians had ‘very few nuggets of hard intelligence and a great deal of … outright speculation,’ according to Maj. Gen. E.R. Thompson, an intelligence historian.

Nathan Hale, illustration, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

All that was certain was that Nathan Hale went ashore on Long Island sometime in mid-September 1776 and disappeared. And three nuggets of information:

An orderly book reported Hale was apprehended Sept. 21, confessed and was hanged on Sept. 22nd at 11 a.m.
A diary entry by British Lt. Frederick Mackenzie reported on the capture of Hale on Long Island.
A diary entry by Capt. William Bamford of the 40th Regiment of Foot, which surfaced in 1933, reported Maj. Rogers took Nathan Hale.

Also, Robert Rogers and his men hovered off the coast of western Long Island in 1776 from September 16 to 21, according to the log of the Halifax.

Capture of Nathan Hale

According to Tiffany, Rogers knew American spies on Long Island had a mission to learn if the Long Islanders sympathized with the patriots.

Robert Rogers (artist conception)

Rogers kept an eye on Hale, thinking him an enemy in disguise. Rogers put on his own disguise and visited Hale in his quarters. Then he told Hale he was troubled at being stuck on Long Island, where the inhabitants sided with the British. He suggested he wanted to spy on British troop movements.

The hapless Hale believed Rogers, his new best friend, and invited him to have dinner with him the next day. They met in a tavern, where Rogers brought three or four men who also pretended interest in spying for the Americans. As they talked, a company of soldiers surrounded the house and seized Hale. Hale denied his identity, but several Connecticut Loyalists recognized him. The British hanged him immediately without a trial.

So goes Consider Tiffany’s account of Nathan Hale’s capture. But should we believe it?

Wrote Hutson, it ‘fits the facts as we know them so well that one is tempted to accept it as being substantially true.’

This story about Nathan Hale was updated in 2022.

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The 40 Towns With the Exact Same Birthday: Aug. 23, 1775

On Aug. 23, 1775, 40 towns suddenly sprang into existence in the Province of Massachusetts, which then included the District of Maine.

With one sweeping declaration, the Massachusetts General Court declared that all districts, along with towns,

…have full right, power, and privilege to elect and depute one or more persons, being freeholders and residents, in such Town or District, to serve for and represent them in any Great and General Court or Assembly

Suddenly settlements from Woolwich in Maine to West Stockbridge in Massachusetts could send a representative to the Great and General Court.

The Great and General Court, however, had just come into existence as well. It all had to do with setting up a new government after the colony had decided to kick out the British.

40 Towns

Sam Adams

Things had gotten a bit chaotic in Massachusetts during that summer of 1775. Before then, the the General Court had resolved itself into the first Provincial Congress on October 7, 1774, The action followed the passage of the Intolerable Acts, which closed the Port of Boston and allowed the quartering of British troops in people’s homes.

Lawmakers met in Concord. They appointed Henry Gardner as receiver-general and organized the Committee of Safety for the colony’s defense.

The first Provincial Congress didn’t last, though. Two more short-lived Provincial Congresses followed. In May, after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Provincial Congress No. 3 asked the Continental Congress to clarify its status. At the same time it disqualified Thomas Gage as governor, something of a formality since militias had Boston under siege.

The Continental Congress decided Massachusetts had no governor, lieutenant governor or Governors Council. It urged the Massachusetts Bay towns to create a temporary government.

That’s exactly what the Massachusetts towns did. They elected a new General Court, which selected a Governors Council from its members. On July 19, 1775, they assumed the powers of civil government. Then on Aug. 23, 1775, the new government declared everything the previous Provincial Congress had done to be law. And it also created 40 new towns. Secretary Samuel Adams made it official.

New Governments

Most of the new towns in Massachusetts were located in central and western Massachusetts. Some had come about when groups of families struck out from the coastal towns to settle tracts of land “purchased” from Native Americans. New Braintree and New Marlborough, for example, got their names from their parent.

A few new towns owns split off from other towns, like Cohasset from Hingham and Wellfleet from Eastham.

Whatever, the case, 35 new towns in Massachusetts and five new ones in the District of Maine could now send representatives to the new General Court.

The 35 new towns in Massachusetts include:

Amherst, Charlton, Conway. Cohasset, Danvers, Egremont, Granville, Greenfield. Hubbardston. Huntington, Lenox, Ludlow, Monson, Montagu, New Braintree, New Marlborough, New Salem, Northborough, Northbridge, Oakham, Palmer, Paxton, Pepperell, Sharon, Shelburne, Shirley, South Hadley, Southampton, Southwick, Spenser, Wales, Ware, Wellfleet and West Stockbridge.

In Maine, the new towns of 1775 were Cape Elizabeth, Harpswell, Newcastle, Pepperellborough (changed to Saco in 1805) and Woolwich. (All Maine districts were accepted as towns by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1775.)

With thanks to King and People in Provincial Massachusetts by Richard L. Bushman, American Archives and The Massachusetts Archives. Photo: ‘Samuel Adams’ by John Singleton Copley. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Battle of Bunker Hill Throws Salem Into a Panic

Shortly before the Battle of Bunker Hill, Edward Augustus Holyoke sent his wife to Nantucket for safety. A respected doctor in Salem, Mass., people suspected him of loyalty to the king. He and his wife, Mary Vail Holyoke, had actually dined with Gen. Thomas Gage upon his arrival as military governor of the Province.

In May 1775, Holyoke and several other prominent Salem men published a statement retracting previous Loyalist–leaning comments. They also professed their dedication to the patriot cause.

Edward Augustus Holyoke, Salem doctor

Nonetheless, it seemed wise to send his wife to the island inhabited by peace-loving Quakers who, he presumed, claimed neutrality in the conflict.

On Nantucket Island, Mary Vail Holyoke learned from her husband the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill. According to her diary, she spent those anxious days visiting friends, dining with friends, having tea with friends. On June 17, she wrote:

At Sheep’s shearing. Tea at Mrs. Fitch.

Alarm in Salem

Her husband wrote her the next day to tell her the battle on Bunker Hill threw Salem into a panic. He wrote, ‘almost everyone is moving away.’ His change of heart begins to be evident in the letter. ‘Our men’ were the colonists, not the British army.

“Well, my dear, I am heartily glad you are not here just at this time; you would, I know, be most terribly alarmed,” he wrote. “We had an appearance yesterday of a most prodigious smoke, which I found was exactly in the direction of Charlestown and as we knew our men were entrenching on Bunker Hill there, we supposed the Town was on fire, and so in fact it proved.”

The evening before, he explained, the regulars had landed at Charlestown under cover of the smoke from the buildings they set on fire. They then “forced the Entrenchments on the Hill and had beat our men off with loss.”

That morning they learned that ‘400 of our men’ died, and the regulars pursued them as far as Winter Hill–2-1/2 miles away, now in Somerville. However, he wrote, he just now learned the regulars kept possession of Bunker Hill and the patriots had entrenched on Winter Hill. And, he wrote, “our loss amounts only to about 150 killed.”

The Battle of Bunker Hill alarmed the townspeople of Salem and Marblehead, 15 miles north of Charlestown. Wrote Holyoke:

The commotion here was so considerable, though none of our men went to ye Battle (as the northwest part of the Province and not the sea coast were called upon the occasion) that we had but one meeting house open in ye morning. —

Mary Vial Holyoke

Smoke

Holyoke then recounted how some met and others talked over ‘ye action’ of the day before when smoke appeared in Marblehead, the next town. .

That broke up ‘ye meeting,’ and “the people with their engines & buckets went over to extinguish the fire, and I among the rest.” He would have preferred not to go on account of the prodigious heat. But, he wrote, he owed the preservation of his own house to help from Marblehead during ‘the utmost hazard.’

So he went, but stopped halfway there when someone told them ‘ye smoke’ arose from a field of grass and didn’t harm any buildings.

“[S]o I returned home, and am now set down to rest and cool myself, and to give you this account,” he concluded.

With thanks to the Internet Archive. This story was updated in 2021.

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Joseph Warren Dies a Martyr in the Battle of Bunker Hill

Dr. Joseph Warren died a martyr’s death in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. According to British Gen. Thomas Gage , his death was “worth the death of 500 men.”

The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill by John Trumbull. Courtesy Wadsworth Athenaeum.

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.”

This story about Joseph Warren was updated in 2022.

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