Bunker Hill

on the Committee of Safety from co-opting the agenda of the patriot movement and prematurely starting a war, Congress had already determined that the vote of five members of the Committee of Safety was required before issuing the alarm. As a further safeguard, Congress also decided that not more than one of these five members could be from Boston, thus requiring that a meeting of those members who lived outside the city be convened before the trigger was pulled. And so the Committee of Safety had its orders. Before the alarm could be sounded, three conditions must be met: first, the British force must exceed five hundred men; second, the soldiers must be equipped with baggage and artillery; third, five members of the committee must vote in favor of the alarm.
    Thanks to Benjamin Church, Gage quickly learned of the Provincial Congress’s resolve. Gage now knew that as long as the next group of regulars to leave Boston had no artillery or baggage, the patriots could do nothing—according to their own legislature—to oppose them. It remained to be seen whether the patriots would obey their representatives.

Part II
    REBELLION

    Here’s fine revolution,
    an we had the trick to see ’t.
    —William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
    We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to
improve
them.
    —Samuel Adams to the Reverend Samuel Cooper, April 30, 1776
    Should the whole frame of nature round him break,
    In ruin and confusion hurled,
    He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
    And stand secure amidst a falling world.
    —Joseph Addison’s translation of Horace’s
Odes,
book 3, ode 3

CHAPTER SIX

    The Trick to See It
    O n April 2, Joseph Warren received a letter from Arthur Lee, an American in London who had become a close friend of Josiah Quincy Jr. Lee had encouraged Quincy at the end of March to believe that war between America and Great Britain was inevitable. Lee’s letter to Warren (written back on December 21, 1774) sounded a similarly alarmist note. In December, both houses of Parliament had voted in support of the ministry’s conviction that Massachusetts was now in “actual rebellion.” What’s more, additional regiments were on their way to reinforce Gage’s already considerable army of almost three thousand regulars. Warren seized upon the news as a reason to send out the call to the members of the Provincial Congress, many of whom had returned home, to reconvene in Concord. After a troubling winter of infighting and irresolution, this was just the news to shake the delegates out of what Warren called “that state of security into which many have endeavored to lull them.”
    Warren still hoped for a reconciliation with Great Britain, but this had not prevented him from doing everything possible to prepare the province for war. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had led efforts to assemble military stores in Worcester, Concord, and other towns throughout the province. He also worked to provide some organization to the provincial “army of observation” that would take the field in the event of an incursion by the British. What’s more, he had begun to prepare
himself
for a possible conflict. He might be trained as a doctor, but if it should come to war, he intended to fight.
    By one account, Warren had spent the last “several years . . . preparing himself by study and observation to take a conspicuous rank in the military arrangements which he knew must ensue.” His father had once told him, “I would rather a son of mine were dead than a coward,” and he seems to have taken that parental directive to heart. Rather than oversee the medical side of the provincial army, he ultimately hoped to be “where wounds were to be made, rather than where they were to be healed.” If glory was to be won in this possible conflict with the mother country, the place to do it was not in the Provincial Congress (of which he was now a member) or even the Continental Congress; it was on the battlefield.
    Warren’s biggest obstacle to achieving this goal was his own outsize talent. His seemingly limitless capacity for work, along with his unmatched ability to adapt his own actions to meet the demands of the moment, meant that as the speed of events began to increase in the days ahead, he was inevitably looked to as the person to keep the patriot cause together. Given that he was now an influential member of the Provincial Congress and of the perhaps even more powerful Committee of Safety, most assumed