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Joseph Warren - Thomas Gage

Personal charm and affability are traits not commonly issociated with revolutionaries, and rarely has an agent of social upheaval been held in such universal esteem by his contemporaries as was Dr. Joseph Warren. He seems to have been a man nearly everyone liked, and his qualities come down to us in those dignified adjectives of the eighteenth century—gentle, noble, generous. So it is difficult to know if it was because of these characteristics or in spite of them that he was one of a handful of provincials most feared by British officialdom. Not without reason, Lord Rawdon called Warren “the greatest incendiary in all America”; with the possible exception of Warren’s colleague and intimate, Samuel Adams, the Boston physician did more than any other American to maneuver the dispute between Britain and her colonies into a revolution. For some years he believed that change could be accomplished within the system (he felt obliged to do “every thing in my power to serve the united interest of Great Britain and her colonies”), but by 1774 he had concluded that little hope lay in that direction, so intransigent were George in and his ministers. His goals and his determination had hardened: as he wrote to John Adams, “… the mistress we court is Liberty, and it is better to die than not to obtain her.”

When John Singleton Copley painted his portrait in 1775, Warren was a fine-looking man of medium height, with large, wide-set eyes, full mouth, rather long, straight nose, and blond hair; although he was only thirty-four, there is in the fullness of the face and in his posture a hint that he was beginning to add a little weight. To look at the portrait is to accept the opinion of Warren’s contemporaries: that he was kind, friendly, entirely frank and open in all he said and did, scrupulously fair and humane in dealings with friend and enemy alike—a man universally trusted and admired. Born on a Roxbury farm in 1741, Joseph Warren made his way through Harvard, studied medicine with Dr. James Lloyd in Boston, and while still in his twenties was regarded as one of the town’s leading physicians. He was also known as a leader of the radical opposition, who was shaping public opinion in Boston against the Crown’s policies.

With Sam Adams, Warren initiated the Committees of Correspondence, which, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote, brought Massachusetts from “a state of peace, order, and general contentment … into a state of contention, disorder, and general dissatisfaction.” He gave speeches, wrote articles, attended countless caucuses and meetings, petitioned and attacked the authorities, and was a dominant figure in the Boston Massacre trial and the Tea Party. A driving force in the Committee of Safety, he took the lead in creating the colony’s Provincial Congress, presided over it in 1775, and did his utmost to create a government that would “give every man the greatest liberty to do what he pleases consistent with restraining him from doing any injury to another.” If any one man could be held responsible for triggering the events that led to war, it would have to be affable, charming Joseph Warren. In the Suffolk Resolves, which he drafted in September, 1774, he set forth a principle of defensive war that was subsequently adopted by the Continental Congress, thus committing the other colonies to support Massachusetts, come what might. In dispatching Paul Revere on his midnight errand, Warren instructed him not simply to warn the citizenry that the British were out and on the march, but to arouse the militia—a call almost certain to lead to bloodshed. And after the affair at Lexington and Concord, it was Joseph Warren who determined that the ragtag army that had assembled in response to the alarm and had harassed the redcoats from Concord to Boston, should not disband and return to their homes but would remain, a huge armed camp, bottling up the British in a state of siege. In May, when Samuel and John Adams and John Hancock left for Philadelphia and their duties in the Continental Congress, Warren stayed behind to shape Massachusetts policy. By that time Massachusetts was the rebellion, and Joseph Warren’s domination of its affairs was involving the other colonies in an ever-widening struggle.

Always the man of action, Warren had been the last radical leader to leave Boston, in the early hours of April 19; and after narrowly avoiding capture he was in the thick of the fight later in the day, when a musket ball tore through a lock of his hair. On June 17, 1775, after attending a council of war, Warren, with one of his medical students, made his way from Cambridge across Charlestown Neck, past Bunker Hill and out onto Breed’s Hill, where the provincial troops had erected a crude fort the previous night. He was offered command of the men (he had been appointed a major general a few days earlier) but declined, saying he came as a volunteer. A few hours later, in the desperate battle that marked a point of no return for Britain and her colonies, Joseph Warren was dead, a British musket ball in his head. Somewhere, in the last wild melee of the day, he fell. “He died in his best cloaths,” a British officer wrote, “every body remembers his fine silk-fringed waistcoat.” Another Englishman, Captain Laurie, found his body and “stuffed the scoundrell with another Rebel into one hole and there he and his seditious principles may remain.” Not until a year later were the remains recovered; Warren’s brothers and some friends—among them Paul Revere—rowed over to Charlestown, and Revere identified the corpse by the two artificial teeth that he had installed for his old friend.

It was a bitter blow for the cause, as Abigail Adams realized. “Not all the havoc and devastation they have made,” she wrote, “has wounded me like the death of Warren. We want him in the Senate; we want him in his profession; we want him in the field.”

On October 10, 1775, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage took his last salute as commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America and the next day sailed for England aboard the transport Pallas. As he wound up nearly two decades of dedicated service in the American colonies, almost no one saw him off; and after his arrival in London a fellow officer wrote of him as a “poor wretch [who] is scarcely thought of, he is below contempt …” while other countrymen joked about the possibility of hanging him. For nearly half of those years in the colonies Gage had been the most powerful official on the continent; honest, honorable, a faithful servant of his king, he had given all he had to his task, only to be despised by the Americans and abandoned by the British.

It was ironic that Thomas Gage’s colonial service should have begun and ended with two of the greatest disasters of British arms in North America Braddock’s defeat and the battle for Bunker Hill; yet in the twenty years between those bloody encounters the mood and circumstances in the colonies had altered forever, and forces totally beyond Gage’s capacity to control had swept across the land like a whirlwind, catching him up, helpless, and wrecking his career in the process. (It may have occurred to him that his family, the Gages of Firle in Sussex, had an affinity for losing causes: his forebears had backed King John, Charles I, and James II.)

After attending Westminster, the famous public school, where his fellow scholars included a collection of names that would figure in the Revolution Francis Bernard, John Burgoyne, George Germain, and two of the Howe brothers, George Augustus and Richard Gage (as was then the custom) purchased a lieutenancy, fought the French in Flanders, and helped rout the Scottish clans at Culloden. In 1754 his regiment was posted to America, and in July, 1755, Gage was out in front with the advanced guard when the French and Indians struck General Edward Braddock’s army. Wounded in the belly and the head, with several bullet holes in his coat, he nevertheless organized the rear guard for the retreat after Braddock was mortally wounded. He saw a thousand brave men killed that day, of fifteen hundred who went into action, yet Gage went back for more and was in Abercromby’s suicidal attack on Montcalm at Fort Ticonderoga, where his friend Viscount Howe fell. Out of this wilderness experience came, in 1757, his proposal for a corps of disciplined irregulars Gage’s “chasseurs” the first light-armed regiment in the British army. In 1760 Gage was made governor at Montreal; three years later he took command of British forces in North America.

Gage had demonstrated courage in battle, but he was not regarded as a brilliant commander; nevertheless, he had an aptitude for administration, and it was thought that his marriage to an American—the slender, ambitious Margaret Kemble—might be an asset. So in 1774, while Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, was home on leave, Gage was appointed to serve in his place in troubled Boston, retaining his rank as commander in chief. Good-natured, popular, with the fare of a calm, even-tempered aristocrat, the conscientious Gage saw his duty and followed it, and could console himself that he had been patient and reasonable at every turn, in the face of exceptionally trying circumstances One of his first acts in Boston was to put the unpopular Port Bill into effect an event greeted by tolling bells, fasting, and public display of mourning and every subsequent move he made on behalf of the king’s ministers met with nil the legal trickery and political chicanery known to the cantankerous, rebellious Yankees. He could have imposed martial law, but instead he permitted the town’s residents almost complete freedom. He made no move to censor or suppress the scurrilous press; he allowed the rabble-rousers to hold their meetings; he did nothing to stop militiamen in outlying towns from drilling on village greens and collecting arms and ammunition. To set an example of justice to local authorities, he listened to complaints against drunken British soldiers and punished offenders with a flogging. All to no avail; for while the rebels called him a “monster” his own soldiers and the loyalists ridiculed him as “Tommy, the old woman ”

Unhappily, Gage could not make policy; only London could do that. Again and again he wrote home, urging the government to take one clear course or another—either lop off the colonies “as a rotten limb from the empire, and leave them to themselves, or take effectual means to reduce them to lawfull authority. leniency would not work, he knew; force and action might. Yet even when the government clamored for action they refused him the means with which to execute it. When on April 14, 1775, he received a dispatch ordering him to move decisively, to use force if necessary, and to arrest the principal rebels at the risk of provoking hostilities—Gage ordered out the troops, with humiliating results at Lexington and Concord.

On June 17, when he was forced to move again, to capture the redoubt the rebels and erected in front of Bunker Hill, it was his final military act as commander, for the casualties of that frontal assault produced more than mourning in London; they incurred a hitter, unreasoning anger that demanded a scapegoat for defeat and national humiliation And the scapegoat had to be the man who had pointed the finger of blame at his superiors for not giving him adequate support.

For a time after his return to England, Gage had hopes of obtaining an important post; there was even talk of giving him a new commission as commander in chief, but it came to nothing. Thomas Gage survived the war, living on until 1787, but the echo of his anguished cry after he learned the extent of his losses at Bunker Hill still rings in the ear: “I wished this Cursed place was burned!”

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