On the face of it, Dr. Warren and Paul Revere seemed unlikely associates. Burly, forty-year-old Revere was the town’s most gifted artificer, a ruddy-faced, plain man with a wide, generous mouth, a substantial, flaring nose, and quizzical brows arching over warm, dark eyes. His blunt, capable hands had fashioned the most beautiful silver pieces in America, and that spring, in his oft-exercised role of surgeon-dentist, he had contrived and fitted for Dr. Warren two artificial ivory teeth. His skill, good taste, and sensibility ordinarily would not have been sufficient to break down the social barrier that existed between the world of the mechanic and the circle of the wellborn, Harvard-bred Joseph Warren, but between these two had grown a genuine affection, born of political rebellion and bonded by common cause and common peril.

That there was something special about the man Revere his nominal social superiors recognized; they accepted him graciously into the exclusive Long Room Club, made up of Harvard graduates, scholars, and men of affairs. The friendship of Revere and Warren had grown apace with their radicalism. More and more Warren had come to rely upon the judgment and abilities of his friend Revere, who worked closely with the Whig committees, mostly doing what he loved—“outdoor work” he called it—riding courier from the Boston committee to others as far away as Philadelphia.

During the past winter, about thirty mechanics, most likely all North Enders and friends of Revere, had formed themselves into a vigilance committee to keep an eye on the activities of the Tories and the movements of the British troops quartered in the town. Ever since General Thomas Gage, a plain, sensible man, had returned from England in the spring of 1774 as the colony’s first military governor, supported by nearly 4,000 regular troops “to keep order,” the Whigs had been expecting him to take some sort of punitive action against them and their leaders. In pairs the mechanics patrolled the streets all night.

Not only the Whig leaders were in jeopardy, but also a certain valuable cache in the town of Concord, about seventeen miles to the northwest. There, with typical New England prudence and foresight, the radicals already had stockpiled and concealed against the day of need muskets and cannon, musket balls and cartridges, hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, reams of cartridge paper, spades, axes, medicine chests, tents, hogsheads of flour, pork, beef, salt, boxes of candles, wooden spoons, dishes, canteens, casks of wine and raisins, and other supplies for war.

On Saturday night, April 15, three nights ago, the patrolling mechanics began to suspect that General Gage meant to move his troops, perhaps in a raid on the party chiefs and the supplies at Concord. The rowboats which belonged to the British naval ships anchored in the harbor had previously been hauled

When the General marched his troops into the country for exercise, it was usually from the southward across Boston Neck and through the hamlet of Roxbury, or northward across the Charles River by ferry and through Charlestown. He would know that any expedition through these towns was sure to be detected. Was he now shrewdly planning to move troops swiftly one night by boat across Back Bay to East Cambridge and steal a march on the unsuspecting patriots by lonely country lanes that led into the road to Concord?

Nothing more happened that Saturday night, the fifteenth.

On Sunday morning, sent by Dr. Warren, Paul Revere rode to Lexington to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock that Gage soon might make a sudden march to seize both them and the Concord stores.

Riding back to Boston, Revere wondered if Gage, when he marched, would post extra guards at the Charlestown Ferry and the town gates on Boston Neck to prevent couriers from leaving Boston to alert the countryside. So he turned toward Charlestown. From there, across the broad mouth of the Charles, Boston was plainly visible, its steeples pricking the sky. Revere hunted up Colonel William Conant, a high Whig, and several “other gentlemen” and with them he arranged signals: If General Gage should leave Boston by water, Revere would show two lanterns in the North Church tower; if the redcoats marched over Boston Neck and out of town by land, he would show one lantern. He himself would endeavor to reach Charlestown with details, but if he should fail, the lanterns would tell the Colonel what warning he must send into the countryside.

Monday, the seventeenth, dreary and threatening rain, and this Tuesday, the eighteenth, showery but turning clear and cold, were taut with rumors. Many of the British regulars were billeted in private houses. Profane, honest, likable old Major John Pitcairn of the marines was quartered almost next door to the Reveres in North Square. Officers of the Royal Irish and the 43rd were in Back Street close by. Scarcely a house with an extra bed but quartered one or more of His Majesty’s troops. And it was obvious to anyone that they were going on active duty.

So by ten o’clock at night, when the unknown messenger brought Dr. Warren’s summons to North Square, Paul Revere was waiting for it. What took place at Dr. Warren’s house that Tuesday night is Revere’s own recollection: … Dr. Warren … begged that I would immediately set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock and Adams were,

The British patrol, muffled in their long blue cloaks, had asked Devens where “Clark’s tavern” was, leading him to suspect that the men knew that Adams and Hancock were at Clark’s but were unaware that Clark’s was a parsonage, not a public house. Devens had sent a warning to the Reverend Jonas Clark that the patrol evidently was seeking his residence and his guests.

Revere mounted Deacon Larkin’s horse and, with Devens’ warning of the British troop in mind, spurred through slumbering Charlestown and out over Charlestown Neck, with the Mystic on his right and the Charles glistening on his left. It was now about eleven o’clock. The night was chill but pleasant, and the moon shone bright.

Through the desolate salt marshes, clay pits, and scrub, where the smell of the sea rose strong and rank, Revere bore left, taking the short road through Cambridge to Lexington. He came in sight of the awesome gibbet where the mummified body of Captain Codman’s Mark, who had conspired in poisoning his master, had hung in chains for twenty years as a warning against insurrection. The sandy road narrowed where it approached woods. Suddenly, Revere saw two horsemen ahead, close in the shadow of a spreading tree. He was near enough to recognize their British holsters and cockades. One started toward him, and the other trotted up the road to head him off. Revere spun short about, raked his horse’s flanks, and “rode upon a full gallop for Mystic Road.” Over his shoulder he saw his pursuer’s heavy charger stumble into a clay pond.

“I got clear of him,” Revere told later, “and went through Medford, over the bridge, and up to Menotomy. In Medford I awakened the captain of the minutemen. And after that I alarmed almost every house till I got

Lexington was a cluster of pleasant, roomy country houses, where the road from Boston forked left to Concord and right to Bedford. On the triangular village common stood a big, barnlike meetinghouse with an awkward detached wooden belfry in the yard. Across the road was John Buckman’s popular tavern, strangely alight at this late hour, while the large dwellings on the other side of the green slept quietly in the moonlight.

Revere flanked the common and turned down the Bedford Road about a quarter of a mile to Clark’s rambling frame house, snuggled in a grove of trees.

To his surprise, he found a militia guard at the door! Earlier in the evening, a townsman returning from the Boston market had told Orderly Sergeant William Munroe of the Lexington minutemen that he had seen the patrol of British officers on the road. The Sergeant, sensitive to the temper of the day, assumed they were out for no good; he guessed that the important visitors at Clark’s, for whom he as militia officer felt responsible, might be the object of a raid. To protect them from molestation, he posted himself and eight other minutemen around the parsonage as a guard.

When Revere trotted up and demanded entrance, Sergeant Munroe said the family had retired. Adams and Hancock had settled down for the night, asking Munroe not to disturb them by any noise in the yard.

“Noise!” shouted Revere. “You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!”

John Hancock heard the commotion in the yard and recognized Revere’s hearty voice. From the house he called, “Come in, Revere. We are not afraid of you!”

Both Hancock and Sam Adams ushered him in, eager to know what tidings had brought him to their door at midnight. His news shattered the peace of the household. John Hancock’s formidable old aunt and his fiancée, pert, pretty Dorothy Quincy, were also guests of the minister and his wife. They all crowded noisily about Revere, while frail, dandified John theatrically proclaimed he would take up a gun and join the Lexington minutemen if they opposed the British march. Sam Adams tried to persuade him not to act foolishly, but Hancock was insistent; somewhere in this compulsive fervor was the key to one of Hancock’s weaknesses as a revolutionary.

Revere, who knew both Hancock and Adams well, must have been faintly amused by the contrast between them at this moment when their dissimilarities were thrown into bold relief. Sam Adams at 52 appeared to be an old man. Although his gray eyes were clear and his thin mouth and thick jaw were firm and often stern, his hair was a thinning gray and his voice and hands shook with palsy. In the rusty, patched clothes he wore, he looked like a seedy failure, and by economic standards he was one. He had run indifferently through a modest inheritance because he simply could not manage business or money. He was

Fortunately, just as he faced jail for defalcation, passage of the Stamp Act diverted attention from his shortages, and he swept into power as a radical member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and quickly rose from an obscure work horse of the radical wing of the Whig party to its supreme leadership. Eschewing personal glory, he became a self-effacing, single-minded man, unwavering in his devotion to republican principles and content to stand behind the scene and maneuver more colorful men into rebellion. At last he found success in the specialized field of political revolution. He was a dedicated, realistic revolutionary, who did not waste himself in gestures, histrionics, or in courting personal popularity.

John Hancock was one of his political protégés, and he was everything Sam Adams was not. By inheritance, the merchant, shipowner, and smuggler was the wealthiest man in New England. Adams had recruited him for the party when he was 28 and had but recently inherited the mighty fortune of his uncle, Thomas Hancock. The two men never developed any real affection such as that which grew between Revere and Warren, for their moral concepts were completely different: Hancock dreamed of snatching leadership from Adams, the rabble-rouser, and Adams, who was pleased to have Hancock as a figurehead and financier, distrusted him intellectually and emotionally, suspecting quite rightly that Hancock hoped to head a new aristocracy. Nevertheless, through Hancock—vain, petulant, vacillating, selfish—ran a strain of idealism not unlike Sam Adams’: a sense of charity, and a notion of fair play. It was only characteristic of him now to be contending wildly in Clark’s parlor that he should arm himself and sally forth. But shrewd, level-headed Sam Adams had brought his revolution too far along to lose one of its potential leaders. Both he and Hancock were representatives-elect to the Second Continental Congress to be held in May. Calmly he reasoned that it was their duty to flee and save themselves for the important work of the cabinet.

John was still holding out a half-hour later when William Dawes, Dr. Warren’s other messenger, who had come out of Boston over Boston Neck, arrived at Clark’s. He and Revere had no time to lose on senseless heroics. They took a bite together, rested a few minutes, and then departed to ride on to Concord to arouse more of the countryside.

As the two couriers cantered out of Lexington, they were joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott of Concord. Until this one o’clock hour, he had been courting Miss Milliken in Lexington. He struck the couriers as a “high son of liberty,” whose company they would welcome. While the three rode along, Revere told his companions about the officers who were rumored to be in the vicinity and voiced the fear that

… When we had got about halfway from Lexington to Concord, the other two stopped at a house to awake the man. I kept along. When I had got about two hundred yards ahead of them, I saw two officers under a tree. I immediately called to my company to come up, saying here was two of them. … In an instant I saw four officers, who rode up to me with their pistols in their hands and said, “G-d d-n you, stop! If you go an inch further, you are a dead man!”

Immediately Dr. Prescott came up … we attempted to get through them, but they kept before us and swore if we did not turn into that pasture, they would blow our brains out. They had placed themselves opposite to a pair of bars and had taken the bars down. They forced us in. When we got in, Dr. Prescott said to me, “Put on!” … He … took to the left. I turned to the right … towards a wood, intending when I had gained … that to jump my horse and run afoot.

The doctor, who knew the ground, jumped his horse over the low stone wall of the pasture and headed safely for Concord. William Dawes also escaped. Paul Revere, dashing toward the wood at the bottom of the pasture, was not that fortunate: Just as I reached it, out started six officers, seized my bridle, put their pistols to my breast, ordered me to dismount, which I did. … One of them, who appeared to have command there and much of a gentleman, asked where I came from. I told him. He asked what time I left. … I told him. He seemed surprised. He said, “Sir, may I crave your name?” I answered, “My name is … Revere.” “What?” said he …. “Paul Revere?” I answered … “Yes.” The others abused me much, but he told me not to be afraid, no one … should … hurt me.

Revere then glibly told the officer that the British would “miss their aim,” because he had alarmed “the country all the way up” from Boston. Hoping to confuse the patrol and convince it to release him, and thus to gain time for the men who were being called out, he blandly lied that the British boats had run aground; by the time the delayed troops reached Lexington, he warned, 500 men would fall upon them.

The patrol, seeming very agitated, grilled him closely. They already had rounded up four countrymen who had been found riding in the night. The commanding officer herded his prisoners together and turned back toward Lexington. To Revere he announced, “We are now going toward your friends, and if you attempt to run, or we are insulted, we will blow your brains out.”

Revere coolly told

The Major must have figured that there was little time to lose if he was to join the advancing British main force and inform its officers that the rebels were awake and waiting. He ordered the girths and bridles on the four countrymen’s horses cut and the horses driven afield, and told the men to go home afoot.

For a short distance, he refused to dismiss Revere. Then he commandeered Deacon Larkin’s horse from Revere for the use of the sergeant, whose mount was tired. The sergeant’s horse was stripped and turned loose. The patrol rode away and, ironically, Deacon Larkin’s gallant little horse that had borne Revere and his news to every Middlesex village and farm carried a British soldier off on the King’s business and forever disappeared into the British Army. Revere was left to make his way afoot through the fields in what he guessed was the direction of Jonas Clark’s:

I went across the burying ground and some pastures and came to the Reverend Mr. Clark’s house, where I found Messrs. Hancock and Adams. I told them of my treatment, and they concluded to go … towards Woburn. I went with them and a Mr. Lowell, who was a clerk to Mr. Hancock. When we got to the house where they intended to stop, Mr. Lowell and myself returned to Mr. Clark’s to find what was going on.

By now, a great many men of the neighborhood were doing the same thing. At Lexington, an hour or more earlier, Revere’s alarm had brought out the captain of the minutemen, John Parker. He lost no time in assembling his company. From warm beds his men hurried in their workaday clothes to the common before Buckman’s Tavern “to consult what to do.”

Captain Parker, “a great tall man with a large head and a high, wide brow,” did not think his handful of rustics could halt the regulars, but he determined to protect the town and its women and children if the redcoats grew mischievous there on the way to Concord. He and his men had stood waiting for a time in the clear, cold moonlight, stamping their chilled feet and blowing on their stiff fingers. When

Had everything gone as smoothly for General Gage’s expeditionary force as he had planned, it would probably have passed through Lexington by this time. From the beginning, however, it seemed doomed to irritating failures. Before Gage marched his men to the Boston Common, he knew that his secret was out.

In the evening he informed Hugh, Earl Percy, the young but battle-tested commander of the 5th Regiment, that Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith was to command a force of 700 to be sent to seize the stores at Concord. Very likely because he was senior field officer in town, Colonel Smith was chosen to head the force. Although a friend called him “a gallant old officer,” most of the army knew him to be grossly fat, slow-thinking, and often tardy. Perhaps that is why Gage had named Major Pitcairn of the marines second in command. The major was a portly, comfortably middle-aged, devout Scotsman, an old army man who was a rigorous disciplinarian, but who tempered his strict demands with humanity, patience, and tact—the kind of man General Gage would want on a difficult command such as this. Lord Percy was told he would command reserves which would be ordered up to support Smith if the Colonel should run into trouble. But the General added he probably would not have to call them out, for he “did not think the damned rebels would … take up arms against His Majesty’s Troops.” Percy rather agreed. He had come to Boston only a short time after Gage’s return last spring, and although Whig-principled, he quickly had decided “the people here are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel and cowards.”

At dusk, Lord Percy left the general’s office at Province House for his own quarters. He walked unrecognized up to a group of eight or ten men on the common. One of them said, “The British have marched, but they will miss their aim.”

“What aim?” Percy asked.

“Why, the cannon at Concord,” said the loiterer.

Percy quickly retraced his steps to Gage’s headquarters and repeated what he had heard, much to the General’s consternation. But it was too late to abandon the enterprise. Gage, hoping his plans were not too widely known, decided to proceed, with all possible secrecy. His men moved silently through the dark streets and

Lieutenant John Barker, of the King’s Own Regiment, a peevish, carping young man who was a little contemptuous of his superiors, kept a diary in which he described the landing at Phip’s Farm on Cambridge Marsh. The heavily loaded boats could not get close in. The men dropped overboard into shallow water.

After getting over the marsh, where we were wet up to the knees, we were halted in a dirty road and stood there till two o’clock in the morning waiting for provisions to be brought from the boats and to be divided, and which most of the men threw away, having carried some with them. At two o’clock we began our march by wading through a very long ford up to our middles.

The cold, wet, miserable march was not long under way when Colonel Smith, doubtless dissatisfied with his slow progress, dispatched Major Pitcairn ahead with six companies as an advance corps to secure the two bridges beyond Concord.

Pitcairn took every precaution to prevent any warning of his approach from reaching Lexington. By marching a small advance guard as flankers, he swallowed up all but one of Captain John Parker’s Lexington scouts. Finally, he was met by the patrol that had taken Revere, and was told that at least 500 men stood ready at Lexington to oppose his advance. The Major slowed his march to allow Colonel Smith to draw closer. Revere’s ruse had succeeded.

Colonel Smith, meanwhile, already had sent back to Boston for reinforcements. Major Pitcairn had scarcely left him when he had become aware, by the sound of an occasional, distant musket shot and the faraway ring of bells, that the countryside was astir.

The Colonel had cause for concern. Few men slept that night in the towns and on the farms along the British route. Among those aroused by the excitement was 23-year-old Sylvanus Wood of Woburn, three miles from Lexington. The sharp, shrill tolling of the Lexington bell had suggested to the sleepy youth that “there was difficulty” there.

I immediately arose, took my gun, and with Robert Douglass went in haste to Lexington. … When I arrived there, I inquired of Captain Parker … the news. Parker told me he did not know what to believe, for a man had come up about half an hour before and informed him that the British troops were not on the road. But while we were talking, a messenger came up and told the captain that the British troops were within half a mile.

Parker immediately turned to his drummer … and ordered him to beat to arms ….

Captain Parker asked Sylvanus Wood and his companion if they would parade with his company. As the men gathered, Parker called out, according to Wood’s account: “Every man of you who is equipped, follow me. And those of you who are not equipped, go into the meetinghouse and furnish yourselves from the magazine and

While we were standing, I left my place and went from one end of the company to the other and counted every man who was paraded, and the whole number was thirty-eight and no more. Just as I had finished and got back to my place, I perceived the British troops had arrived on the spot between the meetinghouse and Buckman’s, near where Captain Parker stood when he first led off his men.

Captain Parker did not intend to meet the British regulars with force. He planned only to stand and resist any overt act. But he chose to stand in a position and at a place that dared the redcoats to pursue the road they had determined to take.

On the far side of the common at this instant, Thomas Willard watched from a window in Daniel Harrington’s house as Major Pitcairn took the rebel dare. Willard testified later:

I … saw … about four hundred of Regulars in one body coming up the road and marched toward the north part of the Common back of the meetinghouse. … As soon as said Regulars were against the east end of the meetinghouse, the commanding officers said something, what I know not. But upon that, the Regulars ran till they came within about eight or nine rods of about a hundred of the militia … at which time the militia of Lexington dispersed. Then the officers made a huzza, and the private soldiers succeeded them. Directly after this, an officer rode before the Regulars to the other side of the body and hallooed after the militia … and said, “Lay down your arms, damn youl Why don’t you lay down your arms?”

These were practically the same words that rang in the ears of Sylvanus Wood, just as the little five-footer regained his place in the minuteman line:

The officer … swung his sword and said, “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, or you will all be dead men! Firel”

Some guns were fired by the British at us from the first platoon, but no person was killed or hurt, [the guns] being probably charged only with powder. Just at this time, Captain Parker ordered every man to take care of himself. The company immediately dispersed, and while the company was dispersing and leaping over the wall, the second platoon of the British fired and killed some of our men. There was not a gun fired by any of Captain Parker’s company within my knowledge. I was so situated that I must have known it, had anything of the kind taken place before a total dispersion of our company. When the strong east wind swept away the cloud of acrid gunsmoke that for moments

Jonas Parker, an older cousin of the Captain’s, stood his ground. In his hat at his feet he had tossed bullets, wadding, and spare flints. When a British ball buckled his knees, he tried vainly to reload his piece, but a redcoat’s bayonet finished him. Jonathan Harrington, with a ball in his body, dragged himself from the common almost to his own doorstep, but he died before his anguished wife, bursting from the house, could reach him. John Brown fell on the edge of a swamp north of the common. Another man slumped dead behind the wall in John Buckman’s garden.

The regulars went entirely out of hand, much to the disgust of Lieutenant Barker: “The men were so wild they could hear no orders.” Major Pitcairn was furious, chagrined, and mortified; one of his subordinates had shouted the order to fire. His own cease-fire went unheeded. He was finally able to form his unruly ranks, just as Colonel Smith came into sight with the main body.

The common was deserted now, except for the redcoats and the rebel dead and wounded. In those few minutes of fire, eight Massachusetts men had been killed and ten wounded. One regular had suffered a slight leg wound, and Major Pitcairn’s horse had been struck lightly twice.

Regrouped, the British fired a volley to celebrate their victory, struck up their music, and marched briskly for Concord. Sylvanus Wood reported:

After the British had begun their march to 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. …

"Their Balls Whisled Well”

Concord, April 19, 1775

Many a tanner, farmer, wheelwright, and clerk was proceeding that morning toward Concord with his gun. By the time the fresh April sunlight flooded down on the bloody common at Lexington, the alarm set off by Dr. Warren had spread far and wide.

Colonel Conant and his Charlestown friends, signaled by Paul Revere’s lanterns, had roused their neighborhood and as Revere and Dawes awakened house after house and village after village on the roads to Concord, other riders swung into the saddle and galloped to spread the warning that the regulars were marching into the country. From every direction in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Worcester counties, militiamen and minutemen were on the march to Concord.

Over their shoulders, or cradled in their arms, they carried the muskets that their English law required each of them to own. Every one of them, from sixteen to sixty, was enrolled in the Crown militia, liable to be called out en masse or by a draft in time of danger. Each

Concord stood alerted. Harness-maker Reuben Brown had been sent down toward Lexington before light to learn the truth of Dr. Prescott’s panted warning that the British were out in force. He had arrived in sight of the Lexington Common just as the regulars drew up before the minutemen and the firing started. He reined in long enough to take in what was happening, then he wheeled his horse and dashed for home to tell what he had seen. There the two local minuteman companies and one from Lincoln already were assembled, about 200 men in all.

Corporal Amos Barrett of David Brown’s Concord minuteman company expected to celebrate his twenty-third birthday in a few days; his recollection of the morning of the nineteenth was far more accurate than his orthography:

… the Beel Rong at 3 o Clock for alarum, as I was then a minnit man I was soon in town and found my Capt and the Rest of my Compny at the post, it wont Long Before thair was other minit Compneys. one Compney I believe of minnit men was Raisd in a most every town to Stand at a minits warning, before Sunrise thair was I beleave 150 of us and more of all that was thair. we thought we wood go and meet the British, we marched Down to wards Lfexington] about a mild or mild half and we see them acomming. we halted and stayd till they got within about 100 Rods, then we was orded to the about face and marchd before them with our Droms and fifes agoing and allso the Bfritish]. We had grand musick.

About a mile from Concord, a sharp ridge rose abruptly from the plain and flanked the Lexington Road all the way to the Concord town square. At the square, the road turned sharply right and followed another ridge to the wide wet meadows on the bank of the Concord River, where it turned squarely to the left and crossed the North Bridge across the stream. Thence it followed the the graceful curve of the river, skirting a hill, and arrived after about two miles at the farm buildings of Colonel James Barrett, commander of the Concord militia. Not far beyond the bridge a short road struck right off the main road to Barren’s and climbed to the top of the hill north ot the river. Colonel Barren’s buildings were one of the main objectives of the British, who knew that a quantity of the stores was concealed around them.

Lieutenant Barker described the British approach to Concord:

We met with no interruption till within a mile or two of the town, where the country people had occupied a hill

Upon occupying Concord, the British troops systematically searched for stores to destroy. Observed Corporal Barrett:

Thair was in the town House a number of intrenchen tools witch they Caried out and Burnt them, at last they said it was Best to Burn them in the house and Sat fire to them in the house, but our people Begd of them not to Burn the house and put it out. it wont Long before it was Set fire again but finaily it warnt Burnt, their was about 100 Barrels of flower in Mr. Hubbards malt house, they RoId that out and nocka them to peces and RoId some in the mill pond ….

While the grenadiers went about their work and the officers refreshed themselves in the local taprooms, advance companies marched to secure the bridges across the river beyond which the minutemen and militia were retiring. Captain Munday Pole marched left from the square past Jones’ tavern and posted his company at the South Bridge, but it was along the road that crossed the North Bridge that trouble promised. Colonel Smith ordered seven companies of light infantry in that direction, under command of Captain Lawrence Parsons of the 10th Regiment. Captain Walter Sloane Laurie of the light company of the 43rd recalled:

As we advanced to the bridge a large body of people under arms, assembled on the hills near the bridge, immediately retreated over it and took post on the rising grounds on the other side. As soon as we got possession of the bridge, Captain Parsons ordered my company and the company of the Fifth Regiment to remain at the bridge, whilst he and the other four proceeded [toward Barrett’s farm]. On his advancing towards the heights the country people retired at a great distance to the woods.

The light company of the 23rd, accompanied by two officers jouncing along in a chaise, passed Laurie’s handful of men a few minutes later and crossed the bridge to overtake Parsons. A courier came back from Parsons with orders for Laurie to advance the light company of the 5th, leaving only Laurie’s men at the bridge.

The “large body of people under arms” on the height overlooking Laurie’s position steadily increased in numbers. From Acton came 38 minutemen under a gunsmith, Isaac Davis, and two companies of militia. Several score from Bedford were there. Men from Lincoln came,

There was uneasy waiting on both sides.

Captain Laurie passed a tense hour. Although there were about 700 British troops in and about the town, his company of thirty-odd men, advanced about a half-mile beyond town, alone facing the mass of rebels, was piteously outweighed. The rebels shifted a little closer. Laurie reported:

… as they came nearer, the Light Company of the Fourth Regiment posted on a height immediately retreated to me at the bridge as did likewise the Light Company of the Tenth Regiment, who also had been at no great distance. Upon this, I sent Lieutenant [Alexander] Robertson … to acquaint Colonel Smith of my situation, desiring he would send some of the Grenadiers to support me in case of their attacking. Mr. Robertson brought for answer that two companies would be sent me. By this time the body of the country people arrived on the heights which the company of the Fourth Regiment had occupied, and there drew up with shouldered arms …. They halted for a considerable time looking at us and then moved down upon me in a seeming regular manner. … I determined to repass the bridge with the three companies, retreating by divisions to check their progress, which we … did, lining the opposite side of the river with one company to flank the other two in case of an attack. By this time they were close upon us.

Both sides were moving cautiously, neither eager to be guilty of opening fire. It was now half past nine, or a little later, of a bright, cool morning. The rising smoke from the fires in town inspired Colonel Barrett and the rebel officers assembled on the hill to advance to the town and defend it. The troops, commanded by Major John Buttrick with Captain Davis of Acton at the head of the column and Colonel John Robinson as a volunteer aide, formed in a column of twos and started down the hill toward the British. Colonel Barrett, who remained at the crest of the hill, ordered the column not to fire unless fired upon. The two Acton fifers struck up “The White Cockade,” and the rebels strode resolutely forward. The road off the hill met at right angles the road that led to the bridge. Major Buttrick’s men turned toward the British soldiers and formed up on the causeway that led over a meadow to the bridge. At the bridge a small detail of redcoats left by Laurie were pulling up the planks.

Corporal Amos Barrett marched in the third company of minutemen; this is the way the next moments appeared to him:

Mager Buttrick said if we wair all of his mind he would Drive them away from the Bridge, they should not

Three regulars were killed, four officers and four privates were wounded, before Laurie’s men fled from the bridge back toward town. The Americans did not pursue them far beyond the bridge, but withdrew to the hill from which they had marched.

The regulars, falling pell-mell back to town, collided with two belated companies of reinforcements under Colonel Smith himself. Lieutenant Barker bitterly accused the Colonel of being responsible for their tardiness: the elephantine commander had insisted on bringing them up himself, which, said Barker, “stopped ‘em from being [in] time enough, for being a very fat heavy man he would not have reached the bridge in half an hour, though it was not half a mile….” Colonel Smith, instead of re-forming the retreating troops and driving back across the bridge to succor Parsons, who had not yet returned from Barrett’s, abandoned him and joined the retreat to town. As it happened, however, Parsons and his three companies were allowed by the colonials to recross the bridge without interference.

The rebels allowed the British to retire in order for about a mile out of town. Then, as the sparkling red ranks, all aglitter in the sun, came to a bridge where the road narrowed, the angry men of the Massachusetts towns swarmed down on them. Of a sudden, Corporal Amos Barrett said, “a grait many Lay dead and the Road was bloddy.” For Lieutenant Barker, of the King’s Own Regiment, a nightmare had begun:

… we were fired on from all sides, but mostly from the rear, where people had hid themselves in houses till we had 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 upon us, as we did too upon them, but not with the same advantage, for they were so concealed there was hardly any seeing them. In this way, we marched … miles, their numbers increasing from all parts, while ours was reducing by deaths, wounds, and fatigue; and we were totally

Lieutenant Colonel Smith, now nursing a painful leg wound, prayed desperately for the relief column he had ordered so many long hours before, at two or three o’clock in the morning, when he had found the night filled with rebel alarms. General Gage had not waited for his request; on his own initiative he had ordered out Lord Percy’s force at four in the morning, but a series of stupid blunders and misunderstandings had delayed its start until nine. About that hour a thousand troops under Percy had swung out of Boston, toward Roxbury, their fifes and drums impudently shrilling “Yankee Doodle.”

With the relief force marched Frederick Mackenzie, a serious, methodical lieutenant of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. In his diary he wrote that when the column neared Lexington a little after midday, “some persons who came from Concord informed that the Grenadiers and Light Infantry were at that place and that some persons had been killed and wounded by them early in the morning at Lexington.” It was about two o’clock when Mackenzie heard some straggling shots fired about a mile in front.

As we advanced we heard the firing plainer and more frequent, and at half after two, being near the church at Lexington and the fire increasing we were ordered to form the line, which was immediately done by extending on each side of the road. But by reason of the stone walls and other obstructions, it was not formed in so regular a manner as it should have been.

The Grenadiers and Light Infantry [under Smith] were at this time retiring towards Lexington, fired upon by the rebels who took every advantage the face of the country afforded …. As soon as the Grenadiers and Light Infantry perceived the First Brigade drawn up for their support, they shouted repeatedly, and the firing ceased for a short time. [Percy, as a brigadier general, would now assume command over Lieutenant Colonel Smith.]

The ground we first formed upon was something elevated and commanded a view of that before us for about a mile, where it was terminated by some pretty high grounds covered with wood. The village of Lexington lay between both parties. We could observe a considerable number of the rebels, but they were much scattered, and not above fifty of them to be seen in a body in any place. Many lay concealed behind the 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 where our regiment was posted. A few cannon shot were fired at those on and near the road which dispersed them. The flank companies now retired and formed behind the brigade which was soon fired upon by the rebels most advanced. A brisk fire was returned but without much effect.

As there

Lord Percy, judging that the returning to Boston by way of Cambridge (where there was a bridge over the Charles River which might either be broken down or required to be forced) and Roxbury might be attended with some difficulties and many inconveniences, took the resolution of returning by way of Charlestown, which was the shortest road and which could be defended against any number of the rebels….

During the whole of the march from Lexington the rebels kept an incessant irregular fire from all points at the column, which was the more galling as our flanking parties which at first were placed at sufficient distances to cover the march of it were at last, from the different obstructions they occasionally met with, obliged to keep almost close to it.

Our men had very few opportunities of getting good shots at the rebels, as they hardly ever fired but under cover of a stone wall, from behind a tree, or out of a house, and the moment they had fired, they lay down out of sight until they had loaded again or the column had passed. In the road indeed in our rear, they were most numerous and came on pretty close, frequently calling out “King Hancock forever!” Many of them were killed in the houses on the roadside from whence they fired; in some of them seven or eight men were destroyed. Some houses were forced open in which no person could be discovered, but when the column had passed, numbers sallied out from some place in which they had lain concealed, fired at our rear guard and augmented the numbers

Few or no women or children were to be seen throughout the day. As the country had undoubted intelligence that some troops were to march out and the rebels were probably determined to attack them, it is generally supposed they had previously removed their families from the neighborhood.

Although Mackenzie had seen few women or children, many were involved in the actions of the day. A man from the British ships in Boston Harbor wrote to England about the fury of the rebel attacks:

… even women had firelocks. One was seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and husband from their windows. There they three, with an infant child, soon suffered the fury of the day. In another house which was long defended by eight resolute fellows, the grenadiers at last got possession, when after having run their bayonets into seven, the eighth continued to abuse them with all the [beastlike rage] of a true Cromwellian, and but a moment before he quitted this world applied such epithets as I must leave unmentioned….

The British column had been on the march about an hour under heavy, scattered rebel fire, when a little more than two miles from Lexington, it descended the high road to the “Foot of the Rocks” at Menotomy. In the long street of the village, nearly 1,800 fresh rebels descended upon the harassed Britons, and it was here that most of the fierce, bloody, close-quarter and house-to-house fighting of the day occurred. Lord Percy turned his fieldpieces on his pursuers, but the cannon balls only tore up the road, toppled stone walls, and crashed into houses, causing few casualties. The redcoats fought as wildly as cornered game; their officers lost all control of their frenzied men, especially the flankers and the inevitable freebooters. From one house, Deacon Joseph Adams had fled to a nearby barn and was now hidden in the hay. In the house in bed lay his wife Hannah, who later declared:

…divers of them entered our house by bursting open the doors, and three of the soldiers broke into the room in which I then was laid on my bed, being scarcely able to walk from

He replied, “Damn you.”

One that stood near said, “We will not hurt the woman if she will go out of the house, but we will surely burn it.”

I immediately arose, threw a blanket over me, went out, and crawled into a corn-house near the door with my infant in my arms, where I remained until they were gone. They immediately set the house on fire, in which I had left five children and no other person; but the fire was happily extinguished when the house was in the utmost danger of being utterly consumed.

Farther on, at Cooper’s Tavern, two idle men, 39 and 45 years old, were calmly drinking flips. When one suggested that the fighting was getting too close for comfort, the other replied, “Let us finish the mug. They won’t come yet.” Before the cups were drained, some redcoats crowded into the taproom. An altercation broke out, and the soldiers shot down the drinking companions. A few days later the owners of the tavern, swept away by the hysteria of the day’s events, deposed for the Provincial Congress a colorful tale of terror:

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 most barbarously and inhumanly 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.

Lord Percy continued to hold his force together and astutely made a feint as if to enter Boston by way of Cambridge, then wheeled left in North Cambridge and marched for Charlestown. “We threw them!” exulted Lieutenant Barker.

At sunset, half past six, the exhausted column stumbled its last mile across Charlestown Neck toward the comforting safety of Bunker Hill, rising a hundred feet above the surrounding country. Darkness fell fast and musket flashes showed as bright as fireworks when the footsore, hungry, thirsty regulars—after some 35 miles of marching, half of it fighting an enraged and merciless foe—flung themselves down to rest on Bunker’s slope.

As the redcoats crowded across the narrow isthmus that connected Charlestown with the mainland, “the rebels ceased fire,” charged Ensign Lister, “they not having it in their power to pursue us further in their skulking way behind hedges and walls.” Actually, the greenest military novice among the New Englanders recognized that further pursuit would be disastrous. Once the redcoats had crossed Charlestown Neck they

To the haphazardly assembled citizens’ army that had risen from the farms and shops, command had come late in the day. Militia General William Heath had come into the field for a brief hour of glory. The General, a native of Roxbury, was a farmer who candidly described himself as a man “of middling stature, light complexion, very corpulent, and bald-headed.” An old-time militia officer, and a member of the Committee of Safety, he was one of five general officers appointed sixty days earlier to command the colony’s troops in case of hostilities.

At daybreak the morning of the nineteenth, Heath had been awakened and told that a British detachment was on the march for Concord. He consulted briefly with members of the Committee of Safety and then struck out for Lexington. On the way he met Dr. Joseph Warren. The doctor, on hearing that morning from one of his messengers of the clash at Lexington, had crossed the Charlestown Ferry for the scene. He and Heath reached Lexington a few minutes after Percy’s relief column had arrived there. Heath had gathered together a regiment of rebels, which he commanded in the pursuit, and Warren had stuck with him.

Now as senior officer on the field, Heath ordered the militia, which converged about 3,000 strong on Charlestown Common, just outside Charlestown Neck, “to halt and give over the pursuit, as any further attempt upon the enemy in that position would have been futile.” He ordered a guard posted close to the Neck to watch the redcoats, and then ordered the militia “to march to the town of Cambridge, where, below the town, the whole were ordered to lie on their arms.”

Thus ended an unbelievable April day. About 1,800 British regulars had marched to destroy some secreted rebel stores; 73 of them had been killed, 200 were wounded or missing. Probably an equal number of Americans had been engaged during the day, but no one could count accurately the men who came, shot at the red column, and then either came to Cambridge or hiked home. Forty-nine Americans had died and 46 were wounded or missing.

A man named John Jones arrived at Concord too late for the fighting, but soon his company was in Cambridge, billeted in Harvard College, and he was writing his “Loving Wife” the only universal truth of the day: ” ‘Tis uncertain when we shall return…. Let us be patient & remember that it is ye hand of God.”

“When the Sword

Rebellion Is Drawn”

Cambridge Camp and Ticonderoga,

April-May 1775

The night of the nineteenth was long and agonizing for the bone-tired redcoats. In Boston, General Gage had waited tensely all day for the return of his expedition, and as it entered Charlestown in flight, he had sent relief troops across the Charles to throw up and hold a “sort of Redoubt” on Bunker Hill. “My Lord,” he had sent word to Percy, “Gen. Pigot will pass over with a Reinforcement and fresh ammunition. The Boats which carry him may return with the Grenadiers and Light Infantry who must be most fatigued and the wounded….”

For the rebels the night did not end. Their campfires shone all night in a great circle from the Mystic to Cambridge until they paled at last against the thinning dawn. When light came, the redcoats discovered that yesterday’s nightmare had not been just a bad dream. The incredible Yankees had not vanished in the night. There they crouched around their breakfast fires, muttering about yesterday’s bloody work, remembering what their women had said when they left home, remarking how it looked like it was going to be a dry spring, and shaking their heads over what they reckoned would happen next. They were not going home. They did not intend to go home until something was decided. It was as preposterous as General Gage must have thought it was, but these men seemed to understand that they had started a war, and they intended to sit right where they were until their adversary made terms.

General Heath accepted the fact that a state of war already existed and realistically went about putting first things first. “How to feed the assembled and assembling militia was now the great object,” he thought. Even those men who had been foresighted enough to snatch a slab of bread or some cured meat when they dashed from their homes the day before were long out of food. Heath’s sergeants collected all the edibles around Cambridge, including the carcasses of beef and pork prepared for the Boston market and some ship bread at Roxbury belonging to the Royal Navy. The kitchen of Harvard College provided pots, kettles, and utensils, and soon the informal “army” was fed.

In the afternoon, General Artemas Ward, Massachusetts militia commander in chief, arrived. A bluff, fat, “middle-aged man afflicted with bladder-stone,” he had been lying ill in bed when an express rider had galloped through his town of Shrewsbury with the news of the fighting at Lexington; at daybreak on the twentieth, he had pulled himself into the saddle and ridden to Cambridge.

Ward was a slow, deliberate man with little or no imagination, but he was dependable and well liked and acted now with decision. He promptly called a council of war to fix upon guard posts, distribution of troops, fortifications, recruiting, and other matters.

He sent out parties to bury yesterday’s dead and ordered earthworks thrown up to bar the roads from Boston and to protect the central

A number of families who had fled from Charlestown early on the nineteenth returned to their houses, but others like Hannah Winthrop and her ailing husband recognized that the peninsula, now lying between two armed forces, was a dangerous place. Mrs. Winthrop wrote her friend Mercy Warren, political satirist and wife of Plymouth merchant James Warren, that she and her husband and some eighty fellow refugees spent an uncomfortable night, the nineteenth, at a house a mile from town, “some nodding in their chairs, others resting their weary limbs on the floor.”

To stay in this place [on the twentieth] was impracticable…. Thus with precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintance, five of us to be conveyed with one poor tired horse and chaise. Thus we began our pilgrimage, alternately walking and riding, the roads filled with frightened women and children, some in carts with their tattered furniture, others on foot fleeing into the woods. But what added greatly to the horror … was our passing through the bloody field at Menotomy, which was strewed with the mangled bodies. We met one affectionate father with a cart looking for his murdered son and picking up his neighbors who had fallen in battle in order for their burial.

While the citizens of Charlestown puzzled where to seek refuge, and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety entreated the Massachusetts towns to enlist and send forward men to form an army at Cambridge and asked Connecticut and New Hampshire to come to their aid, the story of Lexington and Concord swept like a timber blaze through all New England and down the coast. Only a few hours after the firing between the British and the minutemen at Lexington, Israel Bissel, one of the regular post riders from Boston to New York, was thundering down the coast carrying an official report to each of the committees of safety of the other colonies. Bissel made it all the way to Philadelphia in only five days and a few hours, beating the stagecoach time some three days, a remarkable feat of endurance for a single rider. From Philadelphia the news flew southward; other riders were urged to stay in the saddle night and day until the news spread to Georgia and westward across the mountains. Everywhere the “momentous intelligence” went, a spirit of resistance sprang up: meetings were held, arms and powder were seized, and men prepared to fight.

While the American council was sitting, the British troops on Bunker Hill were withdrawn to Boston. Like General Gage himself, few British officers serving in the colonies had believed that Americans ever would resist royal armed force, but the one day of the nineteenth changed many minds. Lord Percy was first to express his revised opinion in a letter

Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them those 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.

Nor are several of their men void of a spirit of enthusiasm, as we experienced yesterday, for many of them concealed themselves in houses and advanced within ten yards to fire at me and other officers, though they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.

You may depend upon it, that as the rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go through with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home. For my part, I never believed, I confess that they would have attacked the King’s troops or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday.

These rebels moved swiftly to gain the advantage in propaganda. The Second Continental Congress would not convene until May 10; the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, convening on April 22, decided that news of the hostilities of the nineteenth should be given to the English people as quickly as possible and from the viewpoint of the colonists. Without waiting to consult the general Congress, the Massachusetts body within three days took depositions from scores of participants who avowed that the British troops fired first. These depositions, accompanied by a letter addressed “To the Inhabitants of Great Britain,” were sent across the Atlantic by a fast Salem schooner, and on the twenty-ninth of May the news was all over London.

The king was not disturbed. From the day he had come to the throne at the age of 21, full of piety, a personal purity new to his Hanoverian line, and a consuming ambition, he had determinedly maintained a Tory government that supported his absolute personal rule. That the American colonists had found friends among the men who opposed him did not faze the strong-willed king. Long months since, his mind had been made up. He would employ “every means of distressing America” until his deluded subjects “felt the necessity of returning to their duty.”

The Whig press in London accepted the news from New England largely as it came, making reasonable allowances for hysteria and exaggeration. An American sympathizer reported:

Administration were alarmed at the unexpected success of the Provincials and were at a loss what lies to fabricate which would destroy the force of the qualifications which accompanied the intelligence. Runners were sent to every part of the city, who were authorized to deny the authenticity of the facts, and so distressed was Government that they officially requested a suspension of belief until dispatches were received from General Gage.