American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Other soldiers entered the Adams house and made their way to the bedroom, where Hannah Adams lay clutching her newborn daughter. They ordered Hannah out of the house so they could burn it. She rose and painfully made her way to an outbuilding, fearful for her five other children, who remained hidden under a bed. Thanks to the precocious nine-year-old who poked his head out from underneath and taunted the regulars, they were discovered and chased outside unharmed.

  The soldiers finished ransacking the house, taking an heirloom clock and a silver tankard from a communion set among their bounty, and packed it off in the sheets from Hannah’s bed. Before leaving, they dumped a basket of wood chips on the floor and set them on fire with a hot brand from the hearth. Hannah Adams need not have worried about her young brood, however. After the regulars moved on, her children made their way back into the house and put out the fire with a quantity of home-brewed beer.12

  A little farther down the road, fifty-nine-year-old Jason Russell had a less pleasant experience. He and his family sought refuge away from their home, but after going with them some distance, Russell, who was partially lame, returned to look after the house. He piled wooden shingles up beside his gate as a makeshift breastwork and waited. A neighbor urged Russell to abandon his post, but Russell refused.

  As the flankers approached the Russell house, a party of Danvers militia found themselves in danger of being trapped between the flankers and the main British column, and, despite its proximity to the road, they took shelter inside the Russell house. Blasted by a hail of British bullets, Russell followed them, but as Russell limped through the doorway, two bullets struck him down. The regulars rushed him and put eleven bayonet wounds in his body. Inside, seven of the Danvers men were killed. Other rebels took refuge in the cellar and shot a British soldier who attempted to descend the stairs. Another soldier died in the melee upstairs. When it was over, twelve lay dead in this one location alone: nine Danvers men (seven inside and two in the yard), Russell, and two British soldiers, making the Russell house the bloodiest site of the day.13

  There is another oft-told story from the fight at Menotomy. Samuel Whittemore was an eighty-year-old former militia officer who lived with his wife, son, and grandchildren. After the continuing alarms and the passage of both Smith’s and Percy’s columns through town that morning, Samuel’s wife, Elizabeth, made preparations to flee to the safety of another son’s house, toward Medford. Elizabeth presumed that Samuel would accompany her until she found him oiling his musket and pistols and sharpening his sword. He refused to leave and sent Elizabeth off with their grandchildren.

  Whittemore took up a position almost five hundred feet from the main road, being close enough for an effective shot but not so close as to get pinned by the roving flankers. When Percy’s troops came into view, Whittemore fired a round from his musket and killed the soldier he aimed at. As flankers saw the puff of smoke and closed in on his hiding place, Whittemore fired his two pistols and killed two more, one instantly and another with a wound that would later prove fatal. But now the flankers had his range, and a musket ball struck the old man in his head and rendered him unconscious. Regulars rushed the spot and may have been surprised to discover Whittemore’s white hair and grizzled age, but that did not stop them from clubbing him with their muskets and adding a few bayonet jabs for good measure.

  By all accounts, the regulars left Samuel Whittemore for dead. The “incessant fire, which like a moving circle surrounded and followed us,” as Percy described it, moved on with the British column. Residents who then gathered around Whittemore’s body also presumed him dead. But his old heart was still beating. Less than optimistic, they carried him to Cooper’s Tavern and summoned a doctor. The doctor pronounced it useless and a waste of time to dress his wounds because he would soon be dead. But that didn’t happen. Not only did Samuel Whittemore survive, he lived to see the end of the Revolution and did not die until the age of ninety-eight. During his recovery, when Elizabeth, no doubt with a reproving frown, asked him if he did not now regret that he had not fled with his family, Whittemore supposedly replied, “No! I would run the same chance again.”14

  The same could not be said for two customers of Cooper’s Tavern, which stood just east of the crossroads where Samuel Whittemore made his stand. Proprietors Benjamin and Rachel Cooper had already had one excitement that morning when a group of Menotomy men judged too old to mobilize with the town’s militia nonetheless assembled at their tavern and then went off to capture a supply wagon that was lagging behind Percy’s outbound column. These old-timers were so successful that they next captured the wounded Lieutenant Edward Gould after he parted from Percy and made his way toward Boston in his commandeered chaise ahead of Percy’s column. None of this activity, however, kept Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman, two regular customers who were in their forties, from having their usual afternoon mug of flip at Cooper’s.

  Colonial flip was not for the faint of heart. Served in a large mug or pitcher, flip consisted of about eight ounces of beer, sweetened to taste with a quantity of sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and then topped off with about a gill of rum—four ounces. The bartender stuck a red-hot iron poker into the mixture, and this produced a flurry of foaming and bubbling and gave flip its trademark burned and bitter taste.

  In the manner of regular drinkers unperturbed by events around them, Winship and Wyman were sipping their flip, seemingly oblivious to the sounds of approaching musket fire, when British regulars stormed into Cooper’s Tavern. They did not stop to notice that these patrons were unarmed and otherwise engaged. Benjamin and Rachel Cooper hid in the cellar, but according to the Coopers’ subsequent testimony Winship and Wyman were repeatedly stabbed and horribly beaten, “their heads mauled, skulls broke and their brains dashed out on the floor and walls of the house.” Later, more than one hundred bullet holes were counted in the tavern’s walls. It was yet another indication of the growing savagery on both sides.15

  That thirsty British soldiers undoubtedly helped themselves to the remaining flip and had been doing so with other beverages at taverns of convenience en route only served to increase the ferocity of their actions. Lord Percy and Colonel Smith didn’t want to admit it, but they were losing control of their men. “The plundering was shameful,” Lieutenant Barker, who had been all the way to the North Bridge, reported. “Many hardly thought of anything else; what was worse they were encouraged by some Officers.”16 Lieutenant Mackenzie, who marched with Percy, acknowledged, “many houses were plundered by the Soldiers, notwithstanding the efforts of the Officers to prevent it.” Mackenzie speculated that this behavior “influenced the Rebels, and many of them followed us further than they would otherwise have done.”17

  THERE REMAINED ONE MORE MAJOR building to pass before Percy’s column could rid itself of Menotomy. This was the Black Horse Tavern, at what is now the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Tufts Street. When it was finally cleared, the British troops were able to cross Alewife Brook and proceed toward Cambridge. The fight at Menotomy had not only cost Percy valuable men but valuable time as well. It was well past five o’clock, and darkness would be upon his command within two hours. In Menotomy alone, the British lost forty men killed and about eighty wounded, about half their casualties for the entire day’s fighting. On the rebel side, it was more difficult to assign figures to this piece of ground, but estimates totaled twenty-eight killed, at least ten wounded, and three captured.18

  Now, with Cambridge looming up ahead, Percy faced perhaps his most important decision. Having just endured the passage through Menotomy, Percy worried that Cambridge, long a hotbed of rebel sentiment, might give him an even warmer reception. On its northern outskirts, two roads diverged. One was the route over which Percy had ridden so confidently at midday: through Cambridge, across the Charles River bridge, and back to Boston via Roxbury, Brookline, and Boston Neck. The rebels were expecting him to return by this route. The other led almost due east to Charlestown. Although this second route wou
ld not return his command to Boston proper, it was slightly shorter, and once in Charlestown, Percy would have both a strong, defensible line at the narrows of Charlestown Neck—in those days about as narrow as Boston Neck—and the protection of the British men-of-war guarding the Charlestown-to-Boston ferry crossing.

  There was also the matter of the bridge over the Charles River. Percy simply could not be sure that it was intact. His column had found planks missing on its crossing that morning—thanks to General Heath’s diligence. His men had encountered little difficulty repositioning them, but this slowed their supply wagons and may have contributed to one wagon being captured by the feisty old-timers of Menotomy.19 Now, however, the Watertown militia had removed the bridge planks once again and taken up positions to defend the crossing.

  There has been speculation as to whether Percy himself could see that the bridge was impassable and/or heavily defended—or at the very least whether he had scouting reports that it was—before he made his decision to detour around Cambridge and strike for Charlestown. If Percy sent his column cutting eastward in the vicinity of the back road of Kent Lane in Cambridge (south of the present-day Massachusetts Avenue and Somerville Avenue intersection), as seems likely, it would have been impossible for him to observe the bridge himself from that distance.20

  In hindsight, Percy made the correct decision to bypass Cambridge, but he seems to have done so in order to avoid another Menotomy rather than because he knew for certain that the Charles River bridge was impassable. In fact, the draft of Percy’s report to General Gage supports this: “We retired… under an incessant fire all round us, till we arrived at Chastown, wh road I chose to take, lest the rebels shd have taken up the bridge at Cambridge (wh I find was actually the case), & also the country was more open & the road shorter.”21

  It is certainly clear that Percy’s sudden turn to his left flank momentarily disrupted the rebel strategy. “We threw them,” Lieutenant John Barker later gloated, “and went on to Charles Town without any great interruption.”22 But it wasn’t quite that easy. There was indeed a warm welcoming committee spread throughout Cambridge, and there likely would have been a pitched battle at the bridge. As it was, some militia once again moved rapidly to get in front of Percy’s advance, taking up positions on Prospect Hill, a piece of high ground en route to Charlestown Neck. Percy was down to the last of his cannonballs, but he fired them to scatter the rebels until his troops could plod by. Even then, he might have been cut off from the safety of Charlestown Neck but for the inaction of militia from Salem, which would add one final controversy to the day’s events.

  ONE CAN SUPPOSE THE MEN of Salem felt both anger and a sense of obligation regarding the events of the prior February—anger at the British regulars who had then marched so boldly through their town and a sense of obligation to the minutemen from neighboring towns who had come so quickly to the town’s aid. Twenty-nine-year-old Colonel Timothy Pickering commanded the Essex County regiment, composed of militia companies from Danvers, Salem, and Marblehead. This April morning, he was working quietly at his office in the Registry of Deeds at Salem when sixty-four-year-old Captain Daniel Epes of the Danvers company reported with news of the initial British march and asked for orders. Pickering and Epes agreed that because the Danvers company was already assembled and closer to the action, it would march and not wait for the rest of the regiment. This decision itself was to have major ramifications as Epes and his Danvers men rushed into the fight at Menotomy and suffered horrible casualties at the Russell house.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Pickering’s next move was to call a meeting of Salem’s board of selectmen. Given the distance between Salem and Concord, and not yet knowing what would ensue on Percy’s retreat through Menotomy, many militiamen in Salem assumed that the regulars would be safely back in Boston before they could take the field. But the public relations side of the equation prompted a show of support for their neighboring towns. Pickering formed his companies of Salem men, numbering about three hundred, or roughly half his regiment, and started west. The Marblehead company did not join this advance because many of its members were absent, having gone fishing, and the remainder were reluctant to leave their town unguarded with a British warship anchored in its harbor.

  The subsequent controversy centered on the speed of Colonel Pickering’s march. Had he delayed several hours at the start, he might not have been faulted, but to some his conduct appeared to be just fast enough to satisfy neighboring towns that Salem was doing its share but not so quick as to make a headlong rush into action. Like their British counterparts, the Salem men took refreshment along the way at the only places available: the roadside taverns. Twice Pickering ordered long rest stops near such establishments, each time in full expectation of receiving news of the British withdrawal. When none was forthcoming, it was the murmurs of his troops that encouraged him onward, not his own impatience.

  Finally, Pickering received reports that far from being in a backwater, the Salem men were very close to the line of Percy’s surprise withdrawal to Charlestown. Pickering finally quickened the pace, and as the Salem militia crested Winter Hill, near Charlestown Neck, they found Percy’s column strung out below. Had Pickering instantly attacked, at the very least Percy would have had to fight one more bloody encounter as he pushed his beleaguered troops across the neck and onto the defensible heights of Bunker Hill. It is also possible that Pickering’s strong fire on Percy’s left would have delayed his advance and permitted the militia assembled in Cambridge to catch up and wreak more havoc, particularly as by all reports Percy’s ammunition was almost exhausted.

  But instead of attacking, Pickering sent a messenger in search of General Heath, asking for orders. According to Pickering, Heath responded “that the British had artillery in their rear, and could not be approached by musketry alone; and that he [General Heath] desired to see me.” Percy’s disposition of artillery had, of course, been the case all afternoon and had not dissuaded other attacks. Heath’s memoirs recounted the arrival of “an officer on horseback”—perhaps Pickering himself—but did not recount any orders Heath gave in return, only the speculation that had the men from Salem “arrived a few minutes sooner, the left flank of the British must have been greatly exposed.” The end result was that the Salem men did not fire on Percy’s brigade, and his troops completed their withdrawal across Charlestown Neck.

  Timothy Pickering went on to a far more successful career than William Heath, serving as the Continental Army’s quartermaster general and much later as secretary of state. Although Heath was appointed a major general in the Continental Army, he botched actions during the Trenton and Princeton campaigns and was relieved of serious command. What brought this 1775 incident to the forefront years later were political claims made against Pickering when he was a senator from Massachusetts. Pickering was a dedicated Federalist, and some, including Mercy Warren, in her history of the Revolution, speculated that his delay in engaging Percy that day was “owing to timidity, or to a predilection in favor of Britain.”23 Regardless of Pickering’s actions that evening of April 19, General Heath posted patrols on Charlestown Neck and ordered the remainder of his fledgling army into camp in Cambridge as Percy’s troops moved into Charlestown.

  Under threat of being bombarded by the British fleet and burned, Charlestown did not resist Percy’s arrival. Instead, the selectmen assured Percy that if he would not attack the town, they would see that his troops were not molested and would do all in their power to get them across the ferry to Boston, but that did not keep Percy’s frazzled soldiers from being edgy after the events of the day. As his men marched into town, a lad of fourteen perched in the window of his house to watch their procession. Having endured hostile fire from many such windows, soldiers let loose some shots and struck the unarmed boy dead.24

  For all it had been a very long day. Its fury was evidence of the long-simmering frustrations on both sides. The rebels were sick of chafing under the yoke of what they considered second-class st
atus, conferred by a repressive system. The regulars were just as fed up with their perceived roles as royal nursemaids to an ungrateful brood. According to historian Robert Middlekauff, the retreat from Lexington through a countryside in arms foreshadowed the reality that the British would face throughout the coming struggle: “how to subdue not just another army but a population in rebellion.”25

  As the twilight darkened and the moon once again rose over Boston Neck, there was many a British soldier who thankfully tumbled into the safety of his lodgings or tent and wondered what in the world had happened during that long, long day. On the rebel side, as these men also fell exhausted in homes, taverns, and on the roads leading toward Boston, there was a common refrain: “What have we done?”

  Chapter 15

  What Have We Done?

  As both sides struggled to determine what each had done, on the rebel side the events of the day raised the broader question of why had they acted—not merely why they had fired on the king’s troops, no matter which side shot first, but why they were pursuing a determined, armed resistance against the established government. There was no one answer, and whatever answers were given varied with the retelling of events and were influenced by the context of the times in which they were told. With that caveat, it is nonetheless instructive to recount the oft-told tale of Levi Preston of Danvers.

  Preston was a young man of eighteen that spring, and his title of captain would come later. He was one of the Danvers militia who rushed headlong into the fight at Menotomy. Sixty-seven long years after that fight, when Preston was approaching ninety, Mellen Chamberlain, then a young man of about the same age as Preston had been in 1775, interviewed the old warrior.

  “Capt[ain] Preston,” Chamberlain asked, “what made you go to the Concord fight?”