American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Captain John Nixon was in command of a minute company of West Sudbury men attached to Colonel Abijah Pierce’s regiment. Nixon and his company reached Dugan’s Corner, on the Sudbury side of the South Bridge, about 9:00 a.m. and awaited orders either to advance into Concord over the South Bridge or march to the west and rendezvous at Colonel Barrett’s farm. Nixon had what seems to have been standing orders—witness Parker’s actions a few hours earlier at Lexington—not to fire unless fired upon. But then came word that Captain Mundy Pole’s contingent had occupied the South Bridge in a manner calculated to prevent rebel forces from converging in Concord, exactly as General Gage’s orders had intended.

  Nixon was content to obey his orders and stand his ground, but a member of the town’s exempt company—those advanced in years and excused from active service—had nonetheless tagged along and now exhorted Captain Nixon, “If you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward!” There were murmurs of assent from among his men, but Nixon stood his ground. “I should rather be called a coward by you,” Nixon replied evenly, “than called to account by my superior officer, for disobedience of orders.” Soon afterward, the West Sudbury company received orders to march westward to Barrett’s farm, and Captain Pole continued his occupation of the South Bridge without incident.30

  The remaining companies of light infantry and the bulk of the grenadiers stayed in the center of Concord under Colonel Smith’s direct control. All in all, his force was getting spread rather thin—about one hundred men at the South Bridge, a mile to the west of the town common; another 120 at or near the North Bridge, a mile to the north; 120 with Captain Parsons a good two miles beyond that, digging around Barrett’s farm; and the remaining number of about five hundred searching the buildings in Concord proper. (Whether the light infantry company of the Twenty-Third with its complement of thirty-eight officers and men had belatedly joined Parsons or was somewhere in between Barrett’s farm and Concord has never been entirely clear.) Meanwhile, up on Punkatasset Hill, Colonel Barrett’s militia companies were growing increasingly restless. Many were itching for a fight.

  Chapter 12

  By the Rude Bridge

  At the North Bridge, Captain Walter Laurie of the Forty-Third Regiment was growing increasingly nervous. He had only forty-some men to defend this key point, and the numbers of rebel militia looking down from Punkatasset Hill appeared to be growing with each passing minute. Captain Parsons and three companies were up the road about two miles to the west at Barrett’s farm, while two other companies, those of the Tenth and Fourth Regiments, had been left tenuously positioned atop two knolls about four hundred yards beyond the bridge in advance of Laurie’s position. Laurie had had no communication with them or with Colonel Smith in his rear. He was feeling alone and surrounded when once again Lieutenant William Sutherland put himself at the center of things.

  Without a command of his own and no direct orders from Colonel Smith, Sutherland had been free to tag along with Captain Parsons’s force as it initially marched out of Concord. When Parsons momentarily posted the light infantry company of Sutherland’s own Thirty-Eighth Regiment on yet another knoll along the road to Barrett’s farm, as he had done with those of the Tenth and Fourth, Sutherland appears to have lingered near the bridge. Now Sutherland told the nervous Captain Laurie that he would saunter up the road and make contact with the companies of the Tenth and Fourth as well as his own.

  Meanwhile, the commanders of the companies of the Tenth and Fourth also got nervous atop their little knolls. Seeing these clumps of redcoats pop up on the two hilltops, the assembled rebel militia had cautiously moved toward them for a closer look. Lieutenant Waldron Kelly, momentarily in command of the company from the Tenth because Captain Parsons was off commanding the combined force at Barrett’s farm, reacted first. As Ensign Jeremy Lister of Kelly’s company recalled, “We saw a large Body of Men drawn up with the greatest regularity and approach’d us seemingly with an intent to attack, when Lt Kelly who then Commanded our Compy with myself thought it most proper to retire from our situation and join the 4th Compy which we did.”1

  As this was happening, Lieutenant Sutherland arrived and became “exceedingly vexed” that Captain Parsons had gone on farther—although that appears always to have been the plan. Sutherland begged Lieutenant Kelly of the Tenth “to give me 2 men to go after them,” which Kelly did. But as this trio started up the road toward Barrett’s, the rebels “still approached,” and the officers of the Tenth and Fourth Companies made the decision to retire together and join Captain Laurie at the bridge. “Luckily for us,” Ensign Lister remembered, “we joined the 43rd Compy [Laurie’s] and not a shot [was] Fired.”2

  Sutherland and his two enlisted men might well have continued ahead in search of Parsons and wound up being captured by the advancing rebels, but one of the soldiers called out to him, “Sir, the Company of the 4th are retiring.” Upon hearing this Sutherland expressed surprise but then looked to his right and “saw a large body of men marching almost within Pistol shot of me, [and] it struck me it would be disgracefull to be taken by such Rascals & I made the best of my way for the Bridge never out of reach of Musquet shot of this party.”3

  Thus Captain Laurie ended up with three companies, as well as the always eager Sutherland, at the bridge instead of his own single company. But the increasing numbers arrayed against Laurie made him no less nervous. Rebels continued to move down Punkatasset Hill and occupy the knolls west of the bridge that the regulars had just vacated. They appeared content to continue their waiting game, albeit at much closer range.

  Captain Laurie consulted with Lieutenant Sutherland—“was kind enough to ask me,” in Sutherland’s words—if they had not better alert Colonel Smith about the rebel forces now not only arrayed near them but also seemingly threatening Captain Parsons’s line of withdrawal from Barrett’s farm. Sutherland agreed “by all means as their Disposition appeared to be very regular & determined.” Laurie sent Lieutenant Alexander Robertson of his own Forty-Third Regiment riding hard back down the road to Concord.4

  BY NOW, THE REBEL MILITIA closest to the North Bridge numbered about five hundred men. These were divided into two regiments of five companies each. One was a regiment of minuteman companies commanded by Major John Buttrick of Concord. His home stood about a quarter of a mile to the north of the bridge on the far side. Under his command were companies from Acton, Bedford, Lincoln, and two from Concord. The regiment of regular militia was composed of five older, slower companies from the same towns under the command of Colonel James Barrett. As the senior officer present, Barrett assumed overall command of both regiments. If Barrett and Buttrick represented older, more cautious warriors who had seen the face of war, their adjutant was a young hot-spur lieutenant named Joseph Hosmer.5

  As Barrett and Buttrick held a council with their officers, not everyone in their ranks was ready to fight. One of the men from nearby Lincoln, James Nichols, was remembered as an amusing sort of fellow and a fine singer. “If any of you will hold my gun,” Nichols remarked to his neighbors that morning, “I will go down and talk to them,” meaning the British. Someone took his gun, and Nichols strolled down to the bridge by himself and had quite a conversation with the regulars. No one knows what was said, and Lieutenant Sutherland in his detailed account made no mention of this lone rebel dropping by for a chat. But afterward Nichols returned to his militia unit, retrieved his gun, and said simply that he was going home, and he did.6

  Meanwhile, the grenadier companies in Concord proper were going about their search for weapons and supplies. By some accounts, they did so in the most genteel manner. The readily apparent matériel had long since been spirited away, and what was left had been hidden in ingenious ways. When a British officer pounded on Timothy Wheeler’s door and demanded entrance to his barn, where a large quantity of provincial flour was stored, Wheeler got his key and graciously granted him admission. But when the officer expressed pleasure in his find, Wheele
r launched into quite an act. “This is my flour,” he told the officer indignantly. “I am a miller, Sir. Yonder stands my mill. I get my living by it. In the winter I grind a great deal of grain, and get it ready for market in the spring.” Pointing to other barrels with exaggerated bluster, Wheeler proceeded to identify numerous barrels of “his” flour, “his” wheat, and “his” rye.

  “Well,” replied the officer rather glumly, “we do not injure private property,” and with that he and his men withdrew, leaving the cache untouched.

  Ephraim Jones doubled as a tavern keeper and the town jailer, but he had also been given custody of important papers from the provincial treasurer. Jones was initially taken prisoner and detained by a guard of five men with fixed bayonets, but after a short while they decided that he could be of better service if he opened his tavern and set up a round of drinks, which he did. But before they partook, the soldiers entered his house to search for rebel supplies. As the regulars approached the bedroom where the records were hidden, Hannah Barns, who boarded with the Jones family, defiantly stood in the doorway and insisted that it was her bedroom and contained only her property. Perhaps hearing the call that drinks were being served, the regulars left Miss Barns and the room unmolested.7

  Similar incidents were taking placing near the South Bridge, where Captain Mundy Pole and his detachment had been dispatched. Entering several homes just beyond the bridge, Pole’s troops ordered milk, potatoes, meat, and other refreshments for a late but much-needed breakfast. In the house of Ephraim Wood, one of those instrumental in hiding most of the stores a few days before, the regulars sought to arrest the owner, but he was not home. At the nearby home of Amos Wood, Ephraim’s brother and a sergeant in a minuteman company, Pole’s men graciously paid the female members of the household a guinea apiece for their breakfast. Searching the house, an officer found one room tightly locked and asked Dorothy Wood, Amos’s wife, whether there were other females hiding there. Mrs. Wood, too, played her role well and by her answer, the officer took that to be the case. Gallantly, he told his troops, “I forbid any one entering this room!” and once again another cache of military stores was saved.8

  All in all, it was estimated that the grenadiers broke open just sixty barrels of flour—out of a total of three or four hundred hidden around town—and “knocked off the trunnions of three iron twenty-four pound cannon, burnt sixteen new carriage wheels, and a few barrels of wooden trenchers and spoons.”9 It was a rather poor haul, but the fire that was started to destroy these pieces was to have severe consequences. A pile was set ablaze near the courthouse on the northernmost corner of the village common. This was on the road to the North Bridge and easily visible from the knolls to the west of the bridge that were now occupied by Barrett’s and Buttrick’s regiments. The fire got out of control and quickly spread to the nearby walls of the courthouse.

  Martha Moulton, a seventy-one-year-old widow living next door, had found herself the unwilling hostess of some fifty or sixty officers and men who had been “in and out the house, calling for water and what they wanted” for some time. Initially, they ignored her cries to extinguish the blaze even as she stood in her doorway with a single pail of water in hand. Moulton recalled that only after she “ventured to put as much strength to her arguments as an unfortunate widow would think of” did the troops form a bucket brigade and put “one pail of water after another” on the fire. Whether they did so out of genuine concern or in response to Mrs. Moulton’s fevered assertion that the upper floor of the building was filled with powder that was likely to explode and kill them all is open to speculation. So the courthouse and town buildings were saved, but the billowing smoke from the fire had already set events in motion at the North Bridge.10

  ON THE RISE TO THE west of the North Bridge, Colonel Barrett and Major Buttrick were still conferring with their officers. Their companies were formed in a line with those of Buttrick’s regiment of minutemen on the right and Barrett’s regular militia on the left as they faced the bridge. Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer interrupted this conference and pointed to a cloud of black smoke rising from near the town common. Unaware that Mrs. Moulton was goading her unwelcome guests into a bucket brigade, the observers surmised that the British had set fire to one or more buildings in town.

  It is interesting that most contemporary and secondary accounts of the battle at Concord’s North Bridge focus almost exclusively on the rebel militia facing the bridge and the town beyond it. Little is said of the British force at their rear—the 120-some men then deployed with Captain Parsons at Barrett’s farm. To be sure, Barrett’s and Buttrick’s two regiments were being reinforced by companies and full regiments arriving from surrounding towns, and Parsons’s numbers soon paled in comparison. But the fact that the militiamen ignored or at least downplayed this potential threat in their rear simply underscores their overriding concern for what the British were doing in the town. Protection of their families, homes, and property was their primary concern, not an armed confrontation with British forces.

  For a moment or two, all stood transfixed by the smoke curling up from near the courthouse. Then Lieutenant Hosmer, not so much as a call to arms but as a “what-in-the-world-are-we-waiting-for” question, asked of his commanders the obvious: “Will you stand here and let them burn the town down?” The answer came in Colonel Barrett’s command to march, with the minuteman companies on the right leading the column. And so down off the hill they came.11

  There is an oft-told tale that the two regiments of rebel militia marched the final yards toward the North Bridge to the spirited sounds of fifes and drums playing “The White Cockade.” The background to the story makes it almost too good to be true—but it may well be true. The tune was a traditional Scottish air that had been an unofficial standard of Charles Stuart, known to history as Bonnie Prince Charlie, during his attempt to restore the House of Stuart to the British monarchy. Stuart wore a white rose in his bonnet as a symbol of rebellion before his cause was defeated at Culloden in 1746. While Robert Burns’s lyrics, including the famous line “He takes the field wi’ his White Cockade,” would not be written until 1790, the tune itself was a country dancing set piece much earlier.

  To suggest, as some participants and historians did afterward, that this march was played to gall the British regulars with memories of Stuart’s earlier rebellion is probably overreaching. Truth be told, the British rank and file were far too young to have seen service at Culloden or to have been much influenced by it. The only British officer near Concord to have been on the field at Culloden was General Gage, and he was miles away in Boston, for the moment blissfully ignorant of the extent of the calamity about to befall Colonel Smith’s troops.

  More likely, if “The White Cockade” was played at all that morning, it was chosen because it was a well-known and catchy tune. What does seem certain is that with the Acton company leading the regiment in column toward the North Bridge, Luther Blanchard, its fifer, and Francis Barker, its young drummer, were giving the performance of their lives no matter which tune they called.12

  But was the Acton company of minutemen supposed to be in front? Its commander was thirty-year-old Isaac Davis, a gunsmith by trade. The captain had left his wife, Hannah, and their four small children, the youngest of whom was but fifteen months old, and hurried eastward from Acton about five miles to the heights above the North Bridge. Davis was “serious and thoughtful” after the alarm that morning, Hannah later recalled, but he “never seemed to hesitate in the course of his duty.” As he led his company away from his home, Davis turned toward his wife and appeared on the verge of uttering some parting endearment, but all he could manage was, “Take good care of the children.”13

  A half century later, what might be called the second battle of the North Bridge was fought in an exchange of letters and depositions from aging veterans of the engagement. The debate centered over whether a company of Concord men began leading the minuteman regiment down the slope from Major Buttrick’s residence on
ly to have Davis’s company from Acton cut in front and take the lead. Some reports have the two companies arriving in tandem and drawing up alongside one another in front of the bridge. Whatever the exact order of march, there is little question what happened next.14

  OBSERVING THE REBEL COLUMN COMING toward them, Captain Laurie and his troops at the bridge were genuinely surprised. This was not Captain Parker’s small band hastily gathered on Lexington Green and then just as hastily dispersed. Here was a military column of apparently well-drilled and disciplined troops advancing toward their position. Ensign Jeremy Lister, who was with the company from the Tenth, recalled that the rebel advance was made “with as much order as the best disciplind Troops.”15

  With these men advancing toward him, Captain Laurie suddenly recognized what he should have known upon first crossing the bridge. The best defensive position was on the opposite (Concord) side of the bridge, with the bridge and river to his front and not to his rear. According to Laurie, his fellow company commanders and Lieutenant Sutherland, who among these higher-ranking captains was still being accorded a surprising degree of deference, heartily, if belatedly, concurred.

  Laurie accordingly ordered the three companies to fall back across the bridge—and indeed they might have retreated all the way to Concord but for one of those little acts that suddenly and irrevocably changes the mood of a given moment. Ensign Lister claimed that it was his idea, but it may have come almost simultaneously from Laurie and the other officers. Thus Laurie’s troops paused to rip up planks on the North Bridge to impede, if not outright prevent, the advancing rebel militia from pursuing them. (What Captain Parsons and his companies of regulars out on the road toward Barrett’s farm may have thought about this maneuver is another matter.) Typical of his account, Lieutenant Sutherland asserted that he was the last to cross the bridge and in doing so “raised the first plank.”16