Young Liberty Wright died in March 1775, and their daughter Mary had been buried only nine months earlier—a loss so heavy that Prudence Wright left her own household for a time and went home to her parents in New Hampshire. But by April 19, 1775, she was back again, and the women of Pepperell elected her to lead them. She appointed Mrs. Job Shattuck as her lieutenant, and organized the women into a company called “Mrs. David Wright’s Guard,” They dressed themselves in their husbands’ clothing, armed themselves with guns and pitchforks, and began to patrol the roads into the town.
These women of Pepperell kept patrolling even after dark. They were guarding a bridge that night, when a rider suddenly approached. The women stopped him at gunpoint and forced him to dismount. He proved to be a Tory named Captain Leonard Whiting. They searched him, found incriminating papers, marched him under guard to Solomon Rodger’s tavern in the town center and kept him a prisoner that night. The next morning he was sent to Groton, and his papers were dispatched to the Committee of Safety for study. The Pepperell town meeting later reimbursed Mrs. Wright and the women of her company for their service. With a hint of condescension, the men voted “that Leonard Whiting’s guard (so called) be paid seven pounds seventeen shillings and six pence by order of the Treasurer.” But on the night of April 19, there was nothing of that attitude in Captain Leonard Whiting, when Prue Wright stopped him at gunpoint and threatened to kill him if he did not obey. 17
Tories were arrested in many New England towns. At Scituate on the South Shore of Massachusetts, Paul Litchfield noted in his diary that “very early in the morning of April 20, the town “received news of the engagement between the king’s troops and the Americans at Concord the day before, upon which our men were ordered to appear in arms immediately.” Litchfield was sent to guard the coast, in fear of British attack from the sea, a feeling that was shared in many coastal communities. His company “about eight o’clock took two Tories as they were returning from Marsh-field, who were kept under guard that night.” The next day they arrested four Tories more, and confined them in the meetinghouse.
The great fear continued for many days throughout New England. “Terrible news from Lexington, … rumor on rumor,” John Tudor entered into his diary, “men and horses driving past, up and down the roads. … People were in great perplexity; women in distress for their husbands and friends who had marched. … All confusion, numbers of carts, etc. carrying off goods etc. as the rumour was that if the soldiers came out again they would burn, kill and destroy all as they marched.” 18
On the North Shore of Massachusetts, there was a special panic called the “Ipswich fright.” A report spread through Essex County that British soldiers had come ashore in the Ipswich River and were murdering the population of that town. The rumor traveled at lightning speed up and down the coast. It was written that “all the horses and vehicles in the town were put in requisition: men, women, and children hurried as for life toward the north. Large numbers crossed the Merrimack, and spent the night in deserted houses of Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fled into New Hampshire.” 19
The panic infected Salem, where John Jenks recorded in his diary on April 21,1775, “A report was propagated that Troops was landed in Ipswich.” Jenks heard the next day that “the report was false, no troops came there.” But he and his fellow townsmen decided to take no chances. On the 23rd of April he wrote, “moved my goods up to my Uncle Preston in Danvers. A great number of teams was employed to carry provisions out of the town.” 20
In Newbury, a messenger appeared at an emergency town meeting, crying, “Turn out, for God’s sake, or you will all be killed. The Regulars are marching on us; they are in Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them.” 21 In the interior town of Haverhill, the Reverend Hezekiah Smith, pastor of the Baptist Church wrote in his diary, “a most gloomy time. … Repeated false alarms, and terrifying apprehensions.” He held a day of fasting and prayer in his meetinghouse, as did many other ministers throughout New England. 22
The same emotions spread to the interior of Massachusetts. They were felt at Sudbury, twenty miles inland, where Experience Wight Richardson kept a diary that was running record of her anxiety. She feared not for herself but for others: for her only son Josiah Richardson who went off to “fite” and for other men and families in her town. In particular, she feared for the people of Boston. “We are afraid that Boston people a great many will starve to death,” she wrote. “O Lord! Appear for them I pray thee. O King Jesus help us I pray thee.” 23
The great fear reached as far as the town of Sutton, forty miles from the coast, and persisted there for many days. After April 19, the town’s minister David Hall wrote, “That night there was several alarms. I was up most of the night and prayed with our minute companies a little before day.” He comforted his congregation for many days. “A dark and melancholy week we had,” he noted in his diary. 24
The great fear also spread to Loyalists in Boston and even to the Regulars themselves. Admiral Samuel Graves later remembered that a wave of hysteria swept through the British troops, who were suddenly conscious that they were in “the neighbourhood of so enraged an host of people, breathing revenge for their slaughtered countrymen, and vowing to storm Boston, seize upon and demolish Castle William, fortify Point Alderton, burn all the men of war, and cut off every Tory.” Graves recalled that “each of these reports through the fears of some and wickedness of others was industriously circulated, during the first week or two after the battle of Lexington, and some of them gained credit … such rumors spread abroad, could not but excite on our part the utmost attention.” 25
Among the American leaders, the great fear gave them yet another task. At the same time that they worked to raise the alarm in Massachusetts, they also labored to quiet the anxieties of the people. The network of couriers continued to function for many days, keeping the towns informed about the course of events, but without laying their fears to rest. It was typical of this Calvinist culture that people interpreted this time of suffering as a divine judgment on their own depravity. For many Sundays afterward, the ministers of Massachusetts preached from the first verse of Lamentations: “The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning. The crown is fallen from our head; woe unto us, that we have sinned.” 26
THE RESCUE
Of John Hancock, Sam Adams, a Salmon, and a Trunk
It is supposed their object there was to seize on Messrs. Hancock and Adams, two of our deputies to the General Congress. They were alarmed just in time to escape.
—Letter from a Gentleman of Rank in New England, April 25, 1775
WHILE THE COUNTRYSIDE began to stir, the man who had set these events in motion hobbled back toward Lexington, painfully encumbered by his silver spurs and heavy riding boots. It was about 3 o’clock in the morning when Paul Revere regained his freedom. The night had turned cold and raw and darker than before—the damp Stygian darkness that so often comes before a New England dawn.
As Paul Revere passed the low swamps that lay west of Lexington Green, he would have felt the dampness in his weary bones. He made slow progress in his high-topped boots on the muddy road, but his mind was racing far ahead. He wondered what Samuel Adams and John Hancock had done since he left them. Had they ended their interminable debate? Were they still debating? Did they act wisely on their warning?
Knowing Hancock and Adams, Paul Revere decided that he had better be sure. Before he reached the center of the town, he turned off the road, plunged into a muddy swamp, and waded across the wetlands to Lexington’s burying ground. In the darkness, he picked his way across the broken slates and canted stones that marked the last resting place of the town’s founders.
As Paul Revere stumbled through a maze of burial mounds and sunken holes, perhaps he had a moment to think about the men and women whose mortal remains lay beneath him in the ground. Inconceivable as it may seem to their degenerate descendants, the Whig leaders of revolutionary Ameri
ca often had these periods of reflection. They took a long view of their temporal condition, in a way that Americans rarely do today. “Think of your forefathers!” John Quincy Adams urged his contemporaries, “Think of your posterity!”
Paul Revere and his fellow Whigs believed themselves to be the heirs of New England’s founding vision, and the stewards of John Winthrop’s City on a Hill. The moral example of their forebears haunted and inspired them. When Sam Adams signed his revolutionary writings with the pen-name “Puritan,” and Paul Revere created his political engravings on godly themes, they expressed their strong sense of spiritual kinship with their ancestors.
For these men, the revolutionary movement was itself a new Puritanism—not precisely the same as the old, but similar in its long memories and large purposes. Like the old Puritans who had preceded them, these new Puritans were driven by an exalted sense of mission and high moral purpose in the world. They also believed that they were doing God’s work in the world, and that no earthly force could overcome them. In the language of the first Puritans, they were both believers and seekers—absolutely certain of the rightness of their cause, and always searching restlessly for ways to serve it better. In that endless quest, the memory of distant ancestors who lay sleeping in the grave was a source of guidance and inspiration to them.
At the same time, they also thought of their posterity. These men were deeply conscious of their own mortality—more than we are apt to be today. They looked ahead to the time when they too would be lying beneath the broken slates of New England’s burying grounds, and asked themselves if their acts would be worthy of generations yet unborn. Perhaps some of these thoughts (which have so little meaning to Americans today) may have occurred to Paul Revere, as he felt his way through the broken stones of Lexington’s burying ground during the dark hours before the dawn of April 19, 1775.
At last Paul Revere emerged from the burying ground and turned north to the Bedford Road. He walked a few hundred yards to the Clarke parsonage, hoping to find that the men he had come from Boston to warn were safely away. As he entered the door, Paul Revere was horrified to find that Sam Adams and John Hancock were precisely where he had met them three hours ago— still debating among themselves.
John Hancock, portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1765. The sitter, at twenty-eight had recently inherited the largest fortune in New England. His dress and furniture suggest some of his great wealth which made him independent. But so strong was the ethic of work that he kept at his calling even in his portrait, and sat for the artist with his ledgers in hand. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
The household was an uproar. Elizabeth Clarke, then in her twelfth year, looked on wide-eyed at the scene of confusion that surrounded her. Crowded in the small house, beside Sam Adams and John Hancock, was Hancock’s fiancee Dorothy Quincy, a young woman known to her friends as Miss Dolly, and celebrated throughout New England for her spirit and independence. Also present was John Hancock’s fastidious aunt, the rich widow of the man who had made the largest fortune in New England, “as ladylike a woman as Boston ever bred,” in Miss Dolly’s measured phrase.
Young Elizabeth Clarke wrote many years later, “I … can see, in my mind, just as plain … the whole scene, how Aunt Hancock and Dolly Quincy, with their cloaks and bonnets on, Aunt crying and wringing her hands and helping mother dress the children, Dolly going round with Father to hide money, watches and anything down in the potatoes and up in the garrett.” 1
Samuel Adams, portrait by John Singleton Copley, circa 1770-72. Adams wears a simple suit of dark crimson. In his right hand he holds the instructions of Boston Town Meeting. With his left, he points to the Massachusetts Charter. The portrait represents the personality of the man himself, and also the austerity of his Whig principles. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
John Hancock sat at the Clarkes’ table, busily sharpening the fragile blade of his fine dress sword, breathing fire and brimstone at the British Regulars, and debating furiously with Sam Adams all at the same time. Dorothy Quincy remembered that “Mr. H. was all the night cleaning his gun and sword, and putting his accoutrements in order, and was determined to go out to the plain by the meetinghouse, where the battle was, to fight.” 2
We think of John Hancock as a politician, but he regarded himself as a soldier, and in the small hours of the morning he talked bravely of joining the Lexington men on the Common, and facing the Regulars when they arrived. “If I had my musket,” Hancock was heard to say, “I would never turn my back on these troops.” He swore again and again that “it never should be said that he had turned his back” upon the Regulars. 3
John Hancock punctuated these martial threats by shouting commands at his companions. At one stage Dorothy Quincy thought of her aged father in Boston, and said that she would return to him tomorrow. Hancock turned toward his fiancee and said in his imperious way, “No, madam, you shall not return as long as there is a British bayonet left in Boston.” Miss Dolly answered firmly, “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your control yet.” 4
Sam Adams tried in vain to persuade his fire-eating friend that he was more useful to the cause in other ways than by carrying a musket. Dorothy Quincy saw Adams clap John Hancock on the shoulder and say to him, “That is not our business. We belong to the cabinet.” 5
Paul Revere joined this conversation after he arrived. He added the weight of his recent experience to Adams’s arguments, telling of his “treatment” at the hands of the British officers on the Concord Road. With great urgency Revere told Hancock and Adams that they must leave immediately. Dorothy Quincy remembered that “it was not till break of day that Mr. H. could be persuaded.” 6
The clinching argument was a report that one British officer had asked “where Clarke’s Tavern was,” There was no such tavern in Lexington; only the Clarke home where Adams and Hancock were staying. Tories were everywhere, and the location of the Revolutionary leaders could not long remain a secret. In the end, Hancock was “overcome by the entreaties of his friends, who convinced him that the enemy would indeed triumph, if they could get him and Mr. Adams in their power.” 7
Dorothy Quincy was staying with her fiance John Hancock in Lexington when Paul Revere arrived. She left a memorable account of the events that followed. Whig New England liked its women to be smart and strong. “Miss Dolly” was much celebrated for her beauty, brains, and spirit. The artist John Singleton Copley seems not to have been one of her admirers, and painted her in 1772 as something of a termagant. Her beauty is lost in this likeness, but her intellect and independence shine through. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
As dawn approached, Hancock at last agreed to depart with Adams and Revere. Typically, he left his aunt and fiancee behind in the Clarke house, and insisted on traveling in high state. The fugitives set off in Hancock’s heavy coach, making their way over muddy roads toward a parsonage in the second precinct of Woburn (now the town of Burlington), northwest of Lexington. There they were welcomed by the widow of the former minister, in the network of Congregational clergy that spanned the countryside of Massachusetts.
Soon after they arrived, John Hancock began to think about his dinner. In Lexington, an admirer had presented him with a fine great salmon, fresh caught in a New England river. The fish had been left behind at the Clarke house. Hancock sent back his coach with orders to return with Aunt Hancock, Miss Dolly, and the salmon. All arrived in good order. Hancock demanded the salmon straight away, and asked that it to be cleaned and cooked. His hostess went to work on it in the kitchen.
Adams, Hancock and their party were now alone with their host’s family. Paul Revere was gone again. He had traveled with Hancock and Adams until he felt sure that they were out of danger. Then he decided to return to Lexington Green “to find out what was acting,” as he liked to say. Back he went to the Clarke house, and rested for a few moments.
Suddenly another crisis burst upon him. A young Boston acquaintance named John Lowell appeared, and begged Revere to help him wit
h an urgent task. Lowell was John Hancock’s confidential clerk. He explained that when Hancock and Adams fled, they had left behind a large trunk stuffed with important papers. Lowell told Revere that the trunk had been left in an upper chamber at the Buckman Tavern on Lexington Common, a few hundred yards from where they were talking. It was very heavy—more than one man could carry. It contained the innermost secrets of the Whig cause, and written evidence that could incriminate many leaders.
Paul Revere rose quickly from his seat. With young Lowell, he walked down toward Lexington Common to rescue the trunk. The two men headed straight for the Buckman Tavern where they found a large crowd, many rumors, and much confusion. In the crowded taproom, they were astonished to be told that it was all a false alarm!
Lydia Henchman Hancock brought her husband Thomas Hancock the foundation of his fortune. He used it well, and made her the richest widow in New England. She was with her nephew John Hancock in Lexington on the night of April 18. When Paul Revere arrived, Aunt Lydia gave way to high hysterics. (National Portrait Gallery, Washington)
Revere quickly discovered what had happened. After he and Dawes had left for Concord, the men of Lexington had sounded the alarm. These prudent Yankee farmers decided to act on Revere’s message, but also to confirm its accuracy by sending out their own “expresses” to the east. Two men of Lexington went riding off to Cambridge, with instructions to “gain intelligence of the motions of the troops, and what route their took.” While they were gone, Captain Parker’s men mustered on the Common. 8
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