General Gage had specifically instructed Smith to secure, early on, the two bridges entering Concord. The colonel decided he must reach them before the rebels could surround them and stop him from crossing. That was why Major Pitcairn had ridden ahead with his six infantry companies at the moment Paul Revere was recovering John Hancock’s trunk. Pitcairn had no intention of confronting Lexington’s militia. But to get to the bridges he had to march his troops directly across the town’s green, a two-acre triangular patch that divided the road into two branches.
As the British drew nearer, they heard William Diamond’s drumming, but Major Pitcairn was the first to see the small number of Minute Men on the green. He ordered his men not to fire. He intended simply to advance, surround Captain Parker’s few men and persuade them to throw down their arms. But Pitcairn was a Marine officer and only a volunteer on this operation. The light infantry marched in quick time toward the green, shouting curses.
Pitcairn approached the Minute Men and bawled, “Disperse, ye villains, ye rebels! Disperse! Lay down your arms! Why don’t you lay down your arms and disperse?”
By that time, Captain Parker’s militia totaled seventy-seven. As Pitcairn appeared, Parker called to them to show restraint. Lexington’s Minute Men had made their statement. They had stood fast on the green and met the British Army. When Pitcairn came nearer, Parker called to his men to hold their fire and disband. Some began to amble off the green, carrying their muskets. They were not obeying Pitcairn’s command to throw down their arms, but they were breaking ranks and walking away. There were exceptions; Jonas Parker, the captain’s elderly cousin, threw his hat filled with musket balls on the ground between his feet and prepared to fight all by himself.
Otherwise, the crisis seemed to be passing. Major Pitcairn was now shouting to his own troops, “Soldiers, don’t fire. Keep your ranks. Form and surround them.”
—
In his carriage headed for Woburn, Samuel Adams heard the first sounds of gunfire. “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” he exclaimed to John Hancock.
Adams knew from his answer that Hancock thought he was talking about the fair spring dawn, and he explained. “I mean,” he said, “what a glorious morning for America.”
—
Old Jonas Parker, who had vowed never to run from British guns, fell from a musket ball. He tried to fire from the ground, but a British soldier ran him through with a bayonet. As Captain Parker’s men moved off the green, the British soldiers fired at them. A shot either from behind a stone wall or from a window at Buckman’s Tavern—in the confusion no one could be sure—had touched off the onslaught, and in an instant the British professionals were beyond any attempt by their officers to control them. At most a handful of Parker’s militia fired at the British, and that was only after the infantry was already pumping shot into the backs of fleeing Minute Men. When the smoke cleared, eight Americans lay dead on the green.
Most of the men the troops killed had not defended themselves. Now the British were breaking into houses along the green, looking for the Minute Men. When Colonel Smith caught up with his men, he was appalled. Turning to a lieutenant, Smith said, “Do you know where a drummer is?” The officer found one, who began to beat the tattoo to lay down arms. Hearing it above the din triggered a response that no amount of shouting had achieved. The British troops stopped firing.
—
Lydia Hancock was leaning out of an upper window at the parsonage and saw the slaughter on the green. She heard a whiz close to her ear. “What’s that?” she asked. Her family told her that it was a bullet and she had better be more careful.
Once Colonel Smith had restored order and chastised his men for the breakdown in discipline, he sent them marching off the green with their fifes and drums, headed for the stores of ammunition at Concord. They were leaving behind the eight corpses and nine wounded Minute Men. The only British casualty was one private, lightly hit.
The town came out to see what had happened. Weeping, Lydia Hancock helped to dress the Clark children. Dorothy Quincy and Jonas Clark hid money, watches and other valuables in a potato bin and in the attic. They had watched as the British stormed neighboring houses and knew that when the troops had finished in Concord their return to Boston would lead them through Lexington again.
John Hancock sent his carriage back for the two women, with a note telling them where to meet him. He remembered a fine salmon that had been intended for dinner and instructed them to bring it. The women joined Hancock and Samuel Adams at Woburn, and the salmon was cooked, but before they could eat it a man burst in and told them the British were coming.
A slave led Adams and Hancock to a nearby wood, where they waited until they decided the report was false. Unsettled now, the party moved on by horse cart to a house in Billerica. There John Hancock finally had his dinner—salt pork and cold potatoes, served on a wooden tray.
—
At headquarters, General Gage had been awakened at 5 A.M. by Colonel Smith’s courier. Anticipating Smith’s call for reinforcements, Gage had instructed Lord Percy and his men to be dressed, armed and on the parade ground at four. But Gage’s orders had been left at the house of the brigade’s major, who was out. When he came home, his servant failed to tell him about his commander’s message. The major, along with the entire brigade, was still asleep at 5 A.M.
It was already 7: 30 before the troops were roused and ready to march. Then Percy was held up waiting for the Marine battalion, whose sealed orders had been sent in care of Major Pitcairn. The major had already left for Concord, and for hours no one at his headquarters thought to open them.
At 9 A.M. the relief column marched out Boston Neck and down the overland route that Billy Dawes had traveled ten hours before. With more than six hundred men and two cannon, Percy took along the regimental band. It played “Yankee Doodle” to humiliate the townspeople as they looked on from their doorways. As the British column passed near the Public Latin School, a loyalist teacher, John Lovell, who had taught John Hancock, turned to his class and said, “Deponite libros.” (Lay down your books.) Samuel Adams was not the only one to grasp the day’s significance. “War’s begun,” Lovell said, “and school’s done.”
—
With Paul Revere captured and Billy Dawes thrown from his horse, it was Samuel Prescott who reached Concord to sound the alarm. Between 1 and 2 A.M., bells began to ring, and the Concord militia gathered at Wright’s Tavern. With a population of fifteen hundred, Concord was twice the size of Lexington, and the number of Minute Men who turned out was three times as large as Captain Parker’s force. At daybreak a scout returned to say that there had been gunfire at Lexington but he didn’t know whether the British had fired gunpowder as a warning or had loaded their weapons with ball. The two hundred and fifty men of the militia caucused and decided not to wait for the British to carry the battle to them. Led by their major, John Buttrick, they started down the Lexington road, with fifes and drums to set the pace.
They had gone a little more than a mile on the narrow road when they sighted Colonel Smith’s troops coming toward them. The Minute Men halted and waited until the British were within five hundred yards. Then, as the British officers watched in surprise, Major Buttrick called for an about-face and marched his men, fife and drum still sounding at their side, back toward Concord, as if they were an advance escort for the British troops. Colonel Smith’s men were also accompanied by fife and drum, and martial music filled the air as the two contingents marched.
Near the approach to the town, a high ridge ran along the road. Colonel Smith saw that the ridge posed a tactical danger and sent infantrymen to take command of it. The late-straggling militia who had been watching from those heights now drifted back to town. Not a shot had been fired. Sticking to the road, the British grenadiers entered Concord at 8 A.M., sixteen miles and eleven hours from their starting point in Boston.
—
The morning of April 19 was cold and windy, though bright, and the cher
ry trees were in bud. As the Minute Men slipped away from the British troops, they debated hurriedly about their next course of action. The Reverend William Emerson called for resistance: “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here.” Others had more respect for the odds, and the Minute Men faded back until they reached a hill from which they could see militia from the neighboring country pouring toward Concord.
Colonel Smith’s men secured both bridges, the North and the South, and then he sent his infantry companies to search the town for gunpowder, arms and hoarded food. One company went ahead two miles looking for a cannon that had been buried that morning. As the British troops spread out, the Minute Men consolidated their forces in the hills and organized the arrivals streaming in.
In the town, the grenadiers conducted only a routine search. After their dressing-down at Lexington, they were subdued. The treasurer of the provincial congress, Henry Gardner, had left a chest of documents in his room at the inn in the care of a young woman. She told the soldiers that it was hers and demanded that they leave. At gunpoint, Major Pitcairn made the jailkeeper show where the town cannon had been buried, then ordered his men to dig it up and disable it.
General Gage had instructed his troops to pay for whatever they might need. When the wife of a militia officer refused to accept money for food and drink, several soldiers tossed coins into her lap. Tucking them into her pocket, she said, “This is the price of blood.” As the privates continued to look for weapons, their commanders sat in chairs on the lawns. To those in Concord, who had not heard details of the shooting at Lexington, Pitcairn seemed to be an amiable if scrawny figure, although he made a casual vow of vengeance. Stirring a brandy-and-water with his finger, he said he hoped he’d be stirring damned Yankee blood that same way before nightfall.
While Smith’s officers ordered breakfasts of meat and potatoes, trouble was mounting at the North Bridge. By midmorning, Captain Walter Sloane Laurie, along with three British companies, twenty-eight men to a company, was charged with securing the bridge against the Americans gathering two hundred yards away. Laurie’s men were estimating that behind a nearby hill a thousand Minute Men might be waiting; the number was closer to four hundred. Still, when two of Laurie’s companies were ordered to climb a nearby hill he was left to hold the bridge with only one company, barely more than two dozen soldiers.
For a time, twenty-eight British infantrymen looked warily in the direction of hundreds of concealed Americans. The Minute Men seemed content to let the British control the bridge until they noticed smoke rising from the town.
Smith’s grenadiers were destroying the few armaments they had found. They hacked down the town’s Liberty Pole and set it on fire, and they burned gun carriages and entrenching tools. From their lookout on the hill, the Minute Men saw smoke from the bonfires and concluded that the British were burning their houses. One Concord lieutenant asked his men, “Will you let them burn the town down?”
Their officers told them to get ready to move. They were to hold fire until the British soldiers at the bridge fired, then they were to fire as fast as they could. The Minute Men loaded their guns and started to march.
Captain Laurie not only had few troops but had deployed them badly, keeping them at the far end of the bridge with their backs to the river as they faced the rebels. The two British companies on the nearby hill saw the militia advancing and scrambled down to join Laurie at the entrance to the bridge. With only a narrow footbridge for his escape, the captain had about eighty men to face four hundred grim farmers armed with muskets.
The Minute Men were three hundred yards away when Captain Laurie asked a young lieutenant whether he should inform Colonel Smith of the danger. By all means, the lieutenant agreed. The men swarming toward them looked very determined. Smith was less than half a mile away. As Laurie backed his men hastily across the bridge, a messenger returned to say that Smith himself would be leading the reinforcements.
For Captain Laurie, the news was calamitous. The fat colonel would slow down his troops. As the Minute Men strode toward Laurie two by two, he told his soldiers to tear up the planks at their end of the bridge.
The commander of the Concord militia at the bridge, Major Buttrick, called out to the British to stop the destruction. The Minute Men were so close by that time that Laurie’s soldiers had to obey. Laurie ordered them into columns for street fighting. It was a new technique for the infantry—the front rank was supposed to fire, then turn about-face and march to the rear to reload while the next rank fired. Street fighting might have been an orderly way to retreat through an English city, but Laurie’s men were surrounded by open meadows. Worse, they didn’t understand the tactic very well.
What each British soldier could depend upon was his musket, a four-and-a-half-foot weapon called Brown Bess. A man didn’t need to be a sharpshooter. All he had to do was get within a hundred and twenty-five yards, point it and pull the trigger. Fired from much farther away, the three-quarter-inch balls simply fell to the ground. Given that range, a man had little time to aim. The emphasis was on volume. A well-trained company could fire, load and fire again fifteen times in four minutes. Though it might not have required a keen eye, steady hands were essential. To load, a soldier bit off the end of a paper cartridge that held the powder and the ball, shook some powder into the firing pan and closed the lid. He then rested the butt of his musket on the ground, poured the rest of the powder and the ball down the barrel and rammed in a wad of paper to hold the shot in place.
When he pulled the trigger, the firing cock fell, the flint struck steel and the spark ignited the powder in the firing pan. Fire flashed from the touchhole into the charge, and the ball was sent flying. That was the way Brown Bess worked—when the powder wasn’t too damp to catch the spark and the touchhole wasn’t too badly clogged.
In the end, none of it mattered—neither the strategy nor the weapons. Captain Laurie never gave an order to fire. Just the same, as had happened in Boston, a musket went off. Two or three more shots followed. The British infantrymen may have fired on their own initiative or they may have fired as a warning. The first bullets only roiled the surface of the river.
But they set off a volley from twenty British muskets. The Americans hadn’t believed that the British regulars meant to do anything more than frighten them with harmless bursts of powder. “God damn it!” a militia captain shouted. “They are firing ball!”
Two militia officers were struck dead, and the fifer from the town of Acton was wounded. Since the British had opened fire, Major Buttrick gave the order the Minute Men had been waiting for. “Fire, fellow soldiers! For God’s sake, fire!”
Advancing and firing as fast as they could, the Americans drove Laurie’s men onto the riverbank at the end of the bridge. Their aim was deadly. Few of their weapons were as new or as efficient as Brown Bess, but the Minute Men had been shooting a weapon, often the same one they were using now, since they were old enough to walk. Some had even brought the long guns they used for duck hunting. The British soldiers may have been equipped and trained by a great world power, but this morning at the North Bridge the Minute Men were more effective. In that first round, they killed three men and wounded four of the eight British officers.
Captain Laurie’s men broke and ran for the center of town. On the way, they came upon Colonel Smith plodding to their rescue. Smith had never had much enthusiasm for this entire operation. Hearing of the rout, he marched his grenadiers back to Concord. It was 10: 30 A.M. As Smith debated his next move, Minute Men were rushing to Concord from every farm within the sound of the shots. The alarm bells spread from town to town, and when they reached Watertown, Joseph Palmer, who had mixed saltwater tea at Boston Harbor, saddled up his wife’s horse and rode to the battle. At Sudbury, Deacon Josiah Haynes had risen at dawn, and he had run and walked the eight miles to Concord’s other bridge. Once there, Haynes, who was seventy-nine, chafed at the caution of the militia commander: “If you don’t go and drive them British from th
at bridge, I shall call you a coward.”
Colonel Smith didn’t know that a series of bungles had delayed Lord Percy and the reinforcements. He waited nervously for ninety minutes as scouts brought him reports of the hundreds of farmers flocking into the hills around Concord. Smith retained one bargaining chip by staying in town. Despite the confusion over the smoking bonfires, his men hadn’t set fire to any houses, and Smith assumed that the militia would not turn their town square into a battlefield. Yet the number of Americans surrounding him kept growing, until at last Smith felt that he couldn’t wait for Percy. At noon he ordered his troops to march back down the road to Lexington.
As the British soldiers waited and listened to every rumor, their anxiety had risen. One story was particularly harrowing. Not satisfied with their slaughter at the bridge, the Minute Men were supposed to be scalping their wounded victims. It was a nightmarish vision for veterans of the French and Indian War, and for the younger men who had only heard of such atrocities. In this case, there was a trace of fact to the story. A feeble-minded young man from the countryside had been hurrying across the bridge to join the Minute Men and had come upon a wounded British soldier. Before anyone could stop him, he had split the soldier’s head with a tomahawk.
—
At Lexington, the dead had been cleared from the green. John Parker ordered William Diamond to beat his drum as the order for survivors to fall in, and although some Minute Men were bandaged and aching, they answered Parker’s call. Six hours after losing one third of their ranks to the British onslaught, Captain Parker’s men were on the road to Concord.
—
The British were now withdrawing from Concord with surprising ease. Because General Gage had conceived the mission as routine, he hadn’t sent along a military doctor. While Colonel Smith had fretted about his next move, injured British troops had been taken to local doctors around Concord, who agreed to dress their wounds. Soldiers who couldn’t walk were hoisted onto horses, and chaises were commandeered for those who couldn’t ride. With no drums or martial airs, Colonel Smith led his limping troops out of Concord. The Minute Men seemed content to watch them go. The British moved quietly along toward a bend in the road called Meriam’s Corner.
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