Bunker Hill

When Warren talked about what had happened on March 5, 1770, he did not dwell on the savagery of the soldiers; instead he focused on the agony and despair of the families who had lost loved ones that night. As many of those gathered there in the Old South Meetinghouse knew, Warren had lost a father in his youth, and he seems to have drawn upon the traumatic memories of his younger brothers when he told of a widow and her children witnessing the final death throes of a husband and parent. “Come widowed mourner,” Warren melodramatically intoned, “here satiate thy grief; behold the murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father’s fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father’s brain.” This was a scene made not from the empty political rhetoric of the day but from the darkest collective memories of the Warren family.
    When he did mention the soldiers, he was sure to offer them a backhanded compliment that also served as a kind of warning. Just as Peter the Great had learned “the art of war” from King Charles of Sweden, only to use that knowledge to defeat his former mentor, so were the people of Boston taking careful note of the soldiers’ exercises on the common. “The exactness and beauty of their discipline,” he said, no doubt with a nod to the officers assembled around him, “inspire our youth with ardor in the pursuit of military knowledge.”
    At one point during the speech, a captain of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who was seated on the stairs near the pulpit responded with a warning of his own. He held up his hand; arranged on his open palm were several lead bullets. Not missing a beat, Warren dropped his white handkerchief onto the officer’s hand.
    It was the ideal time for Warren to launch into a paragraph he appears to have added at the last minute. “An independence of Great Britain is not our aim,” he insisted. “No, our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together.” What they all wanted was that this “unnatural contest between a parent honored and a child beloved” result in long-lasting peace. “But if these pacific measures are ineffectual,” Warren cautioned, “and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes, but will, undauntedly, press forward, until tyranny is trodden under foot, and you have fixed your adored goddess Liberty . . . on the American throne.”
    Not until after Warren had finished did the excitement begin. Once the applause had died down, Samuel Adams rose from his seat and, standing beside the pulpit, proclaimed that the thanks of the town should be extended to Warren “for his elegant and spirited oration and that another oration should be delivered on the fifth of March next to commemorate the bloody massacre of the fifth of March 1770.” The use of the word
massacre
immediately drew a response from the officers, many of whom began to hiss while others shouted, “Oh fie! Oh fie!”
    Bostonians in the eighteenth century had a decidedly different accent from the British, especially when it came to the pronunciation of the letter
r
. Instead of “Fie!” they heard the officers shouting “Fire!” Mistakenly fearing that the meetinghouse was about to be consumed in flames, they began to run for the doors as others leaped out the first-story windows. Adding to the “great bustle” inside the church was the sudden appearance of the Forty-Third Regiment, its fife and drums blaring, outside the front door. Many of the patriot leaders gathered around the podium became convinced that the regulars had come to arrest them and hurriedly joined the general exodus out of the meetinghouse.
    As it turned out, the soldiers had just returned from a brief march into the countryside and had no interest in what was going on inside the Old South. As the regiment continued down the street and the people inside the meetinghouse came to the realization that there was no fire, Samuel Adams called them back to order. After conducting what little business remained, the meeting was adjourned.
    As had occurred in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September, at Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth in December, and in