Chapter 13
Retreat, If We Can
How was General Thomas Gage spending what would become such a momentous day? It had not started well. The general was awakened shortly after 5:00 a.m. on the nineteenth by the arrival of the messenger whom Colonel Smith had dispatched with a request for more troops even before Smith’s column reached Lexington. Gage had gone to bed the night before quite confident that he had made arrangements for just such a contingency. In fact, the general may well have been planning all along to use a second force of overwhelming numbers to crush any rebel resistance that dared challenge Smith’s advance.
Before retiring, Gage had issued orders to Lord Percy’s brigade of three regiments and a battalion of Pitcairn’s marines to be assembled and ready to march at four o’clock the next morning. All told, this amounted to about fifteen hundred officers and men and included such well-trained troops as those of the Fourth “King’s Own” Regiment of Foot. Gage’s first waking thought was that this force now stood ready to march. A quick inquiry showed otherwise.
Gage’s orders—perhaps written by his confidential secretary, Samuel Kemble—were addressed to Lord Percy’s brigade major, Captain Thomas Moncrieffe. In one of what a contemporary British history called “two stupid blunders we committed,” they were delivered to Moncrieffe’s quarters, but the captain was out for the evening. Moncrieffe later came home and went to bed oblivious of them. Consequently, as General Gage roused himself and heard Smith’s recommendation for reinforcements, the troops of the First Brigade were sound asleep. Why Lord Percy himself, who had been with General Gage the evening before and supposedly reported to him that their plan against Concord was known, did not take steps to ensure that his brigade was at the ready is just another of the mysteries of that evening.
The second “stupid” blunder was even more incredible. As the regiments of the First Brigade hastily prepared to march, Percy waited expectantly for the battalion of marines. By the time his regiments were finally formed and squared away, it was well after 7:00 a.m. Still, there was no sign of the marines. With what seems like far too much patience considering the confusion that had befallen his own troops, Percy waited some more before finally sending an aide to determine their condition. The marines, too, were asleep. Their orders had been sent to Major Pitcairn’s quarters and left there unopened, despite the fact that “the gentleman concerned in this business ought to have recollected that Pitcairn had been dispatched” with Colonel Smith. “This double mistake,” the British history concluded, “lost us from four till nine o’clock, the time we marched off to support Col. Smith.”1
Lord Percy took the route that Colonel Smith probably wished that he had taken instead of his watery crossing and slog through the marshes: south out of Boston by way of Boston Neck, westward through Roxbury, across the Charles River at the Cambridge bridge, and on through Cambridge toward Menotomy. Although it was midmorning, according to Percy, “all the houses were shut up, & there was not the appearance of a single inhabitant.” Those who dared to peer out from shuttered windows saw a rather grand procession led by an advance guard of a captain and fifty men and two six-pound cannons—the latter calculated mostly for show, as Percy had declined to be encumbered with an ammunition wagon. Consequently, the supply of six-pound shot was limited to what was held in the ammo boxes on the two gun carriages.
Behind this spear point marched the Fourth “King’s Own” Regiment, Pitcairn’s First Battalion of Marines, absent their commander, the Forty-Seventh Regiment, and the Twenty-Third “Royal Welch Fusiliers” Regiment, all trailed by a rear guard. All three regiments were missing their light infantry and grenadier companies, who were already out on the Lexington road with Colonel Smith. Though he was finally under way, Percy “could get no intelligence” concerning the fate of Smith’s column until he “had passed Menotomy.”2
Meanwhile, having dispatched Lord Percy to Smith’s rescue, however belatedly, General Gage took time to answer two short letters from Lord Dartmouth. These had arrived on the sixteenth in the same pouch aboard the Falcon as Dartmouth’s detailed instructions to strike a prompt and decisive blow. Both had been hastily written on the eve of the Falcon’s sailing from England, but they revealed Dartmouth’s attention to North American details.
One letter suggested that British troops in Boston might routinely be supplied with coal from Cape Breton Island, thus avoiding the possibility that rebels might interrupt local deliveries. The other was a direct order for Gage to instruct the area commander at Saint Augustine, Florida, to deploy “not less than 100 Men and Officers in proportion to Savannah in Georgia.” Gage, ever the loyal subordinate, assured Dartmouth that he would take the coal supply under consideration and that he had sent orders via Georgia’s royal governor, Sir James Wright, to move the troops to Savannah.
When Wright received this letter from Gage several months later, however, the governor did not forward it to the Saint Augustine commander; Wright thought the presence of British troops in Savannah would only serve to excite public opinion in Georgia—exactly the situation Gage had been facing in Boston since 1768! The even greater irony is that Wright’s reply to Gage was intercepted in Charleston, South Carolina, by the local committee of correspondence, and rebels ingeniously substituted a reply to the effect that everything was quiet in Georgia and there was no need to send troops.3
In his reply to Lord Dartmouth on April 19, General Gage made no mention of the day’s brewing events.
LORD PERCY AND HIS MEN were not the only ones leaving Boston for Lexington that morning. Dr. Joseph Warren, who had sent Paul Revere and William Dawes riding to spread the alarm the prior evening, was now determined to get into the thick of the fighting. But how had Warren come to this decision? Warren’s principal biographer notes, “A special messenger, early in the morning, brought to Warren the intelligence of the events that occurred in the morning at Lexington… and [Warren] directed [his student] to take care of his patients, mounted his horse, and departed for the scene of action.”4
It is certainly possible that the rebel network slipped a messenger into Boston to report the Lexington news to Warren.5 It is also possible that during this short night, Warren had planned all along to head for Lexington as soon as he could do so without raising undue suspicion. He was, after all, a member of the committee of safety, which was scheduled to meet again that day at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy. A more intriguing possibility, however, is that if Warren did indeed have an informant in General Gage’s headquarters or household, might not the same report from Colonel Smith requesting reinforcements also have reached Warren and told him that something major was brewing?
In any event, Dr. Warren rode through Boston to the Charlestown ferry. That the guard upon it would have permitted so well known a rebel as Warren to pass out of Boston on this of all days reveals the depth of British ineptitude. The last person to whom Warren spoke on the Boston side reported him as saying, “Keep up a brave heart! They have begun it,—that either party can do; and we’ll end it,—that only one can do.”6 Joseph Warren would never set foot in Boston again.
Somewhere between eight and ten o’clock that morning—reports differ as to the time—at least two Charlestown residents encountered the doctor “riding hastily out of town.” By the time he reached Cambridge, Warren was behind Percy’s relief column after it had crossed the Charles River bridge. As Warren reached Watson’s Corner in North Cambridge (the intersection of present-day Rindge and Massachusetts Avenues), he encountered two stragglers from Percy’s column who were attempting to steal an old man’s horse. “The old man, with his cat and hat, [were] pulling one way, and the soldiers the other, [when] Dr. Warren rode up, and helped drive them off.”7
Then Warren spurred his horse forward and attempted to make his way around Percy’s column. He was stopped at the point of a bayonet and soon faced two officers who demanded, “Where are the troops?” Warren could justifiably say that he didn’t know, and they left him alone. Warren appears to have followed Percy’s column into Menotomy and then blended into the countryside as he sought out the committee of safety. Meanwhile, events had come to a head around Concord.
ALL EVENTS, BE THEY LARGE or small, have a tipping point. Two centuries after the battles at Lexington and Concord, American historian and novelist Wallace Stegner would refer to that tenuous balance as “the angle of repose.” On April 19, 1775, about the stroke of noon, just such a point was reached somewhere on the hills surrounding the town of Concord. Having permitted Colonel Smith’s reinforcement of grenadiers to cover Captain Laurie’s retreat from the North Bridge without firing a shot, and also having allowed Captain Parsons’s detachment to return unmolested from Barrett’s farm, the rebel militia went from a posture of limited defense to a state of all-out attack.
Upon marching out of Concord, Colonel Smith once again deployed several light infantry companies as flankers along the ridge above the road leading eastward toward Lexington. The first major landmark en route was the crossroads of Merriam’s Corner, where Bedford Road ran north. How the decision was made to oppose Smith’s retreat and who made it are interesting questions.
The time-honored myth of a swarm of minutemen operating independently upon individual initiative has long been put to rest. Not only did minutemen and militia companies have different operational roles, there was also considerable command and control exerted at the company and regimental levels. At the North Bridge, Colonel Barrett and Major Buttrick each commanded a regimental structure. What was missing, as more and more companies and regiments converged on the Lexington-to-Concord corridor, was an overarching decision-making process and high command presence on the scene above the regimental level. This was not because one did not exist.
Just weeks before, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had empowered its committee of safety to prosecute fully the defense of the colony—at least that portion of the colony with rebel sentiments. The committee had put a military command structure in place, incorporating the existing militia companies and regiments and their officers, and appointed six men of varying military abilities as generals. The difficulty on the morning of April 19 was in getting these general officers to a point on the battlefield where unified command decisions could be made and, as important, communicated to the various regimental commanders who were on the march.
Thus there was not one command decision by an individual or high-ranking group to move from tentative defense on Lexington Green and at Concord’s North Bridge to a concerted, all-out attack.
But if command and control above the regimental level was lacking, the rumor grapevine was surprisingly speedy. The rebels’ pause after the North Bridge skirmish and Colonel Smith’s preparations to depart Concord gave time for the news of what had occurred on Lexington Green—including word that nine of their neighbors lay dead—to circulate among the rebel forces. Suddenly there was a pattern. The firings on the green and at the bridge melded from individual unfortunate events into what was quickly characterized as a concerted British effort to attack local residents and destroy their villages. In the emotion of the moment the day’s occurrences took on the aura of a major invasion—something more than a foray or a raid.
There is something to be said for shock wearing off as well. No matter how well one is trained to prepare for combat, there is something about one’s initial taste of battle that triggers a flood of emotions. Overlaying them is a degree of shock that takes some time to dissipate. The confusion and stupor among the rebels at the North Bridge as Parsons marched by is an example of this. But the news of bloodshed at Lexington was a tonic that sped renewed determination through all rebel ranks. Without an overarching directive, but with regimental and company control as the shock of what had transpired wore off, the rebels—under Barrett’s and Buttrick’s orders and those of other arriving regimental and company commanders—closed in on all sides of Smith’s column and were susceptible to the nudge that broke the friction of the angle of repose.
This tipping point, this moment when armed frustration turned to outright vengeance and determined attack, occurred as the flanking companies of light infantry on the left of Smith’s column closed with the main body to squeeze ahead of it and cross a small bridge over a fork in Mill Brook just beyond Bedford Road, at Merriam’s Corner. No fifes and drums filled the air. The only music the column of regulars heard was the tramp, tramp, tramp of their tired feet. Edmund Foster, a twenty-year-old militiaman from Reading, who later became a minister, recalled that “silence reigned on both sides.”8
Then, for the third time that day, a disputed shot resounded through the spring air. But unlike the first shots at Lexington and Concord, there was little argument over its origin. A preponderance of evidence suggests that it was fired from the rebel side, either intentionally or as an accidental discharge as someone stumbled in the rocks or climbed over a log. The result was that a company or two of the light infantry turned in the direction of the retort, presented their muskets, and fired a poorly aimed volley that by all accounts was once again high. But then the woods and fields erupted with the rattle of rebel musketry.
“Before we had gone ½ a mile,” Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own recorded, “we were fired on from all sides, but mostly from the Rear, where People had hid themselves in houses ’till we had passed and then fired; the country was an amazing strong one, full of Hills, Woods, stone Walls, &c., which the Rebels did not fail to take advantage of, for they were all lined with People who kept an incessant fire upon us.”9
Indeed, this action appeared to British regulars to be just the sort of fight that General Gage had predicted to Lord Dartmouth some six weeks before. “The most natural and eligible mode of attack on the part of the people,” Gage wrote, “is that of detached parties of Bushmen who from their adroitness in the habitual use of the Firelock suppose themselves sure of their mark at a distance of 200 rods.” Then, with the condescending air of superiority that so many British officers shared, Gage went on to say that, these tactics aside, he was “firmly persuaded that there is not a man amongst [them] capable of taking command or directing the motions of an Army.”10
This, of course, was not true. There might have been a momentary lag in command and control above the regimental level, but this was no “wild and ungovernable” mob, as Gage predicted. Regimental and company leaders showed a remarkable sense of tactics and deployments as the British column sought to retreat. They had, after all, been using these tactics for generations against Indians and, more recently, against the French and their Indian allies. This was their type of warfare and terrain, and they would make the most of it.
THE LEXINGTON ROAD EAST OF Merriam’s Corner was then a much more constricted route than it appears more than two centuries later. “The narrow road dropped at times into small ravines which were commanded by the hillsides above. At least two large sections of the route bent to the northward”—at what would be called Bloody Curve and Parker’s Revenge—“with great trees on the west, and high bushes on the east.”11
But first there was the challenge of passing Brook’s Hill, also known as Hardy’s Hill. Lieutenant William Sutherland, who appears not to have been seriously wounded at the North Bridge, recalled, “Here I saw upon a height to my right hand, a vast number of Armed men drawn out in Battalia [line of battle] order, I dare say near 1000 who on our coming nearer dispersed into the Woods & came as close to the road on our flanking partys as they possibly could.” A little farther on, Sutherland observed another party to the left, and as the column of regulars moved through this gauntlet, the rebel fire “never Slackened.”12
On the north side of the road, militia companies from Bedford, Billerica, and Chelmsford, as well as Edmund Foster’s Reading company, fired from stands of trees that surrounded plowed pastures. The Chelmsford militia clustered around Sergeant John Ford, a grizzled veteran of the French and Indian War, and watched as Ford’s musket brought down five British soldiers. But even Ford was surprised at the sudden intensity of the fighting. It was a day “full of horror,” Ford recalled, and “the Patriots seemed maddened and beside themselves.”13
There was equal rebel fury on the south side of the road. Here were at least nine companies of minutemen and militia that totaled about five hundred men and included units from Framingham and Sudbury, the former as far away as twenty miles to the south. News that the British were on the march for Lexington and Concord had reached Framingham before eight o’clock that morning, and within an hour the bulk of two companies of minutemen and one company of militia were hurrying northward for Concord. As a nineteenth-century history of Framingham recalled, barely had the men departed their town when “a strange panic seized upon the women and children” of the white households as someone started the rumor that “the Negroes were coming to massacre them all!” As the history concluded, “Nobody stopped to ask where the hostile Negroes were coming from; for all our own colored people were patriots.” Indeed, Peter Salem, a twenty-five-year-old black slave, was one of the Framingham men assigned to Captain Simon Edgell’s minute company.14
Edgell’s company and that of Captain Micajah Gleason appear to have taken up positions “in the Lincoln woods” above Brooks Tavern and poured a deadly fire into the British column. Edgell and Gleason, along with Captain John Nixon of the West Sudbury minute company, which had been on the move since its appearance at the South Bridge, were all veterans of the French and Indian War, and they “acted in concert” to coordinate the attacks. It was reported that they “well knew the need of discipline in harassing a retreating enemy” and that “a single deliberate shot, from a man behind a safe cover, is effective, when a dozen hurried shots are harmless”15—further evidence that, far from being a disorganized rabble, the rebels were working together with deadly efficiency.
Colonel Smith and Major Pitcairn urged their column forward through this dangerous terrain, but there was worse up ahead. The narrow road dipped into the valley of Tanner’s Brook and then began a strenuous climb up a higher hill on the other side. As it did so, the road made its first major swing to the north and entered a stand of timber. Not surprisingly, another ambush awaited. These were men from Woburn, seven or eight miles to the northeast. They had proceeded down the road in advance of the regulars, and when they came to the wooded knoll on the south side of the road, beyond the bridge at Tanner’s Brook, their leader, Major Loammi Baldwin, recalled, “[We] then concluded to scatter and make use of the trees and walls for to defend us, and attack them.”16
Edmund Foster’s Reading militia company was among those shadowing Smith’s column, and, seeing this same wood, it arrived on the north side of the road just as the regulars began to pass. The result, Foster reported, was that “the enemy was now completely between two fires, renewed and briskly kept up.” The British force was likely Captain Lawrence Parsons’s light infantry company from the Tenth Regiment, and he ordered flankers into the trees to rout the Reading men, but according to Foster, “they only became a better mark to be shot at.”17
Now it was time to run. Exhausted though they were, the regulars advanced at the quick through what came to be called Bloody Curve, desperately trying to get ahead of the rebels outflanking them. The British officers were particularly hard-hit. The rebels undoubtedly targeted them, but in part that was because they were so conspicuous, brandishing their swords and exhorting their men. On the rebel side it was much more difficult to distinguish the officers from the rank and file, as they were mostly dressed alike and to a great extent hidden behind trees, stone walls, and rock outcroppings.
ONCE THE FRONT HALF OF Colonel Smith’s riddled column was out of Bloody Curve, the deep ravines and dense woods gave way to plowed fields and open pastures, near the spot where Major Mitchell and his patrol had captured Paul Revere in the wee hours of that same day. The hurried pace took a terrible toll in fatigue—particularly among the flankers moving over rough ground—but the alternative was to slow down and become easier targets.
As it was, twenty-one companies marching in column by twos and makeshift ambulance chaises made for a procession almost half a mile long. Consequently, barely had the rear of Smith’s column cleared Bloody Curve than his advance elements passed into a field of boulders, once again announcing more difficult terrain. Here the road curved south below a wooded ledge some forty feet high that bordered the road on the north. It ran along the road for about a hundred yards and sloped upward to the north along a low hill. This spot was on the boundary line between Lincoln and Lexington.
The flankers on either side of the British column, slowed by fatigue and the boulder field, had momentarily fallen behind. Blinded by the terrain and without protection on his flanks, Colonel Smith was very vulnerable despite his need for speed. Once again there was a unit of militia on hand to take full advantage of this, but unlike most of the other swarming rebels, these troops had already encountered Smith earlier that morning, and they were determined to avenge their dead neighbors who had fallen on Lexington Green.
Despite what in any other engagement would have been an appalling dead-and-wounded casualty rate of 25 percent, out of the seventy-five-man contingent that assembled that morning, Captain John Parker had rallied his troops by ten o’clock and struck west from Lexington to await the return of Colonel Smith’s force. To his subsequent chagrin, Parker had formed his troops in proper military order that morning. Now he would employ the Indian-style ambush attack that his men knew so well. And there was no better place to make it than this forested terrain on the Lincoln-Lexington line. They would still be defending their town.
Parker spread his men—reinforced by Lexington men who had lived too far away to respond that morning—along the wooded ledge above the road. This position offered a good view of the road to the west, and the ridge rising higher to the north offered a good defense against any flanking attempts. Their wait must have been filled with anxiety and a continued measure of disbelief over what had befallen them earlier. And, too, these Lexington men still had no concrete news about what had occurred at Concord.
Finally, about 1:00 p.m., after Smith had been under way from Concord about an hour, a rebel horseman galloped up to Parker and reported that the regulars had indeed fired on militia at Concord and were now attempting to escape back to Boston. As the sounds of battle came toward Parker’s position, it reminded those who had been within earshot of the regulars’ victory volley and the three cheers that had echoed across their green that morning after their neighbors lay dead and bayoneted.
With no flankers out front or to the sides, the first to ride into this waiting hornet’s nest was Captain Parsons, with the ragged remains of his own company from the Tenth Regiment. These included Lieutenant Waldron Kelly, who had been wounded at the North Bridge, and Ensign Jeremy Lister, who had been so quick to volunteer the night before. Lister had been wounded in his right elbow during the exchange at Merriam’s Corner. Smith rode just behind them, at the head of the main column, and his ample girth made for an easily recognizable target to those who had seen him in action that morning.
Behind them marched the light infantry company of the Fifth Regiment, followed by those of the Twenty-Third and Captain Walter Laurie’s Forty-Third. Parker watched silently and with no small measure of satisfaction as these units hurried along his line of fire. When the first three companies were spread out below, the Lexington men unleashed a ferocious volley that slammed into the column along its left flank. Colonel Smith was among those hit. He suffered a wound in the thigh and dropped from his horse. Captain Parsons, so lucky in his return over the North Bridge, was wounded in the arm.
As Parker’s men continued to fire, Major Pitcairn rode forward into this leadership void and directed a counterattack against the Lexington militia. He hurried companies of grenadiers from the rear of the column to assault Parker’s right flank and sent the flankers who had been lagging on the right of the column around its head to harry Parker’s left. Meanwhile, this action caused the following companies in the British column to begin to telescope inward upon each other along the road.
Parker’s men continued to fire at will into the advancing British troops, but they were soon on the verge of being overrun. Jedediah Munroe, who had been wounded that morning on Lexington Green, was struck by another ball and this time fell mortally wounded. Parker had little choice except to withdraw from the location that is now called Parker’s Revenge. As his men came off the hill, they scattered into the woods.
Pitcairn didn’t dare follow. His objective was to clear their roadblock and urge the leading companies of the British column onward toward a small hill called the Bluff. Here he could defend the passage of the remainder of the column past Parker’s abandoned position and also protect the route up the next obstacle, Fiske Hill. In desperation, Pitcairn turned to his own marines and ordered them to seize and hold the Bluff. His marines did so, and this gave Pitcairn time to reorganize the column before it fought its way up Fiske Hill.
But Parker’s men had accomplished more than they knew. Their delay of Smith’s column had given the companies of militia that had started the attack at Merriam’s Corner time to leapfrog to the head of the British column and renew their attacks even as Pitcairn was riding madly about re-forming the head of his column. As these militia units took up positions along Fiske Hill, their volley fire again raked the British column. Pitcairn’s horse was hit, and the major went sprawling in the dirt, irate but unhurt.
This new onslaught appeared to be the end of Smith’s command. The road over Fiske Hill was steep and heavily wooded—another bloody box of rebel cross fire. For many a regular it was the end of any self-respect and discipline. As the advance companies of the column again appeared to stall on the hill, the following companies collided into them and in the melee all sense of order was lost. It quickly became every man for himself. This throng pushed past Fiske Hill but then was met with yet another obstacle—Concord Hill, on the outskirts of Lexington proper.18
“When we arrived within a mile of Lexington,” Ensign Henry De Berniere recalled, “our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking that they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward… [and] we began to run rather than retreat in order.”19 What further peril awaited them at Lexington Green one could only guess.
To Lieutenant John Barker it appeared that their choices were that “we must have laid down our arms, or been picked off by the rebels at their pleasure.”20 As a last recourse, the few remaining officers who were not wounded “got to the front and presented their bayonets.” They told the men that if anyone tried to flee, he would die.21 To most, it mattered not whether they met their end from a rebel musket ball or a bayonet thrust by one of their own officers. It looked as if this was the end of Smith’s column.