Chapter 11
On to Concord
Who fired the first shot on Lexington Green early on the morning of April 19, 1775, has been debated ever since and likely will be forevermore. About the only thing both sides agree upon is the uncertainty of the moment.
Paul Revere, still struggling with John Lowell to carry Hancock’s trunk away from Buckman’s Tavern, heard the first shot. Many years later, perhaps influenced by other reports, Revere would say that he both “saw, & heard, a Gun fired, which appeared to be a Pistol.” But in a deposition only a few days after the event, Revere specifically recalled that he had to turn his head to view the action. “When one gun was fired,” Revere then testified, “I heard the report, turned my head, and saw the smoake in front of the Troops, they imeditly gave a great shout, ran a few paces, and then the whole fired.”1 When Revere turned around at the shot, he could not see the Lexington militia. A building, probably Jonathan Harrington’s house, blocked Revere’s view of that part of the green closest to him.
Captain Parker, having already “ordered our Militia to disperse and not to fire,” testified only that the regulars “rushed furiously” and fired “without receiving any provocation therefor from us.”2 John Robbins, who was in the militia’s front rank, agreed that the company was dispersing when three British officers yelled, “ ‘Fire, by God, fire;’ at which moment we received a very heavy and close fire from them.” Robbins believed that Parker’s men “had not then fired a gun.”3
Local spectators reported much the same thing. Timothy Smith of Lexington was near the green when he “saw the Regular Troops fire on the Lexington Company, before the latter fired a gun.” Smith, who was likely standing behind and to the right of the front militia line, had started to run away when another volley was unleashed in his general direction. By the time Smith cautiously returned to the common, he saw “eight of the Lexington men who were killed, and lay bleeding, at a considerable distance from each other,” suggesting they had in fact been dispersing.4
AS VEHEMENT AS THE REBELS were in their insistence that they had not fired first, the British were equally so. Major Pitcairn, who in advance of Colonel Smith was the senior British commander on the field, rode onto the green after at least two and perhaps three of the light infantry companies that had mistakenly taken Bedford Road were advancing across it. The rebels to their front were apparently moving, but whether they were dispersing, as they later claimed, was questionable. Pitcairn saw rebels sprinting toward the cover of stone walls to the north of the green and took the movement to be a threat on the British right flank.
According to Pitcairn’s report to General Gage, the light infantry, “observing this, ran after them. I instantly called to the soldiers not to fire, but surround and disarm them, and after several repetitions of those positive orders to the men, not to fire, etc. some of the rebels who had jumped over the wall fired four or five shots at the soldiers.”5
But Pitcairn refrained in this report from discussing a “first” shot and hurried on to describe the next exchange. Lieutenant John Barker, who was in the Fourth Regiment’s light infantry company in Pitcairn’s van, was almost as terse in his account, particularly given the detail elsewhere in his diary. Barker estimated the rebels at three or four times the number actually assembled and said his company “continued advancing, keeping prepared against an attack tho’ without intending to attack them.” When the distance had closed, Barker claimed the rebels “fired one or two shots, upon which our Men without orders rushed in upon them, fired and put ’em to flight.”6
One of the most detailed of the British reports is that of Lieutenant William Sutherland of the Thirty-Eighth Regiment. If Sutherland is to be believed as a reliable source—and time will tell in that regard—he knew nothing of the expedition to Concord until troops were preparing to embark from below Boston Common late on the evening of April 18. Without apparent orders and unassigned to any particular unit—the light infantry and grenadier companies of his own Thirty-Eighth were on the expedition, but they were under their regular commanders—Sutherland nonetheless seems to have been readily received by Smith and Pitcairn.
One wonders if this was truly a last-minute lark by Sutherland or whether he was possibly some sort of special observer dispatched on the sly by General Gage. Either way, on the face of things, Sutherland’s prior service did not necessarily boast of competence. He was commissioned a lieutenant in 1761 and had been with his regiment since 1766. Even in the slow-ordered system of the British army, this fourteen-year tenure in grade was hardly evidence of blooming talent. Whether Pitcairn ordered him directly or Sutherland once again merely seized the initiative, Sutherland ended up with Lieutenant Jesse Adair in Pitcairn’s van after Colonel Smith dispatched Pitcairn’s command ahead of his main force.
Sutherland was rather definite in his recollection, written a week later, that a line of British officers on horseback—be they four, five, or six, as various reports describe—“rode in amongst” the rebels and called out both commands to throw down their arms and assurances that they would “come by no harm.” Sutherland heard Pitcairn’s entreaties to his own troops to hold fire and maintain their ranks. But then “some of the Villains,” as Sutherland termed them, got over a stone wall and opened fire on the regulars. It was only “then & not before,” Sutherland maintained, that the regulars returned fire.7
Sutherland was very specific—almost as though he were trying to provide exculpatory evidence, if one is a skeptic—that it was “very unlikely our men should have fired on them immediately as they must certainly have hurt” the officers on horseback to their front, which by Sutherland’s account included Major Edward Mitchell, Captains Charles Lumm and Charles Cochrane, and Lieutenant F. P. Thorne of Mitchell’s advance patrol as well as Sutherland himself.
Sutherland also mentioned a Lieutenant “Baker,” but this only serves to confuse the matter and show how muddled any account of those brief moments can be. There was, in fact, a Lieutenant Thomas Baker of the Fifth Regiment, but he was posted with that regiment’s grenadier company, which was back down the road a piece with Smith’s main body. Quite probably Sutherland was recalling Lieutenant John Barker of the Fourth, who was on the green but failed to mention in his own brief account any ride among the rebels on horseback or even if he himself was mounted.
However and by whomever the first shot was fired, the first concerted fire from the British ranks caused Sutherland’s horse to bolt, and it took off at a full gallop and carried him “600 yards or more” along Bedford Road, which ran toward the Clarke parsonage. If Sutherland—who was prone to overestimate numbers, at least those of opposing forces—was correct in the distance he traveled, he must have ridden by the Clarke house. What a sight that must have been—a lone British officer riding madly through militia and spectators and then dashing off down the road alone on a runaway horse. Somewhere along the route, Sutherland may have passed close to where Revere and Lowell were lugging Hancock’s trunk, but if they in fact saw one another, neither made mention of it. Finally, Sutherland got his horse under control and galloped back to the green through what he described as a fusillade of fire from which he could hear “the Whissing of the Balls.”8
Sutherland was not, however, the only rider to have trouble with his mount. Benjamin Tidd of Lexington and Joseph Abbott of nearby Lincoln were on Lexington Green that morning and “mounted on horses” when they “saw a body of Regular Troops marching up to the Lexington Company which was then dispersing.” The British officers riding to the front of their troops paid these two horsemen, who evidently were unarmed observers, no mind, so Tidd and Abbott for a moment had front-row seats. They testified that “the Regulars fired first a few guns, which we took to be pistols from some of the Regulars who were mounted on horses, and then the said Regulars fired a volley or two before any guns were fired by the Lexington Company.” But at the sound of the first volley, Tidd’s and Abbott’s horses also bolted, and they raced off down the road toward Concord.9
Two other spectators testified that they not only heard what they took to be a pistol shot but also saw a British officer fire it. Thomas Fessenden, having observed the officer in the lead brandishing his sword, claimed, “Meanwhile the second officer, who was about two rods behind him, fired a pistol pointed at said Militia.” In his reminiscences, Reverend Clarke—who may or may not have witnessed the scene in person—agreed with these details and wrote, “The second of these officers, about this time, fired a pistol towards the militia, as they were dispersing.”10
While these partisan witnesses were likely showing strong bias, it seems quite possible, perhaps even probable, that the first shot came from a pistol held by one of the British officers riding into the rebel lines. Given that Major Pitcairn appears to have been momentarily preoccupied with his advance companies having taken the wrong road and rushing toward the assembled militia, the likely suspects are Major Edward Mitchell, exhausted and clearly keyed up after a tense night without sleep, and Lieutenant William Sutherland, who had been scurrying to the forefront all night long. Whether this officer fired intentionally or whether the pistol discharged accidentally as he rode is another matter.
The evidence suggests that Sutherland was mounted on a horse he took from a rebel courier who was stopped on the road earlier that morning. So in Sutherland’s defense, it was quite likely not his regular mount. Nonetheless, as one historian shrewdly noted—while admitting it was only his personal hypothesis—“riders who have the most trouble controlling their horses are those least able to control themselves.”11 Sutherland’s horse, by its rider’s own admission, had gone for quite an uncontrolled gallop, and it is certainly possible that Sutherland’s pistol discharged by accident as he rode his frisky mount into the rebel lines.
The other possibility is that the pistol shot came from among the spectators or even from someone hidden from view who had a not-so-hidden desire to provoke an incident. Sergeant William Munroe swore that he saw someone, possibly Solomon Brown, fire from the back door of Buckman’s Tavern, but this appears to have been after the initial volley from the regulars.12 Given that there were groups of spectators clustered around the green and no absence of firearms, almost anything is plausible.
In the end, a preponderance of evidence suggests that the first shot did not come from the rebel militia or from the rank and file of the advancing British infantry. Whether it was a pistol shot discharged on purpose or by accident by a British officer or a rebel onlooker remains a point of debate.
Lieutenant Edward Gould from the light infantry company of the Fourth Regiment may have been among the most objective of observers—or at least he may have summarized the majority opinion. Among the first to move forward across the green, Gould acknowledged that the rebels were dispersing as his command approached, and “soon after firing began; but which party fired first, I cannot exactly say.” But even Gould’s testimony must be considered in light of its circumstances: having been wounded in the action at the North Bridge later that day, Gould was being treated by rebels at Medford when he gave his deposition.13
Regardless how that first shot was fired, it quickly spread into sporadic and then volley fire from the British regulars. After the first volley apparently caused no casualties among the rebels, John Munroe remarked to his brother Ebenezer, who was standing beside him, that the regulars were only firing powder—a scare but no harm. But on the second volley, a ball ripped into Ebenezer’s arm, and he exclaimed otherwise. “I’ll give them the guts of my gun,” he cried in surprise, and, leveling his piece, he returned the fire.14
According to one well-worn anecdote of questionable veracity, John Hancock and Samuel Adams were walking through the woods, continuing their escape from Lexington, when they heard this fusillade of musketry. “It is a fine day,” Adams remarked with no little satisfaction. Hancock glanced about, thinking that Adams was talking about the weather. “Very pleasant,” he agreed. Adams suppressed a small smile. “I mean,” he said—for one brief moment, Hancock’s tutor once again—“this day is a glorious day for America.”15 It makes a great story, and, then again, it may have happened, but it certainly conveys the true feelings of Samuel Adams in the matter.
IN THE MAZE OF LEADEN musket balls flying in all directions it was remarkable that there were not more casualties. The black powder of the day was so dense, and so much of it had been discharged, that a thick veil of smoke settled on the green, and John Munroe recalled, “The smoke prevented our seeing any thing but the heads of some of their horses.” But he fired back nonetheless. After his first shot, he retreated some yards and “then loaded my gun a second time, with two balls, and, on firing at the British, the strength of the charge took off about a foot of my gun barrel.” Ebenezer Munroe also fired again, recalling that as he did so, “the balls flew so thick I thought there was no chance for escape, and that I might as well fire my gun as stand still and do nothing.”16
Then came the bayonets. Jonas Parker, Captain John Parker’s aging cousin, had been “standing in the ranks, with his balls and flints in his hat, on the ground, between his feet” when he declared he would “never run.” He didn’t, but he was shot down on the second volley. William Munroe “saw him struggling on the ground, attempting to load his gun… [when] as he lay on the ground they run him through with the bayonet.”17
Jonas Parker, Jonathan Harrington, Isaac Muzzy, and John and Ebenezer Munroe’s father, Robert, were found dead near the place where the militia line had formed. Harrington died almost on his own doorstep, which was just behind the militia line on the edge of the green. No one could say that he hadn’t been defending his home. Samuel Hadley and John Brown died after they had limped off the green. Asahel Porter and Caleb Harrington were shot down on the other end of the common, near the meetinghouse. Porter had been taken prisoner earlier and was trying to escape; Harrington had been minding the powder cache in the meetinghouse with an eye toward blowing it up should the regulars attempt to seize it.18 Among the nine wounded was Prince Estabrook.
The only casualties on the British side were one infantryman wounded in the leg and Major Pitcairn’s horse, which was nicked in two places. Some, including Reverend Clarke, would cite this as evidence that “far from firing first upon the king’s troops; upon the most careful enquiry, it appears that but very few of our people fired at all.”19
ONTO THIS SCENE OF BLOODSHED, pungent with the smell of black powder, marched Colonel Smith and his remaining companies of light infantry and grenadiers. Smith, though he never admitted it, must have been aghast as his horse bore his ample girth to within sight of the meetinghouse and Buckman’s Tavern. Pitcairn’s six companies of the advance guard were in disarray, and dead and wounded rebels littered the green. This was not Salem, and Smith was not going to get off as easily as Colonel Leslie did. What words Smith spoke to Pitcairn were never recorded, but they can certainly be imagined. And what of the hyper Major Mitchell? What angst did he add to Smith’s grim view? And then there was Lieutenant Sutherland.
Once again, Sutherland—by his own account, at least—found himself at the center of the action. Colonel Smith turned to him in this chaos and asked him where a drummer was. Sutherland found one, and Colonel Smith immediately ordered him to beat to arms and bring some order to his troops. It was not easy. The first exchange of deadly fire had had as profound a psychological effect on the regulars as it had on the militia. Adrenaline was at a fever pitch. “We then formed on the Common but with some difficulty,” Lieutenant Barker of the Fourth Regiment recalled. “The Men were so wild they cou’d hear no orders.”20
Within Sutherland’s hearing, Smith and Pitcairn expressed dismay at the behavior of their troops in not obeying the junior officers more readily and in not keeping to their ranks. In Sutherland’s words, they recommended “a more steady Conduct to them for the future.” When some troops lingered and attempted to break into some neighboring houses from which they surmised rebel fire had come, Smith, fearing more bloodshed, stopped them.21
As the sergeants goaded their men back into ranks, Colonel Smith held officers’ call and for the first time told his subordinates the objective of their march—the stores at Concord. Some officers expressed surprise and then skepticism. Others objected almost to the point of insubordination. Contrary to Gage’s and Smith’s delusion, they had never had any hope of surprise, and now the countryside was alarmed all around them with the scent of fresh blood on the ground. Mackenzie’s account suggests that Smith was more patient in hearing these concerns than circumstance or his position required. They would press on, the colonel decreed, if for no other reason than that he was “determined to obey the orders” he had received.22
With his officers’ call finished, Smith directed his command to fire their weapons in a victory salute and raise three cheers. Likely he did so to clear muskets and avoid any accidental firing while on the march. How much of a morale boost his excited troops needed—despite the uncertainty of advancing even farther from home after a sleepless night—is questionable. Certainly the roar of some eight hundred muskets and the subsequent hurrahs echoing across their green had just the opposite effect on the inhabitants of Lexington.23
Colonel Smith gave the order to march toward Concord, but as his column of regulars disappeared to the west, Captain Parker reassembled his company of militia on the green. More men had arrived in the meantime from outlying farms. They joined the morning’s survivors in stunned disbelief at the sight of dead and wounded friends and relatives. Quite suddenly, without Parker or anyone saying anything of particular note, the entire atmosphere changed. This assemblage was no longer a military version of a town meeting called to discuss a course of action or make a demonstration of readiness. Their blood had been spilled, and now they would march with but one aim—that of revenge.
AHEAD OF SMITH’S COLUMN, CONCORD had been on the alert since Dr. Samuel Prescott galloped into town after eluding Major Mitchell’s patrol as it captured Paul Revere. Prescott had ridden through woods and fields that he knew well and avoided further detection. The town’s elders gathered at the parsonage of the Reverend William Emerson, the future grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While the Concord militia was assembled, a saddle maker named Reuben Brown was dispatched eastward to Lexington to gather intelligence. He witnessed the initial firing from the far western edge of the green, but then hurried back to give the alarm without waiting to determine the outcome. Upon Brown’s arrival back in Concord, Major John Buttrick of the Concord militia company asked him if he thought that the regulars were firing ball. Brown wasn’t sure, but thought it highly probable.24
As the Concord militia formed, there was much more debate among the volunteers than had occupied the hours of waiting by the Lexington men in Buckman’s Tavern. In Lexington, there had then as yet been no irrevocable sense of doom. In Concord, especially after Reuben Brown’s report, it was pretty clear that doom was on its way to them. The younger men wanted to march eastward and meet the advancing regulars as far from town as possible. The middle-aged men wanted to stay closer to their families and businesses and defend the town proper. The town elders, most of whom had seen some measure of bloodshed in the French and Indian War or in combat against Indians, were more cautious. However many regulars were on the march, the Concord men were likely outnumbered. It might be wise to melt into the surrounding hills and await reinforcements from neighboring towns. Already members of the militia from neighboring Lincoln, just to the east, were joining them.25
Most of these men were not “minutemen,” as history has so often characterized them. All were militiamen, but per long-standing custom and later suggestions from the Provincial Congress—directives was still too strong a word to these independently minded locals—only about one-quarter of the militia were designated as being able to assemble and march in the shortest time possible. They were the first responders of the day. The remaining militia formed and responded in a much more deliberative manner. Lexington—the minuteman statue that stands on its green to this day notwithstanding—had no company of true minutemen, but larger Concord did, and Amos Barrett was one of them.
As Barrett remembered it fifty years later, “The bell rung at 3 o’clock for alarm. As I was a minute man, I was soon in town and found my captain and the rest of my Company at the post.” When the Concord men decided to send a scouting party in force to reconnoiter the regulars’ advance, Barrett’s minuteman company was among the 150 or so men who took up positions on the crest of a hill east of town. “We thought we would go and meet the British,” Barrett recalled. “We marched down towards Lexington about a mile or mile and a half and we see them coming. We halted and staid till they got within about 100 rods, then we were ordered to the about face and marched before them with our drums and fifes going, and also the British (drums and fifes). We had grand music.”26
As these minutemen fell back into Concord, there was still debate about whether the militia would form and defend the town or withdraw to surrounding high ground—both to ascertain the regulars’ intentions and to await the arrival of more militia. To the consternation of some of the younger men, the counsel of sixty-four-year-old Colonel James Barrett prevailed. As the colonel of the combined Middlesex County regiment of militia, Barrett led them north out of Concord, across the North Bridge over the Concord River, and up to the high ground of Punkatasset Hill, about a mile north of Concord Common. A short pause of prudence seemed in order, and, as Reverend Emerson noted, “We were the more careful to prevent a Rupture with the King’s Troops, as we were uncertain what had happened at Lexington, & Knew not they had begun the Quarrell there by 1st firing upon our People.”27
So Colonel Smith’s men, with fifes and drums playing in an attempt at intimidation—because there was certainly by then no secret of their advance—marched into Concord unopposed and came to a halt opposite the common. At that point it was about 8:00 a.m. The Concord Common, unlike the triangle patch of Lexington Green, was long and rectangular, extending along the southern edge of the main road as it curved north through town toward the North Bridge. In about the middle of the common, a road led west to the South Bridge across the Sudbury River, which joined the Assabet River to form the Concord River just upstream from the North Bridge.
Now it was time for Colonel Smith once again to remember General Gage’s orders. Having caught up with Major Pitcairn’s advance force after its delay at Lexington and marched with it as one force the six miles into Concord, Smith again ordered that the two Concord bridges just beyond the town be seized. But instead of dispatching Major Pitcairn to command the North Bridge force, Smith chose Captain Lawrence Parsons, the commander of the light infantry company of Smith’s own Tenth Regiment of Foot.
No firm reason has survived for why Smith chose Parsons over Pitcairn for this assignment, but it is interesting to speculate that Smith was no doubt disturbed over the bloodshed at Lexington. Whether or not the turn of events had been Pitcairn’s fault, he was the commander of the advance troops and responsible, short of an overt first volley by the rebels, for their firing. Parsons marched off for the North Bridge with six companies of light infantry.
While the record is not completely clear, these appear to have been the light infantry companies from the Fourth, Fifth, Tenth, and Thirty-Eighth Regiments, which were in Pitcairn’s advance into Lexington, along with the Forty-Third and Fifty-Second, which were not. In short order, Captain Walter S. Laurie of the Forty-Third was left guarding the North Bridge and its western approaches, while the companies of the Fourth and Tenth deployed to low hills a short distance westward. Captain Parsons and the remaining three companies, numbering about 120 men and guided by Ensign Henry De Berniere, marched on toward Colonel Barrett’s farm, where Gage’s intelligence had told him there was a considerable stockpile of munitions.28
Indeed, there had been until mere days earlier, when Paul Revere had ridden into town with his first message of warning for the Provincial Congress. Much of the matériel had been removed to outlying towns, and what remained had been hidden with some measure of creativity. Only several days before, Colonel Barrett’s sons had plowed a field on his farm and then planted muskets instead of corn, covering them over with dirt. De Berniere, who had scouted this area surreptitiously with Captain Brown only a month earlier, was forced to report, “We did not find so much as we expected, but what there was we destroyed.”29
Meanwhile, Colonel Smith also detailed a smaller force to the South Bridge, about a mile west of the common, both to look for munitions in that area and to form a defense against any rebel militia coming into town from that direction. Captain Mundy Pole of the grenadier company of Smith’s Tenth Regiment—again the colonel seemed to be going with men he knew well—led this detachment to the South Bridge. But for the steady calm of a rebel minuteman officer, the first shots of the Concord battle might have been fired here.
Captain John Nixon was in command of a minute company of West Sudbury men attached to Colonel Abijah Pierce’s regiment. Nixon and his company reached Dugan’s Corner, on the Sudbury side of the South Bridge, about 9:00 a.m. and awaited orders either to advance into Concord over the South Bridge or march to the west and rendezvous at Colonel Barrett’s farm. Nixon had what seems to have been standing orders—witness Parker’s actions a few hours earlier at Lexington—not to fire unless fired upon. But then came word that Captain Mundy Pole’s contingent had occupied the South Bridge in a manner calculated to prevent rebel forces from converging in Concord, exactly as General Gage’s orders had intended.
Nixon was content to obey his orders and stand his ground, but a member of the town’s exempt company—those advanced in years and excused from active service—had nonetheless tagged along and now exhorted Captain Nixon, “If you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward!” There were murmurs of assent from among his men, but Nixon stood his ground. “I should rather be called a coward by you,” Nixon replied evenly, “than called to account by my superior officer, for disobedience of orders.” Soon afterward, the West Sudbury company received orders to march westward to Barrett’s farm, and Captain Pole continued his occupation of the South Bridge without incident.30
The remaining companies of light infantry and the bulk of the grenadiers stayed in the center of Concord under Colonel Smith’s direct control. All in all, his force was getting spread rather thin—about one hundred men at the South Bridge, a mile to the west of the town common; another 120 at or near the North Bridge, a mile to the north; 120 with Captain Parsons a good two miles beyond that, digging around Barrett’s farm; and the remaining number of about five hundred searching the buildings in Concord proper. (Whether the light infantry company of the Twenty-Third with its complement of thirty-eight officers and men had belatedly joined Parsons or was somewhere in between Barrett’s farm and Concord has never been entirely clear.) Meanwhile, up on Punkatasset Hill, Colonel Barrett’s militia companies were growing increasingly restless. Many were itching for a fight.