Bunker Hill

Concord and their nights at the Clarke parsonage in the nearby town of Lexington. Even though he knew Gage had the equivalent of a warrant for his arrest, Warren was determined to remain in Boston for as long as possible. In the meantime, he hastily made arrangements for Mercy Scollay, whom he now considered part of his “family,” and his four children to live in Worcester, about forty miles from Boston. In a brief letter to a Dr. Dix, he explained that his furniture had already been moved to his mother’s house in Roxbury, where the doctor could send some wagons to retrieve both the furniture and his loved ones for transportation to Worcester. Warren also seems to have been involved in getting both Isaiah Thomas and his printing press to the same safely removed town. It was during this period of turmoil that Warren’s college friend Dr. Nathaniel Ames began billing Warren’s account for boarding Sally Edwards at Ames’s tavern in Dedham.
    Looking back over two centuries later, we know that the patriot movement ultimately led to independence, but such an end result was by no means inevitable in the spring of 1775, when many still believed that the British government must eventually do as it had always done in response to past colonial protests and withdraw the offending legislation. At the root of the patriots’ misguided optimism was their continued confidence in George III. The fiction they all clung to was that once the king saw for himself how his ministers had misled him, he would withdraw the troops and the demand for unjust taxes and allow New England to remain forever free. But, in actuality, the king was hardly the colonies’ great ally, and in fact he saw more clearly than they did the possible results of their current actions. As early as November 18, 1774, he’d written Lord North, “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”
    The last thing most patriots wanted was a war, and more than a few Bostonians now felt that they would have never willingly embarked on this journey if they had known where they were headed. His newspaper opponent John Adams might be loath to admit it, but Daniel Leonard had expressed the sentiments of many inhabitants when he compared the city’s political leaders “to a false guide, that having led a benighted traveler through many mazes and windings in a thick wood, finds himself at length on the brink of a horrid precipice, and, to save himself, seizes fast hold of his follower, to utmost hazard of plunging both headlong down the steep, and being dashed in pieces together against the rocks below.” This sense of disorientation and betrayal—How did we get here in the first place?—was what many were feeling as they stuffed whatever goods would fit in a wagon and joined the long line out of Boston.
    Like Joseph Warren, John Andrews resolved to remain in Boston. In recent weeks Andrews’s wife Ruthy had been hard at work on a landscape sketch that Andrews proudly claimed was “equal to any copper plate that I ever saw.” The drawing had even garnered praise from General Percy, “who expressed his very great admiration of it.” The town might be in turmoil, but life went on in Boston, and in a letter to a relative Percy wrote of the weather. Although the last three weeks had been “cold and disagreeable, a kind of second winter,” the previous months had been for the most part remarkably warm. “Thank God, I still continue to enjoy my health perfectly,” Percy wrote, “and have very much surprised the inhabitants here by going constantly all winter with my bosom open without a great coat. . . . I think I have felt it colder in England.”
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    The king had long since decided that “blows must decide” the current crisis, but not so the members of the Provincial Congress in Concord. On April 7 the spy Benjamin Church reported to Gage that the delegates were in “great consternation” and were considering a recess “to consult with their constituents.” Church asked Gage whether that would be a good development from his perspective. “It would prevent their taking any hasty steps,” he pointed out, while Gage waited for “his dispatches” from the ministry. Clearly, Church was well acquainted with the inner workings of both Congress and General Gage’s staff. He also had some advice: “A sudden blow struck now or immediately on the arrival of the