As we reach another Patriots’ Day, the day that commemorates the beginning of the American Revolution on April 19, 1775, I have been watching the so-called “Tea Party” movement with interest. This movement claims some connection to the original patriots in Boston whose protest of a “tea tax” ultimately led to the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord. So here’s a little refresher about some of the hidden history of this most important day in American History.
“Listen my children, and you shall hear/of the midnight ride of . . . Joseph Warren?”
Okay. Okay. It doesn’t scan like Longfellow’s original. But that’s the problem. In making sure we “hear” about “Revere,” Longfellow’s famous poem ignored the man whose name should be as familiar as those of John Adams or John Hancock. A man who deserves to be honored this Patriots’ Day, the civic celebration of America’s Revolutionary beginnings that is more widely known as Beantown’s “Marathon Day.”
A successful physician and progressive thinker, Joseph Warren was a farmer’s son born in 1741 in Roxbury, outside Boston. Warren chose his profession when he saw his father die after a fall from a tree. Later, he became an outspoken advocate of inoculations to battle the plague of smallpox sweeping colonial America and vaccinated his most famous patient, John Adams.
But medicine was not his only passion. As the colonies began to clash with Mother England, Warren was drawn to the red-hot center of Boston’s patriot inner circle. He became a propagandist, spymaster and orator who modeled himself on Cicero, martyr of the Roman Republic, occasionally appearing in a toga to deliver incendiary speeches.
Most likely, it was Warren who led those men disguised as Indians to the “party” where they tossed a shipload of British tea into Boston Harbor. And he was the crucial go-between, linking Boston’s upper crust patriots –who got most of the glory– and the workingmen and artisans – like Paul Revere – who did most of the dirty work.
But Warren was left out of our poems. And our schoolbooks. And that’s too bad, because his story is compelling.
It was Warren who issued Revere’s “riding orders” on that night in 1775, setting the stage for the fateful April 19th morning at Lexington and Concord –the reason behind Patriots’ Day and, with it, the running of the Boston Marathon. A few weeks after those citizen-soldiers, known as Minute Men, became the first to fight and die in the American Revolution, Warren took to the front lines at the battle called “Bunker Hill.” An enemy ball caught him in the head and he fell.
For the British, Warren’s death was a coup, celebrated by tossing the rebel doctor’s body into a mass grave with other fallen Americans. But for the patriot cause, the loss of Warren cut deep. Abigail Adams mournfully wrote to husband John: “Not all the havoc and devastation they have made has wounded me like the death of Warren. We want him in the Senate; we want him in his profession; we want him in the field. We mourn for the citizen, the senator, the physician, and the warrior. When he fell, liberty wept.”
Paul Revere later returned to the battleground to locate the rebel leader’s body. He was able to identify his compatriot’s remains because Revere had fitted the false teeth that Warren wore, one of the first known cases of forensic dentistry.
Yet, Joseph Warren’s story remained buried, overshadowed by the more illustrious Founders with better biographers –and admiring poets. He became the most important Founding Father most of us never heard of.
This Patriots’ Day, when the runners “hit the wall” at Boston’s “Heartbreak Hill,” let’s remember, it’s not about the Marathon. Nor was it just a bunch of cranky tea drinkers complaining about taxes. As the life and untimely death of Joseph Warren attest, Patriots Day –and the original Tea Party– were about idealism, selflessness, the communal good, courage and sacrifice –civic virtues that are all too often in short supply.
