Bunker Hill

army’s senior surgeons.
    By this time even Warren had become convinced that his brother Joseph was in fact dead. “The loss of such a man,” John Eliot wrote, “in addition to our defeat, and at a time when the distracted state of our affairs greatly needed his advice, threw a gloom upon the circumstances of the people, and excited the most sincere lamentation and mourning.” One of the most strongly moved was Warren’s mentor and friend Samuel Adams. Writing from Philadelphia, Adams admitted to his wife that the death “of our truly amiable and worthy friend Dr. Warren is greatly afflicting. The language of friendship is, how shall we resign him! But it is our duty to submit to the dispensations of heaven.” For John Adams, Warren’s life and death served as a kind of cautionary tale. As head of the Committee of Safety, the Provincial Congress, and as a major general, the good doctor had taken on “too much for mortal.” “For God’s sake . . . ,” he wrote, “let us be upon our guard against too much admiration of our greatest friends.” But Adams’s wife, Abigail, took a different view. “We want [i.e., need] him in the senate, we want him in his profession, we want him in the field. We mourn for the citizen, the senator, the physician and the warrior.”
    The delegates of the Provincial Congress proceeded to elect a new president and argue over the meaning of the battle that had just robbed them of the leader upon whom they’d come to depend. Some claimed that the fighting at Breed’s Hill represented a failed military opportunity that should have “terminated with as much glory to America as the 19th of April.” Others claimed that the encounter had done more for the provincial cause than anyone could have legitimately expected. “This battle has been of infinite service to us,” one observer insisted. Another recalled how the New England soldiers had returned from Charlestown “like troops elated with conquest [rather] than depressed with defeat . . . saying that a few such victories would restore America her liberty.” Or, as the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene wrote, “I wish [we] could sell them another hill at the same price.”
    By the end of June, the commander of the provincial forces in Cambridge, General Artemas Ward, had learned that he was about to be replaced. In response to Massachusetts’s pleas back in May, the Continental Congress had not only addressed the issue of formalizing the province’s civil government by sanctioning the election of a new General Court; it had also assumed control of the army. To facilitate the provincial army’s transformation from a regional army into a truly continental force, Congress had decided to put the Virginia planter and former army officer George Washington at its head.
    Washington had accepted his new position with great trepidation, insisting from the start that “I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” Not until he had left Philadelphia for Cambridge did he hear about the Battle of Bunker Hill. According to one account, he immediately asked the messenger if “the provincials stood the British fire.” When he was assured that they had, he responded, “Then the liberties of our country are safe.”
    As Washington perhaps sensed, the Battle of Bunker Hill had been a watershed. What he didn’t realize was that the battle had convinced the British that they must abandon Boston as soon as possible. Now that the rebellion had turned into a war, the British knew they must mount a full-scale invasion if they had any hope of making the colonists see the error of their ways. Unfortunately, from the British perspective, Boston—hemmed in by highlands and geographically isolated from the colonies to the south—was not the place to launch a knockout punch against the enemy. Rather than become mired in an unproductive stalemate in Boston, the British army had to resume the fighting in a more strategically feasible location—either in New York or even farther to the south in the Carolinas. That was what Gage suggested in his correspondence that summer, and that was what the British ministry decided to do within days of learning of the battle on July 25. But, of course, Washington had no way of knowing what Gage and the ministers in London intended.
    When he arrived in Cambridge on July 2, Washington was a long way from becoming the stoic icon that stares at us each day from the dollar bill. He might