Bunker Hill

Salem as recently as February, when Lieutenant Colonel Leslie attempted to seize the patriots’ cannons, an outbreak of deadly violence had somehow been averted. One could only wonder when and where the next crisis might arise.
    —
    Instead of bloodshed, the British officers chose to respond to Warren’s Massacre Day Oration with ridicule. On Thursday, March 9, Thomas Ditson, a farmer from the town of Billerica, tried to buy a musket from one of the soldiers. After cheating him out of his money, the regulars did unto the patriot yokel what the patriots had been doing to the loyalists. They seized Ditson, coated him with tar and feathers, and to the outrage of the inhabitants, paraded him through the streets of town. Soon after, a delegation from Billerica complained to Gage, who pretended, at least, to be equally upset.
    Almost a week later, on Wednesday, March 15, the day of the much-ballyhooed publication of Warren’s speech, the regulars countered with an oration of their own. What John Andrews described as “a vast number of officers” assembled on King Street, where they conducted a mock town meeting that chose a moderator and seven selectmen. This group of dignitaries then proceeded into the nearby British Coffee House, where they soon appeared on the balcony overlooking the street. Among them was the orator, who instead of a white toga, wore “a black gown with a rusty grey wig and fox tail hanging to it.” This was the loyalist physician Thomas Bolton from Salem, who began to read an oration that may have been written by the turncoat Benjamin Church, who is one of the handful of patriot leaders not mentioned in this biting and contemptuous screed.
    Where Warren had started his oration by insisting that his own words could not match those of the previous Massacre Day orators—“You will not now expect the elegance, the learning, the fire, the enrapturing strains of eloquence which charmed you when a Lovell, a Church, or a Hancock spake,” he had humbly begun—Bolton immediately went for the jugular. “I cannot boast the ignorance of Hancock,” he sardonically insisted, “the insolence of Adams, the absurdity of Rowe, the arrogance of Lee, the vicious life and untimely death of Molineux, the turgid bombast of Warren, the treason of Quincy, the hypocrisy of Cooper, nor the principles of Young.”
    The oration was a masterwork of character assassination. Hancock was “resolved to make a public attempt to become a monarch.” He was also a notorious ladies’ man, whose numerous paramours included the “cook maid Betty Price.” William Molineux, Bolton claimed, had “through the strength of his own villainy and the laudanum of Doctor Warren . . . quitted this planet and went to a secondary one in search of liberty.” Warren was such a boring speaker, Bolton insisted, that most of his listeners were asleep by the time he had finished his oration. Thomas Young was an atheist, and Dr. Samuel Cooper, besides “prostituting his religion” by preaching rebellion instead of “holy writ,” was guilty of adultery. The patriots might claim they were on the side of righteousness, but in actuality they were conniving, carnal, and egotistical.
    Bolton lampooned John Rowe for having speculated about how tea and salt water might mix, and Rowe was indignant. “This day an oration was delivered by a dirty scoundrel . . . ,” he recorded in his diary, “wherein many characters were unfairly represented and much abused and mine among the rest.” Even normally even-tempered John Andrews was miffed: “A person must [be] more than a stoic to prevent his irascibility rising.”
    In truth, the patriots were no different from any group of people. All of them were flawed, and all of them had something to hide. Benjamin Church, who may or may not have had a hand in writing the mock oration, was doing his best to conceal that he was financially overextended and had at least one mistress—not to mention the fact that he was a spy for the British. That winter Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the
Massachusetts Spy
, suffered the indignity of watching his wife, Mary, conduct a very public affair with the young and dashing Major Benjamin Thompson. In addition to being an already married officer in the New Hampshire militia, Thompson, like Benjamin Church, later proved to be a spy for Thomas Gage. Perhaps using the affair as a way to learn more about the patriots’ increasingly clandestine activities, Thompson took