Bunker Hill

was the obvious choice, but Warren’s confidence in Church appears to have been badly shaken over the course of the last month. With Church conveniently out of town, Warren had decided to seek out an alternative. Dr. John Jeffries had an excellent professional reputation and was a fellow member of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge at the Green Dragon; both he and Warren had served their apprenticeships under Dr. James Lloyd. Indeed, Dr. John Jeffries was the perfect candidate, except for the fact that he was, by all accounts, a loyalist. Warren, however, believed he had an offer that Jeffries, who was waiting for him on the docks, could not refuse.
    In his dual roles as leader of the Congress and the Committee of Safety, Warren was the one to whom prospective officers appealed when they were angling for a commission in the provincial army. John Adams later recalled how Warren “often said that he never had till then any idea or suspicion of selfishness of this people, or their impatient eagerness for commissions.” In the British army, an officer came from the English upper class and had to purchase his commission. In the new American army, however, no such social and financial qualifications existed. Instead of paying for a commission, an officer was expected to earn it by recruiting the sufficient number of men. This meant that, in the words of John Adams, “the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.” And as Warren now knew from firsthand experience, “there is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America.”
    But when he offered Jeffries one of these coveted commissions, he received an unexpected response. “I thought, Warren, that you knew me better,” the doctor said.
    “Don’t be so quick, Jeffries,” Warren replied, “
I
have a general’s commission in my pocket. We want you to be at the head of the medical service.” But even this was not enough, and the offer was declined.
    Jeffries, it turned out, was not interested in making it to the top of the provincial pecking order; he was a loyalist and therefore wanted to be a member of the British upper class in the larger imperial realm. In the years to come, he moved to London and did his best to work the English patronage system, attaching himself to anyone who might further a career that ultimately included being a part of the two-man crew that completed the first balloon flight across the English Channel in 1785. It was a fundamentally different approach to life from what was emerging in America, where the absence of a deeply rooted aristocracy meant that ambition had replaced deference as the way to get ahead.
    A few weeks before, Warren had written to Samuel Adams about just these issues. Soldiers searching Thomas Hutchinson’s house in Milton had come across a trunk of letters that revealed, Warren claimed, what had gone wrong with the former governor. Like Jeffries, Hutchinson was not content with what was available to him in provincial Massachusetts; he aspired to use his political office as a stepping-stone to greater glory that could only be found in England. The fault was not necessarily with Hutchinson, who, like all of them, was ambitious; the fault was with a government that required him to go against the wishes of his own people if he was to attain the ultimate prize of a lordship or some other royal preferment. “It is probable,” Warren wrote Samuel Adams, “that [Hutchinson] would have remained firm in [the people’s] interest . . . had there not been a higher station to which his ambitious mind aspired . . . ; in order to obtain this, he judged it necessary to sacrifice the people.” What was needed in America was a government in which “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people.” Instead of attaining membership in a group that existed above the people, the highest office in government should require an official to serve those people. “This being the case,” he wrote, “the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same.”
    Warren was describing a government whose leaders were beholden to what we have come to call “the will of the people.” An eight-year war and many additional years of compromise and struggle would be required to create a political system that approximated the ideal described in Warren’s letter to Samuel Adams. But as it turned out, Warren, caught in the paroxysms of a revolution even as he searched for his own place in that