Bunker Hill

not Church sent the letter to General Thomas on purpose, he wanted, more than anything else, a resolution of the present crisis before he was discovered to be a spy. “May I never see the day when I shall not dare to call myself a British American . . . ,” he wrote Gage. “Oh for peace and [honor] once more.”
    As it turned out, Gage was not planning an assault on the American lines, and in the days ahead, as more and more provincials returned from their visits home, the size of the army once again began to increase. Thursday, May 11, the day following the mix-up initiated by Church, had been designated a provincewide day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer. The Provincial Congress adjourned at four that afternoon, and at some point Joseph Warren was on his way to Dedham.
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    Boston was a city under siege, but its hills still provided views of stunning beauty. Captain George Harris and his regiment had just left their winter quarters and were now living in tents on the common, where they dug fortifications to defend the town from an assault from the Back Bay. He was, he wrote his cousin in England, “twenty yards from a piece of water, nearly a mile broad, with the country beyond most beautifully tumbled about in hills and valleys, rocks and woods, interspersed with straggling villages, with here and there a spire peeping over the trees, and the country of the most charming green that delighted eyes ever gazed on. Pity these infatuated people cannot be content to enjoy such a country in peace. But, alas, this moment their advanced sentinels are in sight.”
    On the evening of May 11, Joseph Warren made his way through this green, rural world. According to the diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, the owner of the tavern in Dedham where Sally Edwards, now seven and a half months pregnant, was staying, the day was sunny and cloudless. Ames also recorded that Warren made an appearance at the tavern that day, undoubtedly to see his “fair
incognita pregnans
.” Secrets were nothing new to Warren. Just the day before, he had written Gage in confidence, urging him to ignore the loyalists, who “care not if they ruin you or this empire,” and honor his agreement with the people of Boston. In a postscript, he wrote, “As no person living knows or ever will know from me of my writing this, I hope you will excuse a freedom which I very well know would be improper in a letter which was exposed to general view.” A secret between himself and General Gage was one thing; the paternity of a baby delivered by an unwed teenage girl was quite another.
    For more than a century the people of New England had been using the ceremony of the fast to repent for their sins even as they girded their loins for the battle to come—that was what they had done during King Philip’s War and the many conflicts that followed it, and that was what they were doing now as they spent this lovely spring day abasing themselves before God so that they and their country might enjoy better days to come. How much Warren took these traditions to heart as he visited the girl who was now the living embodiment of, if not his own personal failings, at least someone else’s, will never be known. We do know that by the following day, he was back in Watertown and presiding over the discussion of whether the time was right to assume “a civil government for Massachusetts.” The army they had worked so assiduously to assemble was proving to be a most unruly and dangerous invention, and something had to be done to control it.
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    From the first, the patriots had feared that the provincial army might ultimately destroy the liberties it was supposed to protect by establishing a military dictatorship. That was what had happened in Rome when Caesar became emperor, and that was what had happened during the English Revolution when Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth.
    Civil leaders in Massachusetts in May 1775 were in an especially precarious position. The First Continental Congress had instructed them not to establish a formal government, since the other colonies would view this as an unnecessarily provocative repudiation of British sovereignty. But now, after Lexington and Concord, with an army of thousands assembling in Cambridge and Roxbury, a recognized civil authority must be allowed to assert some sort of control. Otherwise this army—already fidgety for something to do after the excitement of April 19—might take