Bunker Hill

between there and Boston arming and marching down to the relief of their brethren.”
    Within a quarter of an hour, fifty men had assembled at the tavern in Shrewsbury. Those who weren’t writing messages to be sent on to towns even farther to the west were preparing their weapons and provisions. Soon they were all on their way to Boston. By the time McNeil set out that morning, the only man left in the entire town was the elderly tavern keeper.
    It took most of the day for McNeil to press on to Boston. “He said he never saw such a scene before,” recounted the minister Ezra Stiles, who spoke with McNeil several weeks later. “All along were armed men rushing forward, some on foot, some on horseback, at every house women and children making cartridges [paper packets of gunpowder], [casting] bullets, baking biscuit, crying and bemoaning and at the same time animating their husbands and sons to fight for their liberties, though not knowing whether they should ever see them again.” Just as their ancestors had once rallied to protect their families from the Indians, this new generation of New Englanders was preparing to confront the British regulars.
    Ezra Stiles asked McNeil whether any of the militiamen on the morning of September 2, 1774, “appeared to want [i.e., lack] courage.” “No, nothing of this,” McNeil replied, “but a firm intrepid ardor, [a] hardy, eager, and courageous spirit of enterprise, a spirit for revenging the blood of their brethren and rescu[ing] our liberties.” All along the road to Boston McNeil saw women who had already armed and supplied their own men now offering handfuls of cartridges and bullets to those who continued to pass by. McNeil claimed “the women surpassed the men for eagerness and spirit in the defense of liberty by arms. . . . They expected a bloody scene, but they doubted not success and victory.”
    Throughout the morning and afternoon McNeil rode in “the midst of the people” as they made their way to Boston. Over and over again, it was “positively affirmed” that six men had been killed by the regulars. Not until he was within two miles of Cambridge did he hear the first contradictory report. Soon he was approaching a crowd of several thousand people. Instead of confusion, there was, he remembered, “an awful stillness.”
    —
    Earlier that morning in Boston, Dr. Joseph Warren received word that “incredible numbers were in arms, and lined the roads from Sudbury to Cambridge.” Warren had taken over from Samuel Adams as leader of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, and citizens in both Charlestown and Cambridge asked that he do something “to prevent the people from coming to immediate acts of violence.”
    This was a different kind of role for the committee, whose previous activities had been limited to the written word. Warren was now needed, not as a writer, but as a mediator in what sounded like a highly volatile situation. As it turned out, this was just the leadership role to which Warren’s talents were suited.
    Whereas Samuel Adams was part political boss, part ideologue, Warren, close to two decades younger, possessed a swashbuckling personal magnetism. He’d been born in the nearby town of Roxbury, just across from Boston Neck, and as a boy he was often seen wandering the streets of Boston, selling milk from the family farm. The eldest of four brothers, Warren was recognized as an unusually gifted boy, and when he was fourteen he began his studies at Harvard. In the fall of that year his father was picking apples from the top of a tall ladder when he fell and broke his neck. Warren’s youngest brother, John, had been just two years old at the time of this tragic event, and one of his first memories was of watching his father’s lifeless body being carried away. With the financial help of family friends, Warren was able to continue at Harvard and later served as a kind of surrogate parent for his brothers, particularly for John, who had recently finished his medical apprenticeship with Warren and was now a doctor in Salem.
    At Harvard, Warren’s talent for pursuing a dizzying variety of extracurricular activities was soon evident. Early on, he staged several performances of the popular politically themed play
Cato
in his dorm room. The French and Indian War was then in full swing, and he joined the college’s militia company. A classmate later told the story of how Warren responded to being locked out of a meeting of fellow