While practicing medicine and surgery in
Boston, he became involved in politics, associating with
John Hancock,
Samuel Adams, and other leaders of the broad movement labeled
Sons of Liberty. He was one of the leaders of patriot activities during the 1768
Liberty Affair and facilitated an agreement with Hancock and government customs officials prior to the Boston demonstrations. That same year, Royal officials tried to place his publishers Edes and Gill on trial for an incendiary newspaper essay Warren wrote under the pseudonym
A True Patriot, but no local jury would indict them. Warren conducted an autopsy on the body of young
Christopher Seider in February 1770, and was a member of the Boston committee that assembled a report on the following month's
Boston Massacre. While many historians contend that Warren had no role in the 1773
Boston Tea Party, some have recently argued that he was a key planner of the event. In 1774, he authored the song "Free America," which was published in colonial newspapers. The poem was set to a traditional British tune, "
The British Grenadiers." Warren owned at least one enslaved person. This unnamed man, formerly held by Joshua Green, helped Warren with his medical practice.
American Revolution Battles of Lexington and Concord as a private before the
Battle of Bunker Hill As Boston's conflict with the royal government came to a head in 1773–1775, Warren was appointed to the Boston
Committee of Correspondence. He twice delivered orations in commemoration of the Massacre, the second time in March 1775 while the town was occupied by army troops. Warren drafted the
Suffolk Resolves, which were endorsed by the
Continental Congress, to advocate resistance to Parliament's
Coercive Acts, which were otherwise known as the Intolerable Acts. He was appointed President of the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the highest position in the revolutionary government. In mid-April 1775, Warren and
Benjamin Church were the two top members of the Committee of Correspondence left in Boston. On the afternoon of April 18, the British troops in the town mobilized for a long-planned raid on the nearby town of Concord, and already before nightfall word of mouth had spread knowledge of the mobilization widely within Boston. It had been known to rebel leadership for weeks that General Gage in Boston had plans to destroy munitions stored in Concord by the colonials, and it was also known that they would be taking a route through Lexington. Unsupported stories argue that Warren received additional information from a highly placed informant, usually claiming it was from
Margaret Kemble Gage, the wife of General
Thomas Gage, that the troops had orders to arrest
Samuel Adams and
John Hancock. However, there is little evidence of this as the troops apparently had no such orders. There is growing consensus in new scholarship that Mrs. Gage did not conspire against the British and that Warren needed no informant to deduce that the British were mobilizing. Warren learned there was some British expedition likely to begin that night, and so sent
William Dawes and
Paul Revere on their famous "midnight rides" to warn Hancock and Adams in Lexington. Warren slipped out of Boston early on April 19, and during that day's
Battle of Lexington and Concord, he coordinated and led militia into the fight alongside
William Heath as the British Army returned to Boston. When the enemy were returning from Concord, he was among the foremost in hanging upon their rear and assailing their flanks. During this fighting Warren was nearly killed, a musket ball striking part of his wig. When his mother saw him after the battle and heard of his escape, she entreated him with tears again not to risk life so precious. "Wherever danger is, dear mother," he answered, "there will your son be. Now is no time for one of America's children to shrink from the most hazardous duty; I will either set my country free, or shed my last drop of blood to make her so." He then turned to recruiting and organizing soldiers for the
Siege of Boston, promulgating the Patriots' version of events, and negotiating with General Gage in his role as head of the Provincial Congress.
Battle of Bunker Hill '', a 1786 painting by
John Trumbull Warren was commissioned into the
Continental Army at the rank of
major general by the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress on June 14, 1775. Three days later, he arrived at Charlestown just before the
Battle of Bunker Hill began and made his way to where Patriot militiamen were forming. Upon meeting General
Israel Putnam, Warren asked where he thought the heaviest fighting would be; Putnam responded by pointing to
Breed's Hill. Warren subsequently volunteered to join the militia at the rank of
private against the wishes of both Putnam and Colonel
William Prescott, both of whom unsuccessfully requested that he serve as their commander instead. Warren declined their request due to the fact that Putnam and Prescott had military experience. During the early stages of the battle, Warren repeatedly stated that "These fellows say we won't fight! By Heaven, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!"
Death Defending the Patriot redoubt against two failed attacks by British troops, he kept firing his gun until running out of ammunition and was
killed in action during the third and final assault by British gunfire. The man who killed him was possibly a British officer's servant, supported by a forensic analysis conducted in 2011.
Burials After the battle, Warren's body was stripped of his clothing, repeatedly bayoneted and then buried in a shallow ditch by British forces. American soldier Benjamin Hichborn subsequently wrote a letter to
John Adams on December 10, 1775, claiming that
Lieutenant James Drew, a
Royal Navy officer stationed on board the sloop HMS
Scorpion, went to Breed's Hill "a day or two" after the battle and exhumed Warren's body, "spit in his face, jumped on his stomach, and at last
cut off his head and committed every act of violence upon his body... In justice to the officers in general I must add, that they despised Drew for his Conduct." Warren's body was exhumed for a second time ten months after his death by his brothers and
Paul Revere, who identified the remains by an
artificial tooth Warren had installed in his jaw. He was given a
Masonic funeral and his body was interred in the
Granary Burying Ground. In 1825, it was exhumed and reinterred in
St. Paul's Church in
Boston before being moved one final time in 1855 to his family's vault in Boston's
Forest Hills Cemetery. ==Personal life==