We will never know for sure how much personal ambition influenced Warren’s role in initiating the chaotic rush of events to come. But if there was anyone with the political and social skills to prosper amid the collective trauma of a revolution, it was Joseph Warren.
—
Upon hearing the news that more troops were headed their way, many Bostonians began to panic. Rumors flew about the city. General Percy reported that the country people planned to “set [Boston] on fire and attack the troops before reinforcement comes.”
It was as if the fear that had first incapacitated Dr. Thomas Young’s wife in the days after the Powder Alarm in September had lain dormant over the fall and winter and was only now, with the arrival of spring, reclaiming Boston’s inhabitants. It was an extraordinary and terrifying epiphany. All the rhetoric about taxes and representation, about liberty and freedom, about the sovereignty of Parliament, was about to incite an all-consuming war that might very well start here, in the city they called home. Like Lot and his family, they had no choice but to abandon everything that they once held dear and flee for their lives.
On Tuesday, April 11, John Andrews reported that “all [is] in confusion . . . , the streets and Neck lined with wagons carrying off the effects of the inhabitants, who are either afraid, mad, crazy, or infatuated . . . , imagining to themselves that they shall be liable to every evil that can be enumerated if they tarry in town.”
On Sunday, April 9, in the midst of religious services at the Brattle Street Meeting, Joseph Warren was seen conferring tensely with the Reverend Samuel Cooper. The British ministry, it was rumored, had ordered Gage to arrest Boston’s leading patriots, and Cooper, who corresponded regularly with Benjamin Franklin in London, was in danger. Cooper broke off his conversation with Warren to baptize a child, but by Monday, April 10, Cooper and his wife had left Boston for a friend’s house in Weston.
Samuel Adams and John Hancock were already safely removed from Boston, spending their days at the Provincial Congress in Concord and their nights at the Clarke parsonage in the nearby town of Lexington. Even though he knew Gage had the equivalent of a warrant for his arrest, Warren was determined to remain in Boston for as long as possible. In the meantime, he hastily made arrangements for Mercy Scollay, whom he now considered part of his “family,” and his four children to live in Worcester, about forty miles from Boston. In a brief letter to a Dr. Dix, he explained that his furniture had already been moved to his mother’s house in Roxbury, where the doctor could send some wagons to retrieve both the furniture and his loved ones for transportation to Worcester. Warren also seems to have been involved in getting both Isaiah Thomas and his printing press to the same safely removed town. It was during this period of turmoil that Warren’s college friend Dr. Nathaniel Ames began billing Warren’s account for boarding Sally Edwards at Ames’s tavern in Dedham.
Looking back over two centuries later, we know that the patriot movement ultimately led to independence, but such an end result was by no means inevitable in the spring of 1775, when many still believed that the British government must eventually do as it had always done in response to past colonial protests and withdraw the offending legislation. At the root of the patriots’ misguided optimism was their continued confidence in George III. The fiction they all clung to was that once the king saw for himself how his ministers had misled him, he would withdraw the troops and the demand for unjust taxes and allow New England to remain forever free. But, in actuality, the king was hardly the colonies’ great ally, and in fact he saw more clearly than they did the possible results of their current actions. As early as November 18, 1774, he’d written Lord North, “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”
The last thing most patriots wanted was a war, and more than a few Bostonians now felt that they would have never willingly embarked on this journey if they had known where they were headed. His newspaper opponent John Adams might be loath to admit it, but Daniel Leonard had expressed the sentiments of many inhabitants when he compared the city’s political leaders “to a false guide, that having led a benighted traveler through many mazes and windings in a thick wood, finds himself at length on the brink of a horrid precipice, and, to save himself, seizes fast hold of his follower, to utmost hazard of plunging both headlong down the steep, and being dashed in pieces together against the rocks below.” This sense of disorientation and betrayal—How did we get here in the first place?—was what many were feeling as they stuffed whatever goods would fit in a wagon and joined the long line out of Boston.
Like Joseph Warren, John Andrews resolved to remain in Boston. In recent weeks Andrews’s wife Ruthy had been hard at work on a landscape sketch that Andrews proudly claimed was “equal to any copper plate that I ever saw.” The drawing had even garnered praise from General Percy, “who expressed his very great admiration of it.” The town might be in turmoil, but life went on in Boston, and in a letter to a relative Percy wrote of the weather. Although the last three weeks had been “cold and disagreeable, a kind of second winter,” the previous months had been for the most part remarkably warm. “Thank God, I still continue to enjoy my health perfectly,” Percy wrote, “and have very much surprised the inhabitants here by going constantly all winter with my bosom open without a great coat. . . . I think I have felt it colder in England.”
—
The king had long since decided that “blows must decide” the current crisis, but not so the members of the Provincial Congress in Concord. On April 7 the spy Benjamin Church reported to Gage that the delegates were in “great consternation” and were considering a recess “to consult with their constituents.” Church asked Gage whether that would be a good development from his perspective. “It would prevent their taking any hasty steps,” he pointed out, while Gage waited for “his dispatches” from the ministry. Clearly, Church was well acquainted with the inner workings of both Congress and General Gage’s staff. He also had some advice: “A sudden blow struck now or immediately on the arrival of the reinforcements from England should . . . overset all their plans.” On April 9, he reported that despite the fact that the “people without doors are clamorous for an immediate commencement of hostilities,” Congress appeared incapable of taking any “decisive measures.” On Saturday, April 15, he reported that the deadlock continued and that the one item the Congress could agree on was that they should officially encourage the inhabitants of Boston to leave the city. On Tuesday, April 18, he reported that Congress was now in recess until May and that with Samuel Adams soon to leave for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Adams had left “particular directions” with Joseph Warren on “how to act.”
Whether or not Church’s April 7 suggestion lay behind it, Gage had begun to make preparations “for a sudden blow” as early as April 11, when the warship Somerset was moved up the harbor so that she lay between Boston and Charlestown, “exactly in the ferry way between the two towns.” And then, on April 14, Gage finally received the long-awaited orders from Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth.
The letter had been written back on January 27, when the saber rattling of the North administration had been at its height. Although Dartmouth qualified his statements in half a dozen ways, his overall message was clear: the time had come for Gage to do something, since “the king’s dignity and honor and safety of the empire require that . . . force should be repelled by force.” If a conflict was inevitable, let it begin now, before Massachusetts entered “a riper state of rebellion.” Dartmouth reported that both the king and the ministry felt that “the first and essential step” was to “arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors” in the Provincial Congress. That said, he realized that “in a situation where everything depends so much upon the events of the day and upon local circumstances your conduct must be governed very much by your own judgment and discretion.”
The iro
ny is that by the time Gage received Dartmouth’s letter, the anger of the ministry, along with that of many Massachusetts patriots, had cooled. If Gage had done nothing that spring, the patriot leaders, already beset by growing discord within their own ranks, would have had even more trouble maintaining a united front. The ministry had played perfectly into the radicals’ hands when Gage finally chose to act on a letter based on information and instructions that were several months old.
But perhaps the greatest irony was that a suggestion from a British spy, not the letter from Dartmouth, seems to have initiated the series of decisions that was to have such a momentous historical impact. In the end, Gage didn’t do as Dartmouth had recommended and arrest the leaders of the Provincial Congress, which would have almost certainly led to the seizure of many loyalist leaders (a response recommended in the Suffolk Resolves drafted by Joseph Warren back in September). Instead, Gage proceeded with plans to secure and destroy the military stores in Concord, which had become, thanks to being a town at the crossroads between Boston and the many settlements to the west and north, a major gathering point for patriot weapons and provisions. Church and Gage’s other spies assured him that large amounts of military supplies (including the valuable brass cannons that had been spirited out of Boston back in the fall) had been accumulated in Concord; the town, about twenty miles outside of Boston, was also close enough for a detachment of regulars to march there and back in a single day—an important consideration, given the hostility of the country people. And besides, the likelihood that a company of poorly trained militiamen had the gumption to stand up to the regulars—let alone fire on them—seemed remote at best.
On April 15, the day the Provincial Congress adjourned, Gage ordered that the two elite companies of his regiments—the grenadiers (the bigger and more powerful men) and the light infantry (who were faster and more agile)—be relieved of their duties “till further orders.” The supposed reason for the order was so that the soldiers might learn new “exercises and evolutions,” but Lieutenant John Barker rightly guessed that “this . . . is by way of a blind. I dare say they have something for them to do.”
Gage’s officers were not the only ones to take notice. The patriots had been keeping careful watch on the regulars’ movements since the fall and quickly realized that something was afoot. The next suspicious development was the midnight launching of boats from the decks of the transports anchored in the harbor. These were the type of small rowing vessels that had been used to take the troops up the Mystic River back in September, and the next morning they could be seen clustered at the sterns of the men-of-war. From his house on Hanover Street, Warren directed Paul Revere to ride to Lexington, where Samuel Adams and John Hancock were still living in the town’s parsonage, and inform them of these ominous developments. On the way back to Boston, Revere stopped in Charlestown, where he made arrangements with the local patriots that if the troops did indeed march out of the city, he would make sure that signal lanterns were placed in the belfry of Christ Church, whose steeple was, at 191 feet, the tallest in Boston, taller, in fact, than even Beacon Hill. One lantern would mean the regulars were taking the land route out across the Neck into Roxbury; two lanterns would mean the boats had been used to row the soldiers across the Charles River to either Charlestown or Cambridge.
In an espionage report written on Tuesday, April 18, Gage received detailed information about where the stores were located in Concord. Many of the provisions were hidden in houses in the center of town; most of the military supplies were at a farmhouse on the other side of the Concord River. By the end of the day, Gage had completed the second draft of his orders for Colonel Francis Smith, who was to take a force of about seven hundred grenadiers and light infantry to Concord, destroy or capture the stores (what both sides wanted most were the cannons), and return to Boston. The soldiers were to leave that night in boats brought to the shore along the western edge of the common, and they were to be without both baggage (usually transported in wagons) and artillery. If all went well, they would be back in their barracks before nightfall of the following day.
—
Joseph Warren was one of the last patriot leaders still in Boston on the night of April 18. Around nine o’clock, just as the regulars began to assemble in the remote reaches of the common, he is said to have received word of the impending expedition and decided to alert the countryside that British troops were headed for Concord. The question is who told Warren where the soldiers were headed.
Gage did not inform General Percy of the expedition until that night. After his meeting with Gage, Percy was passing a group of Bostonians gathered on the common when he overheard one of them say, “They will miss their aim.”
“What aim?” Percy asked.
“The cannon at Concord.”
Percy turned abruptly around, rushed back to Province House, and told Gage that his supposedly clandestine mission was no longer a secret. The general was thunderstruck, claiming that besides Percy he had told only one other person.
Many have speculated as to who that person may have been. Margaret Kemble Gage is often looked to as the most likely candidate, even though there is no tangible evidence to support the supposition. The story goes that she and her husband grew apart after the events of April 1775, and Gage quickly sent her packing on a ship back to London. In fact, Margaret Gage did not leave Boston until the late summer and was soon followed by her husband. Hardly estranged from one another, the Gages would have two more children together.
In all likelihood there was no shadowy informant. Boston was too compact and crowded a town for much of anything to happen without a good portion of its residents knowing about it. Traditions have come down to us of someone who overheard a conversation between two officers on Long Wharf, of someone else who saw a battle-ready light infantryman in a Boston shop, and of yet another who spoke with a groomer in the stables of Province House who told him of the expedition. All of these things—or some versions thereof—might have happened. Earlier that afternoon about a dozen mounted officers wearing long blue coats to conceal their scarlet uniforms had left via the Neck and enjoyed a dinner at a tavern in Cambridge. Later that night, when the British officers began to take up positions on the various roads leading to Concord (so as to prevent any messengers from alerting the countryside), the ever-vigilant patriots had added evidence of where the regulars were headed. With the exception of the soldiers themselves, just about everybody in Boston seemed to know where the troops were headed that night.
Much more significant than the identity of Warren’s informant is the reason Warren decided to alert the countryside. In early April the Provincial Congress had determined that a column leaving Boston must be equipped with baggage and artillery before it constituted a threat to the province. Congress had also determined that a vote of five members of the Committee of Safety (only one of them being from Boston) was required before the alarm could be sounded. Earlier that day, the committee had met at the Black Horse Tavern in the town of Menotomy (now known as Arlington) on the way to Concord from Cambridge. At that moment three committee members were staying at the Black Horse, and two others were at their homes in nearby Charlestown. Warren could have crossed the harbor, just as Paul Revere was soon to do, and after consulting his fellow committee members helped make what would have been, even with the committee’s unanimous consent, a controversial decision given the expedition’s absence of artillery and baggage. Warren opted instead to send out the tanner William Dawes (of the cannon-compressed shirt button) by Boston Neck and then called for Revere and directed him to row across the harbor for Charlestown. Even before the regulars had arrived in the marshes of Cambridge and set out for Concord, the alarm was being sounded in towns to the west and north of Boston.
This was exactly the scenario that Joseph Hawley and the other moderates in the Provincial Congress had hoped to avoid: one influential committee member had ignored proper protocol and set into motion
the process that made a confrontation between British regulars and the militia almost inevitable. Knowing that Samuel Adams had employed essentially the same strategy back in June when he attempted to circumvent the opposition to the Solemn League and Covenant, one can only wonder whether he had sent an earlier message to Warren via Paul Revere, urging him to issue the alarm even if the criterion demanded by the Provincial Congress was not met. It’s even more probable that Warren’s decision to send out the alarm was like most decisions made during a crisis—a spontaneous reaction to a seemingly confused rush of unexpected events. Even if the troops crossing the Charles River were without baggage or artillery, they exceeded the five-hundred-man threshold imposed by Congress. The possibility that Smith’s troops were after not just the military stores in Concord but also Samuel Adams and John Hancock was another concern.
What Warren did was technically wrong, but at least he had made a decision—something the hypersensitive Gage had been struggling to do now for weeks. Whether premeditated or spur of the moment, or a mixture of both, Warren’s decision to send out Dawes and Revere rendered the debates at the Provincial Congress moot. After more than four months of preparing for the eventuality, Warren was about to have his war.
—
Paul Revere reached Lexington around midnight. As a precaution, a guard headed by the militia sergeant William Munroe had been posted around the house in which Samuel Adams and John Hancock were staying. Munroe and his men had been given orders to be as quiet as possible so that those inside could sleep, and when the sergeant admonished the newly arrived messenger for making too much noise, Revere erupted, “Noise! You’ll have noise enough before long! The regulars are coming out!” By this point both Adams and Hancock were awake. “Come in, Revere,” Hancock ordered. “We are not afraid of you.”