Bunker Hill

Massachusetts, and on May 4 he wrote Warren, assuring him of his colony’s support.
    As Warren moved from crisis to crisis, he was unable to fulfill his obligations to both the Committee of Safety and to the Provincial Congress, which often required him to be in two places at once. At one point, the Provincial Congress was forced to adjourn several times in a single day as its members impatiently waited for a report from the Committee of Safety “respecting the inhabitants of Boston.” Frustrations reached the point that on May 2, the Congress elected a new president—James Warren of Plymouth (no close relation to Joseph Warren). When that same day James Warren declined to serve, a committee was formed to go to Hastings House, home of the Committee of Safety, to see if Joseph Warren “can now attend the Congress.” On the back of a letter he’d just received from the Boston selectmen, Warren hurriedly drafted his reply, “Doct. Warren presents his respects to the honorable Provincial Congress; informs them that he will obey their order, and attend his duty in congress in the afternoon.” Despite the fact that he was spread dangerously thin, the consensus appeared to be that there was no one better suited to serve as president than Joseph Warren.
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    Tensions among provincial leaders reached a crescendo during the beginning of the second week in May. Many of the militiamen who had arrived in Cambridge in the days immediately following Lexington and Concord had begun to drift back to their homes. Some never returned. Others only needed to make arrangements with their loved ones and perhaps plant their spring crops before they enlisted in the provincial army for the next eight months. If the officers were going to recruit new men, they, too, had to return to their hometowns. All of this meant that there was an alarming, if temporary, drop in the number of soldiers in the lines around Boston. When word reached headquarters in Cambridge that Gage was planning to attack the undermanned American forces, General Ward was deeply concerned. By May 10, fears of an imminent British initiative prompted the Provincial Congress to consider evacuating Cambridge. Instead, they decided to put out the call to the local militias with the hope of hurriedly assembling as many as two thousand men to come to General Thomas’s aid in Roxbury.
    During this anxious and desperate time, Benjamin Church committed an act that might have had disastrous consequences. On May 10 letters were sent out by the Committee of Safety over Church’s signature requesting that officers “repair to the town of Cambridge with the men enlisted under your command.” This was all well and good except for the fact that one of these letters was sent to General John Thomas in Roxbury. If Thomas had obeyed the order, there would have been no one left to oppose a British advance out of Boston. Thomas had the good sense to check directly with Joseph Warren, who was initially baffled by how such an order could have been made in the first place. Once he’d figured out that Thomas’s letter was one of many that had been sent out on the same day, he attempted to put the embarrassing gaffe in the best possible light. “Sending the order to your camp was certainly a very great error . . . ,” he wrote Thomas. “Your readiness to obey orders does you great honor, and your prudence in sending to headquarters upon receiving so extraordinary an order convinces me of your judgment.”
    Once again, Warren seems to have given Church the benefit of the doubt. One has to wonder, however, whether the letter to Thomas had really been an honest mistake. Shortly before May 10, Church had been given reason to fear that the provincials were on to him. He sent Gage a garbled, scribbled-over description of an incident in which someone “mentioned distrust of me, that he suspected my going into Boston.” What’s more, the accuser had made something of a spectacle of himself. “All this uttered with the fury of a demon before the whole camp,” Church wrote. “I do not perceive that he made any great impression upon the people. I left him abruptly . . . [and] destroyed my papers. . . . Caution on my part is doubly necessary as instant death would be my portion should a discovery be made. . . . Secrecy respecting me on the part of [General Gage] is indispensable to rendering him any services, and . . . necessary to the preservation of my life.” Whether or