Ripping up these planks was a destruction of property that galled the oncoming militia and, if anything, was just the sort of overt act that seemed to confirm that the smoke rising from the town was no accident. Major Buttrick announced, “If we were all his mind, he would drive them away from the bridge—they should not tear that up.” Buttrick took no formal vote, but there were murmurs of approval among his men, and Amos Barrett remembered, “We all said we would go.” Significantly, this rebel force, alarming though it appeared to Captain Laurie and his troops, had not yet loaded its weapons. That changed as Buttrick gave the order to load and gave further “strict orders not to fire till they fired first, then to fire as fast as we could.”17
Colonel Barrett later testified that his orders had been largely the same: “to march to said bridge and pass the same, but not to fire on the King’s Troops unless they were first fired upon.” Accordingly, seeing the regulars continuing to rip up planks on the bridge, Captain Davis and the Acton company of minutemen “quickened our pace, and ran toward them.” The companies behind them followed suit, and the approach of this determined column had the effect of hurrying the wrecking-party members off the bridge and back into their ranks.18 Then, as on the green at Lexington that morning, an errant shot rang out.
Who fired this first shot is still a matter of conjecture. Thomas Thorp, who was a member of Captain Davis’s Acton company, saw “a ball strike the water” of the Concord River on his right and then thought that “some other guns were fired over our heads.” Thaddeus Blood, a private in Captain Nathan Barrett’s company of Concord militia, also “saw where the Ball threw up the water about the middle of the river, then a second and third shot.” Significantly, Blood also remembered that just before “a gun was fired,” a British officer “rode up.”19
Who was this man on horseback? By all accounts Captain Laurie was not mounted, nor, it seems, were his brother officers—except, quite possibly, for Lieutenant William Sutherland. It is impossible to know with certainty where and when Sutherland was mounted. If he indeed stopped, as he reported, and “raised the first plank” in destroying the bridge, he had to have been on foot at that point. He might easily have remounted and ridden to the left of the British line forming behind the bridge. This was the position that afforded the best view of the oncoming rebels. Did Sutherland fire the first shot—either as an excited accidental discharge or with more deliberate aim, as he may or may not have done that morning at Lexington? It is an intriguing question and an inviting proposition to blame one man—whatever his motives or inadequacies—for starting the firing at both confrontations.20
What is almost certain, however, is that the first shot came from the British side. Captain Laurie himself reported as much to General Gage in an after-action report: “I imagine myself that a man of my company (afterwards killed) did first fire his piece.”21 For his part, Sutherland was as adamant about the initial shot at Concord as he was about the first shot at Lexington. He claimed that the rebels had fired first at a cluster of men he was trying to form near the bridge and implied that he himself was dismounted at the time.22
These first shots—perhaps as many as three in total—were followed by a full volley from the British side. At least the front rank of one company of regulars that Laurie had positioned immediately at the eastern end of the bridge fired a ragged volley that wounded Luther Blanchard, the fifer, and put a stop to whatever music he was playing. Captain Davis gave the order to return fire, which the Acton men did, but another volley from the ranks of the regulars struck Davis and Abner Hosmer, a distant cousin of Joseph’s, dead. Ezekiel Davis, a brother of the captain, came within a fraction of an inch of a similar fate when a ball passed through his hat and grazed his head.23
Solomon Smith wasn’t sure whether it was Captain Davis or Major Buttrick as the regimental commander who had given the order to fire, but Smith quoted Buttrick as exclaiming, “Fire, for God’s sake, fire!” Two British soldiers were killed, one of whom was left on the ground wounded and subsequently killed by a rebel with a hatchet blow to the head. This was a particularly grisly moment, and the British repeated accounts of it as an example of American savagery. For their part, the Americans were equally appalled, and it was excused “only by the excitement and inexperience of the perpetrator.” The perpetrator later confessed that the deed “had worried him very much,” but that he thought he was doing right at the time.24
Meanwhile, in Concord proper, Colonel Smith and Major Pitcairn had been supervising the search of the town and watching the bucket brigade save the courthouse at Mrs. Moulton’s insistence. Into this scene rode Lieutenant Alexander Robertson with Captain Laurie’s desperate plea for assistance at the North Bridge. If Smith in his usual deliberative way chose to consider the gravity of Laurie’s situation and ponder his response, the sound of the first few scattered shots and then full-blown volleys sped his decision and told him that for the second time that day things had gotten decidedly out of hand. The colonel quickly assembled two companies of grenadiers—about sixty men—and personally set off for the bridge half a mile away.
But Colonel Smith was not the only British officer to be alarmed by the sounds of this firing. A mile and a half to the west of the North Bridge, at Colonel Barrett’s farm, its mistress, Rebeckah Barrett, had been standing her ground in the face of Captain Parsons and his men. Parsons and his officers offered to pay Mrs. Barrett for refreshments—evidently water and perhaps some food, as a request by one of the sergeants for something stouter was refused both by Mrs. Barrett and his commanding officer. But Rebeckah Barrett also refused the proffered payments, saying, “We are commanded to feed our enemies.”
In searching the Barrett house, the regulars took fifty dollars from a drawer but overlooked casks of musket balls, cartridges, and flints that were hidden in the attic and shrewdly covered by a layer of feathers. But then Parsons accosted Barrett’s twenty-five-year-old son, Stephen, and on learning his identity ordered him ready to march for Boston in order to be sent to England to stand trial for treason.
Once again, Rebeckah Barrett showed some Yankee brass. She pointedly intervened and asserted that while Stephen was indeed her son, he was not the master of the house in his father’s place and should not be detained. Parsons seems to have acquiesced and turned his attention to some gun carriages. He ordered them burned, but before his troops could get a blaze going they all heard the sound of musket fire coming from the direction of the North Bridge. Uncertain as to what was occurring, Captain Parsons formed his troops and started on the road back to Concord.25
With perhaps as many as one thousand rebels either assaulting the North Bridge or descending toward it from the nearby hills, there might have been quite a battle as Captain Parsons and Colonel Smith converged on Captain Laurie’s tenuous position. But Laurie’s men were not waiting around to find out. After firing several volleys and becoming entangled in some confusion as front ranks tried to drop to the rear and the others tried to step up, the three companies of the Fourth, Tenth, and Forty-Third regiments beat a hasty retreat back along the road toward Concord. “The weight of their fire,” Ensign Lister wrote of the rebel onslaught, “was such that we was obliged to give way, then run with the greatest precipitance.”26
Laurie’s companies retreated until they met the reinforcements of grenadiers that Colonel Smith was hurrying from Concord. Once again, it would be fascinating to know the exact words that passed between Smith and one of his junior officers. Major Pitcairn had been in charge at the confrontation on Lexington Green, and now Captain Laurie had been responsible for another bloody encounter. What’s more, Laurie had failed to secure the line of retreat for Captain Parsons’s companies returning from Colonel Barrett’s farm.
The remaining companies of rebel minutemen under Major Buttrick scrambled over the missing planks of the North Bridge behind the Acton and Concord men and found two regulars dead and another dying. As Amos Barrett recalled, “There were 8 or 10 that were wounded and a r
unning and a hobbling about, looking back to see if we were after them.” But then the rebels “saw the whole body coming out of town,” and Buttrick ordered his troops “to lay behind a wall that run over a hill and when [Smith’s grenadiers] got near enough, Maj. Buttrick said he would give the word fire.”
Amos Barrett believed that had Buttrick given the order, “we would have killed almost every officer there was in the front.” But the grenadiers halted, probably as Smith and Parsons conferred, and after about ten minutes they turned around and marched back to Concord, protecting Captain Laurie’s retreat.27 Who would protect Captain Parsons’s retreat from Barrett’s farm was another matter.
Captain Laurie reported his casualties at the North Bridge as three privates killed and four officers, a sergeant, and four other ranks—nine in all—wounded. These included Lieutenant Sutherland, who received a slight wound in his right breast. Among the rebels, Captain Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer lay dead and Luther Blanchard wounded. “It is strange,” Amos Barrett recalled, that “there were no more killed, but they fired too high.”28 Indeed, the mortal wounds to Davis and Hosmer were inflicted upon their heads.
The rebel dead were taken first to Major Buttrick’s house, near the battlefield, and then to the Davis home in Acton, where Hannah Davis saw to it that her husband, the captain, was “placed in my bedroom till the funeral. His countenance was pleasant, and seemed little altered.”29
WATCHING THE REGULARS DISAPPEAR TOWARD Concord, the rebel militia—from Colonel Barrett and Major Buttrick down to the greenest recruit—appeared stunned by the exchange of fire that had just taken place and not sure of their next action. The smoke from the town that had sparked their initial advance had died down, suggesting there was no immediate rush to continue their advance. They were in possession of the North Bridge, which remained largely intact. No one seems to have given much notice to the troops of Parsons’s companies in their rear.
“After a short time,” recalled Solomon Smith of the Acton company, “we dispersed, and, without any regularity, went back over the bridge.” For a time, Thaddeus Blood confirmed, “every one appeared to be his own commander.”30
Into this momentary confusion marched Captain Parsons and his men, fresh from Barrett’s farm. The hairs on the backs of their necks must have been standing on end. There was no sign of Captain Laurie and nary a redcoat in sight, only hundreds of rough-cut rebels with guns in their hands. Had Parsons halted his troops or commanded them to load, they might have all been killed or taken prisoner. But he simply kept them marching straight ahead.
“Notwithstanding” the casualties on both sides a few minutes before, Ensign Henry De Berniere, who had guided Parsons’s detachment to Barrett’s farm, expressed surprise that “they let Capt. Parsons with his three companies return, and never attacked us.” Encountering the planks pulled up on the North Bridge, De Berniere assumed it was the work of the rebels, designed to impede the regulars’ return, and not the work of his comrades. Despite the raised planks, “we got over,” recorded De Berniere, but “had they destroyed it we were most certainly all lost.”31
Minuteman Solomon Smith agreed. The regulars “passed us without molestation,” and it was “owing to our want of order, and our confused state,” recalled Smith, “that they were not taken prisoners.”32
But the day’s fight and casualties—on both sides—were far from over. Colonel Smith has faced pointed criticism from modern analysts for being slow to depart Concord. No doubt a small part of this apparent delay came from his usual deliberate manner of operation. But Smith also required time to re-form his widely scattered command. As Captain Laurie’s beleaguered companies marched into the Concord town common with two companies of grenadiers covering their backs, Colonel Smith rode up the small rise of the cemetery hill north of the common to survey the scene.
Laurie’s wounded were cared for, and horse-drawn chaises were appropriated from Concord stables to serve as makeshift ambulances. Major Pitcairn assembled the companies that had been searching Concord homes and buildings. Captain Mundy Pole was recalled from the South Bridge. Smith nervously watched both the road from the North Bridge—down which he expected Captain Parsons would come and from which he also perhaps feared an onslaught of rebels—and the road from Lexington, down which he desperately hoped to see some sign of the relief column he had requested of General Gage earlier that morning.
Smith couldn’t believe his luck when he saw Parsons and his companies march over the North Bridge unopposed and arrive in town tired and thirsty but alive. There was no sign, however, of red-coated soldiers on the road from Lexington—only growing numbers of rebels in homespun filling the ridgelines and surrounding hills.
All this took time. Reverend William Emerson, watching from the ridge above Smith’s position, recorded a scene of disarray and reported, “For half an hour ye Enemy by their Marches and counter Marches discovered great Ficklness and Inconstancy of Mind, sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former Posts, till at Length they quitted ye Town.”33
A British history of the affair charged that Smith “delayed until noon; and those two hours were his ruin.”34 The latter proved correct, but the full two hours cannot be charged singularly to Smith’s delay. By most accounts, the best estimate of the time of the encounter at the North Bridge was 10:00 a.m. Captain Parsons heard these shots while still at Barrett’s farm. If he departed immediately—and it would have taken at least a few minutes to assemble his troops, as they were still searching the farm—it would have taken almost an hour to march the two miles from the farm, across the bridge, and into Concord, and it may well have taken longer. Given the necessity of awaiting the recall of Parsons’s and Pole’s troops, half an hour to prepare to march once they both arrived is much more likely. For Smith to have taken any less time to reorganize his column would have meant even more chaos on the road to Lexington than he was about to encounter.
Thus it was near high noon when Colonel Smith’s column heard his command to march. Boston, depending on the route, was almost twenty miles away, and it had already been a long night and morning. Whatever his critics would say, Smith must have been eager to get out of Concord without further bloodshed on either side. It was clear from the activity on the surrounding hills that rebels were continuing to congregate. It was time to escape this melee and return to Boston—if they could.
Chapter 13
Retreat, If We Can
How was General Thomas Gage spending what would become such a momentous day? It had not started well. The general was awakened shortly after 5:00 a.m. on the nineteenth by the arrival of the messenger whom Colonel Smith had dispatched with a request for more troops even before Smith’s column reached Lexington. Gage had gone to bed the night before quite confident that he had made arrangements for just such a contingency. In fact, the general may well have been planning all along to use a second force of overwhelming numbers to crush any rebel resistance that dared challenge Smith’s advance.
Before retiring, Gage had issued orders to Lord Percy’s brigade of three regiments and a battalion of Pitcairn’s marines to be assembled and ready to march at four o’clock the next morning. All told, this amounted to about fifteen hundred officers and men and included such well-trained troops as those of the Fourth “King’s Own” Regiment of Foot. Gage’s first waking thought was that this force now stood ready to march. A quick inquiry showed otherwise.
Gage’s orders—perhaps written by his confidential secretary, Samuel Kemble—were addressed to Lord Percy’s brigade major, Captain Thomas Moncrieffe. In one of what a contemporary British history called “two stupid blunders we committed,” they were delivered to Moncrieffe’s quarters, but the captain was out for the evening. Moncrieffe later came home and went to bed oblivious of them. Consequently, as General Gage roused himself and heard Smith’s recommendation for reinforcements, the troops of the First Brigade were sound asleep. Why Lord Percy himself, who had been with General Gage the evening before and
supposedly reported to him that their plan against Concord was known, did not take steps to ensure that his brigade was at the ready is just another of the mysteries of that evening.
The second “stupid” blunder was even more incredible. As the regiments of the First Brigade hastily prepared to march, Percy waited expectantly for the battalion of marines. By the time his regiments were finally formed and squared away, it was well after 7:00 a.m. Still, there was no sign of the marines. With what seems like far too much patience considering the confusion that had befallen his own troops, Percy waited some more before finally sending an aide to determine their condition. The marines, too, were asleep. Their orders had been sent to Major Pitcairn’s quarters and left there unopened, despite the fact that “the gentleman concerned in this business ought to have recollected that Pitcairn had been dispatched” with Colonel Smith. “This double mistake,” the British history concluded, “lost us from four till nine o’clock, the time we marched off to support Col. Smith.”1
Lord Percy took the route that Colonel Smith probably wished that he had taken instead of his watery crossing and slog through the marshes: south out of Boston by way of Boston Neck, westward through Roxbury, across the Charles River at the Cambridge bridge, and on through Cambridge toward Menotomy. Although it was midmorning, according to Percy, “all the houses were shut up, & there was not the appearance of a single inhabitant.” Those who dared to peer out from shuttered windows saw a rather grand procession led by an advance guard of a captain and fifty men and two six-pound cannons—the latter calculated mostly for show, as Percy had declined to be encumbered with an ammunition wagon. Consequently, the supply of six-pound shot was limited to what was held in the ammo boxes on the two gun carriages.
American Spring Page 19
