Bunker Hill

officially a part of that army; Connecticut had not yet formally placed its soldiers under Ward’s control. What had been true in Cambridge a few hours before was true now on the hills overlooking Charlestown: no one seemed to be in charge.
    But that wasn’t necessarily all bad. There might be, in essence, three different commanders on the American lines, but as far as General Howe was concerned they amounted to a single, very difficult-to-read enemy. In just the last hour he had watched as the provincial fortifications organically evolved in ways of which not even he was entirely aware. Howe wasn’t up against a leader with a plan to implement; he was watching three different leaders try to correct the mistakes of the other two. The workings of this strange amalgam of desperation and internal one-upmanship were baffling and a bit bizarre, but as Howe was about to discover, the end result was surprisingly formidable.
    —
    Around three in the afternoon, David Townsend arrived at Hastings House in Cambridge. Townsend, twenty-two, was one of Joseph Warren’s apprentices, and while visiting the Carnes family, formerly of Boston and now living in Brighton, he’d learned that the British “were firing very heavy on our men at Bunker Hill.” Townsend announced that he “must go and work for Dr. Warren,” and set out on foot for Cambridge.
    As he approached the town common, he could hear the distant firing from the battery in Boston and from the ships positioned around the Charlestown peninsula. Cambridge, however, was “quiet as the Sabbath—all the troops gone, and no one at Hastings House,” except, he soon learned, for Dr. Joseph Warren.
    “[He] was sick with one of his oppressive nervous headaches,” Townsend remembered, “and had retired to rest and taken some chamomile tea for relief.” Chamomile was recognized in the eighteenth century as a way to dissipate the black bile and thus reduce melancholy. No doubt rubbing his eyes, Warren said that if Townsend would wait to have a cup of tea with him, they could go together to Bunker Hill.
    The night before, Warren had told his roommate and fellow Committee of Safety member Elbridge Gerry that he intended to join the soldiers on Bunker Hill. “As sure as you go,” Gerry had said, “you will be slain.” Warren admitted that Gerry was probably right but insisted that it would be impossible for him to remain in Cambridge “while my fellow citizens are shedding their blood for me.”
    We know that Townsend found Warren in Hastings House in the middle of the afternoon on June 17, but Warren’s whereabouts earlier in the day are unknown. He may have, as Townsend seems to suggest, spent the morning holed up at Hastings House. According to another account, he “pretended that he was going to Roxbury” so as “to deceive” his colleagues into thinking that he had decided not to go to Bunker Hill. But there is another possibility. Instead of Roxbury, he may have gone all the way to Nathaniel Ames’s tavern in Dedham.
    Decades later, a woman made an extraordinary claim to the son of Warren’s brother John. Like his father and his uncle, Edward Warren was a doctor, and one of his patients told of how she had been born in Dedham around the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill and that Joseph Warren had been her mother’s doctor. The woman claimed that on the morning of the battle, Warren visited her mother in Dedham “and finding she had no immediate occasion for his services, told her that he must go to Charlestown to get a shot at the British and he would return to her in season.” We’ll never know for sure whether or not Warren visited Sally Edwards on June 17, but we do know that eleven days after the battle, Dr. Nathaniel Ames delivered her a baby girl, which meant that Edward Warren’s patient might have been Joseph Warren’s illegitimate daughter.
    Once Warren and Townsend had shared a cup of chamomile tea in Hastings House, they set out for Charlestown. Townsend later remembered that Warren was dressed exquisitely in “a light cloth coat with covered buttons worked in silver, and his hair was curled up at the sides of his head and pinned up.” All signs of his headache had vanished, and “he was very cheerful and heartily engaged in preparations for the battle.” They were approaching Charlestown Neck when they learned that several wounded provincial soldiers had been taken to a nearby house. Warren told his apprentice that he “had better