Bunker Hill

create a new government out of whole cloth and get on with it? The debates were kept in secret, so there is no direct evidence of what was being said, but we do know that Warren and the other Boston delegates (which included John Hancock, who served as the Congress’s president) found themselves “by far the most moderate men.” In several letters to Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, Warren asked for his mentor’s advice. They must, Adams responded in so many words, refrain from doing much of anything; otherwise they ran the danger of causing the other colonies to think twice about supporting Massachusetts. In the meantime, Warren remained “rapacious for the intelligence” that might provide the guidance he so desperately needed.
    Warren’s sense of isolation only increased when his good friend Josiah Quincy left at the end of September for London. It was time that a patriot from Boston challenged the version of events that former governor Thomas Hutchinson and other loyalists were promulgating in England, and Quincy was just the man to do it. There was, however, the issue of Quincy’s health. Back in February 1773, Warren had witnessed his friend’s most recent will and testament, and with both the patient and his doctor hoping for the best, Quincy departed in secret from Salem.
    Quincy’s was just one of several departures by noted patriots that fall. Dr. Thomas Young, a transplant from Albany, New York, was one of Boston’s most passionate patriots, and he had already suffered two near-fatal beatings in the streets of Boston. The physician seemed unfazed by the incidents, but it was another matter for his wife, who began to weep whenever Young left the house. When Gage began building the fortifications at the town gate, she became so “enveloped [in] constant terrors” that she took to her bed and appeared, Young wrote to Samuel Adams, “as inanimate as a corpse.” Young decided he must “seek an asylum for her,” and in the middle of September he abruptly moved his family to Providence, Rhode Island.
    About a month later, the patriot William Molineux, whom John Rowe described as “the first leader of dirty matters,” died after a brief illness. The loyalists gossiped that Molineux had actually killed himself (with laudanum provided by Joseph Warren) when it was discovered that he’d been embezzling money from the owner of the wharf he managed. In any event, Warren was suddenly without three of the movement’s most active members.
    He inevitably began to rely more on the physician and Committee of Correspondence member Dr. Benjamin Church. Whereas Warren was known for his openhearted pursuit of liberty, Church had a talent for withering sarcasm. Like Warren, he had composed at least one patriot song, but unlike Warren he had also written a loyalist parody of his own composition. That Church got away with such unsettling behavior was a tribute to his arrogant brilliance, and Paul Revere later maintained that since the patriots “needed every strength, they feared, as well as courted him.” For his part, Warren “had not the greatest affection for [Church],” according to Revere. One wonders, however, if Warren had had much enthusiasm for the dirty trickster Molineux. Then as now, just because two people were of the same political affiliation did not mean that they necessarily liked each other.
    —
    On November 9, the delegates from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally returned to Boston, and the church bells were ringing till midnight. The Congress had agreed to an intercolonial commercial boycott of British goods, but in the interests of maintaining unanimity among the colonies at this critical moment, the delegates had refrained from sanctioning the creation of a full-fledged alternative government in Massachusetts. Any additional measures would have to wait until the second Continental Congress in the spring. Until then, the province must remain in a tense state of limbo—unless, of course, someone, whether it be Gage or the patriots, made the first move.

CHAPTER FIVE

    The Unnatural Contest
    D uring the second week in December, the Boston Committee of Correspondence learned that Gage was about to retrieve the powder stored in New Hampshire’s version of the Castle—Fort William and Mary, situated on a small island near Portsmouth. Paul Revere was sent to warn the town’s citizens, and on December 14 several hundred men assaulted the poorly defended fort. The handful of