Joseph Warren.Ī physician and widower at an early age, the 33-year-old Warren was asked by the Massachusetts top hierarchy, as they headed to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, to lead both the Committee on Safety (the organization established to perform the colony’s executive functions) and the Provincial Congress. While Sam Adams, John Adams and John Hancock receive the lion’s share of contemporary historical attention, between 1774, when the first Continental Congress was convened, and the June 1775 battle of Bunker Hill, the practical burdens of leadership lay on the young shoulders of Dr. Philbrick’s book also describes the de facto colonial leader of the early revolutionary period. While there were 700 British soldiers in the foray, the militia leaders were planning to let the British do what they would until that fateful shot commenced the bloodshed. The militia’s orders were not to engage the British unless they had over 500 soldiers as well as artillery. Moreover, were it not for the mysterious shot fired at the 100 militia on Lexington Green, subsequent events might have been completely different. Benjamin Church, a distinguished member of the colonial effort - he was made surgeon general of the patriot army - was actually a British spy that colonial General Israel Putnam was an ebullient leader but useless at tactical planning that many colonial soldiers refused to budge from Bunker Hill even though the real action was on Breed’s Hill a quarter mile away.
The book uncovers and documents some new (or at least little known) facts: that Dr. Philbrick is a native New Englander and has written half a dozen histories, including Mayflower, a finalist for a Pulitzer. Whereas other books about Bunker Hill focus on the details of the battle, Philbrick spends far more time on the political background of the region, the players on each side and their motivations, and the logistical and organizational problems that made the colonial effort far from perfect despite its tactical victory. Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution makes the case for this statement by laying out in great detail the emotional and political rubric that slowly transformed Boston - and, after Lexington and Concord, the entire Massachusetts colony - into a hotbed of patriots. The Lexington/Concord skirmishes did much to inflame the patriots of Massachusetts and indeed the rest of colonial America, but they were not the battle that would push the teetering china off the table.
If you asked most Americans to name the first battle of the American Revolutionary War, they would most likely say, “Lexington and Concord.” While those responses would be close, they wouldn’t be quite accurate.
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