Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 9

The letter had been written back on January 27, when the saber rattling of the North administration had been at its height. Although Dartmouth qualified his statements in half a dozen ways, his overall message was clear: the time had come for Gage to do something, since "the king's dignity and honor and safety of the empire require that ... force should be repelled by force." If a conflict was inevitable, let it begin now, before Ma.s.sachusetts entered "a riper state of rebellion." Dartmouth reported that both the king and the ministry felt that "the first and essential step" was to "arrest and imprison the princ.i.p.al actors and abettors" in the Provincial Congress. That said, he realized that "in a situation where everything depends so much upon the events of the day and upon local circ.u.mstances your conduct must be governed very much by your own judgment and discretion."

The irony is that by the time Gage received Dartmouth's letter, the anger of the ministry, along with that of many Ma.s.sachusetts patriots, had cooled. If Gage had done nothing that spring, the patriot leaders, already beset by growing discord within their own ranks, would have had even more trouble maintaining a united front. The ministry had played perfectly into the radicals' hands when Gage finally chose to act on a letter based on information and instructions that were several months old.

But perhaps the greatest irony was that a suggestion from a British spy, not the letter from Dartmouth, seems to have initiated the series of decisions that was to have such a momentous historical impact. In the end, Gage didn't do as Dartmouth had recommended and arrest the leaders of the Provincial Congress, which would have almost certainly led to the seizure of many loyalist leaders (a response recommended in the Suffolk Resolves drafted by Joseph Warren back in September). Instead, Gage proceeded with plans to secure and destroy the military stores in Concord, which had become, thanks to being a town at the crossroads between Boston and the many settlements to the west and north, a major gathering point for patriot weapons and provisions. Church and Gage's other spies a.s.sured him that large amounts of military supplies (including the valuable bra.s.s cannons that had been spirited out of Boston back in the fall) had been acc.u.mulated in Concord; the town, about twenty miles outside of Boston, was also close enough for a detachment of regulars to march there and back in a single day-an important consideration, given the hostility of the country people. And besides, the likelihood that a company of poorly trained militiamen had the gumption to stand up to the regulars-let alone fire on them-seemed remote at best.

On April 15, the day the Provincial Congress adjourned, Gage ordered that the two elite companies of his regiments-the grenadiers (the bigger and more powerful men) and the light infantry (who were faster and more agile)-be relieved of their duties "till further orders." The supposed reason for the order was so that the soldiers might learn new "exercises and evolutions," but Lieutenant John Barker rightly guessed that "this ... is by way of a blind. I dare say they have something for them to do."

Gage's officers were not the only ones to take notice. The patriots had been keeping careful watch on the regulars' movements since the fall and quickly realized that something was afoot. The next suspicious development was the midnight launching of boats from the decks of the transports anch.o.r.ed in the harbor. These were the type of small rowing vessels that had been used to take the troops up the Mystic River back in September, and the next morning they could be seen cl.u.s.tered at the sterns of the men-of-war. From his house on Hanover Street, Warren directed Paul Revere to ride to Lexington, where Samuel Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k were still living in the town's parsonage, and inform them of these ominous developments. On the way back to Boston, Revere stopped in Charlestown, where he made arrangements with the local patriots that if the troops did indeed march out of the city, he would make sure that signal lanterns were placed in the belfry of Christ Church, whose steeple was, at 191 feet, the tallest in Boston, taller, in fact, than even Beacon Hill. One lantern would mean the regulars were taking the land route out across the Neck into Roxbury; two lanterns would mean the boats had been used to row the soldiers across the Charles River to either Charlestown or Cambridge.

In an espionage report written on Tuesday, April 18, Gage received detailed information about where the stores were located in Concord. Many of the provisions were hidden in houses in the center of town; most of the military supplies were at a farmhouse on the other side of the Concord River. By the end of the day, Gage had completed the second draft of his orders for Colonel Francis Smith, who was to take a force of about seven hundred grenadiers and light infantry to Concord, destroy or capture the stores (what both sides wanted most were the cannons), and return to Boston. The soldiers were to leave that night in boats brought to the sh.o.r.e along the western edge of the common, and they were to be without both baggage (usually transported in wagons) and artillery. If all went well, they would be back in their barracks before nightfall of the following day.

Joseph Warren was one of the last patriot leaders still in Boston on the night of April 18. Around nine o'clock, just as the regulars began to a.s.semble in the remote reaches of the common, he is said to have received word of the impending expedition and decided to alert the countryside that British troops were headed for Concord. The question is who told Warren where the soldiers were headed.

Gage did not inform General Percy of the expedition until that night. After his meeting with Gage, Percy was pa.s.sing a group of Bostonians gathered on the common when he overheard one of them say, "They will miss their aim."

"What aim?" Percy asked.

"The cannon at Concord."

Percy turned abruptly around, rushed back to Province House, and told Gage that his supposedly clandestine mission was no longer a secret. The general was thunderstruck, claiming that besides Percy he had told only one other person.

Many have speculated as to who that person may have been. Margaret Kemble Gage is often looked to as the most likely candidate, even though there is no tangible evidence to support the supposition. The story goes that she and her husband grew apart after the events of April 1775, and Gage quickly sent her packing on a ship back to London. In fact, Margaret Gage did not leave Boston until the late summer and was soon followed by her husband. Hardly estranged from one another, the Gages would have two more children together.

In all likelihood there was no shadowy informant. Boston was too compact and crowded a town for much of anything to happen without a good portion of its residents knowing about it. Traditions have come down to us of someone who overheard a conversation between two officers on Long Wharf, of someone else who saw a battle-ready light infantryman in a Boston shop, and of yet another who spoke with a groomer in the stables of Province House who told him of the expedition. All of these things-or some versions thereof-might have happened. Earlier that afternoon about a dozen mounted officers wearing long blue coats to conceal their scarlet uniforms had left via the Neck and enjoyed a dinner at a tavern in Cambridge. Later that night, when the British officers began to take up positions on the various roads leading to Concord (so as to prevent any messengers from alerting the countryside), the ever-vigilant patriots had added evidence of where the regulars were headed. With the exception of the soldiers themselves, just about everybody in Boston seemed to know where the troops were headed that night.

Much more significant than the ident.i.ty of Warren's informant is the reason Warren decided to alert the countryside. In early April the Provincial Congress had determined that a column leaving Boston must be equipped with baggage and artillery before it const.i.tuted a threat to the province. Congress had also determined that a vote of five members of the Committee of Safety (only one of them being from Boston) was required before the alarm could be sounded. Earlier that day, the committee had met at the Black Horse Tavern in the town of Menotomy (now known as Arlington) on the way to Concord from Cambridge. At that moment three committee members were staying at the Black Horse, and two others were at their homes in nearby Charlestown. Warren could have crossed the harbor, just as Paul Revere was soon to do, and after consulting his fellow committee members helped make what would have been, even with the committee's unanimous consent, a controversial decision given the expedition's absence of artillery and baggage. Warren opted instead to send out the tanner William Dawes (of the cannon-compressed shirt b.u.t.ton) by Boston Neck and then called for Revere and directed him to row across the harbor for Charlestown. Even before the regulars had arrived in the marshes of Cambridge and set out for Concord, the alarm was being sounded in towns to the west and north of Boston.

This was exactly the scenario that Joseph Hawley and the other moderates in the Provincial Congress had hoped to avoid: one influential committee member had ignored proper protocol and set into motion the process that made a confrontation between British regulars and the militia almost inevitable. Knowing that Samuel Adams had employed essentially the same strategy back in June when he attempted to circ.u.mvent the opposition to the Solemn League and Covenant, one can only wonder whether he had sent an earlier message to Warren via Paul Revere, urging him to issue the alarm even if the criterion demanded by the Provincial Congress was not met. It's even more probable that Warren's decision to send out the alarm was like most decisions made during a crisis-a spontaneous reaction to a seemingly confused rush of unexpected events. Even if the troops crossing the Charles River were without baggage or artillery, they exceeded the five-hundred-man threshold imposed by Congress. The possibility that Smith's troops were after not just the military stores in Concord but also Samuel Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k was another concern.

What Warren did was technically wrong, but at least he had made a decision-something the hypersensitive Gage had been struggling to do now for weeks. Whether premeditated or spur of the moment, or a mixture of both, Warren's decision to send out Dawes and Revere rendered the debates at the Provincial Congress moot. After more than four months of preparing for the eventuality, Warren was about to have his war.

Paul Revere reached Lexington around midnight. As a precaution, a guard headed by the militia sergeant William Munroe had been posted around the house in which Samuel Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k were staying. Munroe and his men had been given orders to be as quiet as possible so that those inside could sleep, and when the sergeant admonished the newly arrived messenger for making too much noise, Revere erupted, "Noise! You'll have noise enough before long! The regulars are coming out!" By this point both Adams and Hanc.o.c.k were awake. "Come in, Revere," Hanc.o.c.k ordered. "We are not afraid of you."

Revere explained that he'd managed to elude two of the officers Gage had sent out to guard the road to Concord, and when Dawes arrived soon after, the patriot leaders could rest a.s.sured that the alarm these two messengers had helped to start was now-according to the system that had been previously organized by the Committee of Safety-being carried from town to town throughout Ma.s.sachusetts and beyond. Warren had been concerned that in addition to the stores in Concord, the regulars were out to arrest Hanc.o.c.k and Adams, but as the Reverend William Gordon later related, the leaders had convinced themselves that Concord was the real aim of the British expedition.

It was a short walk from the Clarke parsonage to the Lexington Common, or Green, a crude triangle of lumpy gra.s.s formed by the intersection of the road from Boston to the east, the road to Concord to the west, and the road to Bedford to the north. In addition to some chest-high stone walls, which would later remind the regulars of the hedgerows back in England, the green was bounded by the houses of Jonathan Harrington and Daniel Harrington to the west, that of Marret Munroe to the south, and Buckman's Tavern to the east. Within the eastern tip of the green was the Lexington Meetinghouse. Rather than a bell-equipped spire, the congregation had opted for a more economical stand-alone belfry, which stood fifty yards or so to the west of the meetinghouse. Soon the bell was ringing, and by 2:00 a.m. approximately 130 members of the 144-man Lexington militia had a.s.sembled on the green under the leadership of forty-six-year-old Captain John Parker. Parker was six feet, two inches tall and the father of four girls and three boys, all between the ages of four and fourteen. He was also a veteran of the French and Indian War and had been at the Siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and with Wolfe when he had taken Quebec. He was now a farmer who lived about two miles from the center of town, and like Josiah Quincy Jr., he was dying of tuberculosis. He had had trouble sleeping the night before, and it looked as if he was going to get even less sleep tonight.

As was true in all the town militias throughout Ma.s.sachusetts, this group of men knew each other intimately. Parker, it was said, was related to at least a quarter of the men gathered there that night. Of the militia's 144 members, 14 of them were Munroes, 11 were Harringtons, 10 were Smiths, 7 were Reeds, and 4 were Tidds. They lived in a tightly knit, largely self-contained community that was profoundly different from what was to be found in a typical village in England. They voted in town meetings that instilled the a.s.sumption that they had a direct say in how their government worked. Their sense of self-worth was determined not by ancient notions or protocols of cla.s.s but by their ability to farm, hunt, and fight. At the center of all their lives was the Lexington Meeting, whose black-robed minister Jonas Clarke a.s.sured them that just as G.o.d had approved of their forefathers' battles with the Indians and the French, their current insistence on liberty was also divinely sanctioned. In keeping with this melding of spiritual and martial concerns, the meetinghouse-unheated and safely removed from other structures near the green-served as the town's powderhouse.

Years later, one of the militiamen who partic.i.p.ated in the events of that day insisted that it wasn't the Tea Act or the Boston Port Bill or any of the Coercive Acts that made them take up arms against the regulars; no, it was much simpler than that. "We always had been free, and we meant to be free always," the veteran remembered. "[Those redcoats] didn't mean we should." It was a sense of freedom strengthened by the knowledge that to the west and north, and to the east in Maine, lay a wilderness that their children could one day go to as their forefathers had done when they first sailed for the New World. Nothing like this was available to the future generations of Europe. It was a sense of promise that made the militiamen's resolve to oppose these troops all the more powerful.

But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook.

While Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Ma.s.sachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they-rather than Gage and the loyalists-had the power to intimidate those around them into doing what they wanted. As one of Gage's officers observed, "The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends." Not since the Salem witch trials had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear, depending on which side of the issues they found themselves.

It was cold that night on the Lexington Green, and after one of the scouts whom Parker had sent down the road to Boston reported that there was no sign of the British, the militia captain dismissed his men, telling them to be ready to rea.s.semble at the beat of a drum. Those who lived close to the green went home, but most of them, including Parker, retired to the convivial warmth of Buckman's Tavern.

There they would remain for the next three hours. At some point, we know that John Hanc.o.c.k made his way to the green. At that time, Hanc.o.c.k was Ma.s.sachusetts's leading political celebrity. Samuel Adams might be looked to as the mastermind, but Hanc.o.c.k was the public face of the patriot movement and would be later referred to that day as "King Hanc.o.c.k." He was both president of the Provincial Congress and chairman of the Committee of Safety. He also had strong ties to Lexington. Not only had he been living here for the last few weeks, his grandfather had built the house in which he was staying, and some of his youth had been spent in Lexington.

Hanc.o.c.k was a leading merchant and political figure, but like Joseph Warren he harbored his own military ambitions. He'd been the colonel of the Independent Company of Cadets, and after talking with the militiamen on the green (and perhaps in Buckman's Tavern), he returned to the parsonage on the road to Bedford and began sharpening his sword. According to Hanc.o.c.k's fiancee, Dorothy Quincy, who was also staying at the Clarke parsonage that night along with Hanc.o.c.k's aunt, he spoke as if he intended to join the militiamen when they reformed on the green. Adams, however, patted him on the shoulder and insisted, "That is not our business; we belong to the cabinet." When Hanc.o.c.k reluctantly agreed that they must "withdraw to some distant part of town," he made one final proclamation that Sergeant William Munroe still remembered fifty years later. "If I had my musket," he claimed, "I would never turn my back upon these troops."

By five in the morning, Hanc.o.c.k and Adams-minus Dorothy and Hanc.o.c.k's aunt-were in Hanc.o.c.k's carriage and rumbling toward a safer location. Meanwhile, Captain Parker had gotten startling news. The regulars were just minutes away.

Not until well after midnight had Colonel Francis Smith managed to get all seven hundred or so of his men across the Charles River. They'd been forced to wade from the boats to sh.o.r.e, and after once again wading across a small tidal river so as to prevent the soldiers' leather-soled shoes from alerting the countryside as they pounded across a wooden bridge, they'd started up the road through Cambridge.

The chilly spring air glowed with the gray light of the full moon as the grenadiers in their tall bearskin caps and the light infantrymen in their close-fitting black leather helmets trudged up the road, each footfall magnified hundreds of times into a single booming step that sounded like a giant striding out of Boston in the dark. One woman looked out her window and was astonished to see the soldiers' gun barrels glinting in the moonlight like a river of flowing silver. The widow Rand watched the soldiers pa.s.s and then went looking for her neighbor, whom she found casting bullets in a shed behind his house. When she told him of what she'd seen, he refused to believe her. Only after he'd seen the many nearly identical footprints in the road did he realize that the old woman had been telling the truth.

In the town of Menotomy, between Cambridge and Lexington, Colonel Smith began to realize that his attempts at secrecy had gone for naught. Signal guns could be heard in the distance up ahead. He ordered his men to halt and sent back a messenger to General Gage, requesting reinforcements. In addition to the grenadiers and light infantry, Gage had included a battalion of marines in the expedition, and Smith ordered Marine Major John Pitcairn to push ahead with six companies of light infantry and secure the two bridges that provided access to the town of Concord from the north.

The Black Horse Tavern was in Menotomy, and the sound of the regulars awakened the three Committee of Safety members who were staying there-Jeremiah Lee, Azor Orne, and Elbridge Gerry, all from Marblehead. In a panic, Gerry rushed for the front door, only to be stopped by the tavern keeper, who directed the three officials to escape out the back. Gerry proceeded to trip and fall facedown in the stubble of a cornfield, where he was soon joined by the two others, who lay trembling in the damp cold until the regulars had moved on toward Lexington.

Pitcairn sent ahead an advance guard led by Marine Lieutenant Jesse Adair. Accompanying Adair were several loyalist guides, one of whom, Daniel Bliss from Concord, would be of immense help when it came to accomplishing their primary objective. As they pushed on through the night, they surprised several unsuspecting travelers, including Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson from Woburn, who were quickly captured and forced to march with the column.

Around 3:30 a.m., about five miles from Lexington, they were approached by a group of hors.e.m.e.n. They were the officers whom Gage had sent out the previous day to guard the road to Concord. Led by Major Edward Mitch.e.l.l, they had recently captured Paul Revere, who after alerting Samuel Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k had continued with William Dawes toward Concord. Revere had brazenly informed the officers that Smith's troops "had catched aground in pa.s.sing the river" and that since he had alarmed the countryside there would soon be as many as five hundred militiamen gathered in Lexington. As Mitch.e.l.l's group approached the town green with their captive, they heard a volley of musketry-probably warning shots intended to rouse the town-"which," Revere later reported, "alarmed them very much." Mitch.e.l.l decided he had no choice but to release Revere and warn Smith that "the whole country" knew what they were about.

In his conversation with Smith's advance guard, Major Mitch.e.l.l claimed that he and his fellow officers had been forced to "gallop for their lives" out of Lexington, where the militiamen were already awaiting the arrival of the troops. Seeming to corroborate Mitch.e.l.l's overheated a.s.sertions were the sounds of bells and signal guns. Beacon fires could be seen flickering in the distant hills. A well-dressed gentleman in a small carriage approached with the news that no less than six hundred militiamen had gathered on the Lexington Green; next came a wagon filled with cordwood for Boston. The driver said there were now one thousand men in Lexington.

On they pushed through the early-morning darkness, and by 4:00 a.m., with dawn approaching, they began to detect a "vast number of country militia" moving across the boulder-strewn fields on either side of them toward Lexington. The regulars wore heavy red coats and white breeches, their chests crisscrossed by belts burdened with cartridge boxes, swords, and bayonets. The country people posed a very different picture of the "soldier" in their floppy-brimmed hats, baggy, dark-colored coats, gray homespun stockings, and buckled cowhide shoes as they strode through the dim light with their powder horns slung from their shoulders. The only significant similarity between the regulars and these militiamen was that they all carried muskets.

Accompanying Adair in the advance guard was Lieutenant William Sutherland, who with Adair's help was able to capture one of these militiamen-thirty-one-year-old Benjamin Wellington of Lexington, whom they relieved of his musket and, unusual for a militiaman, his bayonet. Soon after, a group of hors.e.m.e.n appeared in the road ahead. One of them shouted, "You had better turn back for you shall not enter the town." As the hors.e.m.e.n began to gallop away, a lone rider turned and raised his musket. A soundless flash of light flared from the base of the barrel. The militiaman had pulled the trigger and ignited the weapon's priming powder, but for some reason the main charge in the barrel had failed to detonate-what was known as a "flash in the pan." The militiaman's intent was unmistakable, but so far no ball had whistled in the regulars' direction.

A report was made to Major Pitcairn, who ordered his six companies of light infantrymen to halt. If at least one Yankee was willing to fire upon the king's troops, he had no choice but to prepare his men for the worst as they marched into Lexington. He ordered them to load. Each soldier had a cartridge box full of paper-wrapped charges of powder and ball. After ripping open one of the cartridges with his teeth and pouring the contents into the barrel of his musket, each man threw away the top of the cartridge. Later that day, William Munroe counted approximately two hundred sc.r.a.ps of cartridge paper scattered on the road.

They could hear a drum beating the militiamen to arms. Around a slight bend in the road they got their first glimpse of the Lexington Green. Immediately ahead was the three-story-high meetinghouse, with the belfry beside it, clanging away. Buckman's Tavern was on their right, and in the distance, partly obscured by the meetinghouse, were two lines of militiamen. They estimated there were two hundred, possibly three hundred men ahead of them.

In reality, there were barely seventy militiamen on Lexington Green. After three hours of waiting, they had a.s.sembled in a poorly organized, possibly alcohol-debilitated rush. Those who hadn't yet gotten their powder were in the meetinghouse filling their powder horns. Men were still filtering in from all sides of the common. At the moment the British appeared, Paul Revere and Hanc.o.c.k's secretary John Lowell staggered past the militiamen with Hanc.o.c.k's trunk of official papers, which they had just retrieved from the attic of Buckman's Tavern and were now trying to conceal before the marauding British could get hold of it. Revere heard Parker say to his men, "Let the troops pa.s.s by. Don't molest them, without they being first." As had been said over and over again in instructions from the Committee of Safety, the militiamen were not to fire the first shot.

Pitcairn's six companies amounted to about 250 men, but to these callow militiamen in the half-light of dawn, they looked more like a brigade of 1,500. One man said, "There are so few of us it is folly to stand here." Parker was later reported to have responded, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they want to have a war let it begin here."

Soon the regulars were advancing rapidly toward the militiamen and beginning to shout. At the head of the infantrymen was Lieutenant Adair and Major Mitch.e.l.l, still seething with anger and humiliation after his earlier encounter with Revere. Just before they reached the meetinghouse there was a fork, with the road to Concord going left, the road to Bedford going right. The most direct route toward the militia was to swing right of the meetinghouse, and that's the way Adair, Mitch.e.l.l, and the six companies of light infantry went. Pitcairn, who was behind them, swung to the left of the meeting and momentarily lost sight of the companies ahead. For some reason, four of the companies halted beside an oak tree near the meetinghouse, but Adair and Mitch.e.l.l and two companies of about thirty men each charged on toward the militiamen.

For many months now, the regulars had endured the taunts and outright maliciousness of not just the Bostonians but also country people just like these. It was the country people who had refused to allow the barracks to be built that might have saved the lives of the soldiers' comrades and loved ones who were now buried at the edge of Boston Common. For the regulars this was personal, not political. If any of these farmers dared to fire their muskets, a British volley was sure to follow.

One officer, perhaps Mitch.e.l.l, shouted, "d.a.m.n them, we will have them!" About seventy-five yards from the militiamen, the two companies were ordered to form a line of battle, an interlocking formation of three lines, staggered in such a way that the men behind were able to fire over the shoulders of those ahead of them. Crying "Huzza! Huzza!," the regulars shouted so loud that orders were impossible to hear. There were three officers on horses positioned just ahead of the regulars, and at least one of them was having a virtual tantrum, shouting "Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels, d.a.m.n you, disperse!"

With dozens of British muskets pointed in their direction, Parker decided that they had no choice but to do exactly as the officer was telling them to do, so he ordered his men to disperse. Some of the militiamen were immediately on the move; others, perhaps not able to hear Parker, stood either stubbornly or in catatonic fear and held their ground. Some of the militia claimed one of the mounted officers fired his pistol. The British regulars claimed that it was the provincials who fired first-not those gathered on the green, but someone behind a stone wall to their right or perhaps standing at a doorway or window of Buckman's Tavern. Major Pitcairn was riding toward the two companies, shouting, "Soldiers, don't fire, keep your ranks, and surround them." At some point, his horse was. .h.i.t by two b.a.l.l.s fired from the sidelines. One soldier was. .h.i.t in the leg; another in the hand. Soon the two companies of light infantry were firing without orders. The first volley was ragged and indistinct but was then followed by a "continual roar."

The smoke was so thick that the only evidence of the enemy the militiamen could see were the heads of the officers' horses. At first, John Munroe was convinced that the regulars were firing only warning blanks, since no one seemed to be getting hit by any b.a.l.l.s. But when the man beside him-another Munroe by the name of Ebenezer-got slammed in the arm by a ball, they knew otherwise. Despite his wound, Ebenezer shouted, "I'll give them the guts of my gun," and blasted away into the acrid cloud of dark gray smoke. Ebenezer later testified that the air was so thick with whizzing musket b.a.l.l.s that "I thought there was no chance for escape and that I might as well fire my gun as stand still and do nothing." John Munroe was one of the few militiamen to get off two shots. Unfortunately, he overcharged his musket the second time, and "the strength of the charge took off about a foot of my gun barrel." Captain Parker's cousin Jonas had placed his hat full of musket b.a.l.l.s and flints on the ground between his feet and vowed he would "never run." He was. .h.i.t on the second volley, and as he lay on the ground, struggling to reload his gun, the infantrymen ran up and stabbed him to death with their bayonets.

Most of the militiamen, however, never even fired their guns. Several were killed while sprinting for cover. Jonathan Harrington lived on the west side of the common and was shot down as he ran for the safety of his house. His horrified wife and children watched as he crawled across the dusty road and died on their doorstep. Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson, the two men from Woburn who had been captured earlier that night by the British advance guard, were released on the Lexington Green. Both were warned to walk and not run as they made their way to safety. Richardson did as ordered and survived, but Porter panicked and was gunned down as he ran from the British troops. Several horses were spooked by the blast and crackle of gunfire and carried their riders-including Lieutenant Sutherland-on wild rides around the green and beyond. In the meantime, Major Pitcairn, whom a patriot minister described as "a good man in a bad cause," tried desperately to put a stop to the chaos and "struck his ... sword downwards with all earnestness" as a signal to cease fire.

Order wasn't restored until Colonel Smith and the grenadiers finally caught up to the light infantry. With the help of Lieutenant Sutherland, Smith found a drummer, whom he commanded to sound the beat to arms, which was the signal for the men to regroup into ranks. According to Sutherland, this did not prevent a few more shots from being fired by the provincials in Buckman's Tavern. Now that most of the militiamen had been sent "scampering off," the infuriated infantrymen were about to turn their attention to the tavern and the meetinghouse. Smith wrote that the soldiers were "much enraged at the treatment they had received, and having been fired on from the houses repeatedly were going to break them open to come at those within." If something was not done quickly, anyone still in those buildings was sure to be killed. What Smith and the regulars didn't know was that in the attic of the meetinghouse, the militiaman Joshua Simons waited with the barrel of his musket thrust into a keg of powder. If the soldiers attacked, he was going to make sure that none of them lived to claim the town's powder.

Luckily, Colonel Smith succeeded in "putting a stop to all further slaughter of those deluded people." The infantrymen reluctantly fell into line and after firing a victory salute gave three rousing huzzas. Besides Pitcairn's twice-wounded horse and two soldiers who had received minor injuries, all the casualties had been suffered by the provincials, with eight dead and ten wounded, including Prince Estabrook, who became the first African American casualty of the Revolution since the death of the black sailor Crispus Attucks at the Boston Ma.s.sacre.

From the standpoint of the British, the skirmish at Lexington had been a disaster. For a frighteningly extended period of time, Colonel Smith and his officers had lost control of their men. Even after the infantrymen had been induced to stop firing their muskets, it took a while to calm them down. "We then formed on the Common," Lieutenant John Barker wrote in his diary, "but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders."