The old man straightened in his chair and repeated the question. “What did I go for?”
“Yes,” Chamberlain answered. “My histories all tell me you men of the Revolution took up arms against intolerable oppression. What was it?”
According to Chamberlain, Preston launched into disavowals that it hadn’t been about stamps or tea or taxes or high-minded writings about the principles of liberty. “Well, then,” queried Chamberlain again, “what was the matter?”
“Young man,” bristled Captain Preston in reply, “what we meant in fighting the British was this: We always had been free and we meant to be free always!”1
It makes a patriotic story. It may well have been tempered by Preston’s age and Chamberlain’s retelling, but in almost two and a half centuries since that day on Lexington Green and in the fields and hills from Concord to Menotomy, Preston’s reply became the most basic and cherished answer to the question, why did they do it?
ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 20, 1775, Boston and the towns of Charlestown and Cambridge, across the river, were scenes of chaos. Those British troops who had staggered home from Concord saw to their wounded and pondered what had happened to several trained regiments of one of the world’s better armies. Loyalists were aghast at the rebels’ determined show of force. And while a few rebels celebrated, most were as stunned by the violence as their loyalist neighbors were.
If, when he heard the first musket fire from Lexington Green, Samuel Adams indeed chortled and said to John Hancock that it was a great day for America, even Adams must have been horrified—or at the very least surprised—by the ferociousness of the fighting. The pent-up frustrations of a decade had exploded on both sides.
“You will easily conceive,” Lord Percy wrote to an officer friend in England, “that in such a retreat, harassed as we were on all sides, it was impossible not to lose a good many men.”2 Reports of British casualties varied, but Ensign De Berniere recorded seventy-three dead, 174 wounded, and twenty-six missing. Of these, there were eighteen officers, including Lieutenant Edward Hull of the Forty-Third, mortally wounded at the North Bridge; the mercurial Lieutenant William Sutherland of the Thirty-Eighth, wounded slightly at the North Bridge; and Lieutenant Edward Gould of the Fourth, who was wounded and listed as missing after his capture outside Menotomy.
In his official report to General Gage, Percy speculated that the British casualties were much less than the number “I have reason to believe were killed of the Rebels.” But the rebels actually fared considerably better. A total of fifty were killed or mortally wounded. Fewer rebels were wounded—thirty-nine compared to 174 for the British—because the protective cover of rocks, trees, fences, and buildings had shielded many of them. These rebel casualty counts did not include civilians, such as Jason Russell of Menotomy, but, significantly, they were spread over minuteman and militia units from twenty-three towns—stark evidence that Lexington and Concord’s neighbors had rushed to their aid and that the Massachusetts alarm system was highly effective. Despite the carnage at Menotomy, the town of Lexington bore the highest number of rebel casualties for the day—ten killed and ten wounded.3
Among those rebels and regulars most critical of the expedition was Lieutenant John Barker of the Fourth “King’s Own” Regiment. “Thus ended this Expedition,” Barker wrote of his regiment’s return to Boston, “which from beginning to end was as ill plan’d and ill executed as it was possible to be.” The litany of failure in Barker’s eyes was long: the three hours slogging around the Cambridge marsh, the consequent late arrivals in Lexington and Concord—all delays that gave rebel militia time to converge on Menotomy from as far as twenty miles away. And what had the British accomplished? “Thus for a few trifling stores,” Barker wrote, summing up their bounty, “the Grenrs. And Lt. Infantry had a march of about 50 Miles (going and returning) through an Enemy’s Country, and in all human probability must every Man have been cut off if the Brigade had not fortunately come to their Assistance.”4
Lord Percy was in no position to be so critical, but he could certainly express his surprise about the rebel resistance. “For my part,” Percy wrote, “I never believed, I confess, that they wd have attacked the King’s troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday.” Gone was a great deal of Percy’s smugness about British superiority and his disdain for the perceived lack of rebel command and control. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob,” Percy continued, “will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.”5
Other British officers found the rebel tactics of shooting from behind cover quite despicable and hardly worthy of His Majesty’s troops. Captain W. G. Evelyn commanded a regular infantry company in the King’s Own and marched with Percy to the rescue. Evelyn reported in a letter to his father back in Ireland that the “bickerings and heartburnings” with the rebels had come to blows “between us and the Yankey scoundrels.” He found the rebels “the most absolute cowards on the face of the earth” because they would not fight in open fields by rank and file. But despite their lowly tactics, Evelyn worried that “they are just now worked up to such a degree of enthusiasm and madness that they are easily persuaded the Lord is to assist them in whatever they undertake.”6
General Gage waited three days to receive full reports from Lord Percy and Colonel Smith before writing his own reports to his superiors in London. To Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Gage first noted the receipt of Dartmouth’s letters up to the one dated February 22, including the secretary’s lengthy missive concluding that the time had come when His Majesty’s government “must act with firmness and decision.”7 The originals of these dispatches had arrived on board the Falcon on April 16, and Gage evidently sought to assure Dartmouth that he had acted upon them promptly. Unfortunately for Gage, the result had been to no one’s liking. In recounting the events of April 19, the only good news Gage imparted was that “too much Praise cannot be given Lord Percy for his remarkable Activity and Conduct” and his speculation that “the Loss sustained by those who attacked is said to be great.”8
To Lord Barrington, the longtime secretary of war, Gage bookended the news about Lexington and Concord with mundane acknowledgments of promotions and recommendations for further promotions. He eased into the most important news with what in retrospect seems a decided understatement: “I have now nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but of an Affair that happened here on the 19th.” To both Dartmouth and Barrington, Gage concluded with the obvious: “The whole Country was Assembled in Arms with Surprising expedition, and Several Thousand are now Assembled about this Town, threatening an Attack, and getting up Artillery; and we are very busy in making preparations to Oppose them.”9
Then, either out of lackadaisical indifference or an outright attempt to downplay the importance of this news, Gage—or, more accurately, probably his secretary, Samuel Kemble, the younger brother of his wife, Margaret—affixed seals and entrusted both letters to the two-hundred-ton merchantman Sukey instead of to a faster dispatch ship of the Royal Navy. The Sukey cleared Boston Harbor and set sail for England on April 24.
GENERAL GAGE WAS CORRECT: THERE were many people flocking to Boston and its environs, but not all were rebels. There was also a rush of loyalists in the same direction. Their aim was to get into Boston and under General Gage’s protection—however tenuous—before rebel siege lines rendered access difficult if not impossible. In the weeks ahead, these lines would expand to encircle Boston, with the goal of keeping General Gage and his troops penned up there.
Josiah Sturtevant, the local doctor in the town of Halifax, near Plymouth, who had long espoused “the cause of the king,” galloped north in fear for his life as soon as word came of the fighting at Lexington and Concord. By one report, Dr. Sturtevant rode in such haste that he lost his saddlebags. General Gage rewarded him for both his effort and his loyalty. The doctor was commissioned a captain in the British army, and Gage gave him responsibility f
or the army hospital. But things didn’t work out so well for Dr. Sturtevant. He became infected with smallpox and died four months later. His wife, Lois, was particularly bitter, writing upon his death, “My dear husband departed this life at Boston in his fifty-fifth year where he was driven by a mad and deluded mob for no other offence but his loyalty to his sovereign.”10
Abijah Willard arrived in Boston to receive a similar reward with a better ending. Willard was a veteran of the French and Indian War and one of the wealthiest landowners in Lancaster, some fifty miles northwest of Boston. As one of the hated mandamus councilors, Willard endured several beatings and confinements. Although he then disavowed his royal appointment, his true allegiance remained uncertain—perhaps even to himself. On the morning of April 19, Willard was riding toward his farm with saddlebags filled with seeds for his fields when he encountered rebel militia marching toward Lexington and Concord. It was decision time. Willard might have joined them, but he turned instead in the opposite direction and rode for Boston. There he reported to General Gage and was promptly commissioned a captain in the Loyal American Association, a paramilitary union of loyalists.11
Truth be told, however, Boston quickly became an unpleasant place to be for anyone save perhaps those with an ample larder hidden away as rebel troops stopped deliveries of fresh produce from the countryside. “In the course of two days,” recorded Ensign De Berniere after returning from Smith’s Concord foray, “from a plentiful town, we were reduced to the disagreeable necessity of living on salt provisions, and fairly blocked up in Boston.”12 Most local farmers and dairymen were supporters of the rebel cause and all too glad to find new customers among the large numbers of rebel militia gathering in and around Cambridge.
But not everyone who wanted to leave Boston could. Sometimes, the issue caused marital strife. Sarah Winslow Deming acknowledged to her nephew in England that those British troops who had wintered in Boston “had not given us much molestation, but an additional strength [more troops] I dreaded and determined if possible to get out of their reach, and to take with me as much of my little life interest as I could. Your uncle Deming was very far from being of my mind from which has proceeded those difficulties which peculiarly related to myself.
“Many a time,” Sarah Deming continued, “have I thought that could I be out of Boston together with my family and friends, I could be content with the meanest fare and slenderest accommodation. Out of Boston, out of Boston at almost any rate—away as far as possible from the infection of smallpox & martial musick as it is called and horrors of war—but my distress is not to be described.”13
There were others—including merchant John Andrews, who had wished in the New Year hoping for any sign of moderation from the Crown—who were now forced to choose sides. On what he called “this fatal day,” Andrews wrote his brother-in-law, William Barrell: “When I reflect and consider that the fight [at Lexington] was between those whose parents but a few generations ago were brothers, I shudder at the thought, and there’s no knowing where our calamities will end.”14
With an army of rebels surrounding Boston, General Gage feared insurrection from armed inhabitants inside the city. It was impossible to know which side some residents were on. After a series of tense town meetings that took the unprecedented step of continuing through a Sunday—April 23—it was agreed that all Bostonians, whatever their political leanings, would deliver up their arms to the town selectmen, and in exchange General Gage would open the avenues and docks to permit those who wanted to leave town to do so. “If I can escape with the skin of my teeth,” John Andrews told his brother-in-law, “[I] shall be glad as I don’t expect to be able to take more than a change of apparel with me, as Sam. [possibly Andrews’s nephew] and his wife with myself and Ruthy [Andrews’s wife] intend for Nova Scotia.”
But even with this accommodation for those who wished to depart, Gage could not be certain that rebel forces would not attempt to take Boston by force. “I expect to become a beggar ere long,” Andrews continued, “as our own countrymen have not compassion, but persist in threatening the town with storming it, which pray God avert before I depart.”15
ON THE REBEL SIDE, THERE was equal anxiety over what had just occurred and equal uncertainty as to the future. General Gage’s nervousness aside, there was no immediate plan to push into Boston. Chaos reigned. Even Samuel Adams and John Hancock seemed out of the loop. Following their belated departure from the Clarke parsonage on the early morning of April 19, they momentarily took refuge in Woburn, to the northeast of Lexington, and then moved westward to Billerica, where they were rejoined by Hancock’s aunt Lydia and his fiancée, Dorothy Quincy. Despite Dorothy’s professed determination to return to Boston and see to the safety of her father, she and John finally agreed that given John’s imminent departure for the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the safest place for Dorothy and Aunt Lydia would be in Fairfield, Connecticut, at the home of Thaddeus Burr, an old family friend and Hancock’s ally in both business and politics.16
Over the course of the next several days, Samuel Adams and the Hancock entourage worked their way westward to Worcester, Massachusetts, there to await the arrival of the other Massachusetts delegates—John Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine—and to travel on to Philadelphia together. From Worcester, on the evening of Monday, April 24, Hancock wrote a spirited though somewhat disjointed letter full of questions to the Provincial Congress then meeting in Watertown. “Gentlemen,” began Hancock, “Mr. S. Adams and myself, just arrived here, find no intelligence from you and no guard.” A passing express from the south had conveyed word of four more British regiments arriving in New York, and Hancock wondered, “How are we to proceed? Where are our brethren?”
Knowing little about the military situation in and around Boston, Hancock nevertheless urged, “Boston must be entered; the [British] troops must be sent away.” Then, speaking more as a businessman than as a patriot, he complained: “I have an interest in that town; what can be the enjoyment of that to me, if I am obliged to hold it at the will of general Gage, or any one else?”17
Meanwhile, Samuel’s cousin John had taken it upon himself to get a firsthand look at the carnage along what would come to be called Battle Road. John Adams’s usually verbose diary is silent—or missing—after his return from the First Continental Congress, in November of 1774, until April 30, 1775. During much of that time, he was consumed by his responses to Massachusettensis. Only in his autobiography did Adams fill in his whereabouts for the ten days immediately following the events of April 19, which, he claimed, “changed the Instruments of Warfare from the Penn to the Sword.”
A few days after the battle, Adams left his home in Braintree and rode to Cambridge, where he saw generals Artemas Ward and William Heath and what he called “the New England Army”—really still only those regiments of militia gathering there in the wake of the Concord fight. The scene was one of “great Confusion and much distress: Artillery, Arms, Cloathing were wanting and a sufficient Supply of Provisions not easily obtained.” Nonetheless, Adams found that neither the officers nor their men were lacking in spirit or resolve.
From Cambridge, Adams rode on to Lexington “along the Scene of Action for many miles” and quizzed the locals about the circumstances of that day. What he heard in return did not diminish his enthusiasm for the cause in which he had been laboring and “on the Contrary convinced me that the Die was cast, the Rubicon Passed, and… if We did not defend ourselves they would kill us.”18
John returned home to Abigail in Braintree with a fever and “alarming Symptoms.” He was still feeling poorly when he was forced to depart Braintree again about April 26 in order to reach Philadelphia for the Continental Congress. Abigail was not pleased. “I feared much for your health, when you went away,” she later wrote him. “I must entreat you to be as careful as you can consistently with the duty you owe your country. That consideration alone, prevailed with me to consent to your departure, in a time so perilous and so
hazardous to your family, and with a body so infirm as to require the tenderest care and nursing.”19
The portly Adams had been planning to ride horseback, but being indisposed, he hired two horses, a sulky, and a servant and set off to rendezvous with his cousin Samuel, John Hancock, and the other Massachusetts delegates. Because of his delays, they had proceeded without him beyond Worcester, and he caught up with them in Hartford, Connecticut.20
AS THE MASSACHUSETTS DELEGATES GATHERED in preparation for their journey to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts found plenty to occupy its sessions. Meeting briefly at Concord on the morning of Saturday, April 22, the congress adjourned so that it could reconvene at 4:00 p.m. in Watertown, which was closer to the action in Cambridge. Many of its members were involved with the rush of military activities. The congress’s committee of safety had been meeting almost nonstop since the afternoon of April 19, and the full congress had previously granted it powers as a de facto executive committee to oversee the defense of the province—and now, in light of events, to orchestrate what was quickly becoming a siege of Boston.
Reconvening in Watertown, the congress summoned the committee of safety to attend “with whatever plans they may have in readiness for us” and also requested absent members of the congress then in Cambridge to provide “their punctual attendance.” The principal matter of business for the remainder of that evening was to appoint a committee of nine members, headed by Elbridge Gerry, to take sworn depositions from participants in and eyewitnesses to the April 19 actions and send the depositions to moderates in “England by the first ship from Salem.”21 This was no small matter. Each side was eager to cast blame on the other and spread its version of events.
Meeting on Sunday, April 23—the exigencies of the moment having temporarily overshadowed established customs against conducting business on the Sabbath—the congress resolved “that 13,600 men be raised immediately by this province” to join a Continental Army of at least thirty thousand men; they also elected Joseph Warren president in place of the absent John Hancock. Then the members turned their attention again to the matter of public relations.
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