Joseph Warren’s Last Stand
He could hear the cannons roar in Boston as he lay in bed, frozen by a headache. He hadn’t slept in days. His body wanted to rest.
But Joseph Warren wouldn’t lay and rest. It was no day for such a luxury. The birth of American independence, he knew, was nigh. The date was June 17, 1775—the fateful day of Bunker Hill.
The 34-year-old Warren, a widower with four children, struggled out of bed, dressed, tucked pistols in his waist, gathered intelligence reports and letters, grabbed his Bible, and set off on horseback.
He arrived at Breed’s Hill, where the colonists had dug in. He grabbed a musket and a sword and stood anxiously on the muddy redoubt walls and watched as British vessels crossed the Charles River to march regulars on Warren’s crude but determined militia.
Two months had passed since Warren instructed Paul Revere to ride into the Massachusetts countryside and warn that the British were marching. On April 19, the countrymen fought back the British, first at Lexington and then at Concord. “Oh, what a glorious morning this is!” Sam Adams said.
Days later, Warren engaged the British in a skirmish, during which a lock of his long, curly blonde hair was shot off by a musket ball. It invigorated him. “Perhaps some part of Joseph Warren believed that he could not die on a battlefield,” one biographer wrote.
Warren was a doctor who inoculated Bostonians during the smallpox outbreaks. “Warren is a pretty, tall, genteel, fair-faced young gentleman,” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1764. Years later, future president John Quincy Adams called Warren “a dear friend of my father, and a beloved physician to me.”
But Warren was more than a doctor. “Great events,” Richard Frothingham wrote, “attracted Warren to a wider stage, and gave direction to the current of his life.” Parliament happened: taxes, resistance, more taxes, more resistance. “He devoted himself to the common cause with a zeal extremely prejudicial to his private interests.”
Few patriot leaders labored so intensely for “The Cause” as Warren. And few did so with little attention to personal legacy. While John Adams labored, often vainly and inaccurately, to write himself as the axis on which the Revolution rotated, Warren labored mostly in shrouded secrecy, inattentive to his place in the saga.
He only cared about liberty. “The mistress we court is liberty,” Warren once wrote to Sam Adams, “and it is better to die than not to obtain her.”
He led spy rings, gathered intelligence, instructed patriots, attended town meetings, and organized bold acts of resistance—he disturbed the minds of royal officers one too many times. “Personal freedom is the natural right of every man,” Warren preached regularly.
Twice, he gave rousing orations commemorating the Boston Massacre. “May we ever be a people,” he shouted in 1772. “May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed.”
In 1774 Warren authored the Suffolk Resolves, a precursor to the Declaration of Independence. “It is an indispensable duty which we owe to God,” he wrote, “to maintain, defend, and preserve… those rights which we are justly entitled by the laws of nature.”
Now, Warren stood confidently on Breed’s Hill. Americans, he had written, “esteem death, with all its tortures, preferable to slavery.”
The battle started. British troops stormed the hill. Warren fired off his musket. The British, though heavily battered, advanced, driving the colonists back. Warren stayed behind to cover their retreat. A horrific melee ensued. The ground, a soldier noted, streamed “with blood and strewed with dead and dying men.”
Then fate happened. A musket ball struck Warren in the face. He fell dead instantly. “Warren held the line and was killed facing the enemy,” a team of medical examiners concluded in 2015. “His whole soul seemed to be filled with the greatness of the cause,” a friend wrote John Adams.
“I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!” Warren once declared. And so he did, martyring himself so that others could know the true cost of making America that city on a hill.