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The Audiobook I created took me nearly a year to finish, and is 15 hours long called Life and Times of Joseph Warren. (LINK: Download Audiobook version of "Life and Times of Joseph Warren")
It was written by Richard Frothingham Jr. in 1865. It was my first attempt at a full length audiobook, and like most things, I learned a great deal while doing it that will make my next audiobook better, I don't have it in me to go back and re-do the Frothingham book, but I believe it is worthy of listening to.
I post this here, because what is absolutely fascinating to me is the level of detail Richard Frothingham puts into the book he wrote, often on a day-to-day basis of the activities of the Patriots in Massachusetts in their attempts to obtain what they viewed as fair treatment by their own government.
Very similar to what many of us feel today. I don't know about all of you, but I absolutely feel the anger of "Taxation Without Representation" today, among other things.
This book has one chapter on Joseph Warren's early life and family, but the next 14 chapters begin in 1763, spanning the Stamp Act in 1765 to his death as a Patriot General at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was a 23 year old practicing physician when the Stamp Act was passed, and he was 33 years old when he died at the redoubt of Bunker Hill, in the thick of battle, when it was overrun because the Patriots had run out of ammunition.
During that time, he rose to be the prominent public voice against the British. While it is true Samuel Adams was the prominent behind the scenes voice in the Patriot Cause, he was seen and heard less often in the public eye than was Warren, and Warren was the one who generally interacted directly with the British Authorities. He was considered to be one of the greatest Patriot orators of his day, certainly one of the most learned. He was professional, diplomatic, literate, compassionate, and urbane, all those characteristics in such great measure that it is astonishing for his age of 33 when he died at the peak of his skills at Bunker Hill.
He was there at the beginning, and although considered an intellectual (he WAS) he was as passionate and inflamed on the subject of Liberty as any man, as evidenced by this account by Frothingham in his book:
"...Though of marked amiability of character, he was naturally high-tempered, impulsive,and quick to resent an insult: at times he was passionate. One evening,when the British troops were quartered in the town, he was challenged in a burly way by a sentinel, when Warren knocked him down. He could be vehement in the expressions of feeling. On an occasion when his spirit was stirred by the taunts that British officers were uttering on the Americans, he said to William Eustis, subsequently the Governor of Massachusetts, "These fellows say we won't fight: by heavens, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!"..."
And he meant it. At the Boston Massacre, he tended, as a physician, to the wounded, even as their blood still flowed fresh into the cobblestoned street. When war broke out on April 19, 1775, as related by a fellow physician, "...His soul beat to arms," Dr. Eliot says, "as soon as he learned the intention of the British troops..."
He tasked one of his medical students to take care of his patients, jumped on his horse, and left Boston heading for Lexington. An account by Dr. Welch, who rode with him part of the way described it as follows:
"...Two soldiers," Dr. Welch says,"going to Lexington, tried to steal Watson's horse,at Watson's Corner; the old man,with his cat and hat, pulling one way, and the soldiers the other. Dr. Warren rode up, and helped drive them off. Tried to pass Percy's column; stopped by bayonets. Two British officers rode up to Dr. Warren, in the rear of the British, inquiring 'Where are the troops?' The doctor did not know. They were greatly alarmed. Went home..."
On the day he died two months later at Bunker Hill, he had been appointed a General, and was expected to serve a medical role out of the line of fighting, but would have none of it. He did not have the military knowledge to be useful as a General, deferred to the officer in charge, and instructed him to send him where he could be of the most use.
The point of these passages above is to show Warren was a man of action as well as words. This is the man who was instrumental in the events of the Boston Tea Party several years before. He was the official voice in the direct negotiations with the British regarding the vessels and their tea. He was the voice that reached out, via the Committee of Correspondence (which was tasked with communicating not only with all the communities in Massachusetts to align their behavior and actions, but also with all the colonies throughout Colonial America. He was the official head of the Committee of Correspondence.
It was a delicate time. Boston was only the first place tea was going to arrive. No doubt, based on what happened in Boston as a test case for the British, would be done to the rest of the Colonies with ships of tea. Boston was in a precarious situation, because if they buckled, all the rest of the Colonies would fall in, and it was Warren who corresponded with all of them to assure them Boston would hold fast in the face of it, and he admonished them to follow his example in their Colonies.
When the time came, it was never officially disclosed that Warren was one of the "Mohawks", though in a list given in a memoir, there is one Charlestown man who was unidentified, and that is thought by many to be Dr. Warren.
It is my opinion that, if Warren had not died at Bunker Hill, he would have, in post-colonial America, inhabited the same space as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin.
The book itself, unread by many (including me, until I dictated this) has an astonishing amount of day-to-day detail in the efforts the Patriots made to find a diplomatic resolution to the tea issue, before they resorted to the Tea Party, in which nobody was harmed except the merchants, who were caught between a rock and a hard place.
Frothingham devotes nearly 74 pages in this book to the Boston Tea Party alone, all the correspondences, the interactions with the Massachusetts Governor, the British Military, and the citizens of Colonial America, all of it intended to avoid bloodshed, and nearly all of it orchestrated and communicated by the 33 year old Dr. Joseph Warren.
Thanks! And good work!
Very interesting! I’m familar with Libravox.
You must have a good voice.
I recorded a chapter or two of s book for my nephew for his boy scouts project and with my Boston accent I sound like JFK when reading.
The book on Warren sounds like a good one! I’ll try to find it or just listen!
Thank you....for capturing, on audio, this amazing time in history.
Bookmarking!!