As long as the British troops occupied Boston and Charlestown, Joseph Warren’s mother, Mary, and his brothers, Sam, Eben, and Jack, were unable to retrieve his remains from Breed’s Hill. It would be almost a year before the British evacuated. Joseph died without a will, therefore, during this darkest period of grief his loved ones took care of the immediate needs of Joseph and his wife Elizabeth’s four orphans, possessions, estate, and debt.
John Hancock, unaware that his friend Warren had been killed in action, sent him a letter dated the day after the Battle of Bunker Hill to inform him that the Commander-in-Chief Warren had implored Congress to appoint, was on his way to Massachusetts. His Excellency, General George Washington arrived on July 2nd and immediately faced the monumental task of turning the provincial soldiers, whom Warren had held together, into the Continental Army. Jack Warren, now a surgeon in the army – as were all of Joseph’s former apprentices – offered the use of Joseph’s featherbeds to Washington and his aides.
After the initial shock of her son’s violent death, Joseph’s mother made plans to bring her four grandchildren from Worcester, a town fifty miles from Boston where Joseph sent them to the safety of a friend/colleague just before the outbreak of war. Warren’s patient, Mercy Scollay – the disabled, spinster daughter of Boston Selectman John Scollay (a friend/patient) accompanied the children as their nanny. Upon learning that Mary Warren would be taking her grandchildren to the family home in Roxbury – where they had lived with their grandmother and uncle Sam after their mother’s death two years prior – Scollay made a public appeal to keep the children from their grandmother with unsubstantiated claims that Joseph had secretly given her legal custody. (Scollay’s pretense had no merit for Warren had given no indication whatsoever to his family, minister, friends, or Scollay’s own father that he had any connection to Mercy Scollay other than that she was a paying patient and nanny to the children while in Worcester.) As Mary Warren worked tirelessly to bring a sense of normalcy to her grieving grandchildren, Scollay, in her many unsolicited letters to Joseph’s friends, continuously schemed not only for custody of the orphans – but legal say in what happened to Joseph’s possessions – by attacking the character of the children’s grandmother and uncles. (After Jack Warren had lent Joseph’s featherbeds to Washington and his military family, Scollay insisted to John Hancock that Jack had no right to do so and implored Hancock to intercede!) Her irrational public demands over the course of five years brought more sorrow to the Warren family.
On March 21, 1776, four days after the British evacuated Boston, Dr. Jack Warren wrote in his journal:
“This day I visit Charlestown, and a most melancholy heap of ruins it is. Scarcely the vestiges of those beautiful buildings remain to distinguish them from the mean cottages. The hill, which was the theatre upon which the bloody tragedy of the 17th of June was acted, commands the most affecting view I ever saw in my life. The walls of magnificent buildings tottering to the earth below; above, a great number of rude hillocks, under which are deposited the remains, in clusters, of those deathless heroes, who fell in the field of battle. The scene was inexpressibly solemn, when I considered myself as walking over the bones of the many of my worthy fellow-countrymen, who jeoparded and sacrificed their lives in these high places. When I considered that, perhaps, whilst I was musing on the objects around me, I might be standing over the remains of a dear brother, whose blood had stained these hallowed walks, with what veneration did inspire me!”
On April 4, 1776 – ten months after Joseph Warren was killed in action – Jack and Eben Warren, along with Paul Revere and a group of Joseph’s Masonic brothers – exhumed his decomposing body from a shared, shallow, unmarked grave on Breed’s Hill. The body was identified by a false tooth and silver wire that Revere has placed in his dear friend’s mouth two years before.
On April 8, Joseph Warren’s funeral service was presided over by his parson, friend, and fellow Patriot the Rev. Samuel Cooper, which was followed with a large Masonic procession to Boston’s Granary Buring Ground. Here, he was interred for the second time in a temporary grave made available by the Minot family.
Mary Warren would grieve the loss of her son throughout her long life with prayer and fasting on the anniversary of his death. She was known for her Christian virtue and charity throughout Roxbury. Mary would witness the birth of thirty-three grandchildren. According to the writings of two of her grandchildren, Mary delighted in the company of her large family. Tragically she also lived through the death of many grandchildren – including Joseph’s sons Josey and Dicky. She never remarried. Documentation of her death in 1803, from the records of the First Church in Roxbury refer to her as, “Warren Widow Mary.” (Dr. Jack Warren and his wife Abigail took legal guardianship of his beloved brother and sister-in-law Elizabeth’s four children on October 30, 1781, raising them along with their own children.)
In 1825, Joseph Warren’s remains were taken by his nephew from the borrowed grave at the Granary Burying Ground and placed in the cemetery of Boston’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church alongside those of his brother Jack. Then, in 1856, Joseph and Jack’s remains, along with the remains of their mother, father, paternal grandmother, and Joseph’s eldest son (Josey) were moved by Jack’s son Dr. John Collins Warren and grandson Dr. Jonathan Mason Warren to the Warren family plot in a new cemetery near their family farm in Roxbury (Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamacia Plain, MA).
Here, the remains of Joseph Warren rest.
He was America’s foremost Patriot leader in 1774/1775! The president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress! The man who strategically and purposefully positioned himself to remain safely in Boston to collect and act on information of British activity when all other leaders were forced to flee to safety! The man who ALONE ignited the American Revolution! The man who held everything together until Congress finally acted on his appeal to appoint a Commander-in-Chief over the American forces! The man who willingly sacrificed his life to save his fellow colonists on Breed’s Hill! The man British General Howe declared equal to 500 colonials! The man who has been debased through unsubstantiated assertions calling into question his character in contemporary writings of Samuel Forman, Nathaniel Philbrick, and Christian Di Spigna! The man who has been barely recognized or even mentioned for his paramount role as America celebrates 250 years of Independence and Liberty… It is time for Americans to remember and honor Joseph Warren – The Essence of American Liberty!
“The mistress we court is Liberty; and it is better to die than not to obtain her.” Dr. Joseph Warren, June 15, 1774
