BY SALINA B. BAKER

“The Day: perhaps the decisive day is come on which the fate of America depends. My bursting heart must find vent at my pen. I have just heard that our dear friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his country-saying better to die honourably in the field than ignominiously hang upon the gallows. Great is our loss…and the tears of multitudes pay tribute to his memory…” ~~Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband, John Adams: June 1775

Dr. Joseph Warren was a handsome, young 1759 graduate of Harvard, Boston physician, father, husband, Son of Liberty, Masonic Grand Master, spymaster, and soldier. He provided medical care for rich and poor, American and English, free and slave. He was deeply involved in the American rebellion against Parliamentary taxes and control of colonial autonomy with his fellow patriots: John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere, to name a few. Joseph’s interaction with his much older political mentor, Samuel Adams, would mature into one of the most significant of their lives and of the patriot movement.

In early 1764, a smallpox epidemic swept through Boston and the surrounding areas. Joseph went to work for the physicians’ initiative for community-wide inoculation at Castle William, a fort and smallpox hospital just south of Boston where he met Massachusetts lawyer, John Adams. Joseph became the Adams’ family physician and formed a lasting friendship. 

On the evening of April 18, 1775, with the rebellion underway, Joseph received word from one of his informants that, under orders from British General Thomas Gage, troops were assembling at Back Bay in Boston to march to Lexington and Concord where a stockpile of rebel armaments was stored. Joseph feared for John Hancock’s and Samuel Adams’ lives if the British discovered the fugitives, who had hidden in Lexington after attending the Massachusetts Provincial Congress on April 15 in Concord and were wary of returning to Boston. He summoned his close friend and masonic brother, Paul Revere, along with William Dawes to his home on Hanover Street in Boston, and then dispatched them to warn Hancock, Adams, and the countryside that the British regulars were out.

On the morning of April 19, Joseph received news of fighting in Lexington. He slipped out of Boston and fought alongside militia General William Heath in Menotomy, where the bloodiest hours of combat took place. General Heath and his men fired on the British as they retreated to Boston along what is now called Battle Road. Joseph narrowly escaped death when a musket ball sheared off a lock of his hair held with a pin over his ear. 

After the battles of Lexington and Concord and unable to return to Boston, Joseph lodged at Hastings House in Cambridge. With John Hancock and Samuel Adams departing soon for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Joseph emerged as the de facto leader of what a militia captain described as “the intended revolution.” 

On April 23, 1775, succeeding John Hancock, Joseph was elected to the loftiest political position of the rebellion—president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. With little money or resources, he faced the challenges of a rapidly evolving revolutionary political and military climate. As a tireless and devoted leader, he responded to each new challenge with intelligence and courage.

With provincial military leaders, Joseph oversaw the initial phase of the Siege of Boston. Operating without formal legitimacy of either government or military, he strived to maintain a unified military command with civilian oversight. The Provincial Congress was about to offer him a directorship of medical service but instead proffered him a major generalship on June 14. 

By June 15, it was clear that the British were about to make a preemptive strike on Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown. Joseph and the Committee of Safety decided that the provincial army must make a preemptive move of their own, despite their shortage of gunpowder. At 9:00 p.m. on Friday, June 16, 1775, nearly one thousand provincial soldiers under the command of Colonel William Prescott assembled on the common in Cambridge opposite Hastings House. Joseph was not among them as they marched toward Charlestown. 

Colonel Prescott and his men commenced building a redoubt on the Charlestown peninsula, under the cover of night. The Committee of Safety’s order was to build a redoubt on Bunker Hill, but by mistake Prescott and his men built the redoubt on an unnamed hill closer to Boston (later called Breed’s Hill).

By daybreak, the British became aware of the presence of colonial forces and mounted an attack from British shipping on the Charles and Mystic Rivers, and cannon fire from a battery on Copp’s Hill in Boston. At approximately 2:00 p.m., the British, under the command of General William Howe, began landing at Morton’s Point on the southwestern tip of the Charlestown peninsula.  

Joseph was nowhere to be found on the morning of June 17. There are speculative reasons for his absence. But what is clear is around 3:00 pm his former medical apprentice, Dr. David Townsend, arrived at Hastings House and found Joseph suffering from a sick headache. David relayed the news that the men on Bunker Hill were being fired upon by the British.

After Joseph donned elegant clothes, he and David made their way to Charlestown Neck. David stayed to care for men who had been wounded in the battle. Joseph went on to Bunker Hill. He encountered General Israel Putnam. Putnam relinquished his command to Major General Joseph Warren, but Joseph refused, saying that his commission was not finalized, and he had come to fight as a volunteer. When Joseph entered the redoubt, Colonel Prescott and his 150-exhausted men, raised a cheer of Huzzah! Huzzah! Like Putnam, Prescott relinquished his command to Joseph, and again Joseph refused.

The rebels had, thus far, repelled two waves of the British advance. What ended the American resistance was neither lack of courage nor unstoppable British resolve. It was the Patriot stand was their depleted supply of gunpowder. On a third advance, the British regulars, grenadiers, and marines swarmed the redoubt. The rebels tried to make their last stand by swinging their muskets or throwing rocks at the British. Colonel Prescott ordered a retreat.

Joseph was one of the last remaining men in the redoubt. There has been debate about what happened next. What is known is that Joseph was shot, at close range, in the face just below his left eye, probably with an officer’s pistol and by someone who recognized him. Joseph would have died instantly, unlike the scene depicted in John Trumble’s painting below, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775. Joseph Warren is the man in the foreground, lying on the ground, dressed in white with his sword beside him.

The British stripped Joseph of his fine clothes, mutilated his body, and buried him in a shallow grave with a farmer. Exactly when and who mutilated Joseph’s body is unknown. His youngest brother, Dr. John Warren, attempted to find Joseph’s body a few days after the battle, but he was stopped by British sentries at Charlestown Neck with a bayonet to his chest.

Joseph’s body wasn’t recovered until after the Siege of Boston ended in March 1776 and the British army withdrew. His brothers, John and Eben, found his badly decomposed corpse. Paul Revere fashioned a false tooth with a wire for Joseph before his death. This piece of forensic clue was used as evidence to identify Joseph.  

Joseph’s remains lay in state at the Massachusetts Provincial State House in Boston for three days. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War dispersed the Masons, but, on the discovery of Joseph’s remains, they returned to give their late Grand Master of the “Ancient Lodge” (St. Andrew’s) the burial he was due. On April 8, 1776, a large and respectable number of the masonic brethren assembled to attend his obsequies, and followed in procession from the State House to the Stone Chapel (King’s Chapel). Joseph’s eulogy was delivered by young lawyer Perez Morton. Morton met Joseph as a minor official on the Massachusetts Provincial Committee of Safety during the early months of the Siege of Boston. Morton’s eulogy of Warren was well received at the time.

Joseph’s casket was taken in funeral procession for interment at the Granary Cemetery. The Minot family offered their family’s plot since the Warren family did not have one in Boston. His remains would lie in the tomb, lost to posterity for fifty years until his nephew, John C. Warren, after much research, identified the body’s whereabouts. Joseph was reburied two more times.

The Tory Peter Oliver’s January 1776 newspaper address to rebelling colonists cited Joseph Warren’s grisly end as just desserts for a scheming social climber and recklessly ambitious rebel against the king’s authority. In 1782, Oliver was quoted as saying, “Had Warren lived George Washington would have been ‘an obscurity.””

Joseph Warren should not have been on the battlefield that day. His peers warned him that if he went to battle, the British would recognize him and kill him. Joseph responded, “I am aware of the danger, but I should die with shame if I were to remain at home in safety while my friends and fellow-citizens are shedding blood and hazarding their lives in the cause. I know that I many fall, but where is the man who does think it glorious and delightful to die for his country?” 

The people needed him to lead the patriotic movement. They needed him as a friend, father, brother, and physician. At the time of his death, he was a thirty-four-year-old widower with four young children who were now destitute and orphaned.

Dr. Joseph Warren sacrificed his life for liberty, and in doing so, became America’s first martyr. His death encouraged the people of a nation yet to be born, to keep fighting despite their grief. It’s what he would have done.

John Adams in a letter to John Winthrop following the Battle of Bunker Hill: “Alass poor Warren! …. For God Sake my Friend let us be upon our Guard, against too much Admiration of our greatest Friends. President of the Congress, Chairman of the Committee of Safety, Major General…was too much for Mortal, and This Accumulation of Admiration upon one Gentleman, which among the Hebrews was called Idolatry…”