Bunker Hill

Massacre of 1770: an eruption of violence that was soon to be followed by a gesture of British forbearance. There was no need to assemble an army until after they had first seen whether General Gage wanted to negotiate. Some of those present agreed with Pickering, but only some. “Others thought that now was the time to strike,” he wrote, “and cut off the troops before they were reinforced; and then, said they, the day will be our own.” Pickering believed such talk was recklessly unrealistic. “I do not see,” he wrote, “what mighty advantage can accrue to us by getting possession of Boston; none, I am sure, which can countervail the loss of thousands in storming the town, which will immediately be beat to pieces by the men-of-war.”
    But what troubled Pickering the most about the meeting was not the wildness of the rhetoric; it was the motives of the more radical patriot leaders. Up until that moment, Pickering had assumed they were driven by an honest love of country; but now he had the unsettling suspicion that “
ambition . . .
was as powerful a stimulus as the former.” And with John Hancock and Samuel Adams soon to depart for Philadelphia, Joseph Warren had emerged as the de facto leader of what Pickering described as “the intended revolution.”
    —
    That day Warren issued a circular letter for distribution throughout the colony under the auspices of the Committee of Safety, urging men to enlist in the provincial army. It was not a moderate document. “Our all is at stake,” he wrote. “Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who may survive the carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer to your country, to your own consciences, and, above all, as you will answer to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means the enlistment of men to form the army, and send them forward to headquarters at Cambridge.”
    Warren took a different tone when he turned his attention to what he referred to as “my ever-adored town.” Since the first tumultuous hours after Lexington and Concord—during which Sarah Deming and her friends had been lucky enough to escape—Boston had been almost completely sealed off from the surrounding countryside. Across from the fortifications at Boston Neck, Roxbury had quickly become a town populated chiefly by militiamen, making it impossible for Gage and his army to receive any provisions or supplies from the city’s only access point to the mainland. Before the many patriots trapped inside Boston could get out and the loyalists outside the city could get in, some kind of agreement had to be reached with Gage. That day, Warren wrote the general a letter about the need to settle on a policy regarding Boston. Instead of the hysteria and bluster of the earlier call for recruits, Warren addressed his counterpart as a leader he both respected and was willing to trust. “Your Excellency, I believe, knows very well the part I have taken in public affairs,” he wrote. “I ever scorned disguise. I think I have done my duty. Some may think otherwise; but be assured, sir, as far as my influence goes, everything which can reasonably be required of us to do shall be done, and everything promised shall be religiously performed.” Warren was just thirty-three years old and hardly a career politician. A doctor who had been raised on a farm in Roxbury, he had first assumed elective office less than a year before, yet he apparently had no qualms about writing the man at the apex of political and military power in British North America as an equal. Perhaps Timothy Pickering was right; perhaps there was more than a modicum of ambition behind Warren’s commitment to the patriot cause. But exactly this kind of ambition was to become the driving force—both for good and for bad—behind the United States.
    The next day, Friday, April 21, the Committee of Safety determined to raise an army of eight thousand Massachusetts soldiers to serve until the end of the year, even though no one was yet sure how the soldiers were going to be paid. By that time the provincial army had a new leader, General Artemas Ward, forty-seven, from Shrewsbury. A veteran of the French and Indian War and a former member of the upper chamber of the General Court, Ward had been languishing in bed with an attack of kidney