Joseph Warren

Joseph Warren was killed on Breed's Hill on June 17, 1775, in the fight the country still calls Bunker Hill. He was thirty-four. A Boston physician, he had written the Suffolk Resolves, served the Provincial Congress, and sent Paul Revere and William Dawes out on the April night that started the shooting war.

Congress had named him a major general of Massachusetts militia. He went to the hill as a volunteer and refused a safe post in the rear. The British took the field on the third assault, when the Americans were out of powder. Warren was shot in the head as the line broke.

The British buried him in a shallow grave on the ground he had tried to hold. Friends later recovered the body. Boston buried him with the honors the first year of the war could spare.

He never saw independence declared. He had already spent his credit as an organizer, a writer, and a man who would not let other people do all the dying. The early Revolution was run by doctors and lawyers who still remembered how to stand in a redoubt.