Bunker Hill

point in September 1774, Joseph Warren got a young woman named Sally Edwards pregnant. An alternative explanation could be that Warren had arranged obstetrical care for a friend. Maintaining the unwed mother and child on Warren’s account after his death might have been a way to shield the identity of the true father, who was not Warren. My description of medical practices in the colonial era depends on Lester King,
The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century
, and Forman in
DJW
, pp. 45–53. Forman points out that ipecac had uses in the eighteenth century beyond treatment for poisoning, since it was “a common prescription for reducing pathologic levels of the humor choler by way of the gastrointestinal tract” (p. 49). When it comes to why Warren prescribed ipecac to Scollay in September 1774, he writes, “I cannot identify the disease entity in modern terms, though it involved close follow-up and hands-on care” (p. 394), including the application of a neck plaster the day after Scollay visited Warren twice in a single day.
    John Barker writes of the March 30 expedition with Percy’s brigade in his
Diary
, pp. 27–28. Frothingham tells of the reaction to Percy’s expedition in
LJW
, pp. 446–47.
Joseph Warren tells of the incident in an April 3, 1775, letter to Arthur Lee,
LJW
, pp. 447–48. The Provincial Congress’s March 30 resolve regarding “artillery and baggage” is cited in John H. Scheide, “The Lexington Alarm,” p. 60. As early as March 30, 1775, Gage was receiving intelligence reports about “several grand debates . . . in this committee such as fixing a criterion for assembling the militia together, the manner how the alarm is to be given, and the place where the counties are to assemble” (
PIR
, 3:1976); on April 3 he learned that “should any body of troops, with artillery and baggage march out of Boston, the country would instantly be alarmed and called together to oppose their march to the last extremity” (p. 1977).
    Chapter Six— The Trick to See It
    Joseph Warren’s April 8, 1775, letter to Arthur Lee, in which he recounts how he used the information in Lee’s December 21, 1774, letter to shake the Provincial Congress out of the “state of security into which many have endeavored to lull them,” is in
LJW
, pp. 447–48. Samuel Knapp in
Biographical Sketches
writes of how Warren had been preparing himself “for several years . . . to take a conspicuous rank in the military” (pp. 115–16). Edward Warren in
Life of John Warren
tells of how Warren’s father insisted that his son Joseph not be “a coward” (p. 2). Knapp writes of Warren choosing “to be where wounds were to be made rather than where they were to be healed,” in
Biographical Sketches
, p. 117; Knapp also writes of Warren’s “versatility” (p. 111). J. P. Jewett in
Boston Orators
relates William Eustis’s account of Warren’s outraged response to the taunts of the British soldiers as well as their nighttime visit to Cornhill (pp. 48–49). Thomas Hutchinson writes of Warren’s ambition to “become the Cromwell of North America” in “Additions to Thomas Hutchinson’s ‘History of Massachusetts Bay,’ ” edited by Catherine Barton Mayo,
Proceedings of the AAS
59, pt. 1 (1949): 45. Peter Oliver in
OPAR
writes of Warren’s determination to “mount the last round of the ladder or die in the attempt” (p. 128). General Hugh Percy tells of the provincials’ determination “either to set [Boston] on fire . . . or to . . . starve us out” in an April 8, 1775, letter to Thomas Percy, in his
Letters
, p. 48.
    John Andrews writes of how Boston’s residents were “afraid, mad, crazy, or infatuated” and began leaving the city in droves in LJA, p. 402. Thomas Hutchinson records the account of Samuel Cooper’s tense meeting with Joseph Warren during a Sunday service in April 1775 (which had been told him by Harrison Gray) in the August 15, 1777, entry of his
Diary
, 2:156. According to Cooper’s own
Diary
, he was in Weston by April 10, “having received several menaces and insults, particularly at Mrs. Davis, having a scurrilous song offered me by an officer,” cited by Charles Akers in
The Divine Politician
, p. 195. Clifford Shipton writes of Joseph Warren “knowing that a warrant for his arrest was in Gage’s pocket” in
SHG
, 14:521; Shipton also writes of how Warren assisted Isaiah Thomas in getting his printing press and type out of Boston (p. 520). A transcript