This Forgotten Founding Father Hoped to 'Die Up to My Knees in Blood' in the Fight for American Independence. He Got His Wish

Joseph Warren was a key leader of the American Revolution, mobilizing troops and managing a circle of spies. But he’s mainly remembered for his death at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775

Massachusetts doctor Joseph Warren was a prominent patriot during the American Revolution, a stirring orator who managed a busy medical practice as well as a spy network. Warren dispatched Paul Revere and William Dawes to raise the alarm on a midnight ride before the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He was a military officer who fought alongside foot soldiers, and after he was killed by the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, his dedication to the American cause transformed him into a legend—at least for the century or so after his death. In the 20th century, Warren’s contributions to the fight for American independence were largely overlooked, and today, he enjoys a fraction of the fame of his fellow founding fathers.

Warren was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1741. He attended Harvard College and taught at the prestigious Roxbury Latin School before embarking on his medical training. By the late 1760s, Warren was a practicing physician who was becoming increasingly involved in revolutionary causes. He cared for the wounded after the Boston Massacre of 1770, when British soldiers fired on American colonists, killing five men. Warren was “in the same league as Paul Revere and Sam Adams,” says Cynthia A. Kierner, a historian at George Mason University. He was “a man of respect, a gentleman physician,” adds Christian Di Spigna, author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero.

Warren’s identity as a doctor overlapped with his role as a revolutionary, Di Spigna says. He sometimes canceled poor patients’ debt, accepting flour, beer and shoes as pay. He inoculated hundreds of Bostonians against smallpox.

“He was definitely someone who had a talent for leadership and oratory and then was well respected for his medical and social connections,” says historian Sarah J. Purcell, author of Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice and Memory in Revolutionary America.

In the months leading up to the war’s outbreak, Warren “became the de facto spymaster” of Boston’s rebel circles, his office serving as “an espionage center where patriot spies from all levels of society filtered their vital intelligence,” writes Di Spigna in Founding Martyr. His intelligence sources ranged from an anonymous stable boy to the minister Samuel Mather, son of the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather and a brother-in-law of Massachusetts’ royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson.

In March 1775, British soldiers threatened to assassinate anyone who spoke at an annual event commemorating the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. But Warren volunteered for the job—and wore a toga to remind the audience of the values of the ancient Roman Republic. “Our country is in danger,” he reportedly told his audience, “but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful—but we have many friends. Determine to be free, and heaven and earth will aid the resolution. On you depend the fortunes of America.”

By April, New England seethed. When Warren’s intelligence network alerted him (perhaps incorrectly) that the British planned to arrest the Sons of Liberty’s leaders in Lexington before continuing on to Concord, he sent Dawes and Revere to spread the message. The “shot heard ’round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson later described it, was fired on April 19.

Over the next two months, Warren rallied local towns to bolster the ranks of the patriots’ army, earned the title of president of the Second Massachusetts Provincial Congress and attempted to negotiate alliances with multiple Native American nations. He was “the only person known to have been present [at] and participatory in all four” of the minor skirmishes that took place between the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of Bunker Hill, notes the Ohio-based Warren County Historical Society on its website.

Early on June 17, patriot soldiers built a redoubt, or temporary fortification, on top of Breed’s Hill, located next to Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts. When Warren arrived at the battlefield, General Israel Putnam and Colonel William Prescott, “two grizzled French and Indian War veterans,” both offered him command, says Di Spigna, but he declined, instead requesting to be sent to the site of the worst fighting. “They tell him, ‘Well, it’s going to be the heaviest in the redoubt,’” Di Spigna explains. “And that’s where he goes.”

A few weeks earlier, Warren had made a prescient remark to a friend, declaring, “These fellows say we won’t fight. By heavens, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood.” He would soon get his wish.

The well-trained British soldiers advanced on the rebel army around 3:30 p.m. on the muggy afternoon. Though popular lore suggests Putnam or Prescott ordered their men to save ammunition by not firing until “you see the whites of their eyes,” many scholars now believe that story is apocryphal.

American soldiers shot at the redcoats, who came up the hill in three waves. By the third attack, the British were stepping over their dead comrades as they fought to broach the redoubt. During the assault, a bullet struck Warren, who’d already been injured in hand-to-hand combat. It entered under his left eye, exiting through the back of his head. He fell to the ground near a locust tree, killed instantly at age 34. The Americans, out of powder, finally fled the field following two hours of heavy fighting.

After the battle, Warren was stripped of his clothes, and his possessions, including a family Bible, were stolen. “His body was mutilated afterward by British soldiers because he was one of the important leaders of the patriot cause,” says Kierner. “For all these reasons, he was celebrated as one of the first ‘martyrs’ to sacrifice his life for American liberty.”

A 19th-century oil painting by artist John Trumbull, who witnessed the battle from afar while serving in the Continental Army, offers a highly romanticized version of Warren’s death. In the artwork, a militiaman cradles the dying revolutionary, holding out his hand to stop a British soldier from stabbing Warren with a bayonet. The composition elevates the events “with a heroic iconography that recalls religious art and eschews many facts of the battle,” according to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which houses a version of the scene.

“The reality of his death didn’t look like [that],” says Purcell. Warren was “shot in the face,” she adds. “It was rather brutal. It’s all the culture that’s produced afterward that makes it into a martyrdom. It’s the beautiful painting, not the ugly reality of warfare.”

News of Warren’s battlefield death initially spread through word of mouth and letters. “His whole soul seemed to be filled with the greatness of the cause he was engaged in,” a fellow combatant wrote to John Adams. The future president’s wife, Abigail Adams, also shared the news with her husband, writing, “Our dear friend Dr. Warren is no more but fell gloriously fighting for his country. … Great is our loss.”

The wider public learned of Warren’s death through newspapers and broadsides. Preachers delivered sermons paying tribute to the fallen leader, which were then reprinted as pamphlets. Woodcuts of Warren appeared in almanacs. “People knew exactly who [he] was and what he had done,” Purcell says. “Within weeks, he was someone who other orators would point to as a martyr, as the noble Warren.” She adds, “For the time, it’s lightning speed.”

Warren was featured in “all kinds of print culture, all kinds of orations, and not just in New England,” Purcell says. One poem included the verse “We sore lament both one and all, / In sackcloth let us mourn, / Brave General Warren’s hapless fate / And weep upon his urn.”

The Life and Death of Joseph Warren, the American Revolution's Lost Hero | Christian DiSpigna

Warren’s ruined body was originally buried in a mass grave, but in April 1776, after the British had left the area, Revere identified his friend by a dental piece he’d fashioned for him. Warren’s body lay in state for several days at the Massachusetts State House before his burial at the Old Granary Burial Ground in Boston. In 1825, he was reburied next to his brother at St. Paul’s Church, and in 1856, he was moved to his current resting place, in a family plot at Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury.

Warren’s name and his legacy remained common knowledge into the 19th century. “After the Civil War,” however, the memory of the more recent conflict “started to eclipse some of the Revolution and caused some sectional fracturing,” Purcell says. “In the 20th century, [the Revolution] established the role of the military in the national identity of the United States,” generating renewed interest in the fallen founder.

Depictions of Warren tend to show him in military uniform, with a sword or a musket. “People forget that for those ten years leading up to the Battle of Bunker Hill, he [was working on] smallpox inoculations [and] obstetrical care,” says Di Spigna. “He’s not part of this later triumphal phase of American history. He dies a year before the Declaration of Independence. … That one afternoon in battle overshadows that decade of resistance activities.”

Today, numerous towns, roads and counties across the U.S. are named after Warren, including Warrenton, Virginia, and Warren County, Ohio. But the revolutionary leader isn’t a household name like Revere and other Massachusetts-based founders. He “just didn’t live long enough,” Purcell says. “He just didn’t have the time.” His memory lives on “in places that you wouldn’t expect. But he’s there anyway.”

Purcell adds, “Even though the battle was a loss for the American side, it proved they could stand up to the British in a pitched battle in a respectable way. [Warren’s] death is a great loss, but his reputation served a huge purpose [in] motivating the fight from then onward.”