Bunker Hill

sincerely wish I had broken through the formalities which I thought due to your rank, and freely have told you all I knew or thought of public affairs; and I must ever confess, whatever may be the event, that you generously gave me such an opening as I now think I ought to have embraced.” In the winter of 1775 Gage and the patriots were not yet at war; they were in the midst of a most problematic swirl of ever-changing events, and no one knew where they were headed. For those such as Warren, who honestly wanted relations between the colonies and the mother country to be set right, speaking openly with the other side was not necessarily wrong, and this may have, in part, contributed to their unwillingness to identify the traitor among them.
    The fact remained, however, that there
was
a traitor, and his name was Dr. Benjamin Church.
    —
    Church’s profession was perfectly suited to being a spy. Only a doctor could meet with a nonstop parade of people from all walks of life without creating suspicion. He was one of the few physicians in New England who had been trained in Europe, and he possessed a cosmopolitan haughtiness that he seems to have used to good effect amid the stodgy provincials of Boston. When asked why he socialized with so many loyalists, he claimed to be using them for his own political purposes. The force of Church’s judgmental, often audacious personality seems to have put almost everyone on the defensive and allowed him to meet regularly with those who could have easily provided Gage with Church’s detailed reports.
    His father of the same name was one of Boston’s foremost auctioneers; his great grandfather of the same name had been a famous Indian fighter during King Philip’s War. The original Benjamin Church had mastered the strategy of using captured Indian warriors against their own people. In his narrative of the war, which had been recently reissued with engravings by Paul Revere, Church insisted that he’d followed the only course that could have turned the conflict around for the English. He also admitted to having qualms about what he’d done. One wonders whether his great-grandson was ever troubled by similar concerns about the morality of his actions.
    Dr. Benjamin Church may not have been the most likable of men, but when one reads the reports he filed with Gage, one is impressed not by the cagey duplicity of the writer but by the objectivity—even honesty—of his observations. Indeed, he almost seems to have been performing the exact service that Joseph Warren later wished
he
had provided. And since no transcripts are known to exist of the debates of the Provincial Congress, Church’s reports, which remained among Gage’s personal papers for close to 150 years before they were finally discovered in the archives of the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are the best record we have of what the patriots were thinking in the winter of 1775.
    On March 4, Church wrote, “A disposition to oppose the late parliamentary measures is become general. The parent of that disposition is a natural fondness for old custom and a jealousy [i.e., suspicion] of sinister designs on the part of the administration.” He attributed the “irresolute” workings of the Provincial Congress to “the discordant sentiments of their oracular leaders, partly from the weakness of the executive power of that body and partly from an inadequate knowledge in conducting their novel enterprise.” Various proposals to assume the old charter or form a military government had been rejected because “it would amount to a declaration of independency and revolt and thereby preclude the possibility of a peaceable accommodation.” The other concern was that such potentially radical actions “might produce a schism or rather give encouragement to some lukewarm brethren in other provinces to detach themselves from the present combination.” Church reported that the delegates had appointed generals to lead a possible provincial army and that if hostilities should commence, “the first opposition would be irregular, impetuous, and incessant from the numerous bodies that would swarm to the place of action and all actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable.” That said, the militiamen could be counted on, Church wrote, to fight with a lethal effectiveness: “The most natural and most eligible mode of attack on the part of the people is that of detached parties of bushmen who from their adroitness in