Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Revere explained that he’d managed to elude two of the officers Gage had sent out to guard the road to Concord, and when Dawes arrived soon after, the patriot leaders could rest assured that the alarm these two messengers had helped to start was now—according to the system that had been previously organized by the Committee of Safety—being carried from town to town throughout Massachusetts and beyond. Warren had been concerned that in addition to the stores in Concord, the regulars were out to arrest Hancock and Adams, but as the Reverend William Gordon later related, the leaders had convinced themselves that Concord was the real aim of the British expedition.

  It was a short walk from the Clarke parsonage to the Lexington Common, or Green, a crude triangle of lumpy grass formed by the intersection of the road from Boston to the east, the road to Concord to the west, and the road to Bedford to the north. In addition to some chest-high stone walls, which would later remind the regulars of the hedgerows back in England, the green was bounded by the houses of Jonathan Harrington and Daniel Harrington to the west, that of Marret Munroe to the south, and Buckman’s Tavern to the east. Within the eastern tip of the green was the Lexington Meetinghouse. Rather than a bell-equipped spire, the congregation had opted for a more economical stand-alone belfry, which stood fifty yards or so to the west of the meetinghouse. Soon the bell was ringing, and by 2:00 a.m. approximately 130 members of the 144-man Lexington militia had assembled on the green under the leadership of forty-six-year-old Captain John Parker. Parker was six feet, two inches tall and the father of four girls and three boys, all between the ages of four and fourteen. He was also a veteran of the French and Indian War and had been at the Siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and with Wolfe when he had taken Quebec. He was now a farmer who lived about two miles from the center of town, and like Josiah Quincy Jr., he was dying of tuberculosis. He had had trouble sleeping the night before, and it looked as if he was going to get even less sleep tonight.

  As was true in all the town militias throughout Massachusetts, this group of men knew each other intimately. Parker, it was said, was related to at least a quarter of the men gathered there that night. Of the militia’s 144 members, 14 of them were Munroes, 11 were Harringtons, 10 were Smiths, 7 were Reeds, and 4 were Tidds. They lived in a tightly knit, largely self-contained community that was profoundly different from what was to be found in a typical village in England. They voted in town meetings that instilled the assumption that they had a direct say in how their government worked. Their sense of self-worth was determined not by ancient notions or protocols of class but by their ability to farm, hunt, and fight. At the center of all their lives was the Lexington Meeting, whose black-robed minister Jonas Clarke assured them that just as God had approved of their forefathers’ battles with the Indians and the French, their current insistence on liberty was also divinely sanctioned. In keeping with this melding of spiritual and martial concerns, the meetinghouse—unheated and safely removed from other structures near the green—served as the town’s powderhouse.

  Years later, one of the militiamen who participated in the events of that day insisted that it wasn’t the Tea Act or the Boston Port Bill or any of the Coercive Acts that made them take up arms against the regulars; no, it was much simpler than that. “We always had been free, and we meant to be free always,” the veteran remembered. “[Those redcoats] didn’t mean we should.” It was a sense of freedom strengthened by the knowledge that to the west and north, and to the east in Maine, lay a wilderness that their children could one day go to as their forefathers had done when they first sailed for the New World. Nothing like this was available to the future generations of Europe. It was a sense of promise that made the militiamen’s resolve to oppose these troops all the more powerful.

  But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook.

  While Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Massachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they—rather than Gage and the loyalists—had the power to intimidate those around them into doing what they wanted. As one of Gage’s officers observed, “The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends.” Not since the Salem witch trials had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear, depending on which side of the issues they found themselves.

  —

  It was cold that night on the Lexington Green, and after one of the scouts whom Parker had sent down the road to Boston reported that there was no sign of the British, the militia captain dismissed his men, telling them to be ready to reassemble at the beat of a drum. Those who lived close to the green went home, but most of them, including Parker, retired to the convivial warmth of Buckman’s Tavern.

  There they would remain for the next three hours. At some point, we know that John Hancock made his way to the green. At that time, Hancock was Massachusetts’s leading political celebrity. Samuel Adams might be looked to as the mastermind, but Hancock was the public face of the patriot movement and would be later referred to that day as “King Hancock.” He was both president of the Provincial Congress and chairman of the Committee of Safety. He also had strong ties to Lexington. Not only had he been living here for the last few weeks, his grandfather had built the house in which he was staying, and some of his youth had been spent in Lexington.

  Hancock was a leading merchant and political figure, but like Joseph Warren he harbored his own military ambitions. He’d been the colonel of the Independent Company of Cadets, and after talking with the militiamen on the green (and perhaps in Buckman’s Tavern), he returned to the parsonage on the road to Bedford and began sharpening his sword. According to Hancock’s fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, who was also staying at the Clarke parsonage that night along with Hancock’s aunt, he spoke as if he intended to join the militiamen when they reformed on the green. Adams, however, patted him on the shoulder and insisted, “That is not our business; we belong to the cabinet.” When Hancock reluctantly agreed that they must “withdraw to some distant part of town,” he made one final proclamation that Sergeant William Munroe still remembered fifty years later. “If I had my musket,” he claimed, “I would never turn my back upon these troops.”

  By five in the morning, Hancock and Adams—minus Dorothy and Hancock’s aunt—were in Hancock’s carriage and rumbling toward a safer location. Meanwhile, Captain Parker had gotten startling news. The regulars were just minutes away.

  —

  Not until well after midnight had Colonel Francis Smith managed to get all seven hundred or so of his men across the Charles River. They’d been forced to wade from the boats to shore, and after once again wading across a small tidal river so as to prevent the soldiers’ leather-soled shoes from alerting the countryside as they pounded across a wooden bridge, they’d started up the road through Cambridge.

  The chilly spring air glowed with the gray light of the full moon as the grenadiers in their tall bearskin caps and the light infantrymen in their close-fitting black leather helmets trudged up the road, each footfall magnified hundreds of times into a single booming step that sounded like a giant striding out of Boston in the dark. One woman looked out her window and was astonis
hed to see the soldiers’ gun barrels glinting in the moonlight like a river of flowing silver. The widow Rand watched the soldiers pass and then went looking for her neighbor, whom she found casting bullets in a shed behind his house. When she told him of what she’d seen, he refused to believe her. Only after he’d seen the many nearly identical footprints in the road did he realize that the old woman had been telling the truth.

  In the town of Menotomy, between Cambridge and Lexington, Colonel Smith began to realize that his attempts at secrecy had gone for naught. Signal guns could be heard in the distance up ahead. He ordered his men to halt and sent back a messenger to General Gage, requesting reinforcements. In addition to the grenadiers and light infantry, Gage had included a battalion of marines in the expedition, and Smith ordered Marine Major John Pitcairn to push ahead with six companies of light infantry and secure the two bridges that provided access to the town of Concord from the north.

  The Black Horse Tavern was in Menotomy, and the sound of the regulars awakened the three Committee of Safety members who were staying there—Jeremiah Lee, Azor Orne, and Elbridge Gerry, all from Marblehead. In a panic, Gerry rushed for the front door, only to be stopped by the tavern keeper, who directed the three officials to escape out the back. Gerry proceeded to trip and fall facedown in the stubble of a cornfield, where he was soon joined by the two others, who lay trembling in the damp cold until the regulars had moved on toward Lexington.

  Pitcairn sent ahead an advance guard led by Marine Lieutenant Jesse Adair. Accompanying Adair were several loyalist guides, one of whom, Daniel Bliss from Concord, would be of immense help when it came to accomplishing their primary objective. As they pushed on through the night, they surprised several unsuspecting travelers, including Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson from Woburn, who were quickly captured and forced to march with the column.

  Around 3:30 a.m., about five miles from Lexington, they were approached by a group of horsemen. They were the officers whom Gage had sent out the previous day to guard the road to Concord. Led by Major Edward Mitchell, they had recently captured Paul Revere, who after alerting Samuel Adams and John Hancock had continued with William Dawes toward Concord. Revere had brazenly informed the officers that Smith’s troops “had catched aground in passing the river” and that since he had alarmed the countryside there would soon be as many as five hundred militiamen gathered in Lexington. As Mitchell’s group approached the town green with their captive, they heard a volley of musketry—probably warning shots intended to rouse the town—“which,” Revere later reported, “alarmed them very much.” Mitchell decided he had no choice but to release Revere and warn Smith that “the whole country” knew what they were about.

  In his conversation with Smith’s advance guard, Major Mitchell claimed that he and his fellow officers had been forced to “gallop for their lives” out of Lexington, where the militiamen were already awaiting the arrival of the troops. Seeming to corroborate Mitchell’s overheated assertions were the sounds of bells and signal guns. Beacon fires could be seen flickering in the distant hills. A well-dressed gentleman in a small carriage approached with the news that no less than six hundred militiamen had gathered on the Lexington Green; next came a wagon filled with cordwood for Boston. The driver said there were now one thousand men in Lexington.

  On they pushed through the early-morning darkness, and by 4:00 a.m., with dawn approaching, they began to detect a “vast number of country militia” moving across the boulder-strewn fields on either side of them toward Lexington. The regulars wore heavy red coats and white breeches, their chests crisscrossed by belts burdened with cartridge boxes, swords, and bayonets. The country people posed a very different picture of the “soldier” in their floppy-brimmed hats, baggy, dark-colored coats, gray homespun stockings, and buckled cowhide shoes as they strode through the dim light with their powder horns slung from their shoulders. The only significant similarity between the regulars and these militiamen was that they all carried muskets.

  Accompanying Adair in the advance guard was Lieutenant William Sutherland, who with Adair’s help was able to capture one of these militiamen—thirty-one-year-old Benjamin Wellington of Lexington, whom they relieved of his musket and, unusual for a militiaman, his bayonet. Soon after, a group of horsemen appeared in the road ahead. One of them shouted, “You had better turn back for you shall not enter the town.” As the horsemen began to gallop away, a lone rider turned and raised his musket. A soundless flash of light flared from the base of the barrel. The militiaman had pulled the trigger and ignited the weapon’s priming powder, but for some reason the main charge in the barrel had failed to detonate—what was known as a “flash in the pan.” The militiaman’s intent was unmistakable, but so far no ball had whistled in the regulars’ direction.

  A report was made to Major Pitcairn, who ordered his six companies of light infantrymen to halt. If at least one Yankee was willing to fire upon the king’s troops, he had no choice but to prepare his men for the worst as they marched into Lexington. He ordered them to load. Each soldier had a cartridge box full of paper-wrapped charges of powder and ball. After ripping open one of the cartridges with his teeth and pouring the contents into the barrel of his musket, each man threw away the top of the cartridge. Later that day, William Munroe counted approximately two hundred scraps of cartridge paper scattered on the road.

  They could hear a drum beating the militiamen to arms. Around a slight bend in the road they got their first glimpse of the Lexington Green. Immediately ahead was the three-story-high meetinghouse, with the belfry beside it, clanging away. Buckman’s Tavern was on their right, and in the distance, partly obscured by the meetinghouse, were two lines of militiamen. They estimated there were two hundred, possibly three hundred men ahead of them.

  —

  In reality, there were barely seventy militiamen on Lexington Green. After three hours of waiting, they had assembled in a poorly organized, possibly alcohol-debilitated rush. Those who hadn’t yet gotten their powder were in the meetinghouse filling their powder horns. Men were still filtering in from all sides of the common. At the moment the British appeared, Paul Revere and Hancock’s secretary John Lowell staggered past the militiamen with Hancock’s trunk of official papers, which they had just retrieved from the attic of Buckman’s Tavern and were now trying to conceal before the marauding British could get hold of it. Revere heard Parker say to his men, “Let the troops pass by. Don’t molest them, without they being first.” As had been said over and over again in instructions from the Committee of Safety, the militiamen were not to fire the first shot.

  Pitcairn’s six companies amounted to about 250 men, but to these callow militiamen in the half-light of dawn, they looked more like a brigade of 1,500. One man said, “There are so few of us it is folly to stand here.” Parker was later reported to have responded, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they want to have a war let it begin here.”

  Soon the regulars were advancing rapidly toward the militiamen and beginning to shout. At the head of the infantrymen was Lieutenant Adair and Major Mitchell, still seething with anger and humiliation after his earlier encounter with Revere. Just before they reached the meetinghouse there was a fork, with the road to Concord going left, the road to Bedford going right. The most direct route toward the militia was to swing right of the meetinghouse, and that’s the way Adair, Mitchell, and the six companies of light infantry went. Pitcairn, who was behind them, swung to the left of the meeting and momentarily lost sight of the companies ahead. For some reason, four of the companies halted beside an oak tree near the meetinghouse, but Adair and Mitchell and two companies of about thirty men each charged on toward the militiamen.

  For many months now, the regulars had endured the taunts and outright maliciousness of not just the Bostonians but also country people just like these. It was the country people who had refused to allow the barracks to be built that might have saved the lives of
the soldiers’ comrades and loved ones who were now buried at the edge of Boston Common. For the regulars this was personal, not political. If any of these farmers dared to fire their muskets, a British volley was sure to follow.

  One officer, perhaps Mitchell, shouted, “Damn them, we will have them!” About seventy-five yards from the militiamen, the two companies were ordered to form a line of battle, an interlocking formation of three lines, staggered in such a way that the men behind were able to fire over the shoulders of those ahead of them. Crying “Huzza! Huzza!,” the regulars shouted so loud that orders were impossible to hear. There were three officers on horses positioned just ahead of the regulars, and at least one of them was having a virtual tantrum, shouting “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels, damn you, disperse!”

  With dozens of British muskets pointed in their direction, Parker decided that they had no choice but to do exactly as the officer was telling them to do, so he ordered his men to disperse. Some of the militiamen were immediately on the move; others, perhaps not able to hear Parker, stood either stubbornly or in catatonic fear and held their ground. Some of the militia claimed one of the mounted officers fired his pistol. The British regulars claimed that it was the provincials who fired first—not those gathered on the green, but someone behind a stone wall to their right or perhaps standing at a doorway or window of Buckman’s Tavern. Major Pitcairn was riding toward the two companies, shouting, “Soldiers, don’t fire, keep your ranks, and surround them.” At some point, his horse was hit by two balls fired from the sidelines. One soldier was hit in the leg; another in the hand. Soon the two companies of light infantry were firing without orders. The first volley was ragged and indistinct but was then followed by a “continual roar.”

  The smoke was so thick that the only evidence of the enemy the militiamen could see were the heads of the officers’ horses. At first, John Munroe was convinced that the regulars were firing only warning blanks, since no one seemed to be getting hit by any balls. But when the man beside him—another Munroe by the name of Ebenezer—got slammed in the arm by a ball, they knew otherwise. Despite his wound, Ebenezer shouted, “I’ll give them the guts of my gun,” and blasted away into the acrid cloud of dark gray smoke. Ebenezer later testified that the air was so thick with whizzing musket balls that “I thought there was no chance for escape and that I might as well fire my gun as stand still and do nothing.” John Munroe was one of the few militiamen to get off two shots. Unfortunately, he overcharged his musket the second time, and “the strength of the charge took off about a foot of my gun barrel.” Captain Parker’s cousin Jonas had placed his hat full of musket balls and flints on the ground between his feet and vowed he would “never run.” He was hit on the second volley, and as he lay on the ground, struggling to reload his gun, the infantrymen ran up and stabbed him to death with their bayonets.