Bunker Hill

ancestors. As far back as 1765 he had distinguished himself as an effective political writer when he began writing newspaper articles under a variety of pseudonyms. He had the polemicist’s talent for emotional overstatement. Instead of Joyce Junior’s sneering insistence on submission, Warren saw himself as part of a rapturous convergence of past, present, and future that required everything a person could give: “When I perceive the impending evil . . . , I cannot hold my peace. In such a case no vehemence is excessive, no zeal too ardent. . . . Trace the renown of your progenitors and recollect the stands, the glorious stands they have often made against the yoke of thralldom.” In the spring of 1774 he composed a song that served as a rousing anthem for the patriot movement, and that summer, as he wrote letter after letter, his was one of the most recognizable and unabashedly passionate voices coming out of Boston.
    He was bright, articulate, and multifaceted, but Warren was also something of a spendthrift. His now deceased wife had reportedly been worth a considerable amount of money at the time of their marriage, but by her death in 1772, Warren seems to have worked his way through most, if not all, of those resources. His straitened circumstances may have contributed to the intense activity of his medical practice in 1774 and 1775. Financial considerations also probably influenced his decision to embark that summer on what appears to have been his version of a get-rich scheme: a twenty-one-year partnership with a group of physicians (which included a surgeon with one of the regiments currently stationed in Boston) to build smallpox hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia.
    That Warren entered into a long-term agreement with a British army surgeon in July 1774 might seem incredible, given what we know today about what was to occur in the coming months. The evidence seems clear, however, that in the summer of 1774 not even Warren’s farsighted mentor, Samuel Adams, was convinced that war was imminent. The patriots had been opposing Britain’s policies for the last decade, but this did not mean they anticipated a permanent rupture. “Nothing is more foreign from our hearts,” Warren had written that spring, “than a spirit of rebellion. Would to God they all, even our enemies, knew the warm attachment we have for Great Britain, notwithstanding we have been contending these ten years with them for our rights!” Boston’s patriots (who still referred to England as “home”) were not trying to reinvent the world as they then knew it; they were attempting to get back to the way it had been when they were free from imperial restraint.
    In the meantime, Warren’s relationship with Mercy Scollay appears to have progressed. That month, Mercy’s sister Priscilla, who at nineteen was fourteen years younger than Mercy, married the merchant and Tea Party participant Thomas Melvill, twenty-four. Thomas Melvill and Warren traveled in the same patriot circles, and it’s possible that the wedding helped to bring Warren and Melvill’s new sister-in-law ever closer. We will never know the details of how matters stood between the two of them, but we do know that Scollay became increasingly intimate with Warren’s children and that by the spring of the following year, she and Warren had, according to several accounts, agreed to marry. This did not mean, however, that their private lives settled into a comfortable and predictable course. In this time of tumultuous, often catastrophic change, nothing could be counted on for long.
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    Almost two months before, the delegates to the Continental Congress had been chosen behind locked doors at the courthouse in Salem. On August 10, those four delegates gathered in the home of Thomas Cushing on Bromfield Street in Boston. Over the course of the previous weeks, the patriots had taken it upon themselves to ensure that their famously threadbare leader, Samuel Adams, was properly prepared for his trip to Philadelphia. Arrangements were made to repair his house and barn; he’d been measured for a new suit of clothes; he’d received a new wig, a new hat, six pairs of shoes, and some spending money. Back in June, many in Boston had been embittered by Adams’s handling of the Solemn League and Covenant, but now, thanks in large part to the Coercive Acts, he was once again viewed as the stalwart defender of the colony’s rights. There had been rumors circulating throughout