Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty

By Sam Forman

Meticulously grounded in original scholarship, this ambitious project is the definitive biography of Dr. Joseph Warren. Making sense of the subject's opaque eighteenth-century physician's account books was a feat of both forensic analysis and medical historical scholarship. It was also the elusive key to understanding Joseph Warren's life experiences. Scholar-physician Samuel A. Forman has used his capabilities in history, medicine, and business accounting combined with his enthusiasm for the topic to produce a volume worthy of its subject.

During the American Revolution, Dr. Joseph Warren was a nationally known figure. A Boston physician and hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, he became known for his unconventional exploits in medicine. His hobby of obtaining dead bodies for anatomical study was picked up by the Harvard Spunkers Club, the forerunner of Harvard University's Medical School. Later, when Warren was running his own practice, he was allegedly heading up a spy ring out of his office. It was even rumored that he had an affair with the wife of an enemy general in order to collect military intelligence.

Other newly proved information about him is recorded in the book's illuminating appendices, from personal associations to the truth behind the legend that his head was previously held on display.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pelican Publishing
• Release date: Nov 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781455615476

Sam Forman

Sam A. Forman is a physician, educator, and local historian. He is the president of Oak and Ivy Health Systems, Inc. and a visiting scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Throughout his successful careers as a physician, military officer, and businessman, he has published and lectured on historical topics that affect current issues. Forman lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, also published by Pelican.

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1.

An Apple a Day–Family, Youth, and Adolescence

Birth and Ancestry

Joseph Warren was born June 11, 1741, as the eldest of four sons of Joseph and Mary Stevens Warren. The Warrens were farmers in Roxbury, a small town of some five hundred souls just a mile or so south of Boston. The family tended orchards and farmed a variety of crops. Roxbury was a town tied closely to the sphere of Boston and nearby communities as a two-way market for goods, for education, and for political associations.

Judging by his comments later in life, Joseph Warren’s pride in ancestry emphasized the hard work and personal risk involved in generations of Pilgrims and European immigrants who hewed a wilderness into a viable society based on agriculture, transoceanic commerce, shipbuilding, and local practice of trades. This interest in ancestry did not lionize or fetishize particular forbears, as did subsequent generations of people who came to be known as privileged Boston Brahmins. Indeed, people of Joseph Warren’s lineage going back into the seventeenth century included hard-working, honest colonial yeomen and women, who were undistinguished in terms of British aristocratic linkages or close ties to provincial elites. Joseph’s branches of the Warren family were multigenerational American-born British provincials.

Their relation to the lineage of Richard Warren, who immigrated to Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620, was one of far distant cousins. The Warren family tree had branched off in England long before anyone set sail for Plymouth Plantation or the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thus, a James Warren and his wife, Mercy Otis Warren, who factor into Joseph Warren’s adult life, were very distant kin with common ancestors back in England.

We owe much of our knowledge of Joseph Warren’s genealogy to the nineteenth-century work of his nephew John Collins Warren, one of that generation of Boston Brahmins who took pride of ancestry to great lengths. Joseph Warren himself may have neither known nor cared about some of the specific details about his forbears that his worshipful descendants dug up. He was too busy with the responsibilities of a farm boy, a student, and, later, a politically active physician.

jwFig1.1_Family Tree_Warren bio_01-27-2011.pdf

To the extent that Joseph Warren contemplated ancestry, he viewed his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents collectively as having much in common with generations of immigrant settlers. Such American families had put sweat equity into colonial provinces. They had come to enjoy a variety of rights as free Englishmen possessing local representative government under a Royal charter, depending on Britain for nothing beyond traditional rights, defense against foreign powers, and benign neglect:

[A]t an infinite expense of toil and blood, this widely extended continent had been cultivated and defended . . . the hardy adventurers justly expected that they and their descendants should peaceably have enjoyed the harvest of those fields which they had sown, and the fruit of those vineyards which they had planted.1

If Joseph Warren had been interested, he could have delved into church, town, and probate records to learn tidbits about his ancestors.2 He would have found that one Peter Warren was the first of Joseph’s patrilinear line to settle in North America. Born in the 1620s, and first appearing in Massachusetts Suffolk County records as a sailor, Peter bought land and settled on Essex Street in Boston in March of 1659.

Apparently making up for lost time at sea, he had three wives in succession. It was not unusual for women to die of complications of childbirth and other infectious diseases and for the surviving spouses to marry again. Sometimes the cycle of widower remarrying would repeat, as it did for Peter Warren.

With Sarah Tucker Warren he sired eight children and had three more by second wife, Hannah. His third wife was named Esther. The resulting family of eleven children, even allowing for fatalities due to childhood illnesses, was fairly typical.3 The Warrens were members of the Old South Church in Boston, where the records of the numerous children’s baptisms were recorded. Peter Warren died in Boston in 1704.

Joseph Warren, born February 19, 1663, as the second son of Peter and his first wife, Sarah Warren, continued to live on Essex Street until 1714, when he sold the property in order to buy a farm. The new property was located in nearby Roxbury, a long walk or short horseback ride down the narrow road atop Boston’s Neck, the only land route into town. Inheritance followed the English practice of primogeniture, so this second son’s inheritance of the Essex Street property implies that his elder brother had predeceased the father. Peter Warren’s last surviving spouse, Esther, was granted a life estate in widowhood, allowing her to live in the Essex Street house rent free for the rest of her life despite its sale.

Joseph Warren, grandfather of our subject, now a Roxbury farmer, married Deborah, daughter of Samuel Williams. This Joseph and Deborah had eight children, one of whom was Joseph, born February 2, 1696. Deborah was a sister of Rev. John Williams, a captive of Native Americans in the Deerfield raid of 1704.

Thus, the Warrens had a family connection to the Great Deerfield Raid, whose associated stories of frontier atrocities and adventures of long-held captives engaged the popular imagination in Massachusetts for decades in the early 1700s. John Demos’ fascinating book The Unredeemed Captive relates this tale and its psychological implications for colonial Americans.4 Some of the captives’ ultimate choices, despite the violence of their abductions, to remain unredeemed with their Indian captors in French Canada, complicated the question for colonial Americans to define in their own minds the dichotomies between Native and colonial European lives, civilization and savagery, Christianity and animism.

Father and Mother

This Joseph Warren, child of Joseph and Deborah Warren, and who had moved to Roxbury, died on July 13, 1729, at age sixty-six. His child Joseph, born in 1696, grew up to marry Mary, daughter of Dr. Samuel Stevens, on May 29, 1740. This was the father of our biographical subject. The groom would have been forty-five years old on his wedding day. New England couples of this period tended to marry late, at twenty-six on average for men and twenty-three for women.5 His age at the marital alter was advanced even by contemporary standards. We can only speculate on this Joseph’s personality and the circumstances that led him to marry so late in life. Very little is known about him. The fact that, in addition to farming, he served at various times as a town alderman and deacon of the local church, suggests that he was a respected citizen who was involved in local affairs.

Letters from later life suggest that aging bachelor Joseph Warren’s bride (our biographical subject’s mother Mary Stevens Warren), fifteen years his junior, was religiously observant, seeing God’s hand in everyday affairs.6 Perhaps her husband held similar strong Protestant beliefs. Such would have provided a potent commonality of views with Mary, and a means to overcome a possible reticence around women that might have accounted for his prolonged bachelorhood.

jwFig1.1_Joseph Warren's Birth Home_Bostonian Soc_901765.tif

Joseph Warren’s Birth Home, engraved print by Nathaniel Currier, 1840. Warren was the eldest of four boys growing up on the family’s Roxbury farm among orchards of Warren russet apples. (Courtesy of the Bostonian Society)

Joseph and Mary Stevens Warren had four children, all boys. The eldest was our subject Joseph Warren, born June 11, 1741. Next came Ebenezer and Samuel. John, nicknamed Jack among family members, was the baby of the family, some twelve years junior to his oldest brother.

I sought a description and anecdotes of the Warren household while the boys were growing up but could find none. A romantic pencil sketch of a rustic country family homestead made in the nineteenth century could stand in, though the reality around that time of urbanization was different from the bucolic scene idealized in the drawing. I would have to pursue proxies in order to gain an appreciation for the milieu of young Joseph Warren’s youth.

Warren Russets

The Warren farm was associated with a distinctive kind of apple, variously called the Warren, Boston, or Roxbury Russet.7 The elder Joseph, our Warren’s father, is said to have first produced this variety of russet apple with a red blush.

I sought out Prof. Susan K. Brown, an expert on pomology, the science of fruit trees, at Cornell University’s Experimental Agricultural Station in upstate Geneva. From her I learned that russet apples are thought to have been imported from England in the latter seventeenth century. They were refined by selective breeding in the eighteenth century, including that of the Roxbury Russet in or around that eponymous Massachusetts town. All this is consistent with the traditional account.8 Warren’s father and very likely the women of the family pursued painstaking selection of marketable apple varieties over the years, propagating the favorable variants by grafting onto mature tree stock.

Russeting, which I am more familiar with from potatoes that hail from Maine and land in my local super market, refers to a variegated, bumpy surface. It is fine on a subterranean tuber, but as an apple attribute russeting isn’t as pretty as the smooth skin we have come to expect on modern commercial varieties. Nevertheless, russeting in apples is associated with high levels of flavinoids, natural chemicals that we humans associate with the tastiest and heartiest of apples. The Golden Russet’s flesh is yellow, crisp, and very sweet. The Roxbury Russet is darker, has a reddish blush, and is a tad less sugary.

Attributes of the Roxbury or Warren Russet made it desirable in an age of challenging food preservation for fruits and vegetables. These russets ripen very late in October, taste best after a heavy frost, and keep well into the following April. Their late seasonal ripening and long shelf life made them ideal for local use over the winter and for shipping on long voyages as trade goods to the Caribbean. Their high sugar content increased yields of processed apple products for home use and barter—apple juice, hard cider, and apple butter. Some have speculated that the production and liberal imbibing of hard cider was a cultural response to sometimes-contaminated water.

A Walk among Orchards

To get a sense of the Roxbury neighborhood in the mid-eighteenth century, I solicited William M. McDermott to walk with me among the fields and houses of semirural Shirley and Lunenberg, Massachusetts. This is as close to 1750s Roxbury and to Boston area farm towns as one is likely to get nowadays.

Bill was very happy to visit the area of his youth, some seventy years ago. We chose mid-October, the autumn season of colorful leaves that distinguishes Massachusetts as a tourist destination.

I had other reasons for asking Bill to accompany me, aspects harder to explain to him and that I kept to myself. Joseph Warren attempted to establish the Massachusetts Medical Society, the very organization that Bill led as executive vice president more than two centuries later. Through its publication, the New England Journal of Medicine, it is arguably the most influential medical society in the world. Another area of resonance was the circumstance that these two physicians of both centuries left families to volunteer for dangerous front line military service in time of war.

On the jaunt, I tell Dr. McDermott about some of the fragments I know about Joseph Warren: that Warren was derided by Loyalist critics as being a farm boy, so rustic and poor that he could not afford stockings while hawking his farm’s milk in Boston;9 that a bizarre urban legend exists about his burial; that I want to know better the physician who briefly dazzled as an American Revolutionary; that I had a sense that it is important to tell the story in a modern idiom; and that I am the person to do it.

Our conversation wanders as nostalgia is easily accessed in the autumn of nature and of life. I speak about something I have wondered about before. That was really something, your volunteering for the Marines and Vietnam. E—e and your kids still have a lot to say about that. You might not have come back alive to hear their complaints.

Sometimes you act out of conviction, don’t dwell on the hazards, and trust for the best, says McDermott, realizing that you are the best physician you can be, and are capable of providing services that are needed, I supported friends in arms. They needed good doctors.

I can appreciate that, and volunteered for fleet service, as you know, I say, while thinking that Bill might have cast his decision to join the military in more heroic terms.

But Warren was a different animal, I say. He was an expert physician but lobbied to be a fighting general. These are very different roles. Not many physicians have ever had such a choice, or had taken the route that Warren did.

Joseph Warren may have answered the question for himself: ‘For Liberty, for Posterity, for the Christ who made you free.’ It’s something I can only guess at, I explain. When I was with the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, it was peacetime. Things could have gotten hot with the Iranian Revolution in 1979. But nothing much happened. Not then, at least. It’s easy to be a hero when no one is shooting at you.

Bill has little to say on the latter point. For him, aspirations to duty, patriotism, and the healing arts were sufficient motivation.

We proceed along a pleasant path, careful to avoid the ubiquitous stones, strewn over New England after the last ice age for generations of subsequent inhabitants to trip over. Framed by rolling hills, lanes of white clapboard and saltbox houses punctuate the road. We walk to a town center, with its English flavor of a common green surrounded by two neat, box-like churches, the town hall, and a cemetery. Surrounding harvested fields give way to orchards and pastures with knots of farm animals here and there.

It is a Nashoba Valley landscape, like that of old Roxbury, peculiarly suitable to orchards. Trees do not require the same intensity of cultivation as do the sowing, weeding, and harvesting of grains, but they require attention and patience of a different sort. Orchards are more permanent than crops. Planting them is an act of long-term faith and ownership. Unlike sown crops, trees can take many years, often a generation, to come to maturity and to bear fruit. One must have an expectation of permanence in order to devote a large portion of a family’s livelihood to nurture and manage orchards.

A Sudden Change in Circumstances

Bill asks if there was any reason, aside from the beauty of it, that I chose this time of year to come to this rural enclave in eastern Massachusetts.

I tell him of an incident that, related in newspapers only in its barest essentials, must have been a pivotal event in Joseph Warren’s life:

Roxbury, October 25, 1755. On Wednesday last a sorrowful Accident happened here, as Mr. Joseph Warren, of this Town was gathering Apples from a Tree, standing upon a Ladder, at a considerable Distance from the Ground, he fell from thence, broke his Neck, and expired in a few Moments: He was esteemed a Man of good Understanding, industrious, upright, honest and faithful; a serious exemplary Christian; a useful Member of Society; He was generally respected amongst us, and his Death is universally lamented.10

Perhaps, with frosts setting in, there was some urgency to take in the remaining apples. Joseph’s father must have been reaching from the highest rung of the ladder, stretching for a Warren Russet, when he lost his footing on that graying autumn day.

The account states that he lived for a short time after the accident. It may have been a traumatic end, as the ground on which he fell is typically strewn with stones. A fall from the top of an apple tree could have involved bloody head trauma and a compromised spinal cord from vertebral fracture. The result would have been ineffective and desperately labored breathing from accessory respiratory muscles until asphyxia extinguished life.

Youngest brother John Warren was on the scene. Though not yet three years old at the time, John related as an adult that it was an affecting and haunting memory to be helplessly present as his father died.11 Joseph Warren was just starting Harvard and was unlikely to have been on the scene.

The fourteen-year-old Joseph did not interrupt his Harvard education. Several subsequent days-long absences from Harvard are likely to have been visits to help his mother manage things. As eldest son of a widowed mother, Joseph Warren never questioned his family’s fate nor shirked the increased responsibilities it implied.

I infer that this was an event carrying a strong emotional impact that shaped his being. A description of the scene of the Boston Massacre, from his speech memorializing the martyrs in 1775, carries an emotional force. Its heartfelt power seems to come from his core, transcending the immediate description of politically motivated street violence. His audience was moved, as I suspect, was he. Joseph Warren may have unconsciously cast himself as the orphaned babe, shockingly recalled home from his celebratory Harvard convocation, suddenly bewailing his father’s fate, and conjuring a tableau for his audience that he himself found most horrifying:

Approach we then the melancholy walk of death. Hither let me call the gay companion; here let him drop a farewell tear upon that body which so late he saw vigorous and warm with social mirth; hither let me lead the tender mother to weep over her beloved son: come widowed mourner, here satiate thy grief; behold thy murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father’s fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father’s brains.12

We can speculate what his feelings may have been at this time—sorrow and grieving for a father suddenly gone and for whom there were no proper good-byes; appreciation and love for a mother and perhaps neighbors rallying to support his education at a time of family crisis that challenged him to abort it; and a sense of obligation to succeed and to go on to return the family’s and community’s faith with future service.

In fairness, the evidence is sparse and only suggestive. It is as consistent with a responsible teenager maintaining direction during a time of family loss, as it is of a self-interested climber pursuing a Harvard education as a step up the social ladder, come hell or high water. I mention the latter negative spin neither out of spite nor out of a historical revisionism aiming to knock the half-forgotten hero down a further notch. Rather, I seek to put into perspective views later expressed by political opponents of the adult Joseph Warren. As we shall see in later chapters, these critics were not merely motivated by spite or informed only by hearsay. They included influential Tory leaders who knew Warren personally. I choose to believe the former view, but a darker, parallel view of Warren’s development and actions existed in the latter eighteenth century; I refer to it from time to time.

In the autumn of 1755, just as he was beginning college, Joseph Warren jarringly experienced a world that can be unpredictably violent. In a male-dominated society, he was now head of the family, doubtless with an accompanying sense of responsibility and filial obligation. Joseph Warren reacted by taking on responsibilities, bearing his grief stoically, aspiring to become a healer, maintaining his gregarious nature, and moving forward.

2.

College Education–Joseph Warren

and the Rainspout

Freshman in the Class of 1759

Within weeks of entering college, Joseph had become an orphan. Mother Mary Warren and Roxbury neighbors rallied to assure Joseph’s continued attendance at college. At a time when the need for Joseph’s presence on the farm and work at home was great, he was nevertheless able to continue his education without interruption.

Tuition, lecture fees to professors, room, and board amounted to about £20 a year.1 Tradition attributes sponsorship at Harvard to Roxbury neighbors, an assertion bolstered by Warren’s postgraduate stint as Roxbury Latin grammar-school teacher. It was common at that period for promising young men to be sponsored in whole or part at college in expectation of service in the public grammar school immediately following graduation and prior to subsequent professional pursuits. Contemporary figures as disparate as John Adams and Yale’s Nathan Hale followed such a course upon college graduation, teaching youngsters in Milton, Massachusetts, and New London, Connecticut, respectively.

The general milieu of Harvard during the colonial era is known to historians, but the specific experiences of most students are at best sparsely documented. Only two anecdotes hinting at the nature of young Warren as a flesh-and-blood student come down to us. One is confirmed by journal entries in aspiring physician Nathaniel Ames’ diary. The other was from reminiscence recorded decades after the fact and cannot positively be confirmed as authentic. Utilizing these shreds of evidence and general knowledge of the times at Harvard College, we can construct a reasonable view of Joseph Warren’s late-teenage collegiate experience.

Class Rank

Class rank was determined by the college administration’s interpretation of the prominence and wealth of each student’s family. Rank was ordered from number one, typically the scion of a rich merchant family of Mayflower lineage, to the poor student on scholarship at the bottom of the ranking.2 Such an ordering strikes the modern observer as strange to have been used in an academic setting. It even rankles some observers in the concept’s current incarnations in the social register and debutante balls. While Levelers, opponents of inherited distinctions dating to the time of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War, would have been irritated by Harvard’s class rankings of its pre-Revolutionary period, there is no evidence that the practice was questioned during the 1750s. It was simply the way things were and had been for generations.

For the highly ranked scholars, the practice was recognition of their families’ position in society and their own prospects. For the lowest-ranked students, they were lucky enough to be attending college, had excellent prospects for becoming the respected lawyers, clergymen, and physicians of colonial society, and so should be happy enough to be in college under any circumstances. Joseph Warren’s rank was thirty-one out of his entering class of forty-five,3 respectable considering the modest farming background and distressed family circumstances.

Studies

Courses of study included rhetoric, mathematics, religion, and science. Competence in the Greek and Latin languages was a requisite for admission and was furthered by study of the classics. Warren’s interest in and facility with these languages and their literatures are suggested by his frequent use of Latin and occasionally Greek phrases and quotations in later adult letters and speeches. Such usage of classical languages was a sign of learning among similarly educated people. It would have been received positively, even by the uneducated, as denoting a worthy, educated individual.

Post-collegiate references4 suggest that Joseph Warren was recognized for his facility at chemistry, or the chymical aspects of natural philosophy as it might have been termed. This interest was probably cultivated during his Harvard sojourn.

Clubs and Camaraderie

Joseph Warren may have been a member of the debating club, though no examples of his debate topics or student oratory exist. Such activity would imply attraction to public speaking, ability or interest in making points persuasively, and perhaps an enjoyment of expressive improvisation and verbal sparring. He would have interacted with aspiring lawyers and clergymen, both fields requiring the skilled use of language to advocate and to encourage belief.

Warren may have been a member of the Marti-Mercurial militia group and anatomical club of aspiring physicians. The last two memberships are conjectural. Non-existent records leave doubt of their memberships, or even proven existence, of military and premedical clubs at Harvard during the 1750s.

Theatrics

His college friend Nathaniel Ames noted that Joseph produced and directed Addison’s Cato in his dorm suite. On July 3, 1758, it was acted at Warren’s Chamber. Three days later a repeat performance went to Perfection. The last performance on July 14 showed Cato more perfect than before.5

In the historical drama, Cato is a tragic and virtuous figure opposing Julius Caesar’s despotism. Addison’s depiction of Cato, who committed suicide rather than submit to tyranny as Caesar’s victory loomed, became an inspiration to generations who aspired to virtuous and self-sacrificing citizenship, republican values, and the maintenance of principle in the face of overwhelming obstacles.6 This play inspired such disparate Revolutionary-era figures as George Washington and Nathan Hale. Washington attended performances in Williamsburg, Virginia, and later had the play performed to bolster morale at Valley Forge. Nathan Hale, as he prepared for his execution as a Patriot spy, paraphrased Addison’s words, What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country!7

Joseph may have enjoyed involvement in the intricacies of mounting a play, a rare theatric experience in Boston, where commercial theater was forbidden. He may have been inspired by Cato’s lines, perhaps uttering the words and taking the starring role himself, A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.8

Rainspout Episode

The second story surviving of Warren’s college experience, if genuine, reveals much about his nature and character. According to the tale, a group of Joseph’s classmates secreted themselves in one of their numbers’ upstairs dormitory rooms to plan an activity. They locked their door to limit the company. Young Warren, determined to be a part of the proceedings, climbed up a rainspout, from which he entered an open window to the dormitory suite. Not a moment after Warren unexpectedly entered the room through the window, to the further astonishment of his compatriots, the downspout crashed to the ground into Harvard Yard.

Harvard College, hand-colored engraving 1726. Massachusetts Hall is the building on the right. It was Warren’s dormitory and the site of an acrobatic escapade involving a rickety rainspout, which surprised classmates, possibly of the Harvard Spunkers anatomical club. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

jwFig2.1_Harvard College 1726.tif

From this anecdote we can infer that Warren was a social being, endeavoring to be in the thick of things amongst his peers. Excluding him was sufficient inducement to impetuousness. Climbing a rickety old downspout to a height of twenty to thirty feet would cause most to pause and consider whether they were capable of climbing that high and whether an item designed to channel a trickle of water down from the roof could support a fully grown youth traveling in the opposite direction. And what if his mischievous friends noted the escapade while in progress and simply locked the window?

On the contrary, the young Warren of this story is a bounding athlete, shooting up the rainspout in the wink of an eye and without a moment’s hesitation. Lest the listener miss the point, when one of his fellows exclaims about the danger to Warren just after his successful and dramatic acrobatic entrance into the chamber, Warren declares that the now-collapsed spout had served its purpose. The danger to which he had just exposed himself was hardly worthy of notice to the incipient hero.

I am unsure whether to accept this story on face value. I want it to be true in that it adds a dramatic little episode to a developmental period in Joseph Warren’s life for which little else survives. It also bespeaks a desire for social inclusion, inventiveness, impulsiveness, and heedlessness of danger that resonates with a heroic interpretation of later episodes in his life.

Troubling Parallels to George Washington and the Cherry Tree

Several aspects of this story make me suspect at first that it is spurious. It first appeared in a short biography of Warren by Alexander H. Everett, published in the 1820s. It is said to have come from an alumnus about 1808, almost fifty years after its purported occurrence.9 It also bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a notoriously manufactured story of young George Washington, from the same period.

While the earliest eighteenth-century histories of the American Revolution emphasized military engagements, early nineteenth-century accounts included character sketches of the founders of the Republic and instances of character revelation in childhood. During the early Federal period, stories of the founders were being written and told for a new generation who had no experience of the Revolutionary War era. The founders were described in heroic and even divinely inspired terms. It is the same timeframe when Parson Weems concocted the story of young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, in which young Washington honestly confesses his actions and takes full responsibility for his transgression.

A story like that of the cherry tree was intended to impart moral lessons and contained actions for a young audience to emulate. A fable-like quality made such tales suitable for recounting in religious Sunday school, in the lay classroom, and around the fireplace at home. So well crafted and charming is Weems’ story of Washington, perhaps capturing larger truths in fiction masquerading as fact, that the story is still well known to modern Americans of all ages.10

Alexander H. Everett, in facing a lack of primary material for his short account of Warren in Spark’s American Biography, may, like Weems, simply have made one up or transmitted a hearsay tale of a young Warren. The exploits recounted in his Warren tale all too conveniently reveal attributes key to his subject’s later life.

The manner in which the story of the collegiate Warren is introduced adds to my suspicion. Everett wrote that it was an old classmate of Warren’s, standing in Harvard Yard during a class reunion, and staring wistfully at the old dormitory; its rainspout jogging his memory to pour forth the anecdote like it happened just yesterday. Significantly, Everett did not reveal the source and the exact date of the reunion.

Ring of Truth

Despite reasons for disbelief, there are countervailing aspects in favor of accepting this story, at some level. Circumstances of its collection and internal structure argue for authenticity. It could have been a recorded bit of oral history about Warren’s collegiate era, not about him per se, but attributed for the convenience of the hard-pressed biographer, to Warren. Or it could be an authentic and faithfully recorded memory.

Community festivities surrounding Harvard graduations served as an opportunity for alumni to gather. A writer, anxious to collect reminiscences of Joseph Warren’s youth, would have been well served in 1808 to mingle amongst old alumni and classmates of Warren’s. Trusting that some surviving classmates from the Class of ’59 would be there, the milieu would have been likely to stimulate reminiscence. It is just such a scenario that is suggested by the story of Warren and the rainspout.

While no such story involving property damage survives in official Harvard chronicles, others of comparably modest levels of mischief and student high jinks do.11 Harvard records of that era record minor fines and similar discipline for transgressions of modest import such as breaking windows, missing church services, and the like.

Two such instances involve the only son of Patriot politician Samuel Adams, Samuel Adams, Jr. Apparently young Sam was quite the troublemaker, more worthy of association with the modern, eponymous Boston beer brand than his father. Young Sam Adams was found guilty of stealing from Josiah Babcock’s wood pile, and being involved with classmate John Homans and other students in absconding with a nearby farmer’s ducks and secretly feasting on them in the dormitory.12 These episodes occurred more than a decade after Warren’s tenure at the college, and suggest petty larceny and gluttony more than anything else. On the constructive side of things, the younger Samuel Adams is recorded as having been a member of the shadowy Anatomical Club, also known as the Spunkers, and subsequently pursued his interest in medicine by becoming Joseph Warren’s apprentice.

Returning to Warren and the rainspout episode, there is a curious omission to the story that lends credibility, at least in my mind. The narrator never specifies why the fellow students had secreted themselves in the dormitory, excluding their fellows and the outside world from their planned exploit. I reason that, if Everett had confabulated a fable of the Washington-and-the-cherry-tree sort, one would expect him to reach for credibility with an upfront, economic, and precise exposition of the dramatis personae, motivation, action, outcome, and conclusion.

The young Washington of Weems’ fable is a little man of action tempered by responsibility in wanting the cherry tree gone, but taking full responsibility for the deed with his father. In contrast, the Warren rainspout tale never declares what the secretive collegians were up to, a detail that I would expect to be expounded upon up front and in explicit, terse detail.

Spunkers

Around the same time that young Sam Adams, Jr., stole and roasted those tasty ducks, some carcasses of quite a different sort were being sought by Harvard undergraduates. Alternately called the Anatomical Club or Spunkers, an undergraduate student group of aspiring physicians, its founding and activities obscure, is credited as being a forerunner to the Harvard Medical School. Recalling their student days and the Spunkers Club to which they both belonged, William Eustis (Harvard Class of ’72) and John Warren, Joseph’s youngest brother (Harvard BA ’71), described in their correspondence a curious escapade. Nocturnally racing a rival group to retrieve the body of a freshly executed criminal in a nearby town, presumably for anatomical study, Eustis related the tale with relish:

[A]s soon as the body of Levi Ames was pronounced dead, by Dr. Jeffries, it was delivered by the sheriff to a person who carried it in a cart to the water side, where it was received into a boat filled with about twelve of Stillman’s crew, who rowed it over to Dorchester Point . . . Norwood, David, one Allen and myself took chaise and road round the Point, Spunkers like; but the many obstacles we had to encounter, made it eleven o’clock before we reached the Point, where we searched and searched, and rid, hunted and waded, but alas, in vain! There was no corpse to be found . . . We have a _____ from another place, so [Doctor] Church shan’t be disappointed.

P.S. By the way, we have since heard that Stillman’s gang rowed him [i.e., Levi Ames’ dead body] back from the Point up to the town, and after laying him out in mode and figure buried him, God knows where! Clark & Co. went to the Point to look for him, but were disappointed, as well as we.13

Eustis and John Warren were unsuccessful in this instance, though they apparently had fun in the pursuit. They and many of the other members of the Spunker Club went on to study medicine as Joseph Warren’s apprentices.

The rival, equally unsuccessful group mentioned in Eustis’ letter, may have included classmates John Clarke, Joshua Barker, Benjamin Loring, and Samuel Murray. Some were sons of established Tory families, highly ranked in the Harvard class, and themselves future physicians.14 I cannot postulate anyone else in Massachusetts at that particular time who would be as interested as William Eustis and John Warren were in the illicit retrieval of the remains of an executed criminal. If true, we can infer that Harvard was sufficiently politicized at the time, that membership in the medically oriented Spunkers were Patriots, while a rival group of aspiring physicians were Loyalists and Tories.

Joseph Warren was the animating force behind the Spunkers15 in the 1770s, both as a means of advancing the cause of medical education and of focusing the educational endeavors of prospective apprentices.

Anatomical Teaching Specimens

Harvard University has neither official nor contemporary chronicles of the activities of the Spunkers nor Anatomical Club, much less records of the pursuit of dead bodies by their students. This is not surprising. Acquisition of corpses for study was not only illegal, but blasphemous to many. Absence of an institution to sponsor and house anatomical laboratory studies made any traffic in the deceased a clandestine and hazardous endeavor. Prevailing attitudes are evident in the harrowing experience of an apothecary of central Massachusetts in Worcester, who, accused of possessing a human skeleton, was threatened by a mob. He resorted to a series of self-paid advertisements in Boston newspapers in an effort to vindicate himself.16

Even after the founding of the Harvard Medical College in 1782, the acquisition of bodies, if not the dissections themselves, remained illegal. It took the relentless obsession and dedication of John Warren’s son and Joseph Warren’s nephew, Dr. John Collins Warren, to lobby against, and in 1831 influence the repeal of, Massachusetts’ prohibition on human remains being acquired for scientific and educational purposes.17 John Collins Warren considered it a crowning achievement of an illustrious medical career that included the founding of Massachusetts General Hospital and the introduction of anesthesia in the hospital’s Ether Dome. Later in this book we will encounter this descendant with respect to Joseph Warren’s biography and under improbably macabre circumstances.

The legacy of the nocturnal, illegal, and morally ambiguous pursuit of cadavers and body parts for medical uses fascinated lay audiences in the early nineteenth century just as it does us today. Mary Shelley, in her seminal Gothic novel Frankenstein, dealt with such themes in fiction, while English and American newspapers allotted much ink to resurrectionists and their alleged murderous misdeeds.18

In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, acquiring human cadavers required illicit, if less nefarious, pursuits such as those described by William Eustis and John Warren. There was as yet no public, morbid fascination as occurred in the following century. The students could enjoy the thrill of the chase, but they would have also been aware of how their society condemned what they were doing. If discovered, a student risked condemnation or expulsion from college and civil sanctions for pursuing anatomical knowledge.

Physicians involved in this aspect of medical education had to make themselves comfortable with engaging in illegal activities toward the higher good of alleviating suffering of the afflicted. As aspiring physicians, they sought to embark on a respected profession enabling good individual health and order in society, at the same time that they needed to break the law in order to be properly prepared for the profession. It took a certain kind of conviction, moral courage, and willingness to participate in conspiratorial activities with others of like mind in order to pursue that higher good.

In the Warren and the rainspout story, with its curious omission, I speculate that the Spunkers had earlier beginnings than William Eustis’ and John Warren’s romp. Joseph Warren’s quest to enter the locked dormitory room could have been to attend a Spunkers meeting. Perhaps upperclassman Spunkers could have been huddling and wanted to exclude a younger classman. Fifty years later, the unnamed old alumnus could not or would not identify what the student group was up to, because it was still illegal and not the proper subject to be quoted for a morally uplifting account of an American hero. The biographer or the source may have censored the account. The events of the episode—athletic climbing, dramatic entrance through an open window, collapse of the spout, and Joseph Warren’s devil-may-care attitude—may all have been literally or figuratively true.

Or, the attributes described in the episode may have been true in spirit but not in particulars. The old alumnus may have related fuzzy recollections, condensed into the story, which nonetheless describes Warren’s participation and danger-tinged exploits as part of my postulated Spunkers Club proceedings occurring between 1755 and 1759, Joseph Warren’s undergraduate years.

Alternatively the story could be interpreted as figuratively true, possessing the representational transformations of fable, but nonetheless recounting the spirit of Warren’s anatomical work in the early exploits of the Spunkers Club. If the cadavers they sought, and perhaps obtained, are cast as broken vessels whose vital fluids no longer course within, then Warren’s use of another such object—a decayed rainspout—as a forbidden and dangerous means to enter the medical fraternity, rings true. Indeed, the comment attributed to Warren as he casually and indifferently declared that the collapsed downspout had served its purpose, summed up clinical and utilitarian attitudes taken by students toward their human anatomical teaching specimens then and now, as student physicians dissect the dead.

Source of the Rainspout Story

At the risk of building a mountain of speculation out of a few grains of plausibility, one could theorize on the identity of the old, anonymous alumnus who is said to have related the story in the first place. Following my suggestion of the identity of the secretive student conclave as the legendary Spunkers Club, the story’s source would very likely have been a member of the group, an aspiring physician when the episode occurred.

Suspects are few and can be named, since Harvard classes averaged only thirty-five to forty students each year in the late 1750s. Joseph Warren’s class was larger than most of the era, numbering forty-five at commencement. A handful of graduates each year went on to medical careers, either via apprenticeship or, more rarely, traveling to Europe for university study.

Further, the story’s source would have been likely to be a physician alive and still in practice in 1808. He would possess a continuing Harvard affiliation, or at least geographic convenience, in order to be able to attend a Harvard reunion or graduation.

Nathaniel Ames and Samuel Danforth, emerge as suspects. Nathaniel Ames is the more likely one. Not only did Ames subsequently become a physician and presumably was interested in the field as an undergraduate, but he too practiced in the Boston area for decades.19 We discussed Ames’ diary and how it suggests that Ames and Warren knew each other at college. A few years later, Joseph Warren included Dr. Ames in a 1766 invitation and attempt to organize a Massachusetts medical society.20 Both young men were interested in advancing the professionalism of medicine.

The other potential source for the story, Samuel Danforth, also remained in the Boston area, where he practiced medicine for many years. He was the longest surviving member of his class, passing away in 1827. Arguing against him as being

Reviews for Dr. Joseph Warren

[histreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This freshman offering from Dr. Samuel Forman was enjoyable and extremely informative. Knowing that the book's subject, Dr. Joseph Warren, died at a young age, I was surprised by the length of this book. I had actually joked to my wife that I have read shorter books on more accomplished men; but that was before I opened the front cover and began reading Dr. Warren's captivating story.An unassuming author, Samuel Forman, writes with a passion but an honesty as not to promote the Revolutionary War patriot to something more than an honorable man. Drs Forman and Warren have similarities which lend to the heartfelt sharing of Joseph Warren's illustrious contributions to America. Both being doctors, Dr. Forman, revels in a long chapter discussing and explaining the eighteenth century physician's practice and medicinal options. In addition, making this book more than a simple biography, Dr. Forman reconstructs Dr. Warren's log books and financial records, uncovering a stealthy way of consorting with other Patriots.Dr. Forman also served America in our navy and apparently is a Revolutionary War reenactor. Dr. Warren forewent his medical practice - or even a safer post in the medical corps - to become a field officer, thus leading to his death in one of the first battles.Understanding this is Samuel Forman's first biography (not sure if he has authored any other books), it is easy to overlook the change in writing styles in this book. The book begins by reading as a transcript of a PBS or BBC documentary. This approach lends to understanding the reverence Dr. Forman gives to the revolutionary era doctor, as well as the respected experts in particular fields Dr. Forman consulted. A few chapters later, the book is written in a typical, scholarly biographical fashion. It is substantially completed with excerpts and quotes from those who knew him, as well as from Joseph Warren himself. The author makes no attempt to inflate his status as a novice biographer by virtue of prefacing his inferences or understandings as just being either, respectively. Due to Dr. Warren's lack of letters, documentation, or correspondence, much is left to infer and piece together like a jigsaw puzzle which is missing two-thirds of its pieces.Just as the book became tedious, the author re-ignites interest in the book with his third writing style, a fictionalized account of Dr. Warren's dispatching of Paul Revere on his midnight ride. Chapter 15 was a fast paced, imaginary account of the fateful night which began the Revolutionary War. I would easily purchase any fiction (historical or otherwise) from Dr. Forman.The prolific pens of other Founding Fathers make recounting their lives much easier than learning all of the accomplishments of a burgeoning politician, Mason, physician and patriot, Dr. Joseph Warren. A large amount of personally scribed papers by Dr. Warren has been lost due to numerous reasons in the ensuing centuries; this left a massive amount of work for future biographers to undergo to complete his story. Therefore, Dr. Forman describes his book as an exercise in forensics rather than a clear-cut biography.Five appendices make this book an authoritative tome about the life of the doctor who initiated (but never saw their fulfillment) the creation of both Harvard's Medical School and Massachusetts Medical Association, as well as his legacy. Despite offering his own opinion, Dr. Forman, leaves the ultimate decision to the reader Joseph Warren's full potential in politics had he not been assassinated on Bunker Hill.