4

THE NINETEENTH OF APRIL AND ’SEVENTY-FIVE

LONG afterward, he would remember the day; for while it meant nothing to some, and something to a few, to him it was the beginning and always would be the beginning, the break between two periods in his life and two periods in the life of mankind, the time when he discovered that Tom Paine was made of stuff strange and terrible—and he didn’t cry for himself again.

He had been many things, and now he was an editor, a man with a job, a little money in his pocket, shaven, a good suit of clothes on his back, a good pair of shoes, stockings without holes, a person of some standing in the community, respected by some, liked by some, disliked by some, but truly and actually a person of standing. Walking down Front Street and having them say, “Good morning to you, Mr. Paine,” or “Have you heard the latest from Europe, Mr. Paine?” or “I’ve read your latest issue and it’s brisk, Mr. Paine, brisk, I repeat,” he had to shake his head and concentrate on his identity, nor could he pass a beggar nor a loafer nor some poor wretched devil without thinking, “There, but by the grace of God, goes Thomas Paine.”

Yet with his position, with the value Aitken placed upon him, with issue after issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine emerging under his hand, he still could not shake off his terror of life. Life was a beast, and when this holiday was over, the beast would tear at him again. A man was a fool to struggle or fight back, since in the end a man was grooved in his place, and in the world there was neither pity nor justice.

That was until something happened on the nineteenth of April, in seventeen seventy-five. Then, for Paine, there was a beginning; a crack showed in the wall against which he had been battering his head, and sunlight came through. The devil reared up on his hind legs and bared his teeth, and twenty angels blew a mighty chorus upon their trumpets. But otherwise the world was mighty little disturbed; in places the sun shone, and in other places it rained, and the sound of musketry was heard no farther than a man may hear those things. No shot fired was heard round the world, and up and down the American coast line, where a motley arrangement of three million people were settled, life went on in die placid, bucolic way it had gone on before.

But not in Lexington. On the evening of the eighteenth, a whooping, shouting, over-excited horseman drove into this pretty little New England village, and roaring at the top of his lungs woke everyone who was not already awake. From the white clapboard houses, the tavern, the manse, and even from a farm or two not properly in the village, the good Massachusetts householders came pouring, clad in their long white nightshirts and their tasseled white night caps, their clumsy firelocks in hand, their wives chattering behind them, their children poking heads out of upstairs windows.

“What’s to pay?” they demanded of the rider, whose name was Paul Revere.

“Hell’s to pay!” he shouted.

From the house of the Reverend Jonah Clark came two gentlemen for whom his statement had deadly pertinence. They rubbed their necks feelingly and drew their nightshirts closer about them. Their names were Adams and Hancock; the first was a politician, the second a smuggler, and together they shared a stubborn resentment of foreign rule of the little seaboard colony wherein they lived. Their resentment had taken the form of meetings, congresses, incitements to riot, and wholesale parading of every grievance their compatriots might have; they were dealing with good material for their purpose, stubborn, stiff-necked farmers who had come from a fertile, pleasant land to scratch at this rocky coast simply because they had odd notions about religious and personal freedom. Now, albeit gingerly, the British king, the British prime minister, and the British government were hacking at these liberties of theirs, nibbling the edges, clipping away a right here, a privilege there, adding a tax here, a duty there; nothing really to make a man’s life less pleasant, less easy, but enough to set him to thinking if he was of this stiff-necked, stubborn breed.

The hot-headed rider was brought down to earth by Pastor Clark, who wheedled detail after detail out of him, while the nightshirted farmers, angry to be thus routed from their sleep, crowded closer.

“The British are coming,” he kept insisting.

“From where? On foot?”

He nodded and said from Boston. Then there was time. Pastor Clark assured everyone that there was time enough to think out things, and that there never was a Christian soul saved by hot-headedness, and that they might as well go back and get their sleep.

“There’s time for sleep and time for other things,” someone snorted.

“And time for sleep now,” the reverend said quietly. “God’s in his heaven by night as well as by day. But night was made for slumber.”

“Now, pastor,” said a tall, hook-nosed husbandman, “will you be telling that to the redcoats?”

“I will if I can herd them into my church,” Clark pronounced, and this sally fetched a laugh all around, easing the tension considerably. Someone dragged out a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch, stared at the face, and pronounced solemnly, “Two hours past midnight.”

“Lord a mercy!” a woman squealed, and began to shout at her children to get their faces inside the window and go to bed, or she’d take a stick to them right this minute. A group of giggling girls managed to attract the attention of three nightshirted boys, weighted down by the immense firelocks they carried. Abner Green told his little sister to scat, and then he himself was dragged away by his mother, who had taken a firm grip on his ear. “Fine state of things,” she said. “Men acting like children and children acting like men.”

The night was cool, the pastor’s words cooler, and the men, under the influence of both, drifted away, a few back to their beds, but most to the Buckman Tavern, where already a great fire was roaring in the hearth. The husbandmen leaned their guns against the kitchen wall, sent children and wives for their breeches, so loath were they to leave the excitement and warm comradeship of the group for even a moment, and then brewed pitcher after pitcher of hot flip, a concoction of rum, molasses, and beer—which they drank with a heady instinct that sometime before dawn destiny would come seeking them.

But back at Clark’s house, Hancock and Adams still felt gingerly at their necks and wondered what was this strange devil of revolt they had raised. The pastor nodded, and agreed sagely that if the British caught them, they would no doubt hang them.

“I hate to run away,” Hancock muttered.

“This is only the beginning,” Clark said seriously. “Do you know what you’ve raised up? Men will fight and die, and there will be more than one running away.”

“Don’t condemn me,” Hancock said. “I did what was right.”

“We all do what is right,” the pastor nodded, “and I condemn no one. For me, tomorrow, I will take the Book under one arm and the gun under the other, and God forgive me. I never killed a man; I never thought I would, but there are times when a man puts God behind him and turns away his face. I’ll have horses brought for you, gentlemen.”

It was curious how quickly the memories of the other world, England, Thetford, London, Dover, faded after Paine, with the dour blessing of Aitken, undertook the publication of the Pennsylvania Magazine. For the first time in his life, he had work he loved, work that did not demean him, work that allowed him the simple dignity of hope and intelligence. In the attic which the Scotsman had given him for an office, he sat and labored, in the beginning from dawn through to midnight. He had never been an editor; he had to learn typography, spelling, punctuation; he read the colonial magazines until his eyes ached to get the style, the taste, and, most of all, the political and economic feel of the colonies.

He shed his Britishness as a duck sheds water. He had no time to travel now, but in the taverns and coffee houses, he buttonholed everyone who had been to the far-off countries, or who lived there and was passing through Philadelphia: New Yorkers, Vermont men, Virginians, men from the Deep South, Carolina, Georgia, drawling backwoodsmen, boatmen from the Ohio, soft-voiced Creoles from New Orleans, rangers who had crossed over the mountains into the wild cane-brake of Kentucky, leathery-skinned fishermen from Maine.

Philadelphia was the place for that, and if you waited long enough the whole of America passed along Broad Street. Paine pumped them, and for the first time in his life he found many men, men from every walk of life, who treated him with respect.

Out of this, out of the town itself, out of Aitken, out of the things he read, he was beginning to form a picture of America—a picture detailed by the fringe of tidewater colonization. Here was a land of no one people, of no one prejudice, of no one thought, a country so big that all England could be tucked away in a corner and forgotten, a country so youthful that half the people one met were foreigners or the first generation of foreigners, a country so inevitable that it was calmly, even lazily, stirring itself to revolt against the greatest power on earth.

It was the inevitability of America that stirred him most; here was a new breed of men, not out of blood nor class nor birth, but out of a promise pure and simple; and the promise when summed up, when whittled down, when made positive and negative, shorn of all the great frame of mountains, rivers, and valleys, was freedom, and no more and no less than that.

He was not blind; he had been in the rat cage too long to ever be blinded, and he saw the bad with the good. It was flung in his face, for directly across the street from the print shop in which he worked was the chief public slave market of Philadelphia. There was brought the run of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Jersey human merchandise, the black to be sold body and soul and forever, the white to be auctioned off for bond, for debt, for punishment. Morning and afternoon, the auctioneer would be singing out: “Here’s a buck, here’s a buck, here’s a choice fat black buck, strong as iron, ripe as an apple, as full of juice as a rip-snorting stallion, feel him, come in back, gentlemen, come in back and see his virility, he’s been whipped fine, he’s been broken and trained—” Oh, it was the city of brotherly love, all right, but who ever went through it without stopping for an hour at the slave mart?

The open shed where the selling took place fronted on the swank London Coffee House where the young fops, gotten out in laces and ribbons and silks and satins, a credible imitation of the bloods and macaronis in the old country, sipped their drinks and enjoyed the show.

And there was not only the slave market; there were the stocks, the whipping posts, the gallows, the incredibly foul jails where debtors and murderers, men, women, and children were thrown together in a tight pen of death and disease.

There was the bad with the good in Philadelphia, but there was no rat cage. If a man had guts or brains—or a little of each, he made his own way. Look at Franklin!

But Aitken would say, when Paine paused at his work to stare at the shed across the road, “Keep a tight lip, Thomas, that be no part a yer business.”

Sometimes Paine wondered what was his business.

“Ye’ll no’ be writing slavery in the magazine,” die Scotsman said. “There’s slaver and non-slaver pay their shilling. Ye’ll no’ be writing rift and rebellion and incite to riot. I hold no brief for the fat king in London, but his way is a way of peace and prosperity, and I dinna hold with them that scream so loud for liberty.” Aitken was never quite sure what lay behind Paine’s rough, hook-nosed face, his twisted eyes that seemed to be turned inward more than outward. The magazine which had started off as a venture was rapidly becoming a success, six hundred for the first issue, fifteen hundred for the second—and, at a shilling a copy, Aitken could see a fortune just over the horizon.

“I have a debt to you,” Paine murmured. “But the magazine is my making. Remember that.”

“And yer my making, remember that,” Aitken said. “Ye were a dirty wretch when I picked you up. Show yer ingratitude to others, not to me.”

A few months before Tom Paine arrived in America, a number of men on horseback had converged toward this same town of Philadelphia. They came from a good many of the countries that made up the fringe of settlements, and some were rich and some were poor; some were brilliant and some not so brilliant, and some were known in their day and others long afterward. There were the two cousins from Massachusetts, Sam and John Adams, Cushing from the same state, strange and burning those Yankee men were, Randolph from Virginia, Patrick Henry also from Virginia—and a big, quiet planter from the Potomac country—his name was Washington—Middleton from the Deep South, and many more, dandies, tradesmen, farmers, hunters, and philosophers.

In Philadelphia they roamed all over the streets, mainly because many of them had never seen a good-sized city before; they ate too much, drank too much, talked too much. They called themselves the Continental Congress. They had a long list of grievances against the British way of government, taxes in which they had no say, repression of trade, heavy duties, import monopolies held by Britain, restrictions on manufacture, redcoat troops quartered on colonists, encouragement for the Indians on the frontier to kill and loot–but with all those grievances, they didn’t know what to do and hadn’t thought too deeply about what they could do.

Not only that, but among themselves, they were strangers. The Yankees didn’t like slavery and made no bones about it, and the Tidewater and Deep South people didn’t like Yankees and made no bones about that either. Sam Adams, the rabble rouser from Boston, whom many of them thought just a wee bit mad, ventured to talk of complete independence; he was shut up and marked down for a fool and a dangerous fanatic. But he captured the imagination of a rawboned, bespectacled Virginian, Patrick Henry by name, who roared out, “By God, I am not a Virginian; I’m American!” Then, while the Congress was in session, Massachusetts reared up back at home and declared her independence from British authority. Paul Revere rode down from Boston to Philadelphia with the news, and the Congress wrote a Declaration of Rights. Then the bleak, terrible prospect of what they had done broke on them.

“If it means war—” they said softly to one another.

But, of course, it wouldn’t mean war; it simply couldn’t; they talked down any suggestion of danger; they talked and talked and talked, and all the words made them certain that everything would come out in the best way possible. They drank that peculiar, vile American concoction, flip, by the hundreds of gallons, and on October 27, 1774, they disbanded, saddled their horses, and started on the long ride home.

Some months afterwards, the London, Dover, and Thetford staymaker, Tom Paine, devoured the record of all they had said and didn’t think it too wordy. “Words pile up,” he said, “and afterwards men do things. First the words.” He was holding out at the Ridgeway Coffee Shop with Clare Benton, the printer, Judah Perez, the Jewish fur trader, Anthony Bent, a smith, and Captain Isaac Lee of the Philadelphia militia.

“This is a new thing here,” Paine said. “That’s why no one knows what to do.”

“When the time comes to fight, we’ll know what to do,” Captain Lee insisted, giving stubborn emphasis to a theme he had repeated over and over.

“No, we have to know what to do first. It’s no use to fight if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Even if you win, it’s no good.”

“And I think,” Perez put in, “that if you know what you’re fighting for, it doesn’t make too much difference if you win or lose.”

“You don’t lose,” Paine said heatedly. “This is like no other thing the world has seen; it’s new; it’s a beginning, and it has to be explained. We have something here, and yet we haven’t got it, and suppose we lose it and it slips through our fingers?”

“Then we’re as well off,” Bent grinned.

“Are we? You don’t know; you’re American! I came from back there!”

“What does that mean?” Benton demanded. “You shook the king’s hand?”

“I didn’t even spit in his face,” Paine said sourly.

“That kind of talk is still treason.”

“Is it? Treason’s a word for a lot of things.”

“Easy, easy,” the smith said.

“I go easy,” Paine said. “Believe me, I hate no man for what he is, not even that fat German bastard, George the Third. But I’ve seen man nailed to a cross, nailed there for God knows how many thousands of years, nailed with lies, oppression, gunpowder, swords. Now someone puts an ax in my hand, and I have a chance to help cut down that cross. I don’t pass that chance by.” Paine’s voice was loud; his words rang out, and by the time he had finished speaking, half the men in the coffee house were gathered about the table. Someone put in, “Is it Independence you’re talking?”

“Independence is a word.”

“You seem almighty fond of words.”

“And not afraid of them!” Paine roared. “I come into a land of free men and find them afraid of the one word that would bind their freedom! This is a land of promise, and there is no other on earth!”

He was quieter on paper than vocally. All his life he had wanted to write, and now he had a whole magazine at his disposal. The more writing he did on his pound a week, the better pleased Aitken was, and Paine could see a good deal of reason in his desire to keep the magazine on the fence. His writing wasn’t good, but he poured it onto paper—essays, bad poems, scientific research, even a letter or two to the great Benjamin Franklin. Fortunately for him, the literary taste of the Pennsylvania people was sufficiently untutored for them to accept Paine and the magazine and the dozen pen names he used—and even to be somewhat enthralled by the breathless pace of his energy. All at once Paine was a theologian, a historian, and a scientist, and he brought into the magazine the wide knowledge of a staymaker, a cobbler, a weaver, and an exciseman. The combination was good, and the circulation went up steadily.

But Paine couldn’t stay quiet; he had too many memories, too many sleepless nights, too many dreams. Looking out of his windows, he would see the white chattel slaves being sold in the market. And there were other things he would see as, pen poised, he remembered all the years before now.

“I’ll be raising yer wages,” Aitken said to him one day.

He had respectability, position, a job—and yet he had nothing. His torments drove him to the brothels where were kept the limp-eyed, half-foolish bondwomen, brought over from England and Scotland by regular firms of dealers, selling their poor peasant graces to all comers for three shillings, sixpence of which was supposed to go for their freedom. Yet somehow none of them got their freedom, but became hard, painted, vile-tongued tarts. For Paine, there was no relief in those places, and even when he bought freedom for two of the girls, his conscience was not eased.

Rum was a way out. He went back to the bottle, and was drunk more and more frequently. Deep in his cups, he had a run-in with Ben Frady, the Tory mouthpiece, and they were both dragged off before the magistrate.

Aitken said, “Yer dirt, and back to the dirt ye go.”

“God damn you, shut up!”

“Be none too certain with yer damn Whiggish way. That pound more will no’ go on yer salary.”

“Go to hell!” Paine yelled.

Then, one night, he sat in front of his candles and wrote and wrote. It came from the heart and now he had no trouble with words. All his hatred for slavery poured onto the paper, all his pent-up fury. And not able to print it himself, he went out in the morning and posted it to a rival magazine. A week later it was printed, and that same day Aitken rushed in holding it in his hand.

“Be this yours?” he cried.

“That it is,” Paine nodded.

“Then out ye go and back to the dirt!”

“Do you have another editor for a pound a week?” Paine smiled.

“I give ye a month’s notice!”

“Make it two months,” Paine said, “or by God, I’ll make it two weeks.”

And that night, for the first time in a long while, Tom Paine slept quietly and easily without the benefit of drink.

It was the twenty-fourth of April, seventeen seventy-five, the slow end of a cool, bright spring afternoon. Long, rich shadows lay over the cobbled streets, and on the air, blowing from the inland hills, was the tangy smell of growing things, new leaves, turned dirt. On that quiet afternoon, the streets of Philadelphia rang with hard-driven hoofbeats, and a lathered rider on a lathered horse drove to a halt in front of the City Tavern. He yelled that he had news, big news, mighty news, and from every side people came running. Then the rider refused to talk until he had finished off a mug of beer, and as a good horseman should, seen his horse wiped and watered. While he drank, the word spread like wildfire, and the crowd became larger and larger. Paine, who was at his shop, heard men shouting, and ran along with the rest.

“It’s war,” the rider said, wiping his lips. “It’s bloody damn war!”

Someone gave him a pinch of snuff; others kept back the crowd.

“Of course, they knew that Hancock and Adams were at Lexington,” he said.

Coherency was asked for: dates, details, background.

“That was April eighteenth,” he said.

There was a sudden hush; news went slowly, but events moved fast, and with startled, pale faces the men and women in the crowd looked at each other.

“They were at Pastor Clark’s house,” the messenger went on. “That was all right. Men went out of Boston to warn them, and there was time enough, since the redcoats went on foot and our boys rode like hell. And Pastor Clark kept a cool head; he sent them away.”

“They weren’t captured, Hancock and. Adams?”

“They got away.”

Again the hush; the journalists scribbled furiously, but the rest waited, and the only sound was the shrieking of children who scurried like hares on the outside of the crowd. The rider called for another mug of beer, and it was rushed through the crowd.

“He couldn’t send the whole town away,” the messenger said. “They were all awake, and most of them stayed awake—” There was more talk, more beer, more questions. Bit by bit the whole story came out, haltingly some of it, some with a rush, sometimes a long break when the rider just stared and attempted to comprehend the events he was narrating.

That night of the eighteenth, few of the Lexington villagers slept. Most of those who were dragged home by their wives dressed themselves and slipped away, taking gun, powderhorn, and bullet pouch with them, to join the group at the tavern. The devil walked tonight, but angels were behind him; there was never such a night before, and there wouldn’t be one again. The men at the tavern talked in whispers, although they could have shouted and not found a sleeping body to be wakened, and they fingered their guns nervously, counted their bullets, and wondered whether to shoot a man was any different from shooting squirrels and rabbits. Captain Parker, their commander, who had seen guns go off during the French War, was none too easy himself, and found it difficult to answer all the questions flung at him.

A while before dawn, out of a need to do something, Parker sent Zeke Sudberry over to the church to set the bells ringing. Zeke rang until everyone in the village was thoroughly awake, the women with their heads out the windows crying, “Shame, shame that a lot of grown men don’t know any better!”

Parker told his men to fall in, which they did rather self-consciously, grinning at each other, whispering back and forth:

“Fine soldier you are, Isaac.”

“Click your heels, Jed. Act like you got a real fancy waistcoat on.”

And to fourteen-year-old Jerry Hicks, “Now, Jerry, why don’t you go home and study your lessons.”

“Forward march!” Parker shouted, and they stamped over to the lawn in front of the Congregational Church. Once there, Parker scratched his head, seemingly unable to think of a further movement. The pastor, a light fowling piece in his hand, came out and said, “Bless my soul, and it isn’t Sunday.”

It was nice having him there, and everyone became easier and began to talk a great deal. The gray of the dawn was now changing to pastel pink and peach and taupe, and across the fields the crows screamed angrily, “Caw, caw, caw!” Joshua Lang’s dog, who was a fool for any sort of bird noise, ran toward the crows, barking at the top of his lungs.

Then the talk stopped; they stiffened; they looked at one another. There was another sound in the world. Faintly, thinly at first, and then more clearly, and then sharp and hard came the beating of drums, the shrilling of pipes, a mocking swinging cadence, an invitation to glory, death—and God only knows what else.

No one had to say who it was; they knew, and no one spoke. Leaning on their guns in that cheerful April morning, tense, frightened most of them, knowing for the first time in their lives an overpowering desire to run away, men, boys, old gaffers, children, the simple folk of a simple New England farming community, they kept their appointment with destiny.

At the City Tavern in Philadelphia, the rider had his fourth glass of beer and said, “They stood, by God!”

“A fight?” someone asked.

“Hell, man! I said they stood. Boy and man, they faced up and goddamned the redcoats all to hell.”

“And then?”

“You never saw a bloody lobster turn his back on a gun,” the messenger snorted.

The redcoat troops marched to within a dozen yards of the villagers before their officer commanded them to halt, and then they stood in their precise files, in their precise and colorful uniforms, in their great shakos, in their white wigs and white belting, men of London, of Suffolk and Norfolk, of Devon and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, staring so curiously at the gawky farmers, who, having come from the same places that bred them, were now outlanders, incredible rustics. For long moments the two groups faced one another; it was a moment the redcoats were trained for, but the farmers’ hands were wet on their guns.

Then Major Pitcairn, commanding the British, made up his mind, spurred to the front and roared, “Disperse!”

The farmers growled.

“God damn you bloody rebels, lay down your guns!”

It was there, hot and terrible; they were rebels. This idea that they had conceived, that they should be free men with the right to live their lives in their own way, this tenuous, dream-like idea of liberty that men of good will had played with for thousands of years had suddenly come to its brutish head on a village green in Lexington. The farmers growled and didn’t lay down their arms; instead one of them fired, and in the moment of stillness after the roar of the big musket had echoed and re-echoed, a redcoat clutched at his tunic, knelt, and then rolled over on the ground.

After that, there was no order, no memory even. The redcoat files fired a volley; the farmers fired their guns singly, by twos and threes. The women screamed and came running from their houses. Children began to cry and dogs barked madly. Then the firing died away and there was no sound except the moans of the wounded and the shrill pleading of the women.

A fifth glass of beer in front of the City Tavern in Philadelphia, and the rider told how the redcoats had marched away. “They were not after Lexington, but after Concord,” he explained. “That’s where the stores were.”

“They took the farmers?” someone asked.

“No, they did not take them! Do you take a mad dog? They left well enough alone and went to Concord and walked into the town and stayed there maybe four, five hours. Then they set out back with never a thing done, like their wits were addled. And when they came to the bridge, the folk was waiting for them, not a few now, but over four hundred.

“‘You dirty bastards!’ the major yells, ‘you dirty peasant bastards! Clear out and back to home!’

“They didn’t move,” the rider said.

“God damn you bastards, clear the bridge!” the major roared.

They were solemn and they didn’t move; their jaws worked evenly; their guns crept to level and their lips tightened, yet they didn’t move. And then the British attacked and hell broke loose. Cannon roared, and there was crash after crash of musketry. With bayonets fixed, the British charged the bridge, and with clubbed muskets the farmers drove them back. Yelling, screaming, cursing, praying, the Yankees forced the redcoats off the bridge back on the Concord side of the stream. But the effort couldn’t be sustained; they were farmers, not soldiers, and after the first heat of rage had passed, they gave back and allowed the redcoats to re-form, cross the bridge, and resume their march toward Lexington.

It was only then, after they had laid out their dead and tended their wounded, that the farmers realized a victory had slipped through their fingers. A cold New England bitterness took the place of their hot-headed fury. They picked up their guns and began to run—down the road to Lexington.

It was six miles to Lexington, six miles of perdition for the redcoats. The whole countryside blazed, and that April afternoon every stone wall, every fence, every house, every bush, every tree roared defiance. Sick men crawled to their windows to fire at the invaders, boys crept through the grass and picked their targets, women behind barn doors loaded guns for their husbands, farmers ran the length of New England stone walls, firing again and again. A boy climbed into a tree with a brace of horse pistols, killed a redcoat subaltern passing underneath, and himself was shot. But on the whole, the redcoat volleys were useless against this stabbing, hacking, hidden warfare.

There was no leadership, no direction, no command; the farmers fought instinctively, desperately, more brilliantly than they were ever to fight again, as if they knew that here, today, the poor, suffering simple folk had finally felt their power.

Six miles to Lexington before the British had any surcease. The town was a place of homes, and in the town were women and children, and therefore the men waited out in the fields and the woods. At Lexington, reinforcements met the redcoats, but at the same time hundreds and hundreds of farmers, drawn by the noise of the firing, by the swiftly spread news, were converging on the village.

Reinforced, the British set out once more on their retreat to Boston—and this time the hell was worse. Stabbed, hacked, bleeding, they staggered along—

“They got to Charlestown,” the rider said, “what was left of them.”