A few minutes before 10 PM on 18 April, British sergeants hurried through a handful of barracks, gruffly shaking the sleeping soldiers awake. They must’ve woken with a start, since they were usually roused awake by coarse shouting from their officers. One can imagine the confusion of waking in the quiet, of seeing your officer above you, the stifled commands to be silent as you assembled. The barracks were quiet as the men dressed in their gear; on days absent any excitement except drill, the soldiers took two to three hours a day keeping their uniforms and equipment polished, but tonight they hastily dressed as the officers hissed at them to step up their pace. None knew what was happening, not even the officers: precise orders regarding the destination of this mysterious night march were given to the officers in sealed envelopes, and they were commanded not to open them until the expedition was well underway. Only those at the head of the force knew what was afoot as the officers led their men through the barracks’ rear entrances; since the barracks were in sight of the Bostonians, it was hoped nothing would be noticed by taking them out the back. The men were led out onto Boston Common, and there they were assembled rank and file: nine companies of grenadiers, eight companies of light infantry, and four companies of Royal Navy marines. Around 700 soldiers plus their drummers, fifers, and medical orderlies stood upon the Common as if they were on parade.
A parade it could well have been: their uniforms were highly ornamental, patterned after those used in Germany in past wars. Their scarlet coats were decorated with facings, pipings, colored lining, lace and brass buttons, and they wore waistcoats either of scarlet or white. Their white breeches and coat sleeves stuck out with the stars unraveled above. Their waist-belts, broad and tight, held their bayonet scabbards. Each wore a belt running from the left shoulder to the right hip, where a cartridge box was attached for easy access. Their coat collars were stiff, and their neck movement was limited by a stiff leather stock bruising the undersides of their chins. They wore their hair like gentlemen, in a club stiffened with grease and white powder, underneath broad-brimmed tricorn hats; the grenadiers, tall and imposing, the Herculean soldiers of the British army, wore tall, brimless, bearskin hats, which only added to their formidable appearance.
British regiments were generally composed of eight companies of ordinary foot soldiers (also known as ‘line’ infantry), a company of light infantry, and another of grenadiers. The soldiers gathered knew their expedition was of critical importance since no line infantry were present: Gage had created his own ‘battalion’ of elite soldiers, hoping that this would give him an edge. Though a common practice in 18th century armies, taking elite units from their usual regiments also removed the troops from their familiar officers, which could result in a weakened command structure and a loss of control over the troops. Gage hoped, rather optimistically, that this wouldn’t affect operational discipline.
The light infantry were men chosen for their physical prowess, their daring, their awareness of their surroundings, their ability to move quickly, and their skill at close-quarters combat. Light infantry were adroit at scouting, skirmishing, leading surprise attacks and flanking the army on the march to sweep the column’s sphere free of hostile presence. Unlike the line infantry, who received orders from the beating of a drum, the light infantry used a bugle horn. The light infantry were praised as elite professionals who excelled as a strategic unit: while skirmishing, the light infantry fought in pairs, in which one soldier would cover the other as he reloaded. The light infantry, pushing ahead of the column and flanking the enemy, would generally fire at will, picking targets as best they could. Because muskets were the most common weapon in light infantry units, they had to get within fifty yards to even attempt at accuracy (rifled weapons were just coming onto the scene, and they were too expensive to be purchased and handed out to all light infantry units).
The light infantry’s skill on the battlefield may very well derive from the ‘odd’ manner in which they trained: the officers trained with their men. They couldn’t rest on the laurels of their position, for their place in battle was so critical that no one could afford to be subpar. Unlike regular units, the light infantry also received special training, and while the line infantry were trained to behave on the battlefield like a pack of dogs under their master, the light infantry were encouraged to employ initiative, take chances, and be able to make decisions on their own rather than simply doing what the bugler commanded. Their place on the battlefield meant that they could easily be overrun, exposed, and flanked themselves: they needed to be able to think and act swiftly with no hesitation. The light infantry were often agile and sinewy men, men whom nowadays would seem more at home on the track than dressed in heavy military gear waiting confusedly on the Boston Common. Indeed, the light infantry might seem ‘lanky’ compared to their counterparts, the grenadiers.
The grenadiers first came into existence in the late 17th century, their primary weapon being a small iron bomb whose fuse would be lit and thrown by hand into enemy formations. The strongest and most imposing men were chosen for the task, since it was understandably important to ensure the ‘grenade’ was thrown an adequate distance (not to mention the sight of swarthy men hurling lit bombs was more terrifying than trading volleys). Once it was realized that broad-brimmed hats could get in the way of a good toss, and since a bad toss had a tendency to be quite tragic for those in the vicinity, grenadiers adopted the towering and brimless bearskin hat. The use of grenadier companies fell out of use as it became evident that grenadier companies, with their unreliable bombs and tragic accidents, were far more a liability than an asset. Simultaneously, the evolution of ‘linear tactics’ coupled with the invention of the flintlock opened the door to a whole new style of warfare. The grenadier companies weren’t disbanded; rather, they were turned into an elite unit of tough, brawny, and daunting men serving in the same capacity as the light infantry, that of flanking the army on the march and in the heat of battle. Only the most resilient men could stand their ground in the face of a company of grenadiers charging from the flanks with their bayonets glistening in the light of battle. Not that all grenadiers had to be impressive men: because fashioning units of strapping, elite grenadiers out of raw recruits could be a challenge, veterans – especially those who had proven their worth in battle – would often ‘move up’ into grenadier ranks when a slot opened. The grenadiers were a privileged unit, and as such membership meant an elevated status and an increase in pay.
British officers were armed either with spontoons (a hybrid between a pike and spear, with an ornamental head) or with a fusil, a short musket; each also wore a dress sword. The non-commissioned soldiers carried muskets, the most common being the Brown Bess, named after the first matchlock guns incorporated into the British Army by Queen Elizabeth. They were ‘Brown’ because their barrels and metal fittings were browned; by the time of the British occupation of Boston, however, the barrels were steel-bright, though the name was retained. The muzzle-loading smoothbore flintlock musket was the primary weapon of the British Army in the mid-late 1700s; its prominence in the coming conflict is evidenced in the Continental Army’s own struggles to acquire them, for without muskets, what did they have? Muskets were large-caliber weapons, ranging from .62 to .75 bore, equal to an 11 or 16 gauge shotgun. They were ‘muzzle-loaders’ since the soldier loaded the musket through the muzzle (or end) of the barrel; and they were ‘smoothbored’ since they could shoot ball, shot, or a combination of the two. The barrels themselves were wider than the balls used: the musket used black powder to fire, and since black powder left behind fouling, the balls needed to be undersized so that the troops could fit the ball down the scoured barrel. The Brown Bess, for example, was a .75 caliber musket with a .69 caliber ball; the Charleyville, the French musket that would be a godsend to the musket-deprived Continental Army (the French delivered upwards of ten thousand Charleyville muskets to the Americans), was .69 caliber with a .65 ball. These muskets were heavy, over ten pounds, and the barrels themselves were at least three feet long – and they were made even longer when affixed with the bayonet.
Though muskets live in infamy in the romance of the Revolution, the ultimate weapon for the British wasn’t the musket but what could be attached to it. The first bayonets came from the French cutlery manufacturing city of Bayonne, whose blades were known as ‘bayonets.’ 1642 saw the invention of the ‘plug bayonet,’ a handled dagger that could be inserted into the musket barrel. Early musketeers learned for themselves the deficiencies of the plug bayonet: they often detached during combat, which could be quite problematic; and with the bayonet in place, the musket couldn’t fire. It made more sense to simply carry a dagger on your belt, at least until another Frenchman improved on the bayonet nearly twenty years later by attaching a socket. These ‘socket bayonets’ were foot-long spear-like blades attached to a metal sleeve that slipped over the end of the barrel; thus the barrel was no longer ‘plugged,’ so that the soldier could fire with the bayonet attached, and since the bayonet itself was a foot long, it turned the cumbersome muskets into virtual spears. This Frenchman’s invention made pikemen – soldiers equipped with spears – redundant: ‘Why arm soldiers with spears when you can arm them with muskets and spears in a single weapon?’ The British soldiers gathered on the Boston Common wore their socket bayonets in scabbards on their waist-belts, and they knew the bayonet wasn’t a ‘last resort’ (as it would become in the American Civil War almost a century later, outdated by technological advances in weaponry) but, rather, the ultimate resort.
British tactics on the battlefield revolved around linear movement. Each unit formed next to its neighbor, and together they stretched across the battlefield (this isn’t to say that the lines were necessarily straight or unbroken). Since these ‘line’ formations were used as the springboard and framework for both attack and defense, the tactics were ‘linear.’ When the soldiers spread out in formation on the battlefield, the plan wasn’t to shoot down the enemy until he gave way: the goal was to turn the enemy’s formations into ragged lines so that your soldiers could then march forward, in a cohesive and organized manner, and charge with the bayonet. Nine times out of ten, a disorganized unit couldn’t stand up against a well-executed bayonet charge. Indeed, regiments were rated not by how many volleys they could throw but how many they could withstand; the first to break was the one who received the bayonet. Because muskets were so inaccurate, and because they took so long to reload, it was impractical to stand there and fire away for hours until regiments withered down to nothing. The bayonet was far more practical, and efficient, and it was terrifying: the Americans, deprived of bayonets until they started receiving them from the French, dreaded the bayonet charge. When an American unit became disorganized and started falling apart, they had two options in the face of the British: retreat or die. Either way, the British were keen to take the field.
The assembled soldiers didn’t stay on the Common long: here they were in full view of anyone walking the streets bordering the Common, and in minutes they were led through the streets with the utmost silence. A dog barked at them; a soldier drew the bayonet from his scabbard and put it down. Its squeals dwindled to silence, and then there was nothing but the sound of the soldiers marching past. They reached the beach of the Back Bay under the shadow of the new powder house. Here boats would take them across the bay to a landing point at Lechmere Point; at the landing site was a farm, and behind it a hill obscuring the farm – and thus the landing site – from the closest road. The boats were too few, and what was supposed to be a swift transport across the shallow bay turned into a shivering wait for the tired and confused men. The boats’ oars were muffled to diminish the sound, and the soldiers were ferried across the bay in waves. Precious hours were lost, and the tides changed so that the water was too shallow for the boats to reach Lechmere Point: the soldiers were forced to disembark from the boats offshore and wade to dry land, soaked up to their knees. Their respite didn’t come with firm ground but the marshy shoreline of Lechmere Point. As soldiers reached the shore, officers led them across the marshy ground to an old wagon track, and there they waited as provisions were distributed. It was two in the morning before the last British soldier stepped off his transport from Boston, and as they were drawn into columns and set off, two lanterns glowed in the steeple of the old North Church rising tall above Boston across the shallow bay.
Around this time several miles north of the British march and beyond the town of Lexington, three riders galloped down an old road with the moon smiling above them. Shadows were drawn about the trees on either side of the road, and the quiet of the night was broken by the distant sounds of cannon, chiming bells, and signal guns being fired. The whole countryside was coming awake. One of the riders was a Boston tanner named William Dawes, whose commercial interests often took him across Boston Neck; thus he became familiar with the guards at the Lines, and he could regularly pass in and out of town without raising suspicion. The second rider was the patriot physician Samuel Prescott; and the third was none other than Paul Revere. Revere’s ‘mechanics’ had gotten wind of something big on Easter Sunday, the 16th of April. The boats Admiral Graves would use to ferry the troops across the Back Bay had been hauled out of the water, repaired in the shipyards, and rowed across the Charles River to the men-of-war anchored in the Harbor. Warren, receiving mixed information and perceiving the assemblage of boats himself, knew some game was afoot; the spies then received detailed information regarding Gage’s plan not only to seize the rebel arms depot at Concord but also to arrest Samuel Adams and ‘that terrible desperado’ John Hancock so that they could be shipped to England to stand trial for treason. The Provincial Congress had disbanded the Saturday before, and Hancock and Adams were trying to be low-key, staying with a fellow patriot named Jonas Clark, where they hoped not to be found should Gage send an expedition their way. Warren had ordered Dawes and Revere to Lexington to alert the targets and hide them away; Dawes managed to pass through the Lines just before the British guards received orders to stop traffic in and out of the town (it truly was a close run thing), and Revere left Boston by discreetly crossing the harbor to Charlestown.
A house rose up out of the shadows ahead of them; Dawes and Prescott stopped to rouse the family to arms, and Revere kept heading down the road. Several hundred yards ahead of the other two, Revere spied two British soldiers standing under a tree. He checked his horse, wheeled about, and shouted down the road, thinking that the three of them could handle the two soldiers. As his voice carried down the road, two mounted soldiers appeared in the road directly ahead of him.
‘God damn you, stop!’ one of them cried. ‘If you go an inch farther, you are a dead man!’
Revere didn’t move as the mounted soldiers made their way towards him. He heard Prescott riding up behind him. The British soldiers were upon them, blocking the road, and they swore that if the rebels didn’t turn in to the pasture off the road, their brains would be spattered all over their horses’ hides.
Revere and Prescott pulled off the road into a pasture. Prescott leaned close to his horse, looked at his companion, hissed, ‘Put on,’ and started to the left. Revere turned his mount slightly to the right, his eyes keen on the fence at the bottom of the pasture: he could already see it in his mind, jumping the fence and making his escape on horseback into the woods. He’d already evaded several British patrols, and just as they prepared to bolt, six more mounted British soldiers appeared from the shadowed woods, and they surrounded them with their pistols drawn. The closest soldier reached for Prescott’s bridle, but Prescott kicked his horse hard and tore through them, galloping across the pasture and leaping a low stone wall and disappearing into the woods. Revere cursed, and a shout came from the road: Dawes, having come up, wheeled his horse about and gave a terrific shout: ‘Halloo, boys!’ he cried, as if impersonating a British officer; ‘I’ve got two of ‘em!’ His theatrical turnabout fell apart as he toppled off his horse into the road. Mounted soldiers kicked after him from the pasture, but Dawes scrambled into the woods, disappearing on foot. That left Revere by himself, and the infuriated British grappled at his bridle, pointed their pistols at him, and ordered him to dismount.
He did as he was told, and one of his captors demanded, ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Boston,’ he growled.
‘When did you leave?’
‘About ten o’clock.’
‘Sir,’ the officer politely asked, ‘may I crave your name?’
The rider paused, drew a breath, and then answered: ‘Revere.’
The officer’s eyes went wide at the name. “What? Paul Revere?”
‘Yes,’ he said, not breaking eye contact.
The mounted soldiers exchanged glances.
Revere was known as a patriot spy, and the soldiers began to curse him.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ the British officer told him. ‘They won’t hurt you.’
Revere didn’t seem fazed. ‘You’ve missed your purpose,’ he said.
‘Oh no. We’re after some deserters who’ve been reported on this road.’
Revere didn’t break eye contact. ‘I know better than that. I know what you’re after, and you’re too late. I’ve alarmed the country all the way up…’ Bells continued to chime in the distance, and cannons were fired to spread the news of the British approach throughout the Massachusetts countryside. ‘I should have five hundred men at Lexington soon,’ Revere lied, a ruse to try and buy time. The ruse worked, aided by the sound of a signal gun coming from Lexington behind them on down the road.
The soldiers eyed the dark trees around the pasture, as if waiting for figures armed with muskets and pitchforks to emerge from the shadows in force. The officer sent one of the soldiers to find a Major Edward Mitchell, and in a few moments the senior officer came galloping from the trees. He dismounted beside Revere, drew his pistol, and placed it against Revere’s head: ‘I’m going to ask you some questions,’ he snarled, and if you don’t give me true answers, I’ll blow your brains out.'
The evening before, Revere arrived in Lexington to warn both Samuel Adams and John Hancock of the dire situation. Hancock and Adams were staying in Lexington to visit with Hancock’s Aunt Lydia and his fiancé Dorothy Quincy. Both Hancock and Adams had until Wednesday the 19th to meet up with Robert Paine and head to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress in May, and Hancock was no doubt looking forward to time with his fiancé. Having warned them of the impending danger, Revere headed back the way he had come. He rode into Charlestown, leaving word that when the British began to move, the route of their march would be signaled from the towering steeple of Christ Church (or the old North Church): ‘If the British march out over Boston Neck through Roxbury and Brookline, there will be one lantern; and if there are two lanterns, then the British took the shortcut by boat across Back Bay. As luck would have it, one of the sextons at Christ Church was a fellow patriot: twenty-four-year-old Robert Newman (known in infamy as Robert ‘Sexton’), who lived with his loyalist mother in a large house with spare rooms she rented out to British officers.
Around sundown on 18 April, Joseph Warren sent for William Dawes. Dawes was told that the British were soon to march and that their main objective was the arrest of both Hancock and Adams in Lexington. Warren suspected the march would go beyond Lexington to Concord, where military gear had been stored, but those running the inconspicuous ‘ammo dump’ at Barrett’s Farm north of Concord had ample time to relocate or hide the stores. There were two routes one could take from Boston to Concord, the longest route by way of Boston Neck towards Roxbury, around to Cambridge and Menotomy, and on through Lexington. Warren told Dawes to take the long route; he mounted his horse and passed through the British fortifications on the Neck by mingling with a group of soldiers. The guards didn’t suspect anything, and he hurried on down the road towards Roxbury. At ten that night, as the British soldiers were being roused from their bunks, Warren summoned Paul Revere and directed him to take the shorter route across the Charles River into Charlestown, and then on to Medford, Menotomy, and then on to Lexington, where it was hoped that he and Dawes would rendezvous at the house of Jonas Clark to warn Hancock and Adams before continuing together on to Concord.
Before heading across the Charles River, Revere summoned Robert Newman, one of the sextons at Old North Church. Warren had told him that the British would be taking boats across Back Bay to a landing point near Cambridge, so Newman was to put not one but two lanterns in the church’s towering belfry, the tallest structure in Boston, dominating the skyline. As Revere and a friend gathered a boat they had hidden from prying eyes, Newman snuck out of his redcoat-filled house and made his way to the church. There he joined vestrymen John Pulling and Thomas Bernard. Bernard served as the lookout as Pulling and Newman climbed to the top of the belfry and lit the twinkling lanterns. The signal was spotted across the Charles River, and more riders were dispatched as Revere and his friend pushed out into the Charles’ dark waters.
They slipped past the British man-of-war Somerset, miraculously unobserved even in the brilliant moonlight, and disembarked on the Charlestown shore at the battery facing Boston. Revere made his way into town and found a man named Deacon Larkin, who owned the fastest horse in the village. The horse was named Brown Beauty, and as Revere mounted and prepared to take the road towards Concord, Larkin told him that nine British officers ‘well mounted and armed’ had already been observed heading for Concord. These, Revere correctly assumed, were advance units sent to make sure the route of the British march was clear. Larkin told him to be wary of the British patrols, wished him luck, and Revere spurred his horse through sleeping Charlestown and across the Charlestown Neck.
Both the Mystic River on his right and the Charles on his left glistened in the moonlight. It was about eleven at night and the air was cold as he drove his horse through desolate salt marshes, clay pits and scrub. The smell of the salty sea was thick as molasses as he cut through Cambridge on his way to Lexington. He passed under the gibbet of the mummified body of Captain Codman’s Mark, who had rebelled against his master and had been hanging in chains for two decades as a warning against insurrection. Revere knew well enough that his own fate could just as easily be the same, so he kept his eyes and ears peeled and hurried on despite knowing that British patrols were out and about. As he neared a crossroads, suddenly two mounted officers appeared standing underneath a tree. They were so close that their holsters and the cockades in their hats could be seen, and they turned their horses towards him to try and head him off. Revere whirled his horse about and galloped hard towards the Mystic Road with the British hot on his heels. Larkin’s Brown Beauty was faster than the British mounts, and they were losing ground. One sought to cut him off by taking a shortcut through a triangle of land formed by two roads; as he soon found out, the triangle of land wasn’t firm at all but the remains of an old, drained pond: his horse sank deep to its haunches in the clay and muck, and the soldier cursed loudly in the still night air. The other rider, falling behind on the road, checked his horse, knowing that more British patrols were stationed on the road ahead of this mysterious rider.
Revere continued on to Medford, where he called upon Captain Hull of the militia to turn out his company of minutemen. Beyond Medford came Menotomy, and there he alerted patriots that ‘the regulars are coming out.’ He and Dawes, en route to Lexington, rode hard through the countryside, alerting the towns and houses along the way of the British expedition. The ‘Midnight Ride’ of Paul Revere has been so romanticized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem that the ride conjures up images of him riding hard through towns and villages, shouting ‘The British are coming!’ at the top of his lungs. His actual words (as reported by a witness) were ‘The regulars are coming out’ (emphasis mine). Revere was intelligent enough to know that shouting his message in the dead of night on roads patrolled by British troops would’ve been more of a suicide mission than anything else. Secrecy was critical, and rather than alert every house along his way, he stopped at the houses of known patriots and gave them the news so that they, in turn, could wake the minutemen and send off their own express riders. The burden of alerting entire towns didn’t fall on Dawes and Revere but on those whom they informed of the approach of the redcoats. In this way the countryside swarmed with activity: bells tolled, signal bonfires were lit, cannons were fired. Like a pathogen, the news of the British march spread far and wide, and minutemen woke from their slumber, donned their work clothes, grabbed their muskets and cartridge boxes and powder horns, and began heading towards Lexington and Concord.
Revere reached Lexington around midnight and hurried to the parsonage of the Reverend Jonas Clark where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying. Nine minutemen were guarding the house, and as Revere rode up, militiaman William Munroe intercepted him. Revere demanded that he talk with Hancock and Adams, and Munroe told him to lower his voice. ‘The family has just retired, and they asked that they might not be disturbed by any noise about the house.’
‘Noise?!’ Revere retorted. ‘You’ll have noise soon enough! The redcoats are coming!’
Munroe’s eyes went wide, and he hurried inside, Revere behind him. Adams and Hancock were awakened, and they quickly dressed, saddled their horses, but didn’t yet leave. Adams was insistent that they should flee, but Hancock would have none of it: he proclaimed he would take up a musket and join the Lexington minutemen if they opposed the British march. Adams insisted that course of action was foolishness, that Hancock’s loss would be a loss for the revolution itself. Since both he and Hancock were representatives to the Second Continental Congress, it was imperative that they save themselves for the work that lay ahead of them next month. Revere, observing all this, was no doubt irate; and when Dawes arrived half an hour after him, Revere abandoned the heated talks about what to do: they didn’t have time to see the argument to its end, and whatever Hancock decided, more towns still needed to be warned. He and Dawes grabbed some food, rested for a few minutes, and then mounted their horses and hurried together towards Concord.
En route to Concord, they were joined on the road by a certain Doctor Samuel Prescott. Prescott had spent a romantic evening in Lexington with a young woman named Miss Milliken. Alerted to the march of the redcoats, Prescott abandoned the warmth of a woman’s arms for a cold, early morning ride for Concord. As the three of them headed on from Lexington, Prescott and Dawes stopped at a house and Revere rode ahead, and there he found himself suddenly surrounded by British patrols materializing from the shadow-laced trees.
Dawes had made his escape on foot through the woods bordering the road, and Prescott had leapt a stone wall and likewise escaped. Revere was captured in a pasture and surrounded by British troops, the cold metal of a flintlock pistol pressed hard against the side of his head as the British Major demanded true answers to his questions. ‘I call myself a man of truth,’ he told Major Mitchell as coolly as he could. ‘You stopped me on the highway and made me a prisoner. I know not by what right I will tell the truth, for I am not afraid.’ Mitchell ran through the same questions Revere had been asked when he was first ordered to dismount, and his answers being the same, the officers were perturbed: if he was indeed speaking the truth, then the dark countryside all around them was swarming with American militia on the prowl for blood. Mitchell ordered Revere back on his horse but refused to let him hold the reigns. Revere insisted that he wouldn’t run, but Mitchell didn’t trust him. Four more prisoners, farmers who had been hidden in the nearby trees, were brought forward and ordered to mount their horses. The five prisoners plus the British patrol returned to the road from the pasture, and Mitchell again told Revere that if he tried to flee, or if he even insulted them, they’d blow his brains out.
Back on the road, the patrol formed a circle with the farmers in the middle. Revere was placed at the head of the company, where he could be observed by all the soldiers. His reigns were given to an officer riding beside him to ensure he didn’t try to make a break for safety. They followed the road on its winding way towards Lexington, and Revere endured countless insults and mockeries. Again and again he was told that he was ‘in a damned critical situation,’ and he merely shrugged and replied that he was sensible of it. About a mile down the road, the officer turned Revere over to a sergeant walking on foot with instructions to shoot him if he tried to escape.
Then a shot rang out from the direction of Lexington.
The party halted, and Mitchell asked Revere if he knew anything about the gunshot.
‘It was to alarm the country,’ he replied.
Mitchell ordered the four farmers to dismount. Their horse bridles were cut and the saddles ripped off their mounts. The horses were driven into a field, and the farmers were sent away. Revere calmly asked if he could leave, too, and Mitchell, knowing that Revere was a prize, refused. Now Revere was the only captive, and they continued towards Lexington. As they neared the Lexington meetinghouse, more shots rang out in quick succession, a volley apparently fired from outside one of the town’s taverns to signal the minutemen to arms. The group halted, Mitchell not wanting to walk into a mass of armed men, and he demanded of Revere the best route to Cambridge. Revere told him, and the sergeant on foot who was leading Revere’s horse was tired. Mitchell had more things to worry about than his prisoner, so he ordered Revere to dismount, gave Brown Beauty to the sergeant, and Revere was set free as the patrol hurried towards Cambridge, avoiding Lexington altogether.
Revere watched the patrol disappear into the darkness, and then he hurried on foot towards the Clark house in Lexington. He pushed through fields and pastures, through thickets of trees and orchards. He reached Clark’s parsonage to find that Adams and Hancock, much to his dismay, hadn’t yet left. Hancock remained adamant: he would heroically defend Lexington from the lobsterbacks. Hancock’s aunt, fiancé, and friends urged him to change his mind, and Revere – knowing the situation was more critical than ever – told Hancock what had happened to him on the road and insisted, even demanded, that he not get lost in his own thirst for heroics but preserve himself for the good of the revolution. His place was in Philadelphia, not on the Lexington Green. Hancock was persuaded, and Revere accompanied him, Adams, and several of their slaves to a crossroad two miles away. Hancock told Revere that he had a trunk in an upstairs room of Buckman’s Tavern, an inn and drinking hall facing the Lexington Green, and he asked if Revere would be kind enough to retrieve it. Revere agreed, and bidding them farewell at the crossroads, he kicked his horse back the way they’d come, towards Lexington. The stars stretched over the sky were twinkling out as the first gray light of dawn crept over the eastern sky, and he knew that if the redcoats hadn’t yet reached the town, they would be there soon enough.
The British March Begins
As Revere was being apprehended by the British patrol north of Lexington, the redcoats at Lechmere Point were starting their march. Their delay due to Graves’ lack of boats had put them four hours behind schedule, and in that time the tide had come in and flooded the nearby Willis Creek so that the waters spilled out over the marshes. Colonel Smith, in charge of the operation, didn’t want to take the bridge for fear that the sound of British boots on the wooden planks would alert nearby citizens; thus the soldiers, already wet to their calves from their late disembarkation onto the marshy Lechmere Point, forded Willis Creek with water up to their waists. Having forded the creek, they followed a narrow cart track that led to a quaint village connected to Cambridge by a single road. Here the troops quietly passed darkened houses, and as the road widened they formed proper ranks and marched in column towards Cambridge. Past Somerville the advance column intercepted three men driving a milk wagon from Lexington, and they ordered them to turn the wagon around and travel back with them the way they had come; Major Pitcairn, the royal marine leading the advance, refused to take any chances. Around three that morning the column neared the small village of Menotomy (an Algonquian word meaning ‘swift running water’), and it became evident that the expedition’s element of surprise had been lost.
By now none of the soldiers were in the dark, and neither was the countryside: signal volleys were fired, the ragged shots echoing through the dense forests; cannons were lit, the cacophonous booms leapfrogging across the rumbling hills; bonfires raged upon barren hilltops, the firelight visible for miles in every direction; and bells woke sleeping minutemen, who jerked out of bed and speedily dressed, seizing their guns, bidding farewell to their wives, and sweetly kissing their sleeping children before hurrying into the dark night. The news of the regulars’ march out of Boston had spread twenty miles in every direction, driven by the colonial alarms and the network of express riders carrying the news of Dawes and Revere far-and-wide. The destination, as both the redcoats and the colonists knew, was Concord, with a pit-stop along the way to detain the rebel radicals Hancock and Adams, who were thought to be in Lexington about a dozen miles north of Boston. At Concord, six miles west of Lexington, rebels had stocked all sorts of military supplies: muskets and cannon, musket balls and cartridges coupled with reams of cartridge paper, hundreds of barrels of precious gunpowder, and scores of military accoutrements: boxes of candles, wooden spoons, canteens, wine casks, medicine chests, axes and spades. Because the illegal and treasonous Massachusetts Provincial Congress had been meeting in Concord, Gage hoped the expedition might round up some of those involved in its proceedings, in addition to Hancock and Adams from Lexington. Gage had hoped to have an edge against the colonists: surprise. He’d hoped the expedition would reach Concord by eight in the morning, but already the troops were far behind schedule and the countryside seemed to teem with alarm. Speed and surprise, so critical to the mission, had been lost.
Lieutenant Colonel Smith of the 10th Regiment (pictured here) had been put in command of the expedition, with Major John Pitcairn selected to lead the light infantry as the column’s vanguard. Pitcairn’s advance force, some four hundred strong, were crucial in the line of march. They were followed by an equal number of grenadiers. Smith, a dull-witted and grossly fat officer, was probably chosen to head the expedition because of his seniority. Major John Pitcairn, a Royal Marine, was a middle-aged, devout Scotsman beloved by his troops for his virtue, patience, and tact (as well as being fondly regarded even by the Sons of Liberty, of whom he’d befriended many). Perhaps Gage hoped that Smith’s weaknesses would be offset by Pitcairn’s strengths. A support force, led by Brigadier General Hugh Percy (also known as Lord Percy), was set to march across Boston Neck, through Roxbury and on to Cambridge. Smith assumed that Percy was already covering his rear miles behind him, but the same fate that had struck Smith’s force had befallen Percy’s, that of critical delay.
As Smith’s forces were disembarking Boston, Gage had sent for Percy and given him orders to support Smith’s forces. As Percy headed home to begin gathering his things and sending dispatches to the officers he required, he overheard a group of eight to ten Bostonians on the Common talking about the British march out of Boston: ‘The troops have marched, but they will miss their aim.’
Percy demanded to know what ‘aim’ they were speaking of.
One of the Bostonians grinned quite smugly. “Why, the cannon at Concord.”
Percy hurried back the way he had come and informed Gage that the secret was out. He told him that if the people in Boston knew, then certainly the countryside knew as well. Gage was visibly upset, all his precautions having blown to nothing, but since the expedition had already sallied forth, and since he was under pressure from Dartmouth to do something, anything, he decided that the mission would go on ahead. Percy gathered his forces, minus a detachment of Royal Marines, and waited on the Common. He was supposed to set out rather early, but at three in the morning he and his troops were still waiting, for the Marines hadn’t showed up. Undoubtedly Percy’s anxieties grew, for the musketry, cannons, and bells grew louder and constant, and he knew Smith was moving on ahead without any support from his rear. Smith surely found comfort in the thought of Percy behind him, but it was a false comfort, and it’d be shown up for that soon enough.
Smith’s column continued its way past Menotomy and towards Lexington in deep darkness. The road turned into a steep hill winding up through dense woods and bordered by rustic stone walls. Pitcairn, in the advance, sent scouting companies of light infantry ahead to serve as flankers. These flankers captured several colonists who confessed they came from Lexington, dispatched by a certain John Parker. Farther down the road, the advance scouts rendezvoused with members of the Royal Artillery whom Gage had dispatched in broad daylight the afternoon before; they had worn civilian clothing and driven light chaises laden with blankets hiding tools to be used in the dismemberment of the rebel cannon at Concord, and they had been dispatched in advance so that their wagons wouldn’t encumber the ‘swift’ expedition. Lieutenant William Grant of the Royal Artillery conferred with Pitcairn’s advance scouts, informing them that the forest around Lexington swarmed with armed rebels. The news was carried to Pitcairn, and the advance continued, swallowing up express riders promising six hundred to a thousand armed rebels poised and ready to strike at Lexington. The scouts came across Major Mitchell, the officer who had temporarily captured Paul Revere, and Mitchell confirmed the outlandish estimates of the captive express riders: ‘We can expect about five hundred rebels at Lexington.’ The news was sent to Pitcairn, who cautiously slowed his advance. The scouts continued moving north, and just as they were nearing Lexington, the darkness of the night began to break apart with the first bleak sunlight of dawn. They saw in the gnarled and naked trees lining the hills around the road hundreds of men moving towards Lexington. The scouts felt in over their heads, and they fell back and rejoined Pitcairn’s main advance force.
Pitcairn, under no delusions about what he was facing, halted the advance half a mile outside Lexington. The four hundred light infantry had a moment to salve hurting feet and admire the Massachusetts hills all around them; some spied movement in the trees, as if they were being watched. Fearing an ambush, Pitcairn reorganized his column: a small advance guard to lead the way into Lexington and flankers to comb the hills on either side of the road to sweep them of rebel threats. He sent a rider to Smith behind him, warning him that they were likely to run into opposition in Lexington, and he conferred with the sergeants, who ordered the men to load their muskets. Riding to the head of the main body, Pitcairn gave the order to march. The column moved forward as the dawn light reflected off their bayonets and the polished steel of their muskets.
Lexington Green: The Shot Heard 'Round the World A strong east wind blew and the sky was paling with the first morning light as Revere neared Lexington, a town gripped in the fervor of the approaching storm. Lexington was a quiet, sleepy town, a cluster of pleasant and spacious houses where the road from Boston forked left to Concord and right to Bedford. The village common, the Green, was a triangle bordered by two roads, with the road from Boston running along its base. On the Green stood a meetinghouse that looked more like a barn with an awkward, detached wooden belfry in the yard. Across the road was John Buckman’s Tavern (pictured here), an inn often used by weary travelers and a favorite watering hole for the residents of Lexington and nearby farmers.
As Revere neared the inn where Hancock’s papers were stored, the windows glowed with the light of candles and oil lanterns. The quiet of the breaking dawn was broken by the coarse voices of men floating from the tavern; groups of men huddled about the drinking hole, dressed in their work clothes, and some were clutching muskets or fowling pieces. The militia had been summoned when Revere rode into Lexington hours earlier to warn Hancock and Adams of the approaching redcoats. The town had come alive by the time Revere and Dawes had set out for Concord: the awkward bell in the detached belfry summoned the town’s citizen-soldiers and dispatched express riders to arouse nearby towns on the redcoat’s line of march towards Concord. Captain John Parker, the leader of Lexington’s militia, gathered the minutemen on Lexington Green in the dead of night, and there they stood for a time in the chilly moonlight, their breath fogging before their eyes and fingers growing stiff in the cold. The regulars didn’t materialize down the road, and Parker couldn’t help but wonder if Revere’s report was false.
Parker, dying from consumption (tuberculosis) and with less than five months to live, kept coughing in the bitter cold as he and the men stood on the Green stamping cold feet for about an hour. Parker asked the men what they wanted to do (though he was the leader, theirs was a democratic force). Parker and his men agreed to fall out and await more developments; some were convinced Revere’s report was false, and Parker dispatched riders south to determine the accuracy of Revere’s reports (these riders wouldn’t come back, being apprehended on the road by Pitcairn’s advance scouts). Parker ordered the men to be ready to assemble at the beating of a drum, and the minutemen dispersed. Those who lived in town returned to their beds, grumbling about having to wake up and wait in the cold for an hour because of a false alarm, and those who had come from nearby farms retired to Buckman’s Tavern to escape the cold. There Buckman served them beer, and they gathered about a roaring fireplace and talked high and mighty of what they would do if the redcoats showed themselves.
Revere entered the tavern, the drinking space crammed full with farmers and artisans and villagers clutching their weapons and wearing civilian clothes. He pushed through the throng looking for Buckman, and then the tavern’s front door flew open and a farmer stood in the doorway, announcing with excitement that the redcoats were just two miles down the road. The tavern went absolutely quiet for but a moment, and the farmer’s report rang true with the beating of a drum out on the Green. The palpable tension disintegrated, and the men downed the last of their beer and snuffed out their pipes, and they rushed out of the tavern and onto the Green, where Parker stood in the gray morning light directing the minutemen. ‘Every man of you who is equipped, follow me!’ he ordered. ‘And those of you who are not equipped, go into the meetinghouse and furnish for yourselves from the magazine and immediately join the company!’ The Green turned into a scene of chaos, men running about, ragged lines forming, Parker doing his best to bring a passion-infused mob into orderly ranks.
Revere had found Buckman with the emptying of the tavern, and Buckman directed him to a room upstairs. Revere gathered Hancock’s trunk of papers under his arm and stole a glance out the second-story window. Directly below on the Green he saw that Parker had drawn up two ragged ranks of fifty to seventy men about a hundred yards from the road to Concord, which ran along the triangular Green’s base. On either side of the Green, men without guns, anxious to see what was about to go down, had gathered. And beyond them, on the other side of the Green, he could see the dawn light reflecting off polished muskets as the red-coated regulars came into view on the road outside Lexington. As he hurried away from the Green, he heard Parker tell the two ranks of men, ‘Let the troops pass by and don’t molest them with out they begin first!’
The colonists on the Lexington Green wore no uniforms, , just their leather jerkins and the broad-brimmed hats of the country folk that had grown popular during the fur trade decades earlier. These weren’t soldiers; they were dairy farmers and craftsmen. Parker, a forty-five--year-old farmer and a veteran of the Indian Wars (and a former member of Rogers’ Rangers), was no fool: he knew his party of rustic farmers and artisans couldn’t halt the regulars’ march to Concord, but he and the men were determined to protect Lexington, not least its women and children, if the redcoats grew roguish on their route to Concord. What Parker intended to do with his party of fifty to seventy men against Smith’s eight hundred regulars is unknown, especially since the regulars’ target wasn’t Lexington but Concord, and the redcoats hadn’t vandalized any of the towns they’d passed through on the night’s expedition. At the least, Parker’s little force served as a direct challenge to the redcoats, and though they weren’t blocking the path to Concord, Parker undoubtedly knew that the regulars wouldn’t allow a body of armed men to be left untreated at their rear.
Outside Lexington, at about four thirty in the morning with streaks of orange and purple in the eastern sky, Pitcairn at the lead of the column heard the militia drum beating in Lexington. He halted the column, ordered the men to double their ranks and fix bayonets, and then they moved forward at the double quick. Entering the town, the light infantry marched around both sides of the church at the southern end of the Green, and coming around the church, the regulars in their scarlet coats, white breeches, and glittering bayonets saw the minutemen, drawn up in two ragged lines, facing them on the Green. One of the minutemen sallied forth from the line, aimed his musket, and attempted to fire on the advancing redcoats. There came only a flash in the pan, the musket misfiring, and he hurried back the way he had come, where the hunched-over and raspy Parker cursed him between stifling coughs.
Pitcairn ordered his column into the conventional battle formation, a line of three ranks divided into two sections (or platoons). The rear ranks shouted and huzzaed as they rushed forward into the extended lines, and several of the colonists in their ranks took a few stunned steps backwards, this conventional movement appearing more like a charge than anything else. At this point minutemen began to break ranks and fall back; some headed for Buckman’s tavern, others mingled with the crowds gathered on the sides of the Green, others took position behind a low stone wall running along the right margin of the Green. Parker tried to prevent the two lines from disintegrating, but it came to no avail: soon all that remained before the redcoats drawn up ahead of them were about forty men.
Parker walked the length of his lines, his back to the redcoats. ‘Stand your ground!’ he snarled. ‘Don’t fire unless fired upon! But if they want to have a war, let it begin here!’ Seeing the British forming up, a nervous militiaman urged Parker to call the whole thing off. Parker brusquely retorted, ‘The first man who offers to run shall be shot down.’ It was all a bluff, of course, as up to thirty had already abandoned the ranks; and any thought of running passed as Pitcairn, riding upon his horse with two or three officers at his side, emerged from the gathered redcoats and moved across the field. The three of them came within one hundred feet of the militia, and Pitcairn’s shout carried across the Green: ‘Lay down your arms, you damn rebels, and disperse!’ Pitcairn’s intention was to avoid bloodshed, and he had explicitly ordered his officers to keep the men from firing: ‘Have them form,’ he’d told them, ‘and surround the rebels.’ He hoped to awe the rebels into submission.
Parker knew he didn’t stand a chance and that any blood spilled would be a futile waste. He complied with Pitcairn’s demand, ordering his men to disperse, and slowly the rebel lines began to disintegrate, the men filtering towards the edges of the common, many heading the way of Buckman’s Tavern. But they hadn’t laid down their arms.
‘Damn you!’ Pitcairn shouted. ‘Why don’t you lay down your arms?!’
‘Damn them!’ another officer echoed. ‘We will have your arms!’
The redcoats moved forward, many of them cheering, and Pitcairn called out to them not to fire but to surround the fledgling colonists and to disarm them.
And then several shots were fired.
No one knows who fired the first shot, and it’s become a matter of academic speculation. American eyewitnesses accused a British officer, but redcoat eyewitnesses denied a regular had fired first. Some later said that the shooter may have been a zealous radical hidden behind a nearby stone wall. Older American historians place blame on Pitcairn, insisting that he ordered the first volley; but this goes against everything that is known about Pitcairn, who was self-controlled and disciplined, a man of tact. He knew better than to spill blood if he didn’t have to. In all likelihood, it’s probable that a handful of minutemen who had moved behind the stone wall turned and fired on the redcoats, wounding one regular and sending balls into Pitcairn’s horse in two places. Pitcairn supports this in his own report: ‘The Light Infantry… ran after [the dispersing rebels]. I instantly called to the Soldiers not to fire, but to surround and disarm them… Some of the Rebels who had jumped over the Wall Fired Four or Five Shot at the Soldiers.’ While it’s unknown who, precisely, fired first, what is known is what happened next.
The sound of the shots ignited a powder-keg of tension and fear.
Jittery regulars and ashen-faced minutemen instinctively fired.
A British officer shrieked, ‘Fire, by God, fire!’
One of the platoons poured a volley into the scattering minutemen.
Pitcairn rode about on his horse, demanding his men to stop firing; but their blood was boiling, all the abuses and hostilities they’d been forced to endure by the colonists spilling forth with black powder and bayonets: the platoon fired another volley and charged. Militiamen ran helter-skelter for safety, firing behind them as they ran. A few only got a step or two before they were cut down. Wounded lay bleeding in the grass of the Green as their brethren sprinted for the protection of trees and walls. Minutemen behind the stone wall fired on the redcoats but did no harm. Fifty to one hundred regulars charged across the Green, pushing like wreathed ghouls through the musket fire’s acrid smoke, shouting and firing as they went. When they came upon the wounded in the grass, they stabbed them again and again with the cold steel of their bayonets.
Pitcairn watched all of this, mortified, enraged at the subordinate who had ordered his troops to fire. He spurred his horse, riding about his men, screaming at them to fall back, jabbing his sword in a downward motion in the cease-fire signal. But the troops ignored him, caught up in the frenzy. Fleeing minutemen had poured into Buckman’s Tavern, and when the regulars reached the barred door, they set about trying to break it down. Through the windows they could see minutemen huddled about inside, and Pitcairn knew there’d be a slaughter if the frenzied redcoats were able to break inside.
At this point Smith rode up on his horse. ‘Where’s the drummer?!’ he demanded.
One of the officers found a drummer boy, and the drummer began pounding the beat, the drum filling the Green, rising above the shouting of the officers and Pitcairn’s hoarse commands. The drums brought the redcoats to a check, and they abandoned the tavern door, regrouping on the Green.
In a matter of seconds, the Green had been swept clear of the minutemen. The crowds on either side had dispersed into dwellings, into the woods, or were running down the roads. Only thirty to forty seconds had passed between the mysterious first shot and the beating of the drum. Eight minutemen were dead and another nine wounded, and one British private suffered a minor wound, a ball grazing his leg. Lying among the wounded was the dying Jonas Parker, cousin to John Parker; Jonas had stood his ground while everyone fled around him. He had fired his weapon, knelt down and began reloading. The second volley fired by the British platoon sent a ball into his knee, and he pitched forward into the grass. He managed to bring himself up on his good knee, and he attempted to reload his piece, but the redcoats were upon him, and multiple stabs from their bayonets finished their grisly work. Jonathan Harrington had been shot, and he dragged himself across the Green and had almost reached his doorstep when he died; his wife burst from the house and collapsed beside him, clutching his body against hers. John Brown fell on the edge of a swamp a little north of the Common, and another man had fallen dead behind the wall in Buckman’s tavern garden.
The victorious regulars milled about the Green, firing their guns and cheering. The officers sought to get their men under control, but it was difficult. Several redcoats had pursued rebels into the nearby trees and into the town, and officers on horseback were sent out to round them up. Smith and Pitcairn were finally able to get the men under control, and Smith sent patrols house-to-house searching for Hancock and Adams; they didn’t turn up, of course, having fled at Revere’s news. Much time had been lost with the skirmish, and several officers urged Smith to call off the march to Concord: blood had been spilled, the countryside was teeming with activity, and they feared that with the elements of both surprise and speed having been lost, the rebels now had the upper hand. Smith refused to budge, and he reformed the British columns and allowed them their traditional victory volley, and they began to march west towards Concord as the sun rose above the naked eastern trees.
Fifes shrilled and drums beat; with all hope of secrecy gone, why not march forward with gusto? Besides, Smith thought, things had gone pretty well: they’d given the rebels quite the whooping on the Green, and certainly they would be more tentative about opening fire on highly-trained professional troops. Abandoning Lexington, it seemed Smith’s confidence was well-placed: they marched for an hour without passing anyone. No wagons, no farmers, no one on the roads. The fields were empty, and the houses along the route were abandoned. All they spied was a lone horseman on the top of a hill, who sat watching them and then galloped away.
Back in Lexington, the bodies of the fallen were gathered and taken to the meetinghouse. There they were laid in boxes built of four large boards nailed together. The citizens who hadn’t fled the town gathered, and the Reverend Clark prayed. The coffins were loaded into horse carts and taken to the graveyard, and the caskets were laid in a long trench bordering the woods. A pattering rain fell as the citizens went about filling the trench with dirt, and they covered the common grave with oak- and pine-boughs spread about to look like a heap of brush in case the British returned to try and confiscate the bodies. Young Sylvanus Wood, a minuteman, reported that after the British abandoned Lexington on their way to the stores at Concord, ‘I returned to the Common and found Robert [Munroe] and Jonas Parker lying dead… near the Bedford Road, and others dead and wounded. I assisted in carrying the dead into the meetinghouse. I then proceeded toward Concord with my gun…’
The British March to Concord Six miles northwest of Lexington, the quiet town of Concord had ‘woken up’ hours before dawn. Neither Dawes nor Revere had reached the town, but news filtered in through express riders, not least Doctor Samuel Prescott, who had evaded the British patrol that had captured Revere. Around two in the morning the alarm bell was rung, and the minutemen saw to their muskets and hurried to the Concord square. Concord was a small town by our standards, with only about twenty-five houses, a meetinghouse and courthouse, and a handful of taverns, but it soon came alive in the early morning darkness as the militia gathered.
The first to show up was the Reverend William Emerson, the town’s minister, with his gun in hand. Then came the minutemen companies: one led by Captain Brown, another by Captain Miles, and the third by Captain Nathan Barrett. The alarm company, composed of old men and boys, magistrates and clergymen, came last. All gathered at Wright’s Tavern on the square. Not knowing whether Prescott’s report was true, they sent a rider southeast to Lexington to confirm the reports. Because the regulars were targeting the military stores housed at Barrett’s farm, Barrett led a party north of the town, across the North Bridge spanning the Concord River, and past a two-hundred-foot hill to the sweeping farm with its three-story brick farmhouse farther down the road. Barrett supervised the removing and hiding of the stores: musket balls, flints, and cartridges were stashed in barrels covered with feathers in the attic; they dragged powder into the woods and hid it in the shadows of the dense trees. A plow was drawn from his barn, and they gouged furrows in a nearby field, and here they laid the light cannon and their supply of muskets and covered them with the plowed dirt. As Barrett supervised the dispersing of their military stores, Captain Minot’s alarm company headed southeast of the town, taking position on a ridge flanking the road that the redcoats were reportedly using; here they could observe the regulars—and take action if the occasion arose.
As the early morning wore on, militiamen from nearby towns filtered into Concord, and riders from Lexington bore news of bloodshed on the Green. Entire companies showed up, as did men in threes, pairs, and on their own. The first out-of-towners came from Lincoln; Captain William Smith’s company bolstered the militia’s force to around one hundred fifty. Corporal Amos Barrett of Captain Brown’s company suggested a reconnaissance, and so the troops marched down Lexington Road, past the alarm company spread out on overlook duty on the ridge. Their fifes shrilled and their drums beat, and down the road their own instruments were met with those of the British. The company halted, and the British appeared, their fifers playing ‘Yankee Doodle’ and drums pounding. The militia didn’t waste time in turning tail and scurrying back the way they had come. Certainly Minot’s alarm company on the hill didn’t find their hurried retreat to bode well.
A mile out from Concord, the British were announcing their approach. Roadside homes were abandoned, and birds took to flight from the naked trees as the drums echoed through the woodlands. A sharp ridge rose abruptly on the road’s right, and it would flank the road all the way to the Concord square. Minot’s company had taken position on the far end of this ridge, overlooking the town’s meetinghouse and its Liberty Pole. When the British came into view, Minot ordered the youngest and the oldest of his company to fall back. The more able-bodied of his company remained on the ridge. Seeing the militia in the trees on the ridge, Smith sent out the light infantry to clear the ridge. The light infantry with bayonets held at the ready ascended the hill in a single line, and the rest of Minot’s company hurried to the far end of the ridge, where it tapered down to nothing and a new ridge began. Here the rest of Minot’s company waited, and the able-bodied men of the alarm company joined their ranks and turned to watch.
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| Battle Map of Lexington and Concord by John Fawkes |
At the square, Lexington Road turned sharply to the right and followed this second ridge to the wet meadows on the bank of the Concord River. The road jerked left and crossed a wide wooden bridge, called the North Bridge, that spanned the river. From their vantage point on the ridge, the alarm company watched as British troops surrounded Concord’s meetinghouse and tore down the Liberty Pole and its treasonous flag. Enraged, a handful of militiamen demanded that they make a stand on the ridge. Strategically it was a good spot, but since the majority wanted to withdraw and rejoin the rest of the militia north of the town, they retreated instead. As the British mocked the rebel flag and stomped it underfoot, the militia hurried from the second ridge, crossed the wet meadows, tramped across North Bridge, and they scampered up the two-hundred-foot-high Punkatasset Hill where the rest of the militia had gathered as the redcoats entered the center of town and began splitting up in search of rebel stores.
Lieutenant Colonel Smith divided his forces into three groups: one force was posted at the South Bridge, another was sent to the Barrett Farm, and the rest were to search Concord proper for military stores and any members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. He sent a small detachment under Captain Pole to guard Concord’s South Bridge, which crossed the Concord River south of the North Bridge. A second detachment, led by Captain Parsons, was to cross the North Bridge (about half a mile from the center of town) and follow the road past Punkatasset Hill to the Barrett Farm, where they would set about destroying the rebel stores.
When Parsons reached the North Bridge, he could see the militia gathered on Punkatasset Hill across the river, half-hidden in the trees shrouding the hill’s crest. He posted two companies, about sixty to seventy men, on a separate hill on the other side of the road to watch the bridge and cover Parsons’ expedition, and he posted one company on the bridge itself; these three companies were under the command of Captain Laurie. Parsons continued unmolested with the rest of his men to the Barrett Farm, and Laurie back at the North Bridge couldn’t help but notice that the numbers of militia shrouded in the trees on Punkatasset Hill seemed to be growing.
The colonists on the hill, led by a sixty-four-year-old miller named Colonel James Barrett (whose farm was being ransacked), didn’t budge from the hilltop as Parsons and his redcoats marched the half mile down the road to Barrett’s farm. Barrett wore an old coat and a leather apron, as if it were just another day of work. Laurie’s observations were correct: the size of the militia was indeed growing as colonists from surrounding towns filtered in. Two hundred fifty six men came from the town of Woburn, and Dedham delivered a company of veteran soldiers from the French and Indian War plus a few dozen recruits. Entire towns were left empty of male inhabitants as men streamed for Concord. Those gathered, especially the residents of Concord, itched to descend upon the redcoats with muskets blazing; but Barrett, like Parker at Lexington, wasn’t eager to open fire unless his hand was forced. Those around him tried to force his hand, but he was adamant that they not attack, since their numbers, topping off at around four hundred undisciplined and untrained colonists, were still inferior to the eight-hundred-odd professional British regulars.
When Captain Parsons and his redcoats reached the Barrett Farm, their findings were scant. They knocked the trunnions off two heavy 24-pound cannons, confiscated some negligible powder and ammunition, and burned a supply of wooden spoons and trenching tools. As Parsons was overseeing the work on the farm, Captain Laurie on the North Bridge kept a cagey eye on the growing numbers of militia on Punkatasset Hill. Determining their numbers was difficult, since they were hidden in the trees crowning the hill; but their numbers became apparent as they began descending the hill en masse, gathering on a field at the bottom of the slope where, for the past several weeks, they had assembled for their training exercises. The field was separated from the road by a wet meadow traversed by a wooden causeway. Unaware of their intentions, Laurie sent a dispatch to Smith half a mile back in the town, requesting reinforcements. Smith obliged, placing himself at the head of the relief force; because he was so fat and slow, the relief force of grenadiers made sluggish progress. As a British officer remarked, Smith, ‘being a very fat heavy man he would not have reached the bridge in half an hour, tho’ it was not half a mile to it.’
As Smith began leading his grenadiers towards the North Bridge, the regulars in the town went about searching the vacated houses, taverns, and other buildings. Most of the stores had been removed earlier that day, and they didn’t find much: five hundred pounds of musket balls, trenching tools, and some wooden spoons. The musket balls were thrown into the town’s millpond (only to be dredged up later), as were nearly one hundred barrels of flour. The outer flour swelled and waterproofed the rest of the flour in the barrels, so that much of it was salvaged after the redcoats departed. Cannon were found buried in the jail’s courtyard, and as the grenadiers went to work unburying them, the British officers refreshed themselves in the local taprooms, under explicit orders to be cordial and to pay for everything they took. The cannon in the jail’s courtyard were spiked, and the grenadiers dumped black powder into the Concord River. Wooden gun carriages, used to transport cannon, were gathered near the courthouse and set afire, the choking black smoke rising above the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.
Across the Concord River, the gathered militia, mostly farmers, artisans and shopkeepers, saw the smoke rising in the mid-morning air, a stark contrast against the deepening blue sky. Seeing the smoke rising above the buildings, the terror struck deep: the British were burning the town. Their gathering was no longer about protecting military stores; now it was about protecting their livelihoods. Corporal James Barrett had forestalled any direct challenge to the redcoats up to this point, quite an achievement with this borderline mob infused with a rigorous lust for vengeance for what had transpired on the Lexington Green hours earlier.
Joseph Hosmer, Barrett’s adjutant, gaped at him: ‘Will you let them burn the town?!’
Barrett knew he couldn’t say No, especially with the militiamen all around him biting at the bit for an opportunity to shed redcoat blood. Their voices rose around him, demanding him to act, cursing him if he were to stand by and allow the town to be burned to the ground. The residents of Concord would be left homeless, jobless, penniless; and in a world without fire- or life-insurance, such a loss would render families destitute and impoverished. Barrett looked across the wet meadows to the North Bridge, where the redcoats had stationed themselves, scattered about and convinced that the rebel rabble wouldn’t dare lift a finger. He drew a deep breath and avowed to march into Concord for its defense – or to die in the attempt.
The Skirmish on the North Bridge It was around 9:30 in the morning. Captain Laurie had about one hundred fifteen regulars under his command, and they were spread about the south side of the bridge, across the river from the gathered militia. These men were relaxing, sitting on the grass and massaging swollen feet, their muskets laid at their sides. A curse was muttered among them, and their eyes went across the river where the four-hundred-odd colonists were no longer standing still but moving in their direction. Laurie ordered his men up and moving, and Lieutenant Kelly, in command of the covering party stationed on the left side of the road to cover Parsons’ expedition, hurriedly moved his men back down the road to reach the bridge before the rebels cut them off. Laurie saw the covering party approaching the bridge and calculated that the redcoats would reach the bridge before the colonists. Thus he spread his men along the riverbank on the rebel side of the bridge where they could take cover behind stone walls separating the wet meadows from the tilled fields at the foot of Punkatasset Hill.
Major John Buttrick was put in command of the rebel militia’s advance, with Corporal Barrett remaining behind to direct the confrontation from the rear. Laurie’s men at the bridge were hopelessly outnumbered by the colonists, since most of Smith’s expedition was back in Concord or half a mile farther down the road at Barrett’s farm (Smith and his relief force of grenadiers were still plodding the half-mile from Concord to the North Bridge, and Laurie knew there was no way they’d reach them in time). The militia had formed in a ragged column of twos and had started towards the British, two fifers shrilling ‘The White Cockade’ and drummers matching the rhythm. Captain Davis of Acton led the column, and behind them came Miles’s company of minutemen, followed by the minutemen of Brown and Nathan Barrett. The Acton militia were behind them, and the militia from Bedford and Lincoln, coupled with volunteers unattached to any particular town, took up the rear. Barrett had ordered them not to fire unless fired upon, for he knew that the matter was critical: whoever fired first would lose the upper-hand in the unavoidable propaganda war.
Lieutenant Kelly’s redcoats reached the bridge, and he ordered them to start removing the planks. The redcoats worked feverishly as the militia drew nearer. The rebels bunched together on the wooden causeway crossing the swampy meadow along the river. Buttrick saw the redcoats pulling the bridge’s planks, and he shouted at them to stop and quickened the column’s pace as they moved across the rickety causeway. Strangely enough, the redcoats on the bridge obliged Buttrick’s request.
Laurie hoped a show of force would dissuade the rebel horde from making any rash decisions, so he ordered his men to form up rank-and-file on the south side of the bridge. Kelly’s men on the bridge were ordered to fall back and join the rest of Laurie’s men. The militia were close now, tense and anxious, the excitement palpable. While withdrawing across the narrow bridge, Kelly’s companies were stacked one against another in their rush to reach the Concord side of the river. This meant that only the company nearest the militia could open fire if need arose; the companies behind them would be forced to fire over the heads of the first company, so that their bullets would miss their mark. Anxious and trigger-happy, the redcoats bunched on the bridge panicked and did exactly that: they opened fire on the rebels crossing the causeway, but their first volley was so poorly aimed that the militiamen, staggered for but a moment, were soon convinced that the regulars were firing only powder, perhaps as a scare tactic. This delusion was set straight as balls plunked into the river, torrents of water shooting in the air. A shot whistled past the ear of one of the colonists, and he gripped his musket and angrily cried out, ‘God damn it! They’re firing ball!’
The redcoats bunched on the bridge fired another volley, and this one hit its mark. Balls tore into flesh. Luther Blanchard, one of the fifers from Acton, staggered down into the grass, clutching at his side. Blood pooled between his fingers. Captain Davis, leading the Acton company, seemed to leap up at the volley, and then he pitched down into the grass, quiet and unmoving. Abner Hosmer, also of Acton, collapsed with a bullet through his head. The militia continued to stubbornly advance across the causeway, gingerly stepping over their dead. None of them had yet fired a shot. Laurie ordered the redcoats to fire, and another volley wounded two more militiamen.
The rebels were close to the bridge, near enough for a decent shot. Buttrick, at the lead, hoarsely gave the order: ‘Fire, fellow soldiers! For God’s sake, fire!’ The men spread out on the causeway, the first line kneeling down with their muskets at the ready, the men behind them standing with a clear field of fire. Their ragged volley filled the air with acrid smoke, and when the chilly wind blew it away, they could see the redcoats scrambling across the bridge towards Concord, stumbling over the bodies of twelve of their fellow soldiers, four of them officers. Outnumbered five to one, the redcoats fell back in a disordered panic, leaving their dead and wounded in their wake. Laurie led the retreat, and he and his men abandoned the bridge and the southern bank, giving the bridge to the rebels. The rebels didn’t pursue, simply milled about on the bridge, perhaps drunk off their victory. Nearing the first buildings of Concord, Laurie and his men met with the two companies of grenadiers led by the portly Smith.
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| ‘The Battle of North Bridge’ by Amos Doolittle, 1775. |
Laurie gave Smith the grim news of the skirmish, which had lasted only two to three minutes, and Smith could see for himself the militia gathered on the North Bridge. Instead of reforming his troops, bolstering their numbers with the two companies of grenadiers, and marching to the North Bridge to give the rebels a lesson in what happens when redcoats aren’t respected, Smith strangely decided to turn around with Laurie’s men and return to the town. This left Parsons cut off at Barrett’s farm, separated from the main British body by the blood-hungry colonists on the North Bridge.
The rebels possessed the bridge, and they had successfully dismembered the British force. But instead of pursuing the advantage, the rebels split into two groups: half returned to the north side of the river to gather up the bodies of their fallen comrades, and the others returned to the ridge they’d previously occupied just north of town. Strung out along a stone wall on the ridge, the colonists could observe the redcoats in the town but were far outside firing range. Because the colonists had split up, when Parsons abandoned Barrett’s farm and marched back towards Concord, he and his troops were able to force an unmolested passage across the North Bridge by show of arms, and on the bridge they discovered what had transpired: British soldiers lied scattered about, their blood soaking into the wooden planks. The head of one had been bloodily bared to the skull, which Parsons and his men took as evidence of cruel and barbaric scalping in the manner of the Indians.
Accusations against the rebels of Indian-esque practices – such as scalping and cutting off ears – became commonplace following the unfolding events of 19 April 1775. Perhaps such things were done; perhaps not. The ‘evidence’ of scalping found on the North Bridge could easily be attributed to the simple practice of using a tomahawk. That the colonists imitated Indian tactics would become frighteningly evident as the hours wore on, but how far the imitation actually went is unsure. There may have been scattered incidents of scalping or the cutting off ofears; quite possibly, there was none of that at all. Half of war is fought with the pen, and the propaganda value of such stories can’t be overestimated. Lord Percy, who would become a key player in the day’s events within the next few hours, showed disgust in his official report ‘at the cruelty and barbarity of the rebels who scalped and cut off the ears of the wounded men that fell into their hands.’
Battle Road: The Retreat from Concord Smith spent two hours in Concord after the skirmish on the North Bridge. He was eager to abandon the town and get back to the safety of Boston, but he had to make provisions for the wounded: two chaises were seized from the town, and critically injured soldiers were placed inside. Those with lesser wounds were forced to limp alongside the uninjured troops or clung to the leather stirrups of officers’ horses. The more seriously wounded were left with the local doctors in the town who, despite any and all misgivings, were bound by the Hippocratic oath to offer their services. Gage had hoped to have Smith back in Boston by noon, but as the sun reached its zenith, Smith remained a dozen miles northwest of Boston. Around noon he reformed his command and started back down the road towards Lexington.
Smith, knowing that blood had been spilled on both sides, couldn’t deny he was immersed in enemy country. There was no reason to suppose their return to Boston would be met with no resistance. He sent out the light infantry as flankers, and they climbed onto the ridge of hills that screened the road on its way to Concord. Opposite the ridge, now on their left, Smith dispatched more light infantry to prowl through a meadow. Here they met no militia, but that wouldn’t last long: as the light infantry met no rebels on the ridge or throughout the sweeping meadow, the militia that had stood tall and proud on the North Bridge were taking a shortcut through woods and bogs, through what was called ‘the Great Meadow,’ and they caught up with the retreating British columns near Meriam’s Corner.
At the Meriam House, a handful of militia companies waited for the British columns to pass by on the road. As the flanking party made its way around the sides of the house, they were shocked to find the rebels waiting. The militia fired a harmless volley, and the light infantry replied with one of their own; two rebels fell. This was just a foretaste of what the regulars had in store for them: rebels waiting in ambush, firing behind cover of trees, stone walls, barns and houses, boulders and ravines. Mimicking the Indian fighting style they had learned during the French and Indian War, the militia enraged the proper British regulars by their unbecoming, ungentlemanly conduct. Firing from cover, dropping down on the ground to reload, then popping back up to take a shot, was considered a cowardly, backward, barbarian way of fighting, unfit for civilized men. As the hours drew on, ambushes and volleys fired from the shadows of trees caught the British in a pincer, and the Concord Road would become known as Battle Road for the hell the redcoats would endure on their flight to Boston. Battle Road was nothing short of a gauntlet sixteen miles long and never at any point wider than four hundred feet, and the redcoats would be forced to march almost every foot under harrowing fire.
A few hundred yards past Meriam’s Corner, the road sloped downhill and converged on a rickety bridge crossing a stream. The road beyond climbed half a mile to the town of Lincoln. On either side of these slopes, scattered clumps of trees and stone walls swelled in ridges from either side of the road. The regulars would have to cross the bridge, packed tight; Smith recalled the flanking light infantry to send them across the bridge first, and thus the light infantry abandoned the hillsides and didn’t catch the militia hiding crouched behind stone walls and standing straight and rigid behind naked, wide-birthed trees. A wounded British officer recounted his view from a chaise: he claimed that there were ‘a vast number of armed men… drawn out in battalia order, I dare say near a thousand were approaching through the trees…’ He recounted seeing an even larger group beginning to appear on the hillside to his left. The column moved quickly, the light infantry hoping to cross the small bridge in good time and fan out to counter the militia presence. They became bunched up on the bridge, and then shots crackled irregularly, puffs of white smoke appearing behind trees and crawling along the masonry of the walls. The bunched-up redcoats offered a fine target, and within seconds several soldiers in the forward companies lay dead and bleeding in the road. The men behind them had to step over the bodies, or drag them aside, to keep from blocking up the bridge. The redcoats in the column returned fire into the trees, but the militia were hiding as they reloaded, and because they weren’t bunched together, and the redcoat muskets had poor aim, few shots made their mark. The officers shouted for their men to move forward, and the light infantry made it across the bridge and rushed out into the fields on either side of the creek to push the rebels out of firing range. The rebels skittered off, and the column crossed the bridge, the wounded being affixed to horses’ stirrups or limping along with the help of their brothers-in-arms.
Making it past the bloodstained bridge, the British column continued its prodding pace up the road ascending towards Lincoln. Trees screened the highway, and muskets roared. The flanking parties spread through the trees, routing the rebels; they vaulted stone walls and crept up behind militia crouched behind the walls, driving them down with the cold steel of their bayonets. Such redcoat victories were bittersweet: provincials continued to pour in from the neighboring counties, numbering well into the thousands, and the light infantry creeping up behind the first bunches of crouched rebels had their own backs turned to militia streaming towards the road through fields, across streams, and through the woods. The British column passed through the town of Lincoln, and the road passed a series of hilltops where the provincials held onto an elevated position. Light infantry, starting to feel the fatigue of a day’s march and the constant flanking maneuvers, swept up the hills with their bayonets at the ready, flushing the rebels from the hilltops. Most hilltops were easily taken, but Hardy’s Hill (known as Brooks Hill back then) was a mile further down the road from Lincoln, and here veterans from the earlier colonial wars against the French and Indians were waiting for the British column. The flankers rushed up the hill to send the provincials reeling, but these veterans stood their ground, and the light infantry weren’t able to take them. All they could do was try and distract the rebels from firing into the column as it passed, and this didn’t work as well as they hoped. Once the battered column passed Brooks Hill, the light infantry abandoned it and continued on their way. The rebels fell in behind the British column and began taking pot-shots at the haggard rear.
Beyond Brooks Hill, the road sloped downhill, crossed another stream, and then curved to a point where dense trees choked it from both sides. Smith knew it was a perfect spot for an ambush, so he halted the main column and sent his weary flankers to investigate. The ground was rugged and uneven, laced with boulders. The light infantry flushed several rebels from the woods, but when the main column took to march again and passed into the shadows, shots whipped out from behind trees and rocks. The regulars spun about on their heels to fire, but they couldn’t see anything: the pale smoke wafted away in the wind, and the militia had dropped down out-of-sight to reload. Smith urged the column on, and more shots peppered them as the road took a ninety-degree turn that would become known as ‘The Bloody Angle.’ Here nearly fifteen hundred Massachusetts provincials lie in wait, knowing it was perfect for an ambush. The regulars were caught in a withering crossfire, and thirty men fell, including three officers, before Smith could push the column forward into a country of brief respite.
The dense trees on either side faded to rolling fields and wooden fences. There were hardly any trees and no low stone walls, and the British column took a breath. Militia could be seen, both individuals and groups, beyond the fields, far out of musket range. The light infantry spread throughout the fields, forcing the militia to keep their distance from the main column. The officers sought to reform the troops who were visibly breaking down: their dead and wounded were mounting, they were exhausted from having been awake and marching since 10 PM the night before, and their own hatred for the rebels was at the bursting point. Not only were they forced to endure insults and fistfights without resolution in Boston, but in the countryside they were subjected to the barbaric manners of these farmers and artisans pretending to be soldiers. Their tactics were cowardly and dishonorable, and these royal soldiers, steeped in virtues of honor and pride, couldn’t reconcile the ways of these ‘peasants’ with the ways of a true soldier. As the troops – tired, sweaty, dirty, paranoid, frightened, infuriated, and craving vengeance in blood – took their breather, Smith cursed at the absence of Lord Percy, who was supposed to be their reserve but who hadn’t been seen since they left Boston. Smith could only continue the push to Lexington, reform there, and then make the rest of the march to Boston.
Beyond the road where the troops could afford to take a few breaths, the precious fields and sparse trees on either side were replaced again by tree-crowded sides and countless barns and houses where rebels ambushed the redcoats before running to safety. Lieutenant John Barker, a British lieutenant, recalled that they were fired upon ‘from all sides but mostly from the rear, where people had hid themselves in houses till we passed, and then fired. The country was an amazing strong one… full of hills, woods, stone walls, etc. which the Rebels did not fail to take advantage of, for they were all lined with people who kept an incessant fire, for they were so concealed there was hardly any seeing them.’ He added, ‘In this way, we marched… miles, but their numbers increasing from all parts, while ours was reducing by deaths, wounds, and fatigue; and we were totally surrounded with such an incessant fire as it’s impossible to conceive; our ammunition was likely near expended.’ Smith knew the situation was dire: once they ran out of ammunition, they would be sitting ducks, the regulars armed only with their bayonets and officers with their ornamental swords. Smith and his officers fought to keep the regulars in good order, but the constant fire, the fatigue, the rage and terror was almost to a breaking point. The kettle was steaming, and Smith hoped they’d reach Lexington before unit cohesiveness shattered. And all the while he cursed Lord Percy for his inexcusable absence.
As the British column lurched down the road, tuberculosis-ridden John Parker had rallied the militia who had fought, fled, and bled at Lexington and assembled them for an ambush along the road. He chose a spot where the road bent at a sharp turn, and the bend was screened by boulders thrown about, a perfect spot for the rebels to conceal themselves. As the British column neared, Parker ordered his men to keep quiet and not fire until they were within range. These rebels were eager to avenge the blood of those who had fallen on Lexington Green, and Parker urged them to hold their fire until the right moment. He drew a sharp breath and waited for the British to come around the bend, and with them flush before him in their array of red, he fired the opening shot, and the Lexington militia perked up and fired a slaughtering volley into the bunched-up soldiers. Colonel Smith let out a scream and tumbled from his horse, his leg spurting blood. Soldiers rushed to his aid, and Pitcairn galloped up to rally the regulars to keep moving as Parker and his men fired another volley. Pitcairn assumed active command, and the light infantry swept up into the boulders. Parker’s men fled into the woods, and Parker had indeed tasted revenge: several British soldiers lay dead or dying, and Smith had been ghastly wounded.
Pitcairn kept the soldiers moving, and he knew time was of the essence: the troops were on the verge of breaking down. They passed a barn where rebels fired from the windows and dark doorways, and Pitcairn ordered the light infantry to storm the building. Rebels were trapped and bayoneted, and their bodies were left bleeding in the hay as the column crept on. The road went over a hilltop and then under a rocky ledge; here rebels fired a murderous rain of bullets down onto the heads of the British. Pitcairn kept the troops moving: they had no other choice. The wounded kept accumulating, and the dead were abandoned on the road (some remain buried under modern highways). At Fiske’s Hill, a rebel volley embedded bullets into the flank of Pitcairn’s horse, and Pitcairn was thrown down onto the dusty road amidst the feet of panicking redcoats. Bodies fell all around him, and his own tumble from the horse signaled the moment of collapse: the redcoats no longer moved as a column, goaded by their officers, but turned into a disorganized, chaotic mass thundering down the road.
Near Lexington, roads, taverns, and barns became common sights along the main thoroughfare. The redcoats, no longer bound by any sort of discipline, broke into homes and taverns, taking any food and drink they could find to replenish their stamina. The officers ordered them to reform in two ranks, but no one listened. Pitcairn’s horse had galloped away, leaping a wall and running directly into rebel soldiers. The horse had been captured, and with it Pitcairn’s pistols (which he kept on holsters on his saddle); these pistols would be taken for privileged use by Israel Putnam, and they’re now preserved in an American museum. Absent his horse, Pitcairn twirled about, saber in hand, screaming at the troops to reform. He called for officers and sent them forward with explicit orders: ‘Prevent the troops from fleeing down the road. If anyone refuses to stop, give him the bayonet.’ The officers rushed ahead of the routed troops, turned about, and threatened them with their bayonets. ‘If you advance, you will die!’ The troops knew better than to try to ignore them, and despite bullets finding flesh and plunking in the dirt at their feet, the redcoats raggedly started reforming before their own officers. One can only imagine the confusion of these officers when the frightened, ashen-faced troops they were corralling suddenly brightened and let off a cheer. Looking back over their shoulders, the officers could see the red-coated troops of Percy’s relief force on the outskirts of Lexington.
The officers cheered as well, and they led the men towards Percy’s relief force. Percy’s front-line soldiers opened ranks to allow the ragged column to pass through, and the fleeing soldiers found that Percy had arrived in Lexington and had already ‘set up camp,’ so-to-speak: his forces were arranged around the town so that the weary soldiers could drop down on the grass near Munroe’s Tavern, which Percy had commandeered as his headquarters. Percy had arranged his troops in a rectangle that enclosed much of the road, Munroe’s Tavern and several houses, so that they were able to fight off militia attacks from every direction. On each of the small hills on either side of the road, he had mounted six-pound cannons overlooking the quaint town now filled to the brim with redcoats. Percy’s relief force was nothing short of a godsend: if he hadn’t been in Lexington, Smith’s beleaguered force very well could have been surrounded, overwhelmed, and destroyed piecemeal.
Intermission: Munroe's Tavern
Brigadier General Hugh Percy and his army of nearly a thousand men and several pieces of artillery had turned Lexington into a military encampment. Militia prodded and poked at Percy’s front line troops, but the regulars fired six-pound balls into the nearby woods. The balls tearing apart trees and bouncing along the ground sent the rebels scurrying deeper into the forest. In the middle of the square, Smith’s soldiers collapsed, thirsty and panting, pouring fresh water over their heads and drinking until their sides ached. For fourteen hours they had been marching, and though they had only an hour of respite before continuing the march to Boston, they utilized it the best they could.
The rebels made no major attempts on the British force in Lexington, though pot-shots were taken from behind trees or rocks. A few crawled forward on their elbows through tall grass to take closer shots. Redcoat sharpshooters prowled the lines, keeping their eyes on the trees and rocks beyond the town, anxious to find a target. Lieutenant Barker recalled, ‘We could observe a considerable number of the Rebels, but they were much scattered and not above 50 of them to be seen in a body in any place. Many lay concealed behind stone walls and fences. They appeared most numerous in the road near the church and in a wood in the front and on the left flank of the line.’ Percy’s officers trained their artillery on the church and sent a ball through the wooden wall, which sheared apart the pews. The militia retired behind a swamp; some British soldiers broke ranks and pursued them, but they were too heavy-laden and unfamiliar with the land to follow after the rebels.
Percy knew he couldn’t dally, but he didn’t want to begin the retreat back to Boston until the exhausted men of Smith’s party had partly recovered strength and morale. As Smith’s men rested, Percy sent out scavenging parties to seize wagons from nearby farmhouses to carry those who had died or been wounded on the retreat from Concord. The more seriously wounded were tended to in Munroe’s Tavern, where Percy, Pitcairn, and Smith gathered with several junior officers to discuss the march to Boston. Pitcairn massaged his swollen shoulder, Smith fingered at the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around his hip and upper leg, and both bit their tongue about Percy’s inexcusable lateness. Percy, knowing the seriousness of such delay, didn’t skip a beat in explaining himself.
He’d received his orders from Gage and gathered those forces under his command in preparation to march from Boston: he had the 4th Regiment (also known as the King’s Own), the 23rd Regiment (or the Royal Welch Fusiliers), and the 47th (minus their flanking companies which had been reassigned to Smith for the Concord expedition). The 1st battalion of Royal Marines had been slated to march with them, but the Marines failed to show. When news was dispatched to the brigade major of the Marines, he wasn’t at his lodging; when he finally came home, his servant forgot to give him his orders. Thus at four in the morning, Percy and his troops were still waiting on the parade ground formed by Scollay Square and the streets on either side of it. An hour later, Percy received dispatches from Smith, warning of hostilities. And all the while he and his troops, anxiously waiting for the 1st battalion, were ‘entertained’ with the thump of distant musket fire; and in the darkness beyond the Back Bay, they could see flashes of light: first the flash of the firing pan, then the muzzle flash, and then the muffled cough of the musket floating lazily through the woods and across the bay’s placid waters. Around eight thirty that morning, the 1st battalion finally showed up. Percy wasted no time in setting off. Some officers recommended taking extra ammunition from the supply wagon on the square, but Percy was confident that they had enough in their side-boxes: twenty-four rounds per man. At eight forty-five Percy and his troops set out. The soldiers sang ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’
Students on their way to school stopped in the road and watched the British soldiers marching north across Boston Neck. When the students reached their schoolhouse, Mr. Lovell, the school operator, had shut and locked the doors. ‘The war’s begun,’ he said, ‘and school’s done.’ As the students scattered, he went to his home, gathered his musket, powder horn, and cartridge box, and went to join the militia gathering around Lexington. He would serve in the war for the next seven years. As the British troops passed through Roxbury, a schoolboy laughed at the fifers playing Yankee Doodle Dandy. Percy, at the lead of the column, demanded to know why he was laughing. The boy quipped, To think how you will dance by and by to Chevy Chase!’ The schoolboy was quite ingenious, for he referenced an old ballad that included the verse, ‘To drive the deer with hound and horne/Earl Percy took his way/The child may rue that is unborne/The hunting of that day.’
It wasn’t until noon (the same time that Smith was setting off from Concord) that Percy came to the bridge spanning the Charles River between Brighton and Cambridge. William Heath, the general of the Massachusetts militia, had ordered the bridge’s planks removed; but members of the Committee of Public Safety couldn’t bear the thought of throwing the boards away, so they neatly piled them on the Cambridge side of the river. The bridge’s stringers hadn’t been torn down, so the redcoats were able to carefully cross, gather the boards, and slowly re-plank the bridge. Percy’s supply train of two wagons couldn’t cross until the bridge was completely finished; Percy, knowing he’d already lost too much time, ordered the rest of his force to continue on to Cambridge. Twelve men were left to guard the supply wagons and finish the bridge, and then they were to hurry forward to rejoin Percy’s force. When he reached Cambridge with his main body, he lost more time: there were several roads going in and out of the town, and the town itself – like most towns along the Lexington-Concord Road – had been abandoned. Not a soul could be seen. Isaac Smith, a tutor at Harvard College, was drug out from hiding and forced to give Percy directions to Concord. It was then that Percy learned of the skirmish at Lexington, and he avowed to lose no more time and kept the troops marching north.
The main column moved quicker than the supply wagons, and by the time the wagons with their twelve-man guard were able to cross the bridge, they were far behind in hostile territory. Down the road they came upon two men riding a horse; the officer in charge of the supply train hollered at them to stop and asked if they knew where Percy’s main force was located. The rider with the reigns, a certain Dr. Thomas Welch, replied that he didn’t. The British officer cursed and told them to step aside, and the two men watched the supply train and its guard of soldiers rattle on down the road. The second rider, Dr. Joseph Warren, drew a deep sigh of relief. By eight that morning he’d heard of the skirmish in Lexington, and he left his patients and hurried by ferry to Charlestown, where he met up with his friend Welch, who kept a horse. They left Charlestown and made their way to Cambridge, which had already been visited and abandoned by Percy’s main force. Watching the British wagons dwindling down the road, Welch and Warren rode across country to join the militia gathering around Lexington: he would be involved in the final stretch of Battle Road, and a bullet would pass so close to him that it’d knock the hairpin from his wig. If the two physicians had lamented not being able to stop the British supply train, they’d be happy to hear someone else did: near Menotomy, a dozen ‘old men’ led by a half-breed Indian surrounded the wagons and the twelve officers. The British held their guns at the ready, demanding the ‘old men’ to desist. A rebel volley was fired from behind a stone wall, killing one of the guards and wounding several others. The redcoats threw down their weapons, and their supplies were captured.
As Percy’s main force neared Lexington, his scouts reported a swelling crowd of militia on the Lexington Green. The six-pounders were drawn forward, and the first shot sent a ball tearing through one of the meetinghouse walls. That’s all it took: the crowd cleared, men running for the sides of the green, taking cover in buildings and behind stone walls before fleeing Lexington altogether. Percy ordered his troops forward, and at Lexington he sent scouts further ahead. They returned with news that Smith’s expedition was in full retreat and that the rebels were swarming the countryside; Percy went about ‘fortifying’ the town with his troops and waited for Smith’s forces to appear.
Now, in Munroe’s Tavern, Pitcairn, Smith, and Percy went over all that had happened and threw together a game-plan for the march back to Boston. They had to speak up over the din of the wounded, their cries and gasps, that sweet, sickly scent of blood lingering in the air. Percy excused themselves into the tavern garden, where Pitcairn noted a body lying slumped in a barren plot. Percy told him that when they reached Lexington, British soldiers entered the tavern and demanded punch. The tavern’s owner was gone, away on ‘militia duty,’ and the affairs had been left in the hands of a cripple. The cripple served the soldiers and then tried to escape through the back garden. The soldiers raised their muskets and fired at all but point-blank range. The cripple managed a few weak steps before collapsing; his blood, perhaps, would fertilize the plot for this spring’s flowers. When Pitcairn informed Percy of how the rebels were fond of using roadside homes and barns as ambush points, Percy ordered the buildings near the tavern to be razed to the ground.
As redcoats went about torching the nearby homes and shops, Percy took full command. Abandoning the tavern, he reformed the troops and began orchestrating the withdrawal from Lexington to Cambridge. Advance and rear guards, along with flanking parties, afforded some protection to the main body of troops; the tired men of Smith’s party would be put in the front of the column, with the fresh troops in the rear companies, where the colonists liked to concentrate their fire. In this way Percy’s fresh troops would bear the brunt of rebel fire, hopefully preserving the morale of the exhausted, frightened, and borderline-panicky troops of Smith’s command.
At 3:45 PM, eighteen hundred British soldiers left Lexington with buildings smoldering in their wake. The first half of their return march would be relatively uneventful, with militia doing nothing more than taking scattered pot-shots here-and-there. The British had far more men now, and the flanking troops weren’t exhausted, as they had been before. For a time Percy let himself feel a certain confidence that they would reach Boston without much incident, but he feared such a hope to be naïve: the rebels could still be seen on their fringes, their numbers continually growing, numbering into the thousands. Percy would learn the extent of such naivety as did Smith and Pitcairn, for up ahead on the road was the ‘Foot of the Rocks,’ the quaint town of Menotomy, and the beginning of the most fierce and bloody stage of Battle Road.
Outside the small Massachusetts town of Menotomy, militiamen from Danvers, accompanied by unattached companies from neighboring counties, settled down for an ambush behind stone walls and stacks of shingles on the property of Mr. Russell. The redcoat column approached, the flankers spread out and pushing forward on either side of the road. The Danvers men quickly realized that the flankers would surround them, but this realization came too late: the redcoats staggered into them before they could make an escape. In seconds the fighting turned to vicious, hand-to-hand combat with hatchets and bayonets, and both redcoats and rebels fell among the stone walls and stacked shingles of the yard. Mr. Russell threw open the door to his house as redcoats rushed up the porch. The first bayoneted him and shoved him down onto the parlor floor, and each redcoat entering the house to find any cowering rebels bayoneted Russell’s corpse as if it were a rite of entry. Percy halted the column and waited for the melee to end: the militia had lost seven with two wounded, and one was captured. The hand-to-hand fighting at the Russell house gave the British a foretaste of what was coming just down the road.
At the ‘Foot of the Rocks’ outside Menotomy (modern-day Arlington), eighteen hundred fresh rebels had descended upon the town in an attempt to put a stopgap in the British retreat to Boston. General William Heath, the wealthy Roxbury farmer who had been named general of the Massachusetts militia, succeeded in forging from the disorganized rebels something like a plan. The road from Concord to Lexington had been marked with scattered and disjointed, albeit deadly, ambush attacks. Although Percy may have thought the militia’s reluctance to attack thus far on the retreat from Lexington could be attributed to the reinforced British numbers, the truth was less fortunate: Heath succeeded in bringing the rabble into some sort of ragged organization, and he had pulled all the militia he could to Menotomy in a grand attempt to check the British retreat. Menotomy would be marked by fierce, bloody, close-quarter and hand-to-hand combat, the like of which even the professional British soldiers had never experienced.
As the British column reached Menotomy, the quiet houses and unassuming stone walls erupted in smoke and flame. Windows flung open, rebels appeared behind piles of timber and the boughs of thick trees, and lines of militiamen fired behind the relative safety of the stone walls. The British column was covered in smoke as balls plunked into flesh and whistled past their ears. The houses seemed to throb with movement and shouting, the roadsides coming alive. Trained to face an enemy they could see, the redcoats staggered about in formation, firing blindly amid the smoke as their attackers hopped from location to location, took cover while reloading, and popped out of cover to fire and disappear as soon as the muzzle flashed. A massed bayonet charge would do nothing against such an enemy, and as Percy rallied the troops forward, morale and order plummeted as rebels swarmed the rear of the column, successfully surrounding them.
Percy ordered their six-pounders turned on the rebels at their rear, but the rebels weren’t massed together for the cannon to be effective. The shot tore up the road, blasted stone walls, and smashed through houses but caused few casualties. Because they were being fired upon from roadside buildings, Percy ordered the flankers to go house-to-house, clearing them out. The soldiers didn’t need to be told twice, and they took warmly to responding to barbarity with barbarity. Some militia, seeing the redcoats knocking down doors and storming houses, rushed from the woods to grapple hand-to-hand with the British regulars: the redcoats used their steel bayonets and the rebels used whatever they had, be it knives, hatchets, clubs, or even rusted bayonets that had become family heirlooms from the seemingly-distant colonial wars. The soldiers entering the houses took no prisoners and left no one alive; anyone inside was deemed hostile. Bodies littered the floors, and one minuteman recounted that in one home he found bodies lying everywhere and blood pooling halfway up his shoes. The soldiers emptied the homes not just of their occupiers but of their property, looting whatever they could fit in their pockets and packs. Slowly the rebels were flushed from the roadside homes, and Percy ordered the buildings torched before the main column moved forward. The smoke rose above Menotomy, the fighting in which had claimed forty rebels, both militia and civilians, as well as forty British regulars.
The British wounded were piling up: many were placed on gun carriages and hastily rolled onto the road whenever the cannon were needed. One British private recalled using a horse for cover, walking on the side that was farthest from the shooting; nearby, another horse, with a wounded man on its back and three other wounded clinging to its leathers, was shot, and all collapsed in the road. They scrambled to their feet, wincing in pain, their uniforms soaked with sweat and blood. They begged the private for his mount, and he handed it over to them. The main body kept lurching along, but order had all but disintegrated. Most moved in column because it was safest: there was always another man nearby to take a bullet that might otherwise come for you. Parties of redcoats, absent both permission and discipline, broke off from the column to flush nearby homes and barns and to fill their pockets with loot; some who lingered too long in the houses were themselves killed by rebels hiding within. Percy didn’t try to stop these undisciplined soldiers acting without orders, fueled by their rage and torment: each house cleared meant a safer path back to Boston. Yet they still had a long while to go, and Percy couldn’t help but regret not taking extra powder and ball from the ammunition wagon on Scollay Square.
Nearing Cambridge, the relative quiet of the first half of their march from Lexington was replaced with the chaotic din of a mile and a half of continuous battle. Buildings burned in the late afternoon sun, and Americans continued pouring in from the neighboring counties, filling the woods and roadsides with powder smoke and whistling balls. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers recalled, ‘[Our] soldiers were so enraged at the suffering from an unseen enemy that they forced open many of the houses from which the fire proceeded and put to death all found in them… As the troops drew near to Cambridge the number and fire of the Rebels increased, and although they did not [show] themselves openly in a body in any part, except on a road in our rear, our men threw away their fire inconsiderately and without being sure of the effect.’ Another soldier remarked with surprise that ‘even women had firelocks. One was seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and her husband from their windows; there the three with an infant child soon suffered the fury of the day.’ Lieutenant Barker grimly noted, ‘[The Rebels] suffered for their temerity, for all that were found in the houses were put to death.’ The redcoats’ blood ran so hot that even unarmed civilians were butchered in their homes due to a suspicion that they might fire upon the British troops.
At Cooper’s Tavern outside Cambridge, two men, one aged thirty-nine and the other forty-five, were calmly drinking away the afternoon. They heard the fighting drawing closer, and one surmised they might do well to leave the roadside tavern. ‘Let us finish the mug,’ the other said. ‘They won’t come yet.’ Before they had finished their beer, the advance flanking parties smashed down the tavern door and rushed the two men at their table, bayoneting them and stomping their heads into the tavern floor. The incident at Cooper’s Tavern would be reported by survivors who had fled into the building’s cellar: ‘The King’s Regular troops… fired more than one hundred bullets into the house where we dwell, through doors, windows, etc. Then a number of them entered the house where we and two aged gentlemen were, all unarmed. We escaped for our lives into the cellar. The two aged gentlemen were immediately and most barbarously and inhumanely murdered by them, being stabbed through in many places, their heads mauled, skulls broke, and their brains beat out on the floor and walls of the house.’ On down the road, grenadiers burst into a house defended by eight men: they bayoneted all eight, and the last died cursing the British and King George III. At the home of Deacon Joseph Adams, a known patriot, redcoats forced his wife Hannah and her newborn to flee while they torched the house – but at least they let the mother and the infant live, for many young mothers and their children died south of Lexington.
Right outside Cambridge, at a place called Watson’s Corner, rebels lie in wait behind a pile of barrels, but they were surprised by flanking redcoats. Rebels had planned to ambush the British troops in Harvard Square, but Percy ended up taking a different route that bypassed the square. Another ambush at the corner of Beech and Elm streets tore into the British advance. William Marcy, the ‘village idiot’ of Cambridge, had taken a seat on a fence watching the redcoats hurry past, making cheerful observations; annoyed, a redcoat fired at him, killing him instantly. Percy himself had a button shot off his waistcoat, and Smith took yet another wound in the leg. A handful of rebel rushed after the Brigadier General on his horse to try and kill him; they were cut down, but Percy was shocked at their bravery. He would write the day after the battle, ‘Whoever looks upon [the Americans] as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken. They have men among them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers [against] the Indians and Canadians, and this country being much [covered with] wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting.’
Up ahead was the Charlestown Crossroads: one way led the way they had come, towards Roxbury and around to Boston Neck or to Lechmere Point, and the other route led to Charlestown Neck. The trek to Boston Neck was considerably longer than that to Charlestown, and Percy knew that though he could make it quickly to Lechmere Point, there weren’t enough boats to carry all the soldiers across in one go. It would be nothing short of suicide to attempt an evacuation by water with the militia pressing against them in the thousands. He made a feint towards Cambridge, then wheeled his men around and marched them in the direction of Charlestown. Fire from a grove of trees cut down a number of soldiers, and at Prospect Hill the rebels fired upon them from an elevated position in the trees. Percy turned his cannon on the hill and the cannonballs tore through the trees, spooking and scattering the rebels.
Further down the road, hundreds of militia had formed themselves in rank across the road, hoping to try and force Percy to turn around and head back towards the crossroads and take the longer route to Boston Neck or Lechmere Point. He would have none of it: he brought his cannon to bear, and the six-pounders tumbled through the ragged rebel ranks. The rebels scattered off the road, and Percy and his column continued their march. Militia filled the road behind them, firing and cheering en masse, chanting, ‘Hancock! Hancock! Hancock forever!’ Charlestown Neck, and safety, was just up ahead, and Percy and the officers urged their frightened, footsore, and battle-wearied men forward. Every minute was of the essence: little did Percy know, but a large body of militiamen from Marblehead and Salem were marching to the Neck as well, hoping to cut off their access to the Charlestown Peninsula. If that happened, the fate the British barely avoided outside Lexington – that of decimation – wouldn’t this time be so easily avoidable.
The British Escape Across Boston Neck
The militiamen from Salem and Marblehead were too late: the exhausted British reached Charlestown Neck unopposed and quickly hurried across the narrow causeway into Charlestown proper. Having marched over thirty-five miles in twenty hours, the last ten of them under fire, the redcoats’ relief and ecstasy at having reached safety was manifest as the they fired their muskets in the air, the flashes appearing as fireworks from the Boston shore as the sun set on such a violent day. The rebels didn’t pursue them into Charlestown, for the triple-decked 74-gun Somerset lie at anchor, its gun-ports open only a quarter of a mile off the town. The dog-tired redcoats passed through town and collapsed along the slopes of Bunker Hill, rising a hundred feet above the surrounding country and dominating the Charlestown peninsula. If the rebels attempted a foray into Charlestown, and somehow survived a barrage from the Somerset, they would still be met with astounding fire from the regulars on Bunker Hill; furthermore, fresh British reinforcements could be ferried without harassment across the Charles River from Boston.
As the column surged into town and vomited itself onto the slopes of Bunker Hill, citizens of Charlestown fled the opposite direction, pushing past the redcoats, terrified that the British would burn the town. The redcoats cursed the refugees and fired their muskets to frighten them; in such a way, one fourteen-year-old boy perched in an upper-story window was killed by a casually-fired musket ball. The Charlestown selectmen informed Percy through a messenger that if he kept his troops from attacking the town, they’d guarantee no hostile action against his soldiers, and that the selectmen would themselves help Percy ferry his men back across the Charles to Boston. Percy agreed, and once all the British troops had crossed the Neck, he organized a makeshift camp atop Bunker Hill and began fortifying the Charlestown Neck in case of any rebel attempts.
The exhausted redcoats passed out where they fell. The Somerset sent over boats to collect the wounded and ferry them to Boston, and Gage dispatched fresh troops across the Charles. These troops took the place of those who had endured the day’s fighting, and the veterans of Battle Road were ferried in waves back to Boston. It was a lengthy process, and as the tired soldiers waited for their turn to return to Boston, they milled about the hillside or slept where they dropped. Some wandered in the fields on the outskirts of Charlestown, aimlessly walking, lost in thought, grief, and rage. The fresh troops manned the hasty fortifications Percy had ordered built on the Neck, and engineers were sent over to strengthen the defenses.
As the rescue operation was in progress, Gage met with Admiral Graves at Province House. Graves suggested they burn Roxbury and Charlestown and fortify the two hills overlooking Boston, Bunker Hill to the north and Nook’s Hill near the Dorchester Heights on the mainland to the south of the town. Gage dismissed the idea: he didn’t have the troops, and most of his men were pooped and battle-tired. Furthermore, burning Charlestown would just enrage the militia spread out around Boston, and any attempts to burn Roxbury would be disastrous, as it would mean another foray into enemy territory ripe with rebels. Graves did, however, send a warning to the selectmen of Charlestown and Marblehead that if they allowed rebel forces to occupy them, they’d be razed to the ground by his men-of-war. Charlestown, at the moment, was free of rebel presence; but once the British withdrew, as Gage planned on doing, that would leave the town empty of redcoats and Bunker Hill plump for the taking. All of Graves’ men-of-war were pulled close to Charlestown so that their guns could be brought to bear if the need arose. In Back Bay, where the water was too shallow for the draughts of the men-of-war, flatboats laden with 6-pound cannon fitted in the bows were put on constant patrol. Graves landed four 24-pounders from his ships and put his sailors to work at a battery on Copp’s Hill, which dominated the water and some of the anchorage between Boston and Charlestown.
It wasn’t until midnight that the last of the British troops involved in the day’s fighting returned to their barracks, anxious for the first sleep they’d had in twenty-six hours of marching, maneuvering, and fighting. Once the tired troops had been relieved, Gage went about withdrawing the reinforcements and destroying the freshly-built fortifications on the Neck so that they wouldn’t fall into rebel hands. Hindsight would get the best of him, for in abandoning Charlestown he abandoned Bunker Hill, the slopes of which would soon be revisited, and those soldiers who had found the grass there so warm and inviting would see the slopes in a different light next time around.
Gage quickly wrote Dartmouth, informing him that the entire countryside had ‘assembled in Arms with Surprising Expedition’ and that the rebels had surrounded Boston and were ‘getting up artillery’ and ‘threatening an Attack.’ Having concentrated all his forces in Boston, Gage knew he had put himself in a sort of coagulated rebel noose. Fearing an attack on the town at any moment, he cracked down on already-tight discipline: officers were no longer to be billeted in houses but had to sleep in the barracks with their men; the soldiers were to sleep dressed on their cots, ready to turn out at the first instance of alarm. Gage suspected the rebels were drawing plans for an attack, but though the rebels did indeed have a sort of organization, it was nothing near what he imagined.
Close to six thousand colonial militiamen had filled the towns and farms on the outskirts of Boston, and General William Heath went about organizing them around Boston to establish a quasi-siege. He strengthened forces at Prospect Hill on the mainland across the causeway from Charlestown; another group had gathered at Roxbury, and several thousand were at Cambridge, which Heath made the unofficial headquarters of his rebel ‘army.’ The militia were eager to continue the battle and even spoke of attacking Boston en masse; but Heath, knowing it would be a foolish endeavor to go up against a well-entrenched army protected by hundreds of cannon from their artillery and men-of-war, was able to keep them from doing anything foolish. It was best if the militia enjoyed their victory and celebrated in their own way rather than spoil it in a mad dash for glory.
Postscript
The death toll for 19 APRIL 1775 ran quite grim: the British had lost 273 men out of a total of 1800 who had left the confines of Boston, with 65 dead and 207 wounded or missing. The rebels lost 95 men, 49 of them dead and 46 wounded, out of 3500 or more. Twenty-six towns made up the companies of those who had been killed or wounded in the first engagement: Lexington & Concord, Chelmsford, Woburn, Medford, Bellerica and Bedford were but a few.
The historian Christopher Ward estimates that 3,763 Americans were engaged in the fighting on the 19th at some point or another, though he doubts that no more than half that number were directly involved at any given moment. Despite the harrowing nature of Battle Road, the British only lost about fifteen percent of their men. A simple mathematical calculation sheds doubt on the conviction that the rebels were expert marksmen: if each provincial had hit his mark only once, the British force’s numbers would’ve been reduced to nothing two times over. Provincials were supposed to carry enough cartridges, powder, and bullets for thirty-six shots; if the average colonial only fired twenty rounds, then no fewer than 75,000shots must’ve been fired at the British, with no more than 247 hits. Only one bullet for every three hundred tore into flesh. Only one rebel out of fifteen found his mark.
The rebels simply weren’t expert marksmen. Indeed, they couldn’t be: their weapons mainly consisted of muskets, fowling pieces, even blunderbusses from years past. These weapons were inaccurate and short-ranged, and the Massachusetts provincials had little training in actually firing their weapons, since training days were few and gunpowder expensive. The story would change in the south, of course, with South Carolina’s partisans; the deciding factor in the shift of accuracy wouldn’t be more training or experience, but better weapons, most notably the rifle: while it took longer to load (at least thirty seconds, sometimes as long as a minute or more), it was far more accurate. Riflemen didn’t fare well on the conventional battlefield, but for partisan fighting – ambushes, raids, and hit-its-&-quit-its – the rifle was a gem. However, limited success of the Massachusetts provincials on Battle Road cannot all be accounted for by low-quality weapons; the same sorts of weapons were used in the infamous French and Indian surprise on British General Braddock and his expedition in the Ohio Country in June 1755: the British column was stuck on the road for three hours (rather than ten, as on April 19th), and they suffered around 500 deaths and 500 wounded at the hands of the French and Indians and their bush tactic fighting. Nevertheless, the British were more than shocked at the casualties they endured on Battle Road. Most of the British troops involved were the special units, the light infantry and grenadiers, the cream of the British army’s crop. They were the pride and joy of the British army, and they’d been whooped and scarred by an uncoordinated and rowdy mob.
The events of the 19th highlighted one of the central problems the British would have to overcome: how to subdue not just another army but an entire population in rebellion (of course, many inhabitants were loyal to the king and Parliament, but in Massachusetts they were a minority, and they knew it best to reign their tongue and keep their opinions to themselves out of fear of social ostracism and persecution). The coming war would indeed resemble what the British knew well: conventional armies using established 18th-century tactics. Indeed, these conventional battles would steer the course of the war. At the same time, partisan warfare, which the Americans had learned during their days fighting the French and the Indians and which they utilized on Battle Road, would be a thorn in the British army’s side. These ‘bush’ tactics didn’t cut the jugular, but they drew enough blood in their savage blows at the extremities of the British army to be more than a nuisance. The partisan warfare and bush tactics of Battle Road would come home to roost in the southern theater years later, when General Cornwallis would find himself plagued by such partisan leaders as Francis Marion, ‘The Swamp Fox.’
The leaders of the rabble that had turned up on Battle Road didn’t find the victory so sweet: the disorganization and individualistic fighting styles of the colonists would bring more harm than good. General Heath knew that their victory could’ve been complete with solid organization and tactics: had the thousands of individuals bent on bloodlust been able to act in concert with a plan, they could’ve destroyed the entire British expedition. By getting ahead of the British column, felling trees in the road, and utilizing flanking troops to keep the British pinned to the road while pouring down withering, concentrated fire from barns, stone walls, and houses, the Americans could’ve pulled off not simply a sting but a mortal blow. Heath’s attempts to organize the Americans during the battle were only half-successful, and as he grappled with the reins of the quasi-siege around Boston, he was absent staff to carry out his orders and was faced with troops who were poorly trained (if trained at all) and preferred to fight alone. George Washington was not yet general of the Continental Army (which, at this point, didn’t even exist), and one of his greatest challenges would be forging organization and discipline out of unruly, individualistic American soldiers. Washington would face the task of turning this disconcerted mob into a conventional, European-style fighting force.
Following the bloodshed at Lexington, Concord, and Battle Road, a new fervor gripped Massachusetts and swept up and down the east coast. Although the provincials had some experience in former wars against the French and Indians, war itself remained something far-off and distant. Most of the fighting in the last colonial war had taken place in the ‘wilderness’ of the Ohio Country and upper New York; the seacoast towns had known nothing but peace for generations. As propagandized reports of what had happened spread by express rider throughout New England, colonists felt the actions of the British to be nothing less than a direct assault on their homes, livelihoods, and families. Dr. Joseph Warren signed off on an ‘official’ report of the day’s events, though it’s likely Samuel Adams had a hand in the reporting: ‘Women in childbed were driven by the soldiery naked into the streets, old men peaceably in their houses were shot dead, and such scenes exhibited as would disgrace the annals of the most uncivilised nations…’ These fantastical reports gripped the New England coastal towns in a suffocating panic; they recalled their militia from around Boston to protect their towns, which they feared to be under the imminent threat of a British seaborne invasion in which redcoats would break into their homes and kill them and their children while they slept.
Warren’s official report was, more than anything, a call to arms: ‘The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren on Wednesday the 19thhave made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery…’ This ‘call to arms’ worked: volunteers streamed into the outskirts of Boston to do their share in protecting themselves, their families, and their homes. They enlisted for forty shillings a month in the full-time, ragtag army under the control of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress until the Continental Congress reconvened in May. Royal governors throughout the colonies found themselves facing riots. Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, abandoned the capital and fled with his family to the HMS Fowley anchored off the Virginia coast.
Colonies enacted boycotts to prevent supplies reaching the beleaguered British garrison holed up in Boston, so that Gage’s only supplies could come from the British garrisoned in Canada and from across the Atlantic. Those supply lanes were prowled by American privateers hoping to seize British frigates. Both from land and by sea, the noose continued to tighten around Gage and his battered, vastly-outnumbered forces. The British troops hungered for revenge against the provincials, and they would have their chance in less than two months, when the slopes of Charlestown that had been a godsend at sundown on the 19th would turn into a bloodbath at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
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