Bunker Hill

that his role was in government. But that is not where Warren ultimately wanted to be. He knew that if he was going to alter the preconceptions people had about him, he must prove himself as a soldier, and so in the weeks ahead he not only continued his leadership role in the Congress and the Committee of Safety: he would be present in the ranks at virtually every encounter between colonial and British forces.
    Accompanying this shift in vocation was a dramatic change in attitude. In the fall Warren had worked to soothe the outrage of the country people. By the spring, he was desperately attempting to inject some life into what had become a dangerously listless Provincial Congress. “Such was his versatility,” one observer recorded, “that he turned from . . . lectures of caution and prudence to asserting and defending the most bold and undisguised principles of liberty, and defying in their very teeth the agents of the crown.” When one night his medical apprentice William Eustis warned him that some British officers were lurking suspiciously near his house, he announced, “I have a visit to make to a lady in Cornhill this evening and I will go at once; come with me.” Warren placed two pistols in his pockets, and they went about their rounds. In another instance, Warren and Eustis overheard some officers speaking condescendingly about the military skills of the New Englanders. “These fellows say we won’t fight,” Warren erupted. “By heavens! I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!”
    What Eustis and other patriots took to be Warren’s natural and laudatory adjustment to the increasingly perilous times was seen by the loyalists as part of a highly calculated strategy. Since it was the quickest way to achieve their secret goal of independence, Warren and his mentor Samuel Adams had been, the loyalists insisted, hoping for a war from the very beginning. Thomas Hutchinson claimed that “as [Warren] discovered a great degree of martial as well as political courage,” he wanted nothing less than “to become the Cromwell of North America.” Peter Oliver agreed. “Conquer or die were the only alternatives with him, and he publicly declared that ‘he would mount the last round of the ladder or die in the attempt’”—a particularly evocative attribution, given the fate of Warren’s father.
    We will never know for sure how much personal ambition influenced Warren’s role in initiating the chaotic rush of events to come. But if there was anyone with the political and social skills to prosper amid the collective trauma of a revolution, it was Joseph Warren.
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    Upon hearing the news that more troops were headed their way, many Bostonians began to panic. Rumors flew about the city. General Percy reported that the country people planned to “set [Boston] on fire and attack the troops before reinforcement comes.”
    It was as if the fear that had first incapacitated Dr. Thomas Young’s wife in the days after the Powder Alarm in September had lain dormant over the fall and winter and was only now, with the arrival of spring, reclaiming Boston’s inhabitants. It was an extraordinary and terrifying epiphany. All the rhetoric about taxes and representation, about liberty and freedom, about the sovereignty of Parliament, was about to incite an all-consuming war that might very well start here, in the city they called home. Like Lot and his family, they had no choice but to abandon everything that they once held dear and flee for their lives.
    On Tuesday, April 11, John Andrews reported that “all [is] in confusion . . . , the streets and Neck lined with wagons carrying off the effects of the inhabitants, who are either afraid, mad, crazy, or infatuated . . . , imagining to themselves that they shall be liable to every evil that can be enumerated if they tarry in town.”
    On Sunday, April 9, in the midst of religious services at the Brattle Street Meeting, Joseph Warren was seen conferring tensely with the Reverend Samuel Cooper. The British ministry, it was rumored, had ordered Gage to arrest Boston’s leading patriots, and Cooper, who corresponded regularly with Benjamin Franklin in London, was in danger. Cooper broke off his conversation with Warren to baptize a child, but by Monday, April 10, Cooper and his wife had left Boston for a friend’s house in Weston.
    Samuel Adams and John Hancock were already safely removed from Boston, spending their days at the Provincial Congress in