He sent Paul Revere on his midnight ride to warn Lexington the British were coming.
A Harvard graduate and a successful doctor in Boston, he left his career when the British passed the hated Stamp Act of 1765. With Samuel Adams, he organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in protest.
His name was Dr. Joseph Warren, born JUNE 11, 1741.
King George III had decided to punish the colonists for the Boston Tea Party by enacting the Intolerable Acts of 1774:
-blocking Boston’s harbor until citizens reimbursed the East India Tea Company;
-quartering British soldiers in private homes;
-allowing British officials to be unaccountable for their crimes; and
-replacing Massachusetts’ elected officials with royal appointees.
In response, September of 1774, Dr. Joseph Warren wrote the Suffolk Resolves, urging Massachusetts to establish a free state, boycott British goods, form militias and no longer be loyal to a king who violates their rights:
“Whereas…the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain, which of old persecuted, scourged, and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity…
It is an indispensable duty which we owe to God, our country, ourselves and posterity, by all lawful ways and means in our power to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious rights and liberties, for which many of our fathers fought, bled and died, and to hand them down entire to future generations.”
Dr. Joseph Warren became President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, April of 1775. His brother, John Warren, founded Harvard Medical School.
In June of 1775, as British ships entered Boston’s harbor, 34-year-old Dr. Joseph Warren joined the militia. Though appointed a Major General by the Provincial Congress, he chose to serve as a private, acknowledging General Israel Putnam and Colonel William Prescott had more military experience.
On June 17, 1775, Warren asked to be placed where the heaviest fighting would be and Putnam pointed to Bunker Hill.
He fought in the redoubt, repelling the British soldiers, till they ran out of ammunition.
The British made a third and final assault on the hill, and Warren was killed instantly by a musket ball in the head. His body was stripped, bayoneted until unrecognizable, and then shoved into a ditch. Ten month later, Paul Revere helped identify his remains by an artificial tooth he had placed in his jaw.
A monument marks where he died.
Three years earlier Dr. Joseph Warren had stated on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre:
“If you perform your part, you must have the strongest confidence that the same Almighty Being who protected your pious and venerable forefathers, who enabled them to turn a barren wilderness into a fruitful field, who so often made bare His arm for their salvation, will still be mindful of you, their offspring.
May this Almighty Being graciously preside in all our councils. May He direct us to such measures as He Himself shall approve, and be pleased to bless.
May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the world in one common undistinguishable ruin!”
William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, best-selling author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc., a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage.
To learn more about the author please visit William Federer
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