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July 19 - July 28, 2020
A hard strike against the depot in Concord would be more fruitful, although disappointing late intelligence indicated that the cagey rebels had evacuated at least some military stocks to other sites. Opposition seemed unlikely except perhaps from scattered “parties of bushmen.”
march “with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord,” Gage noted, adding, You will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.
The expedition would carry a single day’s rations and no artillery; speed and surprise were essential.
Two weeks earlier, the provincial congress had agreed that an enemy force greater than five hundred men leaving town with baggage and artillery ought to be considered a threat to the province and met by an assembled “army of observation … to act solely on the defensive so long as it can be justified.”
In 1775, America had more than three thousand churches, representing eighteen denominations, but none was more important on this April night than Christ Church in Boston’s Salem Street. Known as Old North,
Flint and steel soon lighted the candles, and twin gleams could be seen across the harbor. As Revere intended, rebel leaders beyond the Charles now knew that British troops were on the move via Back Bay—two if by sea
“The regulars are coming out.”
The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.
the Lexington bell began to clang in the wooden tower, hard by the meetinghouse. More gallopers rode off to rouse half a hundred villages. Warning gunshots echoed from farm to farm. Bonfires flared. Drums beat. Across the colony, in an image that would endure for centuries, solemn men grabbed their firelocks and stalked off in search of danger, leaving the plow in the furrow, the hoe in the garden, the hammer on the anvil, the bucket at the well sweep. This day would be famous before it dawned.
130 militiamen, summoned by that insistent pealing, milled about, stamping their feet against the nighttime chill. They awaited orders from their captain, John Parker, described as “a great tall man … with a high, wide brow.” Now forty-five, a farmer, father of seven, and sometime town assessor, he had fought as a sergeant in the French and Indian War at Louisbourg and Quebec.
estimated one in four able-bodied Massachusetts men had served in the last French war.
soon after four a.m., the sounds of a country folk alert and alarmed intensified—bells, shots, distant hoofbeats. Pitcairn ordered his troops to halt and load their weapons, a portentous command.
Imperfect barrels, imperfect balls, a lack of sights, variable powder, and windage between ball and barrel meant the musket was marginally accurate at fifty yards, hopeless beyond a hundred. But that hardly mattered when bullets were fired in swarms at close range.
the men seated their ramrods and surged forward, breathing hard, pulses pounding. The fourteen-inch bayonets on their muskets protruded above their heads like a picket fence. Scraps of cartridge paper, spat out, littered the road behind them.
“Disperse, you rebels, immediately!
A single gunshot sounded above the clamor, possibly a warning shot or a sniper at Buckman Tavern. Whoever fired first on the Common would remain forever uncertain, but muskets quickly barked along the British line,
Few of Parker’s men managed to fire more than once, if that.
Jonas Parker, a cousin of the captain’s, neatly placed his bullets and spare flints in a hat at his feet. A British ball knocked him to his knees, and as he fumbled to reload, British bayonets tore him dead.
Lexington had been not a battle, or even a skirmish, but an execution. The only British casualties were two privates, lightly wounded by gunshots, and Pitcairn’s horse, nicked twice in the flank. The American tally was far worse. Eight rebels were dead, nine wounded. Of those slain, only two bodies lay on the original American line. Several had taken bullets in the back while dispersing, including one man captured earlier in the morning and killed while ostensibly trying to escape a hundred yards to the east.
Samuel Adams, upon hearing of the gunplay, exclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!”
The redcoats “drew up and formed in a body on the Common,” Clarke reported, “fired a volley and gave three huzzahs by way of triumph.” Then, forming again by companies, they turned and marched west, toward Concord.
Sometime before eight a.m., perhaps two hundred impatient militiamen headed for Lexington to the rap of drums and the trill of fifes. Twenty minutes later, eight hundred British soldiers hove into view barely a quarter mile away, like a scarlet dragon on the road near the junction known as Meriam’s Corner.
brief argument erupted over whether to make a stand in the village—“If we die, let us die here,” urged the militant minister William Emerson—but most favored better ground on the ridgeline a mile north, across the river. Colonel Barrett agreed, and ordered them to make for North Bridge. Concord was given over to the enemy.
Into largely deserted Concord the regulars marched, in search of feed for the officers’ horses and water for the parched men.
recent weeks, most military stores in Concord had been dispersed to nine other villages or into deeper burrows of mud and manure. Regulars seized sixty barrels of flour found in a gristmill and a malt house, smashing them open and powdering the streets. They tossed five hundred pounds of musket balls into a millpond, knocked the trunnions from several iron cannons found in the jail yard, chopped down the liberty pole, and eventually made a bonfire of gun carriages, spare wheels, tent pegs, and a cache of wooden spoons.
Three minutes of gunplay had cost five American casualties, including two dead. For the British, eight were wounded and two killed, but another badly hurt soldier, trying to regain his feet, was mortally insulted by minuteman Ammi White, who crushed his skull with a hatchet.
As Noah Parkhurst from Lincoln observed moments after the shooting stopped, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”
Before noon the red procession headed east, silent and somber, every man aware that eighteen miles of danger lay ahead.
Arrowhead Ridge loomed above the north side of the road, offering a sheltered corridor through the Great Fields for hundreds of militiamen hurrying from North Bridge to Meriam’s Corner. Here the road narrowed to a causeway across boggy ground, canalizing and slowing the column.
Captain John Parker’s company had suffered seventeen casualties in Lexington eight hours earlier, but Parker and his men—perhaps a hundred or more—were keen to fight again.
around two p.m. the thin red line came into view six hundred yards down Battle Road, moving briskly despite more than sixty wounded,
A small bridge at a sharp bend in the road again constricted the column, and as the British vanguard approached within forty yards, the rebels fired.
“Our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act,” Ensign Henry De Berniere later wrote. “We began to run rather than retreat.”
Two supply wagons had eventually followed the column only to be ambushed by a dozen “exempts”—men too old for militia duty—at an old cider mill across from the Menotomy meetinghouse. Two soldiers and four horses were killed, and several other redcoats were captured after reportedly tossing their muskets into Spy Pond. Rebels dragged the carcasses into a field, hid the wagons in a hollow, and swept dust over bloodstains on the road.
“The civil war was begun at Concord this morning,” a parson told his diary. “Lord direct all things for His glory.” A Roxbury physician said simply, “Well, the nail is driven.”
Horses, cattle, pigs, and men lay dead across a twenty-mile corridor from the Charles to the Concord River.
One British doctor complained in a letter home that American balls were deliberately scored to shatter on impact and inflict greater damage. Perhaps, but more typically hand-cast bullets often had a ridged seam that left hideous, ragged wounds.
British casualties totaled 273, nearly 15 percent of the total force that marched into Middlesex on April 19; of those, 73 men were killed or would die of their wounds. American casualties numbered 95, over half of them—49—dead. Collecting bodies
Fifty-eight towns and villages, from Acton to Woburn, had sent men into the fight; fourteen thousand had marched against the regulars, of whom about four thousand actually heaved themselves at the British column. For all the chaos of the day, the Americans had demonstrated impressive organizational skills, although combat leadership above the grade of captain had been erratic and sometimes nonexistent. Each militia company had essentially fought alone, improvising without tactical orchestration from higher command.
scholars calculated that at least seventy-five thousand American rounds had been fired, using well over a ton of powder, but only one bullet in almost three hundred had hit home. The shot heard round the world likely missed.
“Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken,” Percy wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general in London, a few hours after returning to Boston. “They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.” Lieutenant Mackenzie acknowledged his foe’s “violent and determined spirit.”
Like a burning fuse, accounts of that day raced across New England and down the seaboard,
“To arms!” criers cried. “Gage has fired upon the people!” A rider appeared on a Providence wharf where deckhands were unloading salt. “War, war, boys,” he called. “There is war.”
swift American schooner, the Quero, sailed from Salem for England on April 29 carrying recent copies of the Essex Gazette, with an article that began, “Last Wednesday, the 19th of April, the Troops of his Britannick Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People of this Province.”
the accounts appeared in the three-penny Evening Post to be read by, among others, George III and Lord North.
late April, the provincial congress called for thirty thousand American troops to turn out,
Eleven hundred tents accumulated by the Committee of Supply sprouted along the Charles, and a request went out to sailmakers and ship masters for more. “We have stripped the seaports of canvas to make tents,”
No sooner did the Grand American Army muster than it began to melt away. Farmers left to tend their spring fields, shopkeepers to tend their counters.
“We are in want of almost everything, but of nothing so much as arms and ammunition,” Joseph Warren wrote on May 15 to Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress had just convened.
welcome news arrived from Lake Champlain in New York, more than two hundred miles northwest: at three-thirty a.m. on May 10, eighty-five whooping New England roughnecks, later described as “tatterdemalions in linsey-woolsey who call themselves Green Mountain Boys,” had swarmed from a scow-rigged bateau to overrun the British garrison at Fort Ticonderoga.
