Joseph Warren

Joseph Warren by John Singleton Copley, 1765

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QUICK FACTS
BORN:
11 June 1741 in Roxbury, Massachusetts
  DIED:
17 June 1775 in Charlestown, Massachusetts
Buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

Joseph Warren, American patriot and politician, was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1741. He graduated from Harvard College in 1759, taught in a school at Roxbury in 1760 – 61, studied medicine, and began to practice in Boston in 1764. The Stamp Act agitation aroused his interest in public questions. He soon became associated with Samuel Adams, John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., as a leader of the popular party, and contributed articles and letters to the Boston Gazette using the signature True Patriot.

The efforts of Samuel Adams to secure the appointment of committees of correspondence met with his hearty support, and he and Adams were the two leading members of the first Boston Committee of Correspondence, chosen in 1772. As chairman of a committee he drafted the famous Suffolk Resolves, which were unanimously adopted by a convention at Milton on the 9th of September 1774. These resolves urged forcible opposition to Great Britain if it should prove to be necessary, pledged submission to such measures as the Continental Congress might recommend, and favored the calling of a provincial congress.

Warren was a member of the first three provincial congresses (1774 – 1775), president of the third, and an active member of the Committee of Public Safety. He took an active part in the fighting at Lexington and Concord (14-Apr-1775), and was appointed Major General of the Massachusetts troops, next in rank to Artemas Ward, on 14 June 1775. Three days later, before his commission was made out, he took part as a volunteer, under the orders of militia General Israel Putnam and Colonel William Prescott, in the Battle of Bunker Hill (Breed’s Hill), where he was killed.

Next to the Adamses, Warren was the most influential leader of the extreme Whig faction in Massachusetts. His tragic death strengthened their zeal for the popular cause and helped to prepare the way for the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence. Warren’s speeches are typical examples of the old style of American political eloquence. His best-known orations were those delivered in Old South Church on the second and fifth anniversaries (1772 and 1775) of the Boston Massacre.

ADAPTED FROM:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 ed.

The Revolutionary leaders never intended to create an original and peculiar indigenous culture. Despite all their talk of American exceptionalism and American virtue in contrast with European corruption, they were seeking not to cut themselves off from Europe’s cultural heritage but to embrace it and in fact to fulfill it. It is a mistake to view America’s post-Revolutionary emulation of Europe as a legacy of helpless dependence passed on from colonial days. Americans imitated European styles and forms not because in their naïveté they could nothing else but because they wanted to.... Their revolution was very much an international affair, an attempt to fulfill the cosmopolitan dreams of the Enlightenment.

Gordon S. Wood
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)