Bunker Hill

revolution, had seen the future.
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    Jeffries’s refusal to accept the surgeon generalship put Warren in a temporary bind, especially when Congress offered the post to
him
. Even before Lexington and Concord, Warren had “fully resolved that his future service should be in the military line.” Like General John Thomas, a doctor who had spurned the medical corps during the French and Indian War and become one of America’s finest officers, he wanted to fight. Congress dutifully submitted to their president’s will, and on June 14, he was chosen by ballot to be a major general. Warren might have complained to John Adams about the overweening ambitions of his countrymen, but that had not prevented him from claiming a rank that put him ahead of William Heath, the officer to whom he had attached himself during the fighting in Menotomy just two months before.
    On June 16, Ezekiel Price of Stoughton recorded in his diary that “Dr. Warren was chosen a major general” and that “Heath was not chosen any office, but it was supposed that no difficulty would arise from it.” This may have been wishful thinking on Price’s part. If the last surviving letter Warren ever wrote is any indication, he had to work very hard to make sure that Heath was not put out by his own good fortune. We’ll never know the exact nature of the deal that was finally agreed upon, but Warren was careful to assure Heath in this June 16 letter that “everything is now going agreeable to our wishes.” That said, Warren made sure to remind Heath that he needed to submit the required paperwork to Congress “without a moment’s delay.” One gets the sense that Heath had been sullenly dragging his feet in the wake of Warren’s sudden rise past him. It was just the beginning of the jockeying and infighting that was to plague the new army’s officer corps for months to come.
    Before Warren was officially a major general, he had to be formally commissioned by Congress. Up until that point, Warren was the one who delivered the oath to the new officers—“a harangue in the form of a charge in the presence of the assembly,” John Adams remembered, “[that] never failed to make the officer, as well as the assembly, shudder.” If Warren were to become a major general, the Provincial Congress must select a new president. But before that particular bridge could be crossed, yet another new and desperate crisis had arisen. “A gentleman of undoubted veracity,” who had “frequent opportunity of conversing with the principal officers in General Gage’s army,” had revealed that on June 18, the British planned to take Dorchester Heights and Bunker Hill.
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    Even before the skirmish at Chelsea Creek, General Israel Putnam had been impatient for some kind of action, claiming “that the army wished to be employed, and the country was growing dissatisfied at the inactivity of it.” It was time, he declared in a council of war on May 12 attended by not only Artemas Ward and the other generals but also the members of the Committee of Safety, to occupy the high ground at Charlestown so as to “draw the enemy from [Boston], where we might meet them on equal terms.” Joseph Palmer of the Committee of Safety agreed with Putnam, but both Ward and Warren felt that it was too risky, especially since there was “no powder to spare and no battering cannon.” Putnam insisted, his son Daniel remembered, that no matter how the British responded to a move to the hills above Charlestown, “We will set our country an example of which it shall not be ashamed.” Years later, Daniel Putnam recounted how Warren had paced the room in Hastings House, considering Putnam’s proposal. “Almost thou persuadest me, General Putnam,” he said, leaning over the back of the general’s chair, “but I must think the project a rash one. Nevertheless, if it should ever be adopted and the strife becomes hard, you must not be surprised to find me with you in the midst of it.”
    By June 15, with the British about to strike at Dorchester and Charlestown, Warren and the others were finally convinced that the provincial army must make a preemptive move of its own. After determining that General Thomas’s forces in Roxbury were not strong enough to take and hold nearby Dorchester Heights, the Committee of Safety decided to implement a plan along the lines first proposed by Putnam. In the early-morning hours of June 17—a day before the British were to begin their assault