ABSTRACT
Town leaders learned soon enough that Preston had written to Pitt. He was, after all, being held in their jail. They countered with a letter to Pitt of their own. The three men who signed the letter—James Bowdoin, Samuel Pemberton, and Joseph Warren—were all prominent in their time, but Warren is the only one of the three to survive in popular memory, and that primarily because of his death in the June 1775 fighting at Breed’s Hill, not his role in town and provincial politics. Bowdoin in particular was a driving force in the town meeting but later generations were destined not to know just how powerful he was. Son of a wealthy Boston merchant, with both a bachelor’s and master’s from Harvard, he served in the Massachusetts House before being chosen by his colleagues there to sit on the governor’s Council. Bernard and Hutchinson could have tried to prevent his being seated but they probably foresaw the potential political backlash, so he joined the Council. There he acted as a thorn in the side of both governors, causing them every bit as much difficulty as Samuel Adams and John Hancock in promoting the “patriot” cause. They are remembered; he is not. Such are the vagaries of the reconstructed past.
