Bunker Hill

students in an upper-story dormitory room. Instead of pounding at the door, he made his way to the building’s roof, shimmied down a rainspout, and climbed in through an open window. Just as he was making his entrance, the rotted spout collapsed to the ground with a spectacular crash. Warren simply shrugged and commented that the spout had served its purpose. For a boy who had lost his father to a fatal fall, it was an illustrative bit of bravado. This was a young man who dared to do what should have, by all rights, terrified him.
    It was at Harvard that Warren showed an interest in medicine. The great challenge for medical students in the eighteenth century was finding human cadavers for dissection. It’s likely that Warren was a member of the Spunkers: a club of medical students (of which we know his younger brother John and Warren’s apprentice William Eustis were members) who regularly raided graveyards, jails, and poorhouses in search of bodies. Illegal, yet all in the name of a higher good, this grisly game of capture the corpse was the perfect training ground for a future revolutionary.
    In 1764 an epidemic of smallpox ravaged Boston. Warren, just twenty-three and a new doctor, served on a team of physicians that inoculated approximately five thousand people—a third of the entire population of Boston—who’d been quarantined on Castle William. Over an intense three-month period, Warren treated John Adams, the children of Thomas Hutchinson, the customs agent Benjamin Hallowell, the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker, John Singleton Copley’s father-in-law, Richard Clarke, along with a host of the town’s poor, prostitutes, slaves, and sailors.
    Around this time, Warren burst on the political scene with several controversial newspaper articles about then governor Francis Bernard. Although Warren always looked to Samuel Adams for guidance, he quickly established his own identity as a political leader, becoming in 1772 the moving spirit behind the North End Caucus, a group quietly organized to handpick the candidates for key positions in town and provincial government. Warren had that rarest of talents: the ability to influence the course of events without appearing to assert his own will—what one contemporary described as “the wisdom to guide and the power to charm.” There were other patriot leaders who believed they were calling the shots, another contemporary later remembered, but it was really Warren through the North End Caucus—an organization that most Bostonians didn’t even know existed—who controlled “the secret springs that moved the great wheels.”
    Warren’s influence extended to the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Masons, the society that came to serve as the clandestine nerve center of the patriot cause. Warren was the lodge’s grand master and presided over meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern on upper Union Street near the Mill Pond in the North End, where, it was claimed, the details of the Boston Tea Party had been worked out in December 1773. In the fall and winter to come, the Green Dragon was where Paul Revere and other lodge members oversaw the surveillance of the British troops, yet another patriot activity in which Warren was deeply involved. Whether it was as leader of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge, the North End Caucus, or now the Boston Committee of Correspondence, Warren had become one of the most influential patriot leaders in Boston.
    On the morning of Friday, September 2, 1774, with thousands of militiamen gathering on the other side of the Charles River in Cambridge, he sent out a messenger to notify his fellow Boston Committee of Correspondence members that he needed them for an impromptu meeting. So as to prevent a possible panic in the occupied city, he chose not to inform the messenger of the reason for the meeting. As a consequence, committee members were in no great rush to attend to Warren’s summons, and once only a handful of members had assembled, Warren and his associates left for Cambridge.
    Instead of taking the longer land route through Roxbury, as Brigadier Brattle had done the previous afternoon, they made their way to Hudson’s Point in Boston’s North End, where they took the ferry to Charlestown, less than half a mile away. From there it was just four miles on a road that after passing Breed’s and Bunker’s Hills on the right and Charlestown’s Mill Pond on the left, skirted the edge of Charlestown Common (where the gibbeted remains