Having already ordered depositions taken, the congress appointed Elbridge Gerry and Thomas Cushing—the latter about to depart for Philadelphia—to work with a third member of the congress, who was not on the depositions committee, “to draw up a narrative of the massacre on Wednesday last.”22 By use of the word massacre, there was not much doubt as to how the rebel media would portray these events. The third member was the highly esteemed Dr. Benjamin Church Jr.
Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1734, Church was raised in Boston, where his father was an auctioneer and respected deacon in the congregation of the senior Mather Byles. Young Church graduated from Harvard in 1754 and went to London to study the medical profession, eventually returning to Boston with both medical training and an English-born wife. The doctor’s talents included gifts for writing and speaking, and by the 1770s Church was an intimate member of Boston’s rebel circle. His position was so respected that Samuel Adams tapped him to deliver the 1773 oration for the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Church was a member of the committee of safety, and when it came to secrets and plotting, it could be argued that only Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren were more involved than he. It seemed quite logical that Dr. Church would be asked to use his talents to spread the rebel position.23
But not everyone thought highly of Dr. Church. For example, Paul Revere, after he lugged John Hancock’s trunk away from Buckman’s Tavern in the nick of time on the morning of April 19, may have lingered on the sidelines about Lexington or possibly have been dispatched by Hancock on some other errand as they parted. By the following day, however, Revere was at Cambridge with the rapidly assembling rebel army. There he met Dr. Church, who showed Revere “some blood on his stocking, which he said spirted on him from a Man who was killed near him, as he was urging the Militia on.” Revere had never been enamored of Dr. Church, despite their years together as members of the Sons of Liberty. Revere, in fact, doubted very much whether Church “was a real Whig.” Nevertheless, Revere came away from this encounter persuaded that “if a Man will risque his life in a Cause, he must be a Friend to that cause.”24
That same day, Revere met up with Dr. Joseph Warren, who had sped him on his mission out of Boston two nights before. Warren now asked Revere to perform messenger duties for the committee of safety as it met at the Hastings house in Cambridge prior to the call to join the entire Provincial Congress in Watertown. In this role, Revere was in and out of the committee’s meetings. After sunset on Friday, April 21, as things were winding down for the day, Dr. Church suddenly rose from the conference and declared his intention to go into Boston the next day. The other committee members and Dr. Warren in particular were aghast. “Are you serious, Dr. Church?” Warren inquired. “They will Hang you if they catch you in Boston.” Indeed, after the events of that week, hanging quite likely would have been the fate of any of the committee members should they have been so bold as to venture into the city.
Church replied that he was in fact very serious and determined to go no matter the objections. After considerable pleading, to which Church turned a deaf ear, Warren suggested that Church concoct a cover story that he was traveling in search of medical supplies to aid both rebel and British wounded officers. Church agreed and left early the next morning with seemingly no cares about his safety.
Indeed, by Sunday evening, April 23, Church was back in Cambridge no worse for the wear. Revere took him aside and asked how things had gone. Church reported that he had been made a prisoner as soon as he crossed over the lines at Boston Neck, taken before General Gage, and questioned by him. He was further detained in a barracks and only allowed one brief, supervised visit to his home. Revere nodded sympathetically. It all seemed quite plausible that Church would then have been released to return with the medical supplies that were part of his cover story.
But Dr. Church had also had two encounters while in Boston that he chose not to reveal to Revere or anyone else. Caleb Davis was a newly appointed deacon of the Hollis Street Church and a member of Boston’s committee of correspondence. Davis was also a shopkeeper who had recently ordered a special buckle at the request of General Gage. On Saturday morning, April 22, Davis called on the general to deliver the buckle and was told that Gage was in private conversation and could not be disturbed. Davis chose to wait, and about half an hour later, the general emerged from his office in the company of Dr. Church. Far from appearing a prisoner, the good doctor was conversing with Gage “like persons who had been long acquainted.” Although they were not intimates, Church and Davis immediately recognized each other, and Church “appeared to be quite surprised at seeing Deacon Davis.”25
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Dr. Church also either called directly upon Rachel Revere, the widowed Revere’s second wife, or somehow took receipt of a letter from her to be delivered to Paul. Rachel was not yet trying to get out of Boston—she had six stepchildren and a young son, Joshua, to look after—but she was definitely concerned for Paul’s well-being, particularly in light of reports that he was “missing, supposed to be Waylaid and slain.”26
Church probably told Rachel that Revere was safe in Cambridge, and she trusted Church, as an insider, to cross paths with him. If Church, upon his return to Cambridge, mentioned this meeting or the letter in his conversation with Paul, the latter did not include it in his recollection of Church’s activities during those two days. More likely, Church himself never mentioned Rachel Revere’s letter because Church never delivered it.
“My Dear by Doctr Church,” Rachel had written, “I send a hundred & twenty five pounds and beg you will take the best care of yourself and not atempt coming into this town again and if I have an opportunity of coming or sending out anything or any of the Children I shall do it.” Asking Paul to keep up his spirits and trust in “the hands of a good God,” Rachel signed herself, “Love from your affectionate R. Revere.”
But if Paul Revere did not receive this via Dr. Church or any other means, what did Church do with the letter and the referenced “hundred & twenty five pounds,” a sum with a substantial value (approximately twenty thousand dollars by 2010 valuations)? In fact, this was such a considerable sum that Rachel’s words may not have referred to money at all. Revere family letters from this period reveal that Paul and Rachel managed to exchange several letters discussing how to procure a pass that would allow Rachel, their children, and as many of their household goods and furnishings as possible to be taken across the Charlestown ferry to a house Paul would find for them in Cambridge. (Paul’s oldest son, fifteen-year-old Paul junior, was to stay in Boston and mind the silversmith shop.)
In one letter, Paul advises Rachel, “If you send the things to the ferry send enough to fill a cart, them that are the most wanted.”27 It seems unlikely that Church would have taken Revere household goods with him, but would Rachel have had the modern-day equivalent of twenty thousand dollars accessible? This, too, seems unlikely, considering that in their exchange of letters, she apparently refers to having been unable to collect a debt of three pounds due them. Would she have worried about three pounds if she were able to send 125 pounds to Paul?
All of this—convoluted and filled with conjecture though it may be—would not be very germane to this story save for the fact that the letter from Rachel to Paul “by Doctr Church” was found 150 years later among the papers of General Thomas Gage.
There are no clear answers, but plenty of innuendo: Did Church deliver the letter to Gage instead of Revere? What happened to the money, if there was any?
It is not known how quickly Caleb Davis told others of his encounter with Dr. Church outside General Gage’s private office. Nor, it appears, was there much contemporary scrutiny of the reliability of the doctor as a Revere family messenger. After his return to Cambridge, the Provincial Congress tasked Church with numerous committee assignments. He was at the center of everything.
Finally, Benjamin Church was given the ultimate mission: he was dispatched to Philadelphia as the Provincial
Congress’s most trusted and articulate spokesman to convey to that body Massachusetts’s urgent request that the Continental Congress assume responsibility for the organizing of a continental army. The question that would soon be asked was, did Dr. Church make another visit to Boston before departing for Philadelphia—and to what purpose?28
Chapter 16
Spreading the News
As uncertain and confused as things were on the rebel side in the first few weeks after April 19, rebel leaders recognized the importance of spreading the news of what had occurred at Lexington and Concord and putting a decidedly pro-rebel spin on it. There was no equivocation. The rebel story line was short and concise: British regulars had marched out of Boston in the dead of night and without provocation attacked well-intentioned, defensive militia. It needed to be told as quickly as possible.
Postal riders carried dispatches that came to be called the Lexington Alarm throughout Massachusetts and into neighboring New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island almost before Lord Percy’s brigade reached the relative safety of Charlestown. One such rider was Isaac Bissell, a twenty-seven-year-old post rider from Suffield, Connecticut. Bissell’s regular route was along the Upper Post Road, which led directly west from Boston to Worcester and Springfield and then south to Hartford, Connecticut. This route was connected to the Lower Post Road, which ran along the coast, and the Middle Post Road, which ran in between them, by lesser north-south roads. These roads formed the infrastructure of a sophisticated communications network—compliments of Ben Franklin’s efforts years before—that tied the colonies together and facilitated relatively speedy delivery of “express” messages.
Colonel Smith’s detachment of regulars was still maneuvering about Concord and the North Bridge when Joseph Palmer of the committee of safety, meeting on the run that day, handed Isaac Bissell a message for points south. It was dated “Wednesday Morning near 11 O’clock” on April 19 and addressed “To all friends of American liberty.” Recounting what was then known about the British march on Lexington and Percy’s advance with reinforcements, it noted Bissell’s charge “to alarm the country quite to Connecticut” and asked all persons to assist him with fresh horses.1
Standard procedure called for these express circulars to be copied upon receipt and the copy endorsed by one or more members of the local committee of correspondence before the copy was sent on its way with the rider to the next town. This had several purposes. Multiple copies allowed the news to spread out from the post roads, and the names of the endorsers gave some measure of credibility as well as a chain of custody to the report when it arrived in the next town. The downside was that continued copying frequently introduced misspellings and other errors that were not in the original.
Isaac Bissell galloped into Worcester later that afternoon of April 19 and came to the proverbial fork in the road: the Upper Post Road, his usual route, led west toward Springfield; another road ran south toward New London, Connecticut, after crossing the Middle Post Road at Pomfret. Subsequent stories to the contrary, Isaac Bissell did not detour from his usual route. After copies of the dispatch were duly made and attested to by Nathan Baldwin, Worcester’s town clerk, Bissell continued westward to complete his charge “to alarm the country quite to Connecticut.”
But the committee of safety’s Lexington Alarm was also sped south from Worcester into Connecticut by another rider, whose name appears lost to history—and therein lies the confusion that over the years has made for a great but totally false story. Because Isaac Bissell’s name was in the original message, it was copied at each town along the routes and, as early as Worcester, appears to have been corrupted to “Israel” Bissell. This incorrect first name was repeated—as well as occasionally further distorted—and its appearance in copies strewn along the post roads from Boston to Philadelphia gave rise to the tale that a Bissell—be it Israel or Isaac—had singularly carried the Lexington Alarm all the way from Watertown to Philadelphia, a distance of about 300 miles.2
Rather, Isaac Bissell was one link in an established cadre of veteran postal riders who set a pace of three to four miles per hour depending on road conditions, weather, and the presence or absence of moonlight. As Bissell continued west from Worcester on the Upper Post Road on the morning of April 20, another rider carried the Lexington Alarm some twenty miles south to Brooklyn, Connecticut. Here another copy was made at 11:00 a.m. and endorsed accordingly.
Perhaps most important about this stop in Brooklyn was that the home of Israel Putnam stood nearby. Putnam was a tough veteran of the French and Indian War and arguably one of the most able of the rebel military leaders. When the postal rider shouted the news of the Lexington Alarm to him, Putnam was working in his field. He immediately dropped everything and set off for Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull’s home in Lebanon, some twenty miles away, to consult with him on a plan of action. “He loitered not,” Putnam’s fifteen-year-old son later recalled, “but left me, the driver of his team, to unyoke it in the furrow.”3
On through Norwich the news went to reach the Lower Post Road at New London. Fresh horses carried the rider westward from New London to Saybrook, Guilford, and Branford before arriving in New Haven sometime after midday on Friday, April 21. By then, the same news either had reached or soon would reach Hartford to the north via Isaac Bissell’s route through Springfield on the Upper Post Road. Behind these advance riders came additional messengers with updates to the initial report. The first update appears to have caught up with the original message at Fairfield, Connecticut, and the home of John Hancock’s friend Thaddeus Burr. Meanwhile, post riders hurrying in the opposite direction carried the news to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and eventually as far east as Machias, Maine, then still part of Massachusetts. When word reached Machias, it produced interesting results that, as we shall see, brought about what some would come to call the Lexington of the Seas.
Throughout Connecticut, the news of apparent war had a galvanizing effect. To be sure, there were loyalists in the colony, but the majority of Connecticut’s population held rebel leanings. The colony’s response—after Israel Putnam had conferred with Governor Trumbull—was to mobilize militia units and prepare to march for Boston.
But when the news reached New York City on Sunday morning, April 23, it was a different matter. Initial reports from Rhode Island and New London “that an Action had happened between the King’s Troops and the Inhabitants of Boston” had not been given much credence that morning in New York, but then “about 12 o’Clock an Express arrived” with the original Watertown dispatch as well as two updates. The printers at the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury worked overtime to set the messages in type for publication in the weekly newspaper the following day.4
Thomas Jones, an attorney and staunch loyalist who later wrote a history of New York during the Revolution, was dismissive and snide in his characterization of the rebel response. “They had wished for it for a long time,” Jones remembered, and “they received the news with avidity.” Several rebel leaders, Jones said, “paraded the town with drums beating and colours flying, (attended by a mob of negroes, boys, sailors, and pickpockets) inviting all mankind to take up arms in defence of the ‘injured rights and liberties of America.’ ”
These same rebel leaders, Jones maintained, “broke open the Arsenal in City Hall, and forcibly removed 1,000 stand of arms, belonging to the City Corporation, and delivered them out to the rabble.… The whole city became one continued scene of riot, tumult and confusion.”5
But as New York reacted with turmoil, the news continued to race south as fast as the manner of the times could carry it. For the next leg, it traveled not by horse but by boat from the tip of Manhattan to Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, Elias Boudinot, who would go on to become president of the Continental Congress, heard the news on the evening of April 23.6 Farther west, at Mount Kemble, his plantation near Morristown, one wonders how Peter Kemble heard the news and what thoughts he had for his children—Margaret, Stephen, and
Samuel—whose lives were so entwined with the fate of General Gage in Boston.
Jemima Condict probably heard the news in Essex County, just north of Elizabeth, the same day. “As every Day Brings New Troubels,” she recorded in her diary, “so this Day Brings News that yesterday [sic] very early in the morning They began to fight at Boston. The regulers We hear Shot first there; they killed 30 of our men And hundred & 50 of the Regulers.”7 Near and far, the rebel news of the fighting was already inextricably bound up with the idea that the British had fired first.
And onward the news ran. Committee members endorsed its receipt at New Brunswick at 2:00 a.m. on Monday, April 24; Princeton, at 4:00 a.m.; and Trenton at 9:00 a.m. before the Lexington Alarm arrived in Philadelphia at 5:00 p.m. on April 24. The big bell in the statehouse rang out to assemble a crowd to hear the news. It had taken five days and six hours for Joseph Palmer’s message to travel the three hundred miles from Watertown to Philadelphia. (One can only imagine the physical condition of Isaac Bissell if indeed he had ridden that distance in this length of time.) Now the Continental Congress that was due to assemble at the Pennsylvania statehouse in little more than two weeks would have plenty on its plate.8
MEANWHILE, ACCOUNTS OF APRIL 19 began to appear in Massachusetts newspapers. The Boston News-Letter of April 20 reported first. This paper was decidedly pro-government and a veritable mouthpiece for General Gage. It acknowledged the departure of Colonel Smith’s advance column and the subsequent march of Lord Percy’s brigade, but thereafter, details got thin. “The reports concerning this unhappy Affair,” the News-Letter concluded, “and the Causes that concurred to bring on an Engagement, are so various, that we are not able to collect any thing consistent or regular, and cannot therefore with certainty give our Readers any further Accounts of this shocking Introduction to all the Miseries of a Civil War.”9
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