American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Despite what in any other engagement would have been an appalling dead-and-wounded casualty rate of 25 percent, out of the seventy-five-man contingent that assembled that morning, Captain John Parker had rallied his troops by ten o’clock and struck west from Lexington to await the return of Colonel Smith’s force. To his subsequent chagrin, Parker had formed his troops in proper military order that morning. Now he would employ the Indian-style ambush attack that his men knew so well. And there was no better place to make it than this forested terrain on the Lincoln-Lexington line. They would still be defending their town.

  Parker spread his men—reinforced by Lexington men who had lived too far away to respond that morning—along the wooded ledge above the road. This position offered a good view of the road to the west, and the ridge rising higher to the north offered a good defense against any flanking attempts. Their wait must have been filled with anxiety and a continued measure of disbelief over what had befallen them earlier. And, too, these Lexington men still had no concrete news about what had occurred at Concord.

  Finally, about 1:00 p.m., after Smith had been under way from Concord about an hour, a rebel horseman galloped up to Parker and reported that the regulars had indeed fired on militia at Concord and were now attempting to escape back to Boston. As the sounds of battle came toward Parker’s position, it reminded those who had been within earshot of the regulars’ victory volley and the three cheers that had echoed across their green that morning after their neighbors lay dead and bayoneted.

  With no flankers out front or to the sides, the first to ride into this waiting hornet’s nest was Captain Parsons, with the ragged remains of his own company from the Tenth Regiment. These included Lieutenant Waldron Kelly, who had been wounded at the North Bridge, and Ensign Jeremy Lister, who had been so quick to volunteer the night before. Lister had been wounded in his right elbow during the exchange at Merriam’s Corner. Smith rode just behind them, at the head of the main column, and his ample girth made for an easily recognizable target to those who had seen him in action that morning.

  Behind them marched the light infantry company of the Fifth Regiment, followed by those of the Twenty-Third and Captain Walter Laurie’s Forty-Third. Parker watched silently and with no small measure of satisfaction as these units hurried along his line of fire. When the first three companies were spread out below, the Lexington men unleashed a ferocious volley that slammed into the column along its left flank. Colonel Smith was among those hit. He suffered a wound in the thigh and dropped from his horse. Captain Parsons, so lucky in his return over the North Bridge, was wounded in the arm.

  As Parker’s men continued to fire, Major Pitcairn rode forward into this leadership void and directed a counterattack against the Lexington militia. He hurried companies of grenadiers from the rear of the column to assault Parker’s right flank and sent the flankers who had been lagging on the right of the column around its head to harry Parker’s left. Meanwhile, this action caused the following companies in the British column to begin to telescope inward upon each other along the road.

  Parker’s men continued to fire at will into the advancing British troops, but they were soon on the verge of being overrun. Jedediah Munroe, who had been wounded that morning on Lexington Green, was struck by another ball and this time fell mortally wounded. Parker had little choice except to withdraw from the location that is now called Parker’s Revenge. As his men came off the hill, they scattered into the woods.

  Pitcairn didn’t dare follow. His objective was to clear their roadblock and urge the leading companies of the British column onward toward a small hill called the Bluff. Here he could defend the passage of the remainder of the column past Parker’s abandoned position and also protect the route up the next obstacle, Fiske Hill. In desperation, Pitcairn turned to his own marines and ordered them to seize and hold the Bluff. His marines did so, and this gave Pitcairn time to reorganize the column before it fought its way up Fiske Hill.

  But Parker’s men had accomplished more than they knew. Their delay of Smith’s column had given the companies of militia that had started the attack at Merriam’s Corner time to leapfrog to the head of the British column and renew their attacks even as Pitcairn was riding madly about re-forming the head of his column. As these militia units took up positions along Fiske Hill, their volley fire again raked the British column. Pitcairn’s horse was hit, and the major went sprawling in the dirt, irate but unhurt.

  This new onslaught appeared to be the end of Smith’s command. The road over Fiske Hill was steep and heavily wooded—another bloody box of rebel cross fire. For many a regular it was the end of any self-respect and discipline. As the advance companies of the column again appeared to stall on the hill, the following companies collided into them and in the melee all sense of order was lost. It quickly became every man for himself. This throng pushed past Fiske Hill but then was met with yet another obstacle—Concord Hill, on the outskirts of Lexington proper.18

  “When we arrived within a mile of Lexington,” Ensign Henry De Berniere recalled, “our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking that they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward… [and] we began to run rather than retreat in order.”19 What further peril awaited them at Lexington Green one could only guess.

  To Lieutenant John Barker it appeared that their choices were that “we must have laid down our arms, or been picked off by the rebels at their pleasure.”20 As a last recourse, the few remaining officers who were not wounded “got to the front and presented their bayonets.” They told the men that if anyone tried to flee, he would die.21 To most, it mattered not whether they met their end from a rebel musket ball or a bayonet thrust by one of their own officers. It looked as if this was the end of Smith’s column.

  Chapter 14

  Percy to the Rescue

  As rebel minutemen and militia closed in for the kill on Colonel Smith’s column just west of Lexington Green, an extraordinary thing happened. British soldiers who were being goaded by their officers to stand and fight looked beyond them toward Lexington and slowly began to raise a cheer. Their puzzled officers turned around and stared in disbelief. There on the rise beyond Lexington Green, where all this had started ten hours before, stood a thick line of red uniforms, dazzling in the afternoon sun. It was Percy.

  Had Lord Percy’s brigade gotten its wake-up call on time, his force of fifteen hundred men might have marched all the way to Concord and arrived about the time of the action at the North Bridge—perhaps in time to have dissuaded Colonel Barrett’s men from marching down to the bridge. But that is conjecture. What is known is that about the time Colonel Smith departed Concord, Percy’s force passed Menotomy, and shortly thereafter Percy “was informed by a person whom I met that there had been a skirmish between his Maj s troops & the rebels at Lexn, & that they were still engaged.”1

  Percy pressed on, and “in less than 2 miles we heard the firing very distinctly.” It was at this point, as Percy claimed in the draft of his after-action report to General Gage, that he met Lieutenant Edward Gould of the light infantry company of the Fourth Regiment, who had been wounded in the foot at the North Bridge. Gould was riding in a commandeered chaise and had somehow managed to get ahead of Smith’s column and avoid capture and further assault by the rebels. Gould told Percy that the grenadier and light infantry companies “were retiring, having expended most of their ammunition.”2 In his final report, Percy inserted the words “overpowered by numbers, greatly exhausted & fatigued” to describe their condition.3

  Percy hurried his troops onward to the sound of the guns and “drew up the Brigade on a height” overlooking Lexington Green. Seeing the tangled column of Smith’s men struggling toward him, he “immediately ordered the 2 field-pieces to fire at the Rebels.” Percy claimed that the cannons, now being used for more than just show, “had the desired effect, & stopped the Rebels for a little time,” while the grenadier and light infantry
companies gratefully found refuge under Percy’s protection.4 “I had the happiness,” Percy wrote his father the next day, “of saving them from inevitable destruction.”5

  Smith’s column moved through the ranks of Percy’s brigade and found shelter around Munroe’s Tavern, east of the town green. With the bulk of Percy’s regiments forming a shield and marksmen sniping away at rebels who ventured too close, Percy turned his attention to several houses that overlooked the British position and offered vantage points for rebel snipers. Colonel Smith probably reported to Percy that the rebels had already employed similar buildings for that use, and Percy ordered them razed.

  Deacon Joseph Loring’s house, barn, and corncrib were put to the torch, as were two more homes and workshops on the road closer to the tavern. Percy had his military reasons for undertaking this destruction, but it inadvertently triggered a disregard for private property among his rank and file. Soldiers whose comrades only a few hours before had been quite content to say “yes, ma’am” and respect any assertion of private property in the homes of Concord now helped themselves to plunder as they burned these homes and later drove rebel sharpshooters from others along the road to Menotomy. Such destruction served to infuriate the rebels all the more.6

  By all accounts—including Percy’s own—the one constant of calm and determination on the British side was Lord Percy. Oblivious to rebel fire, Percy rode among the battle-scarred troops of Smith’s column and those of his own regiments and inspired a steady confidence that the situation was under control. It was—for the moment—but it still remained for this combined force to retire the remaining dozen or so miles to Boston. But first Percy permitted his troops to share their meager rations with Smith’s beleaguered men and rest with them for half an hour along the roadside around Munroe’s Tavern.

  Meanwhile, Percy held a conference with Smith and Pitcairn and his regimental commanders and gave instructions for the order of march on the return to Boston. He wanted the companies of grenadiers and light infantry so recently engaged to move off first, and he “covered them with my Brigade.” Smith in turn chose to put his grenadier companies, which had suffered less during the day than his light infantry, in the van. This meant that Captain Mundy Pole of the grenadier company of the Tenth Regiment would go first.

  During the respite around Munroe’s Tavern, the regiments of Percy’s brigade afforded Smith’s troops some measure of protection from rebel fire, but “as soon as they saw us begin to retire,” Percy reported to General Gage, “they pressed very much upon our rear-guard.” And up ahead and on the flanks, Percy was obliged in “sending out very strong flanking parties, which were absolutely necessary, as there was not a stone-wall, or house, though before in appearance evacuated, from whence the Rebels did not fire upon us.”7

  ON THE REBEL SIDE ABOUT this same time, some small measure of command and control above the regimental level was introduced by the arrival of William Heath, one of the six generals recently appointed by the committee of safety. Heath was himself a member of the committee and had been a participant in its meeting at the Black Horse Tavern the day before. As Heath had returned to his home in Roxbury that evening, he had encountered Major Mitchell and his patrol moving along the Cambridge road.

  Heath was thirty-eight and, by his own description, “of middling stature, light complexion, very corpulent, and bald-headed.” From his childhood, Heath had been “remarkably fond of military exercises” and an avid reader of military treatises. Although he had no combat experience, this avocation placed Heath in good stead to serve as an officer in several militia units. These were initially loyal to the king but after 1770 took on an increasingly rebel nature. Heath was unanimously chosen captain of Roxbury’s first company and then colonel of the first regiment of Suffolk County.8

  General Heath awoke about daybreak at his home to the news that Colonel Smith’s detachment had crossed the Charles River by boat and was marching on Concord. He set off to attend the day’s meeting of the committee of safety and in so doing crossed the Charles River bridge en route from Roxbury to Cambridge. Given his later concern for this structure, it seems likely that it was Heath who ordered planks to be removed to impede just the sort of reinforcement that Percy was then belatedly organizing in Boston. But those performing the task piled the bridge planks neatly on the Boston side of the river, and Percy’s advancing column had little difficulty replacing them on its initial crossing. This early rebel action under Heath’s directive did, however, give Percy cause to worry as the day progressed about the condition in which he would find the bridge on his return march.

  Heath met with the committee of safety—or at least some of its members. Exactly where this occurred is uncertain, because Elbridge Gerry and others had fled the usual meeting place at the Black Horse Tavern as Colonel Smith approached early that morning. Heath’s memoirs, in which he refers to himself grandly in the third person as “our general,” say only that “from the committee, he took a cross road to Watertown” and there found some militia “who had not marched” and were awaiting orders. By then, Percy’s advancing regulars were, in fact, the troops Heath reported as “being in possession of the Lexington road.”

  Rather than rushing them directly against Percy, Heath dispatched the Watertown militia to Cambridge with directions to take up the planks on the Charles River bridge once again, barricade the south end of the bridge, and impede any and all British troops should they return that way to Boston. Heath then moved northward toward Lexington, and somewhere along the way he was joined by Dr. Joseph Warren, who had trailed Percy’s column out of Cambridge searching for the committee of safety as it met on the run.

  Heath arrived near Lexington shortly after Smith’s column reached Percy’s rescuers. He initially occupied himself with re-forming a rebel regiment that had been scattered by Percy’s artillery, and then he and Joseph Warren followed Percy’s combined column eastward as it made good Colonel Smith’s escape. Warren had one close call, when a musket ball came so close to his head that it struck a pin holding a lock of his hair. He would not always be so lucky.9

  HAVING HELD OFF THE REBELS converging on Lexington, Lord Percy adroitly protected his column with flankers beating the woods and fields alongside the road over the course of the three miles to Menotomy. He was beginning to think the worst was over. The tempo of the fight was slowing, and only a few scattered shots from flankers suggested continuing danger. The grenadier companies of Smith’s force descended the grade of Peirce’s Hill (now Arlington Heights) toward a point called Foot of the Rocks and looked with satisfaction over the relatively flat ground that stretched ahead on either side of the road for a distance of almost a mile.

  Menotomy wasn’t much of a place—it was more a collection of houses and buildings strung along the Lexington-to-Cambridge road than a town of residential blocks and cross streets. Though it lacked size and population, Menotomy sat at a major intersection of roads leading not only east to Cambridge and west to Lexington but also north to Woburn and Medford and south to Watertown and Waltham. As rebel militia were about to prove, it was easy to get to Menotomy from all points of the compass.

  Colonel Smith and Captain Pole looked down Menotomy’s one major street and saw frenzied activity. Just three hours before, Percy’s relief column had marched through and encountered hardly a soul. The hairs on Smith’s stout neck bristled as he and his few remaining officers—many of whom desperately wished that the rebels would form up on open ground and give what to them was a fair fight—now saw that once more they would be forced into a gauntlet of rebel fire. Percy had about two thousand rebels hounding his rear, and now—thanks to the road network converging on Menotomy—there were another two thousand or so armed men blocking the route through town. These were largely fresh troops from three regiments of minutemen and one regiment of militia augmented by scattered companies.

  But some of the rebels made a critical mistake. Without any overall command and control and the intelligence that goes
with it, each regimental commander—and sometimes each company commander—made his own decision about where to deploy his troops. Many chose to hunker down in houses, buildings, and yards along the road, assuming that Percy’s column would come marching gaily along it. Percy was much too shrewd for this and had already had a taste of a town fight through the buildings on the outskirts of Lexington. Colonel Smith could only add his own deadly experiences.

  The result was that Percy strengthened his flankers and sent them from house to house in advance of his main column. Given the narrow nature of the town strung along the road and the wide sweep that Percy ordered his flankers to take, some rebel units were trapped between the main British column and the flankers. It made for a fierce fight. In fact, of every place that saw action that day, this stretch of road through Menotomy was the most heavily contested, and casualties along it were the heaviest on both sides.10

  As the Fourth Regiment’s John Barker observed, “We were now obliged to force almost every house in the road, for the Rebels had taken possession of them and galled us exceedingly, but they suffer’d for their temerity for all that were found in the houses were put to death.”11

  Almost all. Joseph Adams was a deacon of the Second Precinct Church. For whatever reason, he had not mobilized with the local militia, perhaps because he was not a member or because his wife had just given birth to a little girl. When Adams saw Percy’s column returning amid the firing, however, he had second thoughts about staying at home and took off running across the fields. Regulars fired a volley in his direction, but it missed. Adams took shelter in a nearby barn and hid under the hay. Some of the soldiers followed and repeatedly stabbed the hay in pursuit, but Adams managed to lie still and avoid their thrusts.