Bunker Hill

done honor to the oratory of a Briton or a Roman.”
    It took two days, but eventually the delegates learned the truth. Boston was not under attack. The regulars had taken some powder, but no one had been killed. It was back to the business of deciding how to respond to the Coercive Acts. And then, a week later, on September 17, Paul Revere arrived from Boston with a document known as the Suffolk Resolves.
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    The Government Act had made town meetings illegal in Massachusetts, but it had said nothing about the counties. Throughout the summer and fall, town representatives gathered at county conventions all across Massachusetts, and on September 9, 1774, at Vose’s Tavern in Milton, Joseph Warren stood before the delegates of Suffolk County (which included Boston and towns to the west and south and included modern Norfolk County) and read them what he’d been working on for the last three days: nineteen resolves in which he had tried to capture the sense of their previous two meetings. Not only did Warren declare that “no obedience is due” to the Coercive Acts, since they were “the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America”; he set forth a blueprint by which Massachusetts might successfully win back her liberties. Each town must elect militia officers, who should muster the militia at least once a week; that said, the militia was “to act merely upon the defensive, so long as such conduct may be vindicated by reason and the principles of self-preservation, but no longer.” If, as threatened, Gage were to seize any patriot leaders, they would respond by taking loyalist hostages of their own. Following the lead of the Solemn League and Covenant, they vowed to “abstain from the consumption of British merchandise and manufactures.” In order to fill the void left by Gage’s dismissal of the General Court, a “provincial congress” was to convene in Concord in October that would “pay all due respect and submission” to anything passed by the Continental Congress. During these perilous times, all “routs, riots, and licentious attacks” must cease at once. Lastly, it was determined to create a system of couriers by which the towns might be alerted “should our enemies, by any sudden maneuvers, render it necessary to ask the aid and assistance of our brethren in the country.”
    That day at Vose’s Tavern, Warren read each resolve several times so that all the delegates knew exactly what they were voting on. It must have been a scene of intense excitement as the delegates gave their unanimous consent “paragraph by paragraph.” Resolve 17 insisted that “renewing harmony and union between Great Britain and the colonies [is] earnestly wished for by all good men.” Overall, however, this was a radical document—but not uniquely so, given what other conventions had already or were about to produce—by which the inhabitants of Suffolk County declared their intention to make preparations for possible war.
    What made the Suffolk Resolves ultimately so significant was the impact the document had on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on September 17 and 18. Warren had appended a preamble that poetically evoked the historical importance of the present moment. Before launching into a passionate account of the colony’s hazardous situation, he told how Massachusetts had witnessed “the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain.” The surging rhythms of Warren’s prose gave the document an emotional force that succeeded in cutting across the cultural and ideological differences of those gathered in Philadelphia, who voted unanimously to endorse the Suffolk Resolves. John Adams was ecstatic. “The esteem, the affection, and the admiration for the people of Boston and . . . Massachusetts which were expressed yesterday,” he wrote, “and the fixed determination that they should be supported, were enough to melt a heart of stone. I saw tears gush into the eyes of the old grave pacific Quakers of Pennsylvania.”
    Owing to the combined effects of the Powder Alarm and the Suffolk Resolves, the Continental Congress had gotten off to a surprisingly militant start. In the weeks and months ahead, a certain amount of retrenchment inevitably occurred as passions began to cool among the delegates. But if nothing else, the endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves proved that, contrary to what the North administration had predicted, the disparate colonies of