Bunker Hill

subordination observed among them.” Jonathan Brewer was a well-respected veteran of the French and Indian War, and when the Provincial Congress turned down his request to lead an expedition to Quebec (something George Washington would in fact decide to do in just a few months’ time), there were those in the provincial army who were not happy. “By God,” one soldier was overheard to say, “if this province is to be governed in this manner, it is time for us to look out; and it is all owing to the Committee of Safety, a pack of sappy-headed fellows; I know three of them myself.” In Waltham, Lieutenant Colonel Abijah Brown insisted that the Provincial Congress should not be allowed to take the gunpowder from the town’s arsenal, claiming “that the Congress had no power to do as they did; for all the power was and would be in the army; and if the Congress behaved as they did, that within 48 hours the army would turn upon the Congress, and they would settle matters as they pleased.”
    Some in Massachusetts blamed General Ward for the army’s lack of discipline, but Warren realized that they could not impose, at this early stage, too much restraint. “Subordination is absolutely necessary in an army,” he admitted; “but the strings must not be drawn too tight at first . . . amongst men who know not of any distinction but what arises from some superior merit. . . . Our soldiers . . . will not be brought to obey any person of whom they do not themselves entertain a high opinion.” Given the unsettled and tentative state of civil government in Massachusetts, the time was not right to impose stricter discipline among the troops. Indeed, too much oversight on the part of the Provincial Congress might instigate a wholesale mutiny. Before there could be a proper army, there had to be a proper government; otherwise, Warren wrote Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, “a military government must certainly take place.”
    Legitimacy was the real issue. How could a self-created legislative body of questionable legal authority expect to impose its will on a group of soldiers who had the power to overthrow it? And besides, who were these soldiers fighting for—for Massachusetts, for the Continental Congress, for the king? No matter what the British regulars might call them, the soldiers of the provincial army refused to consider themselves “rebels,” claiming that they remained loyal to their still beloved monarch. It was his advisers and legislators with whom they had an issue. Liberty—not independence—was what they were fighting for, and as proud Englishmen they still flew the British flag.
    Their counterparts in Boston regarded such claims as patently absurd. On May 1, Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, “The Rebels have erected the standard at Cambridge; they call themselves the King’s Troops and us the Parliament’s. Pretty burlesque!” Even the provincial leaders had to admit that the logic of their position was more than a little tortured, and to provide at least some clarity in this time of uncertain allegiances, Warren felt that the Continental Congress must allow Massachusetts to form its own civil government. He also insisted that the Congress in Philadelphia should appoint “a generalissimo” to take control of the provincial army.
    Warren was greatly concerned about the threat of a military coup, but he wanted to make sure that Samuel Adams understood that he was not “angry with my countrymen.” Unlike many revolutionaries, including Adams himself, whose commitment to the cause could be disturbingly cold-blooded, Warren continued to have an abiding affection for even the most unruly of Massachusetts’s citizens. “I love—I
admire
them,” he wrote. He might be president of the Provincial Congress, but that did not prevent him from spending as much time as possible with these men. “He mingled in the ranks . . . ,” one commentator wrote, “and succeeded in a most wonderful manner in imparting to them a portion of the flame which glowed in his own breast.” But he was more than just a cheerleader. Warren’s contemporary John Eliot (son of the Boston minister Andrew Eliot) claimed that he “did wonders in preserving order among the troops” and was “perhaps the man who had the most influence.”
    As a kind of surrogate civilian general, Warren came to have a deep sympathy for the men who comprised what was optimistically referred to as the Grand American