Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 10

Part of the problem had to do with Gage's decision to put together an expedition made up of grenadiers and light infantrymen rather than go with one of the three brigades that made up the force he had in Boston. Although these seven hundred men represented the elite in his army, they had never trained together and were unfamiliar, for the most part, with the officers who were now commanding them. The trust and cohesion that went with a group of men who had been training and living together for several years did not exist among Smith's expedition. Throughout the long day ahead, orders given by the British officers were either misinterpreted or ignored, an inevitable result of unfamiliarity in a time of crisis.

Compounding the difficulty was the fact that they were already fourteen miles into what they now knew was enemy territory. The prospect of the march back to Boston through a countryside that was rapidly filling up with militiamen was daunting, to say the least. In fact, when shortly after the incident at Lexington, Colonel Smith revealed for the first time the purpose of their mission, several of his officers advised him to turn back. "From what they had seen ... ," Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie wrote, "they imagined it would be impracticable to advance to Concord and execute their orders." Colonel Smith simply told them that he was "determined to obey the orders he had received," and they continued on to Concord.

The encounter at Lexington was just as disastrous for the town's militiamen, who suffered what might be termed the country equivalent of the Boston Ma.s.sacre. It apparently made no difference that, unlike the Bostonians, who had been armed with only clubs, rocks, and s...o...b..a.l.l.s, the militiamen were equipped with muskets. Once the king's troops had been goaded into firing their weapons, the Lexington militia suffered casualties that were as lopsided as those suffered by the crowd in Boston in 1770. Just as determining who was at fault became a hotly contested political issue in the aftermath of the Boston Ma.s.sacre, so was what happened at Lexington about to spark a controversy that persists to this day as to who was the first to discharge his musket or pistol.

The real question was not who fired the first shot, but why were Parker and his men on the Lexington Green in the first place? Seventy or so militiamen had no chance of stopping an advance guard of more than two hundred British regulars. Instead of spending much of the early-morning hours drinking at Buckman's Tavern and then stubbornly lingering on the green, the Lexington militia should have already been in Concord, where they could have helped hide and ultimately defend the military stores. As it was, they had almost called attention to what few kegs of powder they had hidden in the town's meetinghouse. What purpose was to be served by standing out there on the gra.s.s as the soldiers marched by?

Years later, General William Heath, who was about to join with Joseph Warren and play an important role in subsequent events that day, commented that by standing so near the road, Parker and his men had been guilty of "too much braving for danger [since] they were sure to meet with insult, or injury, which they could not repel." If they were intent on engaging the British, they should have been where many of them ended up: behind a stone wall.

Some have speculated that Samuel Adams may have been responsible for the militia being on the Lexington Green. Since Adams had a reputation for stage-managing events, whether it was the selection of the province's delegates to the Continental Congress in June or Warren's Ma.s.sacre Day Oration in March, perhaps he accompanied John Hanc.o.c.k to the Lexington Green and convinced Captain Parker to make a stand against the British. However, Hanc.o.c.k, not Adams, was Lexington's local hero, and he had been the one who, according to William Munroe, proclaimed just minutes before the skirmish, "If I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops." Parker may very well have had Hanc.o.c.k's words in mind when he initially told his men to stand their ground.

Thanks to Reverend William Gordon's account of the events of that day, we know that as Adams and Hanc.o.c.k beat a hasty retreat from Lexington, Adams proclaimed, "Oh, what a glorious morning is this!" Hanc.o.c.k missed his meaning entirely and thought his companion was talking about the weather. "I mean," Adams insisted, "this is a glorious day for America."

Hanc.o.c.k was not as thickheaded as Samuel Adams, who apparently recounted the exchange to Gordon, seemed to imply. Being a businessman, Hanc.o.c.k possessed a practical sense of the human resources required to get a job properly done. Adams was more of a theorist, a man who always had his eye on the bigger picture and who never seems to have allowed the paltry concerns of individuals to interfere with his pursuit of American liberty. For him, any event that furthered the cause-even a confused and heartrending event such as the Boston Ma.s.sacre-was "glorious." Hanc.o.c.k, on the other hand, had seen for himself the men who were about to face the British at Lexington, and he appears to have been less taken with the patriotic possibilities of what was about to unfold. According to his fiancee, he described the militiamen as "but partially provided with arms and those they had were in most miserable order." He may have quite rightly suspected that he and Adams were leaving a slaughter in their wake.

Hanc.o.c.k, in the end, had the wisdom not to take the field at Lexington Green. In just a few hours' time, Joseph Warren was about to make a very different decision.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Bridge

The morning of April 19, 1775, marked the beginning of a beautiful spring day in New England. The unusually warm winter meant that the trees and flowers were ahead of themselves that April, and the foliage dotting the surrounding fields was hazed with blossoms and the bright green buds of emerging leaves. Now that the column's presence was no longer a secret, Colonel Francis Smith ordered the fifers and drummers to strike up a tune during the six-mile march to Concord.

Mary Hartwell lived in the town of Lincoln, just to the west of Lexington. Her husband Samuel was a sergeant in the local militia, but that did not prevent her from appreciating what she saw that morning when she looked out her window. "The army of the king was coming up in fine order," she later told her grandchildren, "their red coats were brilliant, and their bayonets glistening in the sunlight made a fine appearance; but I knew what all that meant, and I feared that I should never see your grandfather again."

Colonel Smith seems to have made a special effort to instill a renewed sense of discipline among his troops that morning. The British army had a long and distinguished tradition to uphold, and Smith later claimed that despite being shot at twice from the surrounding woods, his men marched from Lexington to Concord "with as much good order as ever troops observed in Britain or any other friendly country."

The fact remained, however, that they were not in a friendly country. But was this truly enemy territory? Twenty years before, the regulars had been looked to as the allies, if not the saviors, of the New Englanders as they marched together over these same country roads on their way to battle the French and Indians. Now that the enemy in that war had been defeated, the New Englanders were acting as if the New World of their Puritan ancestors was theirs and theirs alone. It was left to Colonel Smith and his regulars to remind these people that this was still British soil.

Concord is a town surrounded by hills. In 1775, it was also a town where open fields, crisscrossed by stone walls, predominated. This meant that the small group of militiamen gathered on Meriam's Hill at the intersection of the road to Concord and the road to Bedford, about a mile from the center of Concord, had plenty of time to watch the long line of British troops approaching from the east. And like Mary Hartwell before them, they were transfixed by the spectacle of seven hundred British regulars marching through the clear morning air. "The sun was rising and shined on their arms," the magnificently named Thaddeus Blood remembered, "and they made a n.o.ble appearance in their red coats."

Unlike what had happened just a few hours before in Lexington, when in the dim light of dawn the troops had burst upon the green in a terrifying rush, the people of Concord had ample, if not too much, time to contemplate what these colorfully dressed soldiers were about. Definitive word of what had happened at Lexington had not yet reached Concord. Since the militiamen had been directed not to fire the first shot, there were to be several tense and agonizing hours to come as the militia's leaders, full of hesitancy and indecision, tried to figure out what to do.

On a hill overlooking the town's meetinghouse, which just the week before had been the temporary home of the Provincial Congress, stood most of Concord's militia along with a group of civil, military, and religious leaders. Near this collection of elders was a liberty pole topped by a flag, which like the flag in Taunton may have read "Liberty and Union." One of the youngest members of this distinguished group was the minister William Emerson, thirty-two. All winter and spring he had been encouraging the town's residents to resist British attempts to limit their G.o.d-given liberties. "Let us stand our ground," he insisted that morning. "If we die, let us die here!"

Others, such as Colonel James Barrett, sixty-five, a veteran of the French and Indian War whose house on the other side of the Concord River was where many of the most critical military stores were now hidden, had less enthusiasm for forcing a confrontation. The debate continued even as the advance guard of militia that had been monitoring the British rushed into town with the regulars at their heels. Finally they decided to abandon their position beside the liberty pole and retreat with the town's women and children across the North Bridge to the militias' prearranged meeting place at Punkata.s.set Hill, about a mile from the town center, where they could monitor the British and yet be out of the regulars' immediate reach.

It irked them to watch as the soldiers marched into the almost empty town, cut down the liberty pole, and began searching for the cannons, ammunition, and other military equipment that Gage's spies had reported to be hidden in the inhabitants' homes. Most alarming for Colonel Barrett was the sight of seven companies of light infantrymen heading for the North Bridge in the direction of his farm. Once at the bridge, the commander of the British detachment, Captain Lawrence Parsons, left three companies to guard the crossing in antic.i.p.ation of his eventual return as he pushed ahead with four companies toward the Barrett homestead, about two miles from the bridge. By that time Colonel Barrett had left Punkata.s.set Hill and was on his way to warn his wife and family that the regulars were coming.

The Barretts had spent the previous day and night preparing for this eventuality. Barrett's fourteen-year-old grandson, James, had led a team of oxen towing a cart full of military supplies to a nearby swamp, where he and his companions hid the stores under pine boughs. South of the barn, others plowed up a thirty-foot-square section of field and, instead of sowing it with seed, laid muskets in the trenches. Some of the cannons were laid under a bed of sage; other pieces of artillery were buried beneath a mound of manure.

As soon as he arrived that morning, Barrett encouraged his wife, Rebeckah, to flee. "No," she replied. "I can't live very long anyway, and I'd rather stay and see that they don't burn down the house and barn." While her husband returned to Punkata.s.set Hill by a back route through the woods, she and her family made some final preparations in antic.i.p.ation of the soldiers' arrival.

Captain Parsons was led to the Barrett farm by Ensign Henry DeBerniere, one of the two British spies that Gage had sent out that winter into the New England countryside. Upon meeting Mrs. Barrett, Parsons immediately realized that this was not going to be easy. She expected, she sternly informed him, that he and his men would "respect private property." Once he a.s.sured her that this was the case, she proceeded to shadow his every move, repeatedly reminding him of his promise and in several instances providing enough of a distraction to steer his men away from hidden caches of bullets and other stores. By 8:00 a.m., they'd managed to find only a few wooden gun carriages, which they burned on the road near the corn barn after Mrs. Barrett insisted that they move them away from the larger barn near her house.

Tired, frustrated, and hungry, Captain Parsons requested something to eat. Mrs. Barrett obliged, and the soldiers enjoyed a meal of brown bread and milk in the same large room the colonel used to muster and organize the Concord militia. When the soldiers insisted she take some coins as payment, Mrs. Barrett replied, "This is the price of blood."

By the time Colonel Barrett returned to Punkata.s.set Hill, the number of militiamen had increased significantly as companies continued to arrive from towns to the west and north of Concord. At the beginning of the morning, the British column of seven hundred men had possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage, but now with the arrival of additional militia companies and with the division of Smith's force into several isolated battalions, the situation had changed dramatically. At present only about a hundred regulars were at or near the North Bridge, waiting for Captain Parsons's return from the Barrett house. The militia leaders a.s.sembled on Punkata.s.set Hill began to contemplate moving their force of somewhere between three and four hundred men closer to the regulars near the bridge.

Accompanying Colonel Barrett were Major John b.u.t.trick, forty-three, leader of the local regiment of minutemen, as well as five Concord company captains, three of whom were related by blood or marriage to Colonel Barrett. Not all the officers present that morning were inclined to agree with Colonel Barrett; for example, Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer, thirty-nine, already had a well-established reputation for making the lives of the town elders uncomfortable. Instead of deferring to rank when making decisions, these New Englanders followed, in the tradition of the town meeting, a more consensual approach. Eventually they decided that the time was right to make a move toward the North Bridge.

About three hundred yards to the northwest of the bridge was a low, flat-topped hill on which one of the companies of British troops was positioned. Leaving the women and children and dogs on Punkata.s.set Hill, the American militiamen began marching toward the British position, about a thousand yards away. The New Englanders were relieved to watch the company of regulars hurriedly abandon their initial position and join the other company closer to the bridge.

For the next hour, the American militia and the British regulars stood at ease watching each other, with only a few hundred yards between them. The Concord River flooded each spring, and the road leading down to the North Bridge had to curve around an inlet of seasonal marshland, where a causeway connected the road to the bridge. A cool westerly breeze surged across the surrounding meadow. According to tradition, the militia company from nearby Bedford carried a crimson flag (which still exists) depicting an armored arm reaching out of the clouds with a sword clenched in its fist. The Latin phrase "Vince aut Morire" (Conquer or Die) was emblazoned around this forbidding, celestial-looking appendage, which, thanks to the wind direction, would have been clearly visible to the regulars on the bridge, especially if one of the officers had a spygla.s.s.

Flags such as this had been carried into battle during the English Civil War; they'd also accompanied the militiamen's forefathers during King Philip's War, when the region's Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts had been reviled by the English as the literal children of Satan. Now that New England's original inhabitants had been defeated, this most recent generation of colonists looked back on the struggles of the past with some nostalgia. Rather than despise the foes of their ancestors, they had begun to invoke and even honor their memory. Whether they disguised themselves as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party or had come to recognize the tactical advantages of what their forefathers had once dismissed as the Indians' "skulking way of war," these men had moved in directions that would have been inconceivable to the Puritans of the past. After generations of adapting to their surroundings, they had become a people who were profoundly different from the British regulars watching them tensely from the North Bridge.

At least one militiaman, however, was a relative newcomer to Ma.s.sachusetts. At some point, James Nichols, the owner of a farm in Lincoln and recently emigrated from England, handed his musket to one of his townsmen. "I will go down and talk to them," he said. He walked to the bridge and struck up a conversation with the British officers. After a while, he returned to the hill. Nichols, who was described as a "good droll fellow and a fine singer," clearly had no heart for what was about to transpire. It was time, he said, to head home. With gun in hand, James Nichols walked away.

The alarm had reached the town of Acton around 3:00 a.m. Thanks to the thirty-year-old gunsmith Isaac Davis, Acton had one of the best-equipped militia companies in the province. Not only did Davis have a beautiful musket of his own manufacture but he had equipped each of the men in his company with a bayonet. They were also well practiced, having met at Davis's home twice a week since November 1774.

But on the morning of April 19, as he prepared to lead his men to Concord, about six miles to the southeast, Davis was, according to his wife, "anxious and thoughtful." Several of their four children were suffering from scarlet fever. By about seven o'clock, more than twenty militiamen had collected at the Davis house, and Isaac decided they must leave. His wife believed that he had "something to communicate" as he took up his musket and cartridge box, but, unable to find the words, he simply said, "Take good care of the children," and walked out the door.

They marched quickly past the Acton Meetinghouse and, soon after that, past Brooks Tavern, where they were greeted by handkerchiefs waving from the windows and doorway. All the while additional members of their company kept catching up to them and falling into line until they eventually comprised thirty-eight men, close to the entire company.

After following the road for several miles, they took a shortcut along a woodland path and two miles later found themselves at the edge of a field overlooking the home of Colonel Barrett. They could see Captain Parsons and his men moving about the property, looking for stores. Staying off the main road and marching on a direct line through the fields, they pa.s.sed a tavern kept by the widow Brown, about a mile from the North Bridge. Thirteen-year-old Charles Handley was living at the tavern then; years later he would remember hearing Davis's fifer play "The White c.o.c.kade," a bouncy Scottish tune that memorialized Bonnie Prince Charlie's doomed attempt to overthrow the British king. During that 1745 uprising the prince had placed a white rose on his bonnet, and thus the "white c.o.c.kade" became an emblem of rebellion. With the fife and drum playing this song of defiance, Captain Isaac Davis and his men marched toward the North Bridge of Concord.

By about nine that morning, somewhere between four and five hundred militiamen had a.s.sembled on the flat-topped hill overlooking the river. In addition to those from Concord, Lincoln, and Bedford, officers and men had arrived from Carlisle, Chelmsford, Groton, Littleton, and Stow, including Lieutenant Colonel John Robinson, who had just arrived ahead of his militia companies from Westford. At some point, they were joined by Captain Davis's company from Acton.

As they had been doing for several hours now, Colonel Barrett and his officers were discussing what to do next. Then someone pointed out that smoke had begun to rise from the center of Concord. This was the opportunity for which Lieutenant Hosmer had been waiting all morning.

Hosmer had a history of taking adversarial positions at town meetings. He was also a militant patriot, and he'd probably grown increasingly impatient with Colonel Barrett's reluctance to engage the British. As billows of smoke continued to rise into the windy sunshine, he turned to Barrett and said, "Will you let them burn the town down?"

Colonel Smith and Major Pitcairn had fared no better than Captain Parsons in their search for military stores in Concord's town center. The townspeople were, Colonel Smith later reported to General Gage, "sulky," and in one instance a man even attacked Major Pitcairn, who scored one of the few successes that morning when he came upon three rusty cannon barrels. As the burly grenadiers moved about the houses, some of the officers sat in the sun on chairs that they'd temporarily confiscated, sipping hard cider.

As at the Barrett farm, the regulars came upon a few wooden gun carriages, which they burned in the road along with some other wooden objects, including the town's liberty pole. When the wind took hold of the flames and the conflagration spread to the nearby Town House, local matron Martha Moulton urged the officers to put out the fire. When they equivocated, saying, "Oh, Mother, don't be concerned," Moulton took up a pail of water and shamed them into helping her. Soon a bucket brigade had succeeded in extinguishing the flames, creating the cloud of smoke that the militiamen saw from the hill on the other side of the Concord River. The regulars weren't burning the town; they were doing their best to save it.

All of this was lost, however, on the militiamen and their officers. As far as they were concerned, Concord was about to be burned to the ground by the regulars. Colonel Barrett reluctantly decided that they must challenge the soldiers at the bridge and rescue the town. If they got lucky, the regulars would let them pa.s.s unmolested. If not and the bridge became a scene of brutal fighting, the company leading the militiamen must have bayonets. Other captains volunteered, but their companies were not as well equipped as the men from Acton, and Isaac Davis was given the honor of leading them toward the regulars gathered at the North Bridge. "I have not a man that is afraid to go," he a.s.sured the other militia officers. Concord's schoolmaster was present that morning, and years later he remembered how Davis's face "reddened at the word of command." Davis's cheeks may have been suffused with a flush of pride and resolve, but he may have also been suffering, like his children, from scarlet fever.

Davis's Acton company moved from the left of the line to what became the front of the column. Marching beside Davis were Concord's Major John b.u.t.trick and Westford's Lieutenant Colonel John Robinson. The militia followed behind them in files of two, normally not a fighting formation. In the rear and on horseback, Colonel Barrett repeated to each pa.s.sing company not to fire first.

Even though men had already been killed at Lexington, many later looked to what was about to happen at the North Bridge as the start of the American Revolution. But, in truth, this was hardly the first time that armed colonists had actively opposed the British military. Back on December 14, the citizens of New Hampshire had attacked Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth and taken the king's gunpowder and artillery. Two and a half years before that, on June 9, 1772, a British customs schooner, HMS Gaspee, had been boarded and burned by a group of Rhode Islanders led by the merchant John Brown. In both incidents, American colonists had initiated an attack with the intention of taking or destroying the crown's property.

But the events at the North Bridge were to be different. The militiamen were not out to storm a fort or scuttle a hated customs vessel. They simply wanted to save their town. But first they must cross a river.

The three companies of British regulars at the bridge were commanded by Captain Walter Laurie, who had long since sent a message to Colonel Smith calling for reinforcements. Laurie's hundred or so soldiers were cl.u.s.tered on the west side of the bridge, but when they realized that the militiamen were headed toward them, marching, one of his officers wrote, "with as much order as the best disciplined troops," Laurie ordered his own men back across the bridge. Now most of his force was concentrated in a single group on the east side of the river, with the bridge between them and the approaching militiamen.

Two of Laurie's officers lingered on the bridge and began to pull up some of the planks so as to impede the progress of the militiamen. In the meantime, Laurie tried to a.s.semble two of his companies into what was known as a street-firing formation. After firing, the soldiers kneeling in the front rows would peel off to the sides to reload as those behind moved forward to continue the firing. Maximizing firepower in a confined s.p.a.ce, street-firing, if performed properly, might have succeeded in holding the bridge until reinforcements arrived. But as it turned out, Laurie, like Lexington militia captain John Parker before him, hadn't given himself enough time to prepare his men.

As Laurie struggled to get his troops organized, Lieutenant William Sutherland and a handful of men leaped over the wall on the left side of the road leading to the bridge. Sutherland immediately realized that since the road on the other side of the river curved as it approached the bridge, he and his men would have a clear shot of the right flank, or side, of the militia companies before they crossed the river. By this time Concord's Major b.u.t.trick was yelling at the regulars to stop pulling up the planks as Captain Laurie's soldiers did their best to follow their own commander's undoubtedly hurried orders.