The British Are Coming

“We retired for 15 miles under an incessant fire, which like a moving circle, surrounded and followed us wherever we went,” Percy would write the following day. “It was impossible not to lose a good many men.” He would have lost a good many more had he not made the best British tactical decision of the day. As his vanguard approached Cambridge around five p.m., Percy studied two paper sheets pinned together as a sketch map of the road ahead. Rather than returning via the only bridge over the Charles River to reach Roxbury and Boston Neck, he ordered the column to pivot left into Kent’s Lane and head for Charlestown. The route would require ferrying his men into Boston, but Somerset and other warships would offer protection. As he suspected and later confirmed, a large rebel force had tossed the bridge planks into the Charles and militiamen waited in ambush behind barricades. Had the column not veered away, a senior British general later concluded, “there would have been an end that day of British government in America.”

The final miles to Charlestown were harrowing enough—casualties climbing, ammunition dwindling, sun sinking, men at the last pitch of exhaustion. The column avoided an ambush at Harvard Square, but several soldiers died in another gunfight near the future Beech and Elm Streets while three rebels who had built a redoubt at Watson’s Corner were encircled and bayoneted. William Marcy, described as “a simple-minded youth” who thought he was watching a parade, was shot dead while sitting on a wall, cheering. Percy’s white charger was also hit; he found another, nonplussed to see American gunmen who, he wrote, “advanced within ten yards to fire at me & other officers.” Ensign Jeremy Lister, slumped on a horse and faint with blood loss from his shattered elbow, “found the balls whistled so smartly about my ears I thought it more prudent to dismount.” It was said that footsore soldiers flung themselves onto low ground near the Charles and “drank like dogs from an old pond.” Now everyone’s tongue was hanging out. “Taking the whole together,” a militiaman wrote, “it was the most fatiguing day’s work I ever heard of.”

Of Cambridge’s eight hundred residents, many hid a mile west at Fresh Pond. Hannah Winthrop, the wife of a Harvard mathematics professor, wrote that a remote house there was “filled with women whose husbands had gone forth to meet the assailants, seventy or eighty of these, with numbers of infant children, weeping and agonizing for the fate of their husbands.” In Charlestown, the chatter of musketry and an occasional cannon boom carried from Milk Road on the approach to Charlestown Neck.

Dusk brightened each muzzle flash, and scarlet bursts limned the line of retreat. Some Charlestown residents fled across the Mystic River at Penny Ferry or scurried along the marshes toward Medford. Others hid in clay quarries below the high pasture that would soon be known as Breed’s Hill. Terrified women and children huddled in the local Pest House, usually reserved for the infectious. Returning British officers crowded a tavern near the town hall. “All was tumult and confusion,” a witness reported, “nothing but drink called for everywhere.” Edward Barber, the fourteen-year-old son of a sea captain, was shot dead while watching the column from his front window. Rumors spread quickly that the British were massacring children.

The shooting ebbed and finally faded away, along with this very long day. Percy ordered the grenadiers and light infantry to the Charlestown wharves, where boat crews waited to row them the half mile to Boston. Five hundred fresh regulars arrived to garrison the heights below Charlestown Neck, including Bunker Hill. Militiamen scraped beds from the hillsides north of the Neck or stumbled back into Cambridge to sleep on their arms. “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.”

The great spire atop Old North loomed above the river. Keening carried from the homes of the dead. The moon rose, a bit later than the previous night, and found the world changed, changed utterly.

A thousand campfires glittered from the high ground in a semicircle around Boston, tracing the contours of the siege that would last for almost a year. Rebel sentinels posted the Neck at Roxbury, and patrols scuffed through the night. “We had as much liquor as we wanted,” Private Samuel Haws wrote in his journal, “and every man drawed three biscuit which were taken from the Regulars the day before, which were hard enough for flints.” British ships remained cleared for action, with guard boats doubled and the Charlestown ferry lane closed but for the steady shuttling of soldiers back to their barracks. In a tense conference with General Gage late Wednesday night, the Royal Navy urged “burning and laying waste the whole country” before insurgents could attack the garrison. Gage rejected the proposal as “too rash and sanguinary,” and soon pulled his exposed troops from the Charlestown peninsula. British rule in New England now ended at Boston’s town limits.

The countryside hardly slept. Horses, cattle, pigs, and men lay dead across a twenty-mile corridor from the Charles to the Concord River. A rumor that redcoats were on the march northeast of Boston sent civilians fleeing into the woods, the village streets behind them strewn with bedding and cookware that had tumbled from farm carts. “Men and horses driving post up and down the roads,” a deacon in Brighton noted in his diary. “People were in great perplexity.” More family silver was lowered down wells or tucked into tree hollows. Horses were saddled and unsaddled, oxen yoked and unyoked. Some farmers armed themselves with pikes, whittled sharp and fire-hardened.

Women in Framingham clutched axes and pitchforks, convinced that black servants incited by the British were intent on murder. A similar report in Menotomy prompted a woman to ask her approaching slave, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?” The Anglican church in Cambridge became a field hospital, and wounded men jammed private homes. Nathaniel Cleaves of Beverly would receive a three-shilling bill from a surgeon for “amputating finger, sutures, &c.,” and Israel Everett was also charged three shillings, for “extracting a bullet from the cubitus,” the forearm. Samuel Whittemore, said to be eighty-one when he fought with musket, pistols, and sword behind a stone wall west of Cambridge, was treated for bayonet wounds and a gunshot that carried away part of his cheek; he would live to see his great-great-grandchildren, according to the obituary published when he died at ninety-eight in 1793. Young John Tolman, shot between the shoulder blades and left for dead, also recovered to write, in his old age, “Freedom or independence was the hobby I mounted, sword in hand, neck or nothing, life or death.”

In Boston, surgeons toiled in the barracks and wherever wounded regulars had collapsed, snipping off bloody uniforms, lopping away ruined arms and legs, dosing their patients with Jesuit’s bark in an effort, often vain, to prevent mortification. Officer casualty rolls listed the wounds with anatomical simplicity: “thigh,” “breast,” “throat.” 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. The butcher’s bill was grim indeed. 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 began promptly. A Dedham militia company was ordered to search the battlefield and to bury the unburied. Reverend David McClure rode from Roxbury toward Lexington in the drizzle that fell on Thursday, April 20. “I saw several dead bodies, principally British, on & near the road,” he wrote. “They were all naked, having been stripped.… They lay on their faces.” As a gesture to British widows and orphans she would never know but could not ignore, Mary Hartwell of Lincoln took her children by the hand and followed an ox-cart hearse to a large trench in the town burial ground where the dead regulars were interred. “There was one in a brilliant uniform, whom I supposed to have been an officer,” she recalled. “His hair was tied up in a queue.”

The fourteen-year-old son of John Hicks found his father’s body on the roadside near the Watson’s Corner barricade; the boy took him home in a wagon. The corpse of Isaac Davis, killed in the first volley at North Bridge, was laid out in his bedroom before interment with some of his other comrades from Acton. “His countenance was pleasant, and seemed little altered,” his widow, Hannah, would recall in 1835 when she was eighty-nine. Davis’s epitaph deemed him “a loving husband, a tender father, a kind neighbor, an ingenious craftsman, and serviceable to mankind.”

In Danvers, a young girl noted that the seven dead men stacked on a cart all wore gray homespun stockings; two minute companies with reversed arms and muffled drums escorted them to their common grave. A dozen corpses in Menotomy were hauled to a burial trench on an ox-drawn sled, legs and arms splayed and rubbery; they were buried, a witness reported, “head to point, with their clothes on just as they fell.” The eight dead from Lexington were laid in rude coffins, described as “four large boards nailed up.” Villagers dug a trench close to the tree line in the cemetery. “I saw them let down into the ground,” a daughter of Reverend Clarke recalled. “It was a little rainy, but we waited to see them covered up with clods.” Using pine and oak boughs, the parson himself helped hide the raw gash in case the British should return in a mood of desecration.

The British would never return, not here. The first of the war’s thirteen hundred actions had been fought, the first battle deaths mourned. 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. A Massachusetts general—the tubby, sensible William Heath of Roxbury—had trundled out to Menotomy on Wednesday afternoon, perhaps inspiriting young musketmen but hardly imposing his will on what was the first battle he had ever seen. On Thursday he would be supplanted by Major General Artemas Ward, who shrugged off an excruciating attack of kidney stones to ride forty miles from his Shrewsbury farm to Cambridge.

The limits of the musket even in close combat were clear enough after the daylong battle. Later 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. Fewer than one militiaman in every ten who engaged the column drew British blood, despite the broad target of massed redcoats. A combat bromide held that it took a man’s weight in bullets to kill him, and on Battle Road that equation was not far exaggerated.

Still, British survivors emerged from the maelstrom with a new respect for American fighters. “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.”

The British combat performance, if often courageous in the ranks, had been troubling, with miserable staff work and inert commanders, Percy excepted. The day’s action included looting, arson, and various atrocities, suggesting that the usual decorum of eighteenth-century warfare would be adapted to an American setting. On April 21, Gage publicly rebuked his men for “great inattention and neglect to the commands of their officers”; he demanded that they “behave with more discipline and in a more soldierlike manner.” General Harvey, upon reading accounts of April 19, later wrote, “I am much concerned at the wild behavior of the men.” To Percy he added, “It was an unlucky day.”

Like a burning fuse, accounts of that day raced across New England and down the seaboard, carried in some instances by Paul Revere for a four-shilling per diem plus “expenses for self and horse.” “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.” Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.”

In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23. Freeholders in Hackensack authorized payment of a shilling and sixpence to a local gunsmith for each musket cleaned. Eight thousand citizens rallied for a town meeting in Philadelphia, where an observer noted that “the rage militaire, as the French call a passion for arms, has taken possession of the whole continent.” A New Yorker wrote a friend in London, “There is no such thing as being a looker on.” Militia companies in Pennsylvania rushed to order drums and colors; soon men in uniform, said to be “as thick as bees,” were exercising twice daily under arms, including many “Broadbrims,” as John Adams called the pacifist Quakers.

Meeting in Concord on April 22, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appointed a committee to take sworn statements from nearly a hundred eyewitnesses, to be published promptly in colonial newspapers. Joseph Warren appended a cover letter to these accounts, lamenting that “we are at last plunged into the horrors of a most unnatural war.” The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony’s deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

A 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 cargo also included eyewitness depositions and a corroborative statement from a captured British officer. Warren admonished the skipper, Captain John Derby, to keep the voyage “a profound secret from every person on earth.” After an unmolested crossing in just twenty-nine days, Derby delivered his packet in London, where the accounts appeared in the three-penny Evening Post to be read by, among others, George III and Lord North.

The king’s resolve was unshaken. He still believed that “with firmness and perseverance America will be brought to submission.” Others in England were less sanguine. The government was unable to offer a coherent rejoinder to the American claims except to plead for “a suspension of belief.” “This looks serious,” Edward Gibbon wrote, “and is indeed so.”

The news of Concord “flew like wildfire and threw the whole Continent into a flame,” Horace Walpole told his journal. “Bitter invectives were published every day against the governing party.” The guard at St. James’s Palace reportedly was doubled. Even staunch supporters of North’s regime felt bewildered. “All my prejudices are against the Americans,” the theologian John Wesley wrote Lord Dartmouth, but “waiving all considerations of right and wrong, I ask is it common sense to use force toward the Americans?” Gage’s laconic, tardy version of events, sent aboard the sluggish brig Sukey, did not arrive in England until June 9; the commander in chief’s dispatch, only four paragraphs long, hardly reassured his monarch, his government, or his fellow Englishmen, particularly since he closed by noting, “Several thousand are now assembled about this town, threatening an attack and getting up artillery, and we are very busy making preparations to oppose them.”

Preparations also continued in the American camp. Citizens in Concord retrieved cannons and musket balls from millponds, thickets, and various hiding places. A seven-year-old in Braintree named John Quincy Adams later recalled how militiamen “took the pewter spoons out of our kitchen to melt them into bullets.” Men in Menotomy pried the shoes from the four horses killed while pulling Percy’s ill-fated supply wagons. A scavenged red coat was draped across a brace of sticks in a greening field as both a scarecrow and a warning. On the Sunday following the battle, and for many Sundays to come, preachers drew from Lamentations to remind parishioners that their suffering reflected divine judgment on their own imperfections: “The joy of our heart is ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.”

Yet many also felt vibrant, even exhilarated, and aware that “something clear and fine” had transpired, as the historian Allen French would write a century and a half later. They were now swept up in events grander than themselves, in “the meeting of strong men, at the beginning of great things.”

True enough. But something opaque and awful also had happened, a fraternal bloodletting. The enmity of recent years had curdled into hatred. Young men had died in agony, as befell young men in war, and many, many more were still to die. One of them was Lieutenant Edward Hull of the 43rd Foot. Shot at North Bridge, then shot again in a chaise ambulance during the retreat through Menotomy, Hull had been left behind in rebel care. A day after the battle, Reverend McClure found the young Scot in obvious anguish from three bullet wounds, yet still “of a youthful, fair, and delicate countenance.” Sprawled across a feather bed in Samuel and Elizabeth Butterfield’s house near Cooper’s Tavern, he wore a greatcoat and fur hat provided by his captors, since his own men had stripped him of his tunic, waistcoat, and shirt before the militia snatched his shoes and buckles. His bloody breeches lay beside him on the bed, and he sucked on an orange donated by a neighbor. “I asked him if he was dangerously wounded,” McClure wrote. “He replied, ‘Yes, mortally.’” Lieutenant Hull would linger for nearly two weeks in a twilight of pain and remorse; then, on May 2, he “took heaven by the way,” as the expression went. Six rebel officers escorted his coffin to the Charlestown ferryway, where British bargemen rowed him to Boston for burial.

He, at least, would be drummed into the next world. The graves of many others remained unmarked and unremembered, except for the long bones and the ribs and the skulls that over the years pushed to the surface in Middlesex meadows and woodlands, memento mori from one raving afternoon on Battle Road.

3.

I Wish This Cursed Place Was Burned

BOSTON AND CHARLESTOWN, MAY–JUNE 1775

An army of sorts soon bivouacked along a ten-mile crescent from Roxbury to Chelsea, determined to serve the god of battle by driving the British into the sea. In late April, the provincial congress called for thirty thousand American troops to turn out, and legions left farm, shop, and hearth, including one patriot and his three sons who hurried from their sawmill without even bothering to shut the gate. Two thousand were said to march from New Hampshire. Forty-six of Connecticut’s seventy-two towns sent men, and classes at Yale College were canceled for lack of students. “The ardor of our people is such that they can’t be kept back,” a committee in New Haven informed John Hancock. A woman in Philadelphia wrote, “My only brother I have sent to the camp.… Had I twenty sons and brothers, they should go.”

The Essex Gazette would name this host the Grand American Army, though William Tudor, a protégé of John Adams’s who soon would serve as judge advocate, called it “little better than an armed mob.” Houses abandoned by loyalist families in Cambridge were confiscated for barracks and officers’ billets. 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,” a member of the provincial congress reported. Any man who enlisted fifty-nine others into a company qualified for a captaincy; any captain who organized ten companies might be designated a regimental colonel.

Drums beat reveille daily at four a.m., and after roll call the men marched to morning prayers. “The camp abounds with clergymen,” one soldier wrote, and more than a dozen local divines volunteered their services for regiments without chaplains. Officers were empowered to suppress “tumults” in the ranks, to confine men to their tents after evening tattoo, and to shutter grogshops selling liquor to the troops. The smells of encampment grew ripe—wood smoke, roasting meat, imperfectly dug latrines. Soldiers cast new bullets with molding tools, fashioning cartridges from paper scraps and thimbles of powder. A homesick soldier hanged himself in a barn. “I went down & saw him,” a private noted in his journal, then added, “I went home & took a nap.” More rumors flew, including a pastor’s warning in early May to beware “lest General Gage should spread the smallpox in your army.”

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. Most Connecticut troops soon wandered home, discouraged by the shortage of provisions around Boston. The force would dwindle to sixteen thousand or so within a month after the shots at Lexington, although no one was sure of the number. “As to the army, it is in such a shifting, fluctuating state,” a Committee of Safety member wrote. “They are continually going and coming.” To deceive the British in mid-May, a brigade of seven hundred men in Roxbury marched round and round a hill to feign preponderance; a mile-long column of more than two thousand marched from Cambridge to the Charlestown fish market, bared their fangs across the Charles, then marched back.

Shortages extended beyond canvas and rations. “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. Massachusetts counted thirty-eight cannons, mostly inferior iron guns. Rhode Island sent a few brass fieldpieces to the siege line, but they hardly sufficed to confront the British Empire. In mid-month, 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.

Almost fifty sleepy redcoats had surrendered without a fight, as had a smaller detachment at nearby Crown Point. The captured booty included some two hundred iron cannons, ten tons of musket balls, thirty thousand flints, and forty-nine gallons of rum, much of it consumed by those tatterdemalions to celebrate their victory. Two men led the raid in an unsteady collaboration: a strapping, profane, sometime farmer, lead miner, and tosspot philosopher named Ethan Allen and a short, gifted Connecticut apothecary, merchant prince, and hothead named Benedict Arnold, who had been given a colonel’s commission by Joseph Warren and whose long nose and dark hair caused him to resemble a raven in human form. How the captured munitions would be transported from the remote fortress remained to be seen, but no one who knew Allen and Arnold, or knew of them, doubted that both would be heard from again. For now, the “acts of burglarious enterprise,” in one British writer’s description, gave the Americans control not only of Ticonderoga—the most strategic inland position on the continent—but also of the long blue teardrop of Lake Champlain, the traditional invasion route into, or out of, Canada.