Bunker Hill

daughter just before he left for England. Their son Josiah had turned three in February. If all went well, Quincy would be in Boston by the middle of April.
    —
    March 5, the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, was a Sunday, so the annual oration was delayed to Monday. Almost everyone in Boston—including Gage, who put the regiments on alert that day—expected trouble. The already harassed regulars were inevitably going to resent an oration whose very purpose was, in the words of Samuel Adams, “to commemorate a massacre perpetuated by soldiers and to show the danger of standing armies.” Even though he had already delivered a Massacre Day Oration three years ago, Dr. Joseph Warren was asked to do it again. If there was trouble, Samuel Adams wanted someone of Warren’s experience and resolve in the pulpit.
    March 6 was exceptionally warm, with the temperature in the mid-fifties. At 10:00 a.m., Bostonians began to file into the Old South Meetinghouse, and before long the pews were crowded with people, some of them British officers. Expecting them “to beat up a breeze,” Adams invited the officers to sit in the pews directly in front of the pulpit so that they “might have no pretence to behave ill, for it is a good maxim in politics as well as war to put and keep the enemy in the wrong.” This put the soldiers uncomfortably close to the many leading patriots in attendance, which included Samuel Adams (the meeting’s moderator), John Hancock, Benjamin Church, town clerk William Cooper (brother of the minister Samuel Cooper), and the Boston selectmen. The estimated thirty to forty British officers were not only sitting in pews; some, it was said, were seated on the steps leading up to the pulpit, which had been draped in black cloth. Surrounding the officers and town dignitaries were at least five thousand townspeople. A soldier claimed that every man in this immense crowd held “a short stick or bludgeon in his hand.” “It is certain both sides were ripe for it,” First Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie recorded in his diary, “and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities.” “Every person was silent,” another witness remembered, “and every countenance seemed to denote that some event of consequence might be expected.”
    Around eleven o’clock, a one-horse chaise containing Warren and a servant could be heard clattering down Cornhill to Marlborough Street. Rather than immediately entering the meetinghouse, they disappeared into the apothecary’s across the street. One observer noticed that the servant held a bundle in his hands.
    A few minutes later, Warren emerged, dressed in what was described as a “Ciceronian toga.” It was an outrageous act of dramatic symbolism. A toga—a twenty-foot-long piece of cloth that is folded and wrapped around the wearer’s body, its outer edge draped over the left shoulder—was what was worn by a citizen of Rome and distinguished him from a soldier and a slave. At Harvard, Warren had performed the play
Cato
with his classmates. In that play, Cato, the devout republican who courageously opposes Caesar’s tyranny, speaks inspiringly of the sacredness of liberty. On March 6, 1775, Warren, clad in a toga, was about to perform before both his fellow townspeople and the soldiers who had made Boston a city of occupation.
    Since the aisles of the meetinghouse were jammed with people, Warren was taken around to the back of the building, where he was able to access the pulpit from a rear window, making an entrance almost as dramatic as when he had burst through the open window of a Harvard dorm room. He stood before his audience in “a Demosthenian posture,” a loyalist reported, “with a white handkerchief in his right hand, and his left hand in his breeches.” For the vast majority of those present, Warren’s evocative histrionics intensified the already surging emotions of the moment. For those who did not share in his point of view, however, Warren’s antics were downright juvenile, and he was, the loyalist wrote, “groaned at by people of understanding.” Warren began to speak with the high-pitched nasal delivery that had been a staple of New England ministers since the early seventeenth century, and one loyalist commented derisively on his “true puritanical whine.”
    But the speech that might have been an incendiary taunt directed at the British soldiers turned out to be surprisingly respectful of all those present.