Chapter 14

Percy to the Rescue

As rebel minutemen and militia closed in for the kill on Colonel Smith’s column just west of Lexington Green, an extraordinary thing happened. British soldiers who were being goaded by their officers to stand and fight looked beyond them toward Lexington and slowly began to raise a cheer. Their puzzled officers turned around and stared in disbelief. There on the rise beyond Lexington Green, where all this had started ten hours before, stood a thick line of red uniforms, dazzling in the afternoon sun. It was Percy.

Had Lord Percy’s brigade gotten its wake-up call on time, his force of fifteen hundred men might have marched all the way to Concord and arrived about the time of the action at the North Bridge—perhaps in time to have dissuaded Colonel Barrett’s men from marching down to the bridge. But that is conjecture. What is known is that about the time Colonel Smith departed Concord, Percy’s force passed Menotomy, and shortly thereafter Percy “was informed by a person whom I met that there had been a skirmish between his Maj s troops & the rebels at Lexn, & that they were still engaged.”¹

Percy pressed on, and “in less than 2 miles we heard the firing very distinctly.” It was at this point, as Percy claimed in the draft of his after-action report to General Gage, that he met Lieutenant Edward Gould of the light infantry company of the Fourth Regiment, who had been wounded in the foot at the North Bridge. Gould was riding in a commandeered chaise and had somehow managed to get ahead of Smith’s column and avoid capture and further assault by the rebels. Gould told Percy that the grenadier and light infantry companies “were retiring, having expended most of their ammunition.”² In his final report, Percy inserted the words “overpowered by numbers, greatly exhausted & fatigued” to describe their condition.³

Percy hurried his troops onward to the sound of the guns and “drew up the Brigade on a height” overlooking Lexington Green. Seeing the tangled column of Smith’s men struggling toward him, he “immediately ordered the 2 field-pieces to fire at the Rebels.” Percy claimed that the cannons, now being used for more than just show, “had the desired effect, & stopped the Rebels for a little time,” while the grenadier and light infantry companies gratefully found refuge under Percy’s protection.⁴ “I had the happiness,” Percy wrote his father the next day, “of saving them from inevitable destruction.”⁵

Smith’s column moved through the ranks of Percy’s brigade and found shelter around Munroe’s Tavern, east of the town green. With the bulk of Percy’s regiments forming a shield and marksmen sniping away at rebels who ventured too close, Percy turned his attention to several houses that overlooked the British position and offered vantage points for rebel snipers. Colonel Smith probably reported to Percy that the rebels had already employed similar buildings for that use, and Percy ordered them razed.

Deacon Joseph Loring’s house, barn, and corncrib were put to the torch, as were two more homes and workshops on the road closer to the tavern. Percy had his military reasons for undertaking this destruction, but it inadvertently triggered a disregard for private property among his rank and file. Soldiers whose comrades only a few hours before had been quite content to say “yes, ma’am” and respect any assertion of private property in the homes of Concord now helped themselves to plunder as they burned these homes and later drove rebel sharpshooters from others along the road to Menotomy. Such destruction served to infuriate the rebels all the more.⁶

By all accounts—including Percy’s own—the one constant of calm and determination on the British side was Lord Percy. Oblivious to rebel fire, Percy rode among the battle-scarred troops of Smith’s column and those of his own regiments and inspired a steady confidence that the situation was under control. It was—for the moment—but it still remained for this combined force to retire the remaining dozen or so miles to Boston. But first Percy permitted his troops to share their meager rations with Smith’s beleaguered men and rest with them for half an hour along the roadside around Munroe’s Tavern.

Meanwhile, Percy held a conference with Smith and Pitcairn and his regimental commanders and gave instructions for the order of march on the return to Boston. He wanted the companies of grenadiers and light infantry so recently engaged to move off first, and he “covered them with my Brigade.” Smith in turn chose to put his grenadier companies, which had suffered less during the day than his light infantry, in the van. This meant that Captain Mundy Pole of the grenadier company of the Tenth Regiment would go first.

During the respite around Munroe’s Tavern, the regiments of Percy’s brigade afforded Smith’s troops some measure of protection from rebel fire, but “as soon as they saw us begin to retire,” Percy reported to General Gage, “they pressed very much upon our rear-guard.” And up ahead and on the flanks, Percy was obliged in “sending out very strong flanking parties, which were absolutely necessary, as there was not a stone-wall, or house, though before in appearance evacuated, from whence the Rebels did not fire upon us.”⁷

ON THE REBEL SIDE ABOUT this same time, some small measure of command and control above the regimental level was introduced by the arrival of William Heath, one of the six generals recently appointed by the committee of safety. Heath was himself a member of the committee and had been a participant in its meeting at the Black Horse Tavern the day before. As Heath had returned to his home in Roxbury that evening, he had encountered Major Mitchell and his patrol moving along the Cambridge road.

Heath was thirty-eight and, by his own description, “of middling stature, light complexion, very corpulent, and bald-headed.” From his childhood, Heath had been “remarkably fond of military exercises” and an avid reader of military treatises. Although he had no combat experience, this avocation placed Heath in good stead to serve as an officer in several militia units. These were initially loyal to the king but after 1770 took on an increasingly rebel nature. Heath was unanimously chosen captain of Roxbury’s first company and then colonel of the first regiment of Suffolk County.⁸

General Heath awoke about daybreak at his home to the news that Colonel Smith’s detachment had crossed the Charles River by boat and was marching on Concord. He set off to attend the day’s meeting of the committee of safety and in so doing crossed the Charles River bridge en route from Roxbury to Cambridge. Given his later concern for this structure, it seems likely that it was Heath who ordered planks to be removed to impede just the sort of reinforcement that Percy was then belatedly organizing in Boston. But those performing the task piled the bridge planks neatly on the Boston side of the river, and Percy’s advancing column had little difficulty replacing them on its initial crossing. This early rebel action under Heath’s directive did, however, give Percy cause to worry as the day progressed about the condition in which he would find the bridge on his return march.

Heath met with the committee of safety—or at least some of its members. Exactly where this occurred is uncertain, because Elbridge Gerry and others had fled the usual meeting place at the Black Horse Tavern as Colonel Smith approached early that morning. Heath’s memoirs, in which he refers to himself grandly in the third person as “our general,” say only that “from the committee, he took a cross road to Watertown” and there found some militia “who had not marched” and were awaiting orders. By then, Percy’s advancing regulars were, in fact, the troops Heath reported as “being in possession of the Lexington road.”

Rather than rushing them directly against Percy, Heath dispatched the Watertown militia to Cambridge with directions to take up the planks on the Charles River bridge once again, barricade the south end of the bridge, and impede any and all British troops should they return that way to Boston. Heath then moved northward toward Lexington, and somewhere along the way he was joined by Dr. Joseph Warren, who had trailed Percy’s column out of Cambridge searching for the committee of safety as it met on the run.

Heath arrived near Lexington shortly after Smith’s column reached Percy’s rescuers. He initially occupied himself with re-forming a rebel regiment that had been scattered by Percy’s artillery, and then he and Joseph Warren followed Percy’s combined column eastward as it made good Colonel Smith’s escape. Warren had one close call, when a musket ball came so close to his head that it struck a pin holding a lock of his hair. He would not always be so lucky.⁹

HAVING HELD OFF THE REBELS converging on Lexington, Lord Percy adroitly protected his column with flankers beating the woods and fields alongside the road over the course of the three miles to Menotomy. He was beginning to think the worst was over. The tempo of the fight was slowing, and only a few scattered shots from flankers suggested continuing danger. The grenadier companies of Smith’s force descended the grade of Peirce’s Hill (now Arlington Heights) toward a point called Foot of the Rocks and looked with satisfaction over the relatively flat ground that stretched ahead on either side of the road for a distance of almost a mile.

Menotomy wasn’t much of a place—it was more a collection of houses and buildings strung along the Lexington-to-Cambridge road than a town of residential blocks and cross streets. Though it lacked size and population, Menotomy sat at a major intersection of roads leading not only east to Cambridge and west to Lexington but also north to Woburn and Medford and south to Watertown and Waltham. As rebel militia were about to prove, it was easy to get to Menotomy from all points of the compass.

Colonel Smith and Captain Pole looked down Menotomy’s one major street and saw frenzied activity. Just three hours before, Percy’s relief column had marched through and encountered hardly a soul. The hairs on Smith’s stout neck bristled as he and his few remaining officers—many of whom desperately wished that the rebels would form up on open ground and give what to them was a fair fight—now saw that once more they would be forced into a gauntlet of rebel fire. Percy had about two thousand rebels hounding his rear, and now—thanks to the road network converging on Menotomy—there were another two thousand or so armed men blocking the route through town. These were largely fresh troops from three regiments of minutemen and one regiment of militia augmented by scattered companies.

But some of the rebels made a critical mistake. Without any overall command and control and the intelligence that goes with it, each regimental commander—and sometimes each company commander—made his own decision about where to deploy his troops. Many chose to hunker down in houses, buildings, and yards along the road, assuming that Percy’s column would come marching gaily along it. Percy was much too shrewd for this and had already had a taste of a town fight through the buildings on the outskirts of Lexington. Colonel Smith could only add his own deadly experiences.

The result was that Percy strengthened his flankers and sent them from house to house in advance of his main column. Given the narrow nature of the town strung along the road and the wide sweep that Percy ordered his flankers to take, some rebel units were trapped between the main British column and the flankers. It made for a fierce fight. In fact, of every place that saw action that day, this stretch of road through Menotomy was the most heavily contested, and casualties along it were the heaviest on both sides.¹⁰

As the Fourth Regiment’s John Barker observed, “We were now obliged to force almost every house in the road, for the Rebels had taken possession of them and galled us exceedingly, but they suffer’d for their temerity for all that were found in the houses were put to death.”¹¹

Almost all. Joseph Adams was a deacon of the Second Precinct Church. For whatever reason, he had not mobilized with the local militia, perhaps because he was not a member or because his wife had just given birth to a little girl. When Adams saw Percy’s column returning amid the firing, however, he had second thoughts about staying at home and took off running across the fields. Regulars fired a volley in his direction, but it missed. Adams took shelter in a nearby barn and hid under the hay. Some of the soldiers followed and repeatedly stabbed the hay in pursuit, but Adams managed to lie still and avoid their thrusts.

Other soldiers entered the Adams house and made their way to the bedroom, where Hannah Adams lay clutching her newborn daughter. They ordered Hannah out of the house so they could burn it. She rose and painfully made her way to an outbuilding, fearful for her five other children, who remained hidden under a bed. Thanks to the precocious nine-year-old who poked his head out from underneath and taunted the regulars, they were discovered and chased outside unharmed.

The soldiers finished ransacking the house, taking an heirloom clock and a silver tankard from a communion set among their bounty, and packed it off in the sheets from Hannah’s bed. Before leaving, they dumped a basket of wood chips on the floor and set them on fire with a hot brand from the hearth. Hannah Adams need not have worried about her young brood, however. After the regulars moved on, her children made their way back into the house and put out the fire with a quantity of home-brewed beer.¹²

A little farther down the road, fifty-nine-year-old Jason Russell had a less pleasant experience. He and his family sought refuge away from their home, but after going with them some distance, Russell, who was partially lame, returned to look after the house. He piled wooden shingles up beside his gate as a makeshift breastwork and waited. A neighbor urged Russell to abandon his post, but Russell refused.

As the flankers approached the Russell house, a party of Danvers militia found themselves in danger of being trapped between the flankers and the main British column, and, despite its proximity to the road, they took shelter inside the Russell house. Blasted by a hail of British bullets, Russell followed them, but as Russell limped through the doorway, two bullets struck him down. The regulars rushed him and put eleven bayonet wounds in his body. Inside, seven of the Danvers men were killed. Other rebels took refuge in the cellar and shot a British soldier who attempted to descend the stairs. Another soldier died in the melee upstairs. When it was over, twelve lay dead in this one location alone: nine Danvers men (seven inside and two in the yard), Russell, and two British soldiers, making the Russell house the bloodiest site of the day.¹³

There is another oft-told story from the fight at Menotomy. Samuel Whittemore was an eighty-year-old former militia officer who lived with his wife, son, and grandchildren. After the continuing alarms and the passage of both Smith’s and Percy’s columns through town that morning, Samuel’s wife, Elizabeth, made preparations to flee to the safety of another son’s house, toward Medford. Elizabeth presumed that Samuel would accompany her until she found him oiling his musket and pistols and sharpening his sword. He refused to leave and sent Elizabeth off with their grandchildren.

Whittemore took up a position almost five hundred feet from the main road, being close enough for an effective shot but not so close as to get pinned by the roving flankers. When Percy’s troops came into view, Whittemore fired a round from his musket and killed the soldier he aimed at. As flankers saw the puff of smoke and closed in on his hiding place, Whittemore fired his two pistols and killed two more, one instantly and another with a wound that would later prove fatal. But now the flankers had his range, and a musket ball struck the old man in his head and rendered him unconscious. Regulars rushed the spot and may have been surprised to discover Whittemore’s white hair and grizzled age, but that did not stop them from clubbing him with their muskets and adding a few bayonet jabs for good measure.

By all accounts, the regulars left Samuel Whittemore for dead. The “incessant fire, which like a moving circle surrounded and followed us,” as Percy described it, moved on with the British column. Residents who then gathered around Whittemore’s body also presumed him dead. But his old heart was still beating. Less than optimistic, they carried him to Cooper’s Tavern and summoned a doctor. The doctor pronounced it useless and a waste of time to dress his wounds because he would soon be dead. But that didn’t happen. Not only did Samuel Whittemore survive, he lived to see the end of the Revolution and did not die until the age of ninety-eight. During his recovery, when Elizabeth, no doubt with a reproving frown, asked him if he did not now regret that he had not fled with his family, Whittemore supposedly replied, “No! I would run the same chance again.”¹⁴

The same could not be said for two customers of Cooper’s Tavern, which stood just east of the crossroads where Samuel Whittemore made his stand. Proprietors Benjamin and Rachel Cooper had already had one excitement that morning when a group of Menotomy men judged too old to mobilize with the town’s militia nonetheless assembled at their tavern and then went off to capture a supply wagon that was lagging behind Percy’s outbound column. These old-timers were so successful that they next captured the wounded Lieutenant Edward Gould after he parted from Percy and made his way toward Boston in his commandeered chaise ahead of Percy’s column. None of this activity, however, kept Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman, two regular customers who were in their forties, from having their usual afternoon mug of flip at Cooper’s.

Colonial flip was not for the faint of heart. Served in a large mug or pitcher, flip consisted of about eight ounces of beer, sweetened to taste with a quantity of sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and then topped off with about a gill of rum—four ounces. The bartender stuck a red-hot iron poker into the mixture, and this produced a flurry of foaming and bubbling and gave flip its trademark burned and bitter taste.

In the manner of regular drinkers unperturbed by events around them, Winship and Wyman were sipping their flip, seemingly oblivious to the sounds of approaching musket fire, when British regulars stormed into Cooper’s Tavern. They did not stop to notice that these patrons were unarmed and otherwise engaged. Benjamin and Rachel Cooper hid in the cellar, but according to the Coopers’ subsequent testimony Winship and Wyman were repeatedly stabbed and horribly beaten, “their heads mauled, skulls broke and their brains dashed out on the floor and walls of the house.” Later, more than one hundred bullet holes were counted in the tavern’s walls. It was yet another indication of the growing savagery on both sides.¹⁵

That thirsty British soldiers undoubtedly helped themselves to the remaining flip and had been doing so with other beverages at taverns of convenience en route only served to increase the ferocity of their actions. Lord Percy and Colonel Smith didn’t want to admit it, but they were losing control of their men. “The plundering was shameful,” Lieutenant Barker, who had been all the way to the North Bridge, reported. “Many hardly thought of anything else; what was worse they were encouraged by some Officers.”¹⁶ Lieutenant Mackenzie, who marched with Percy, acknowledged, “many houses were plundered by the Soldiers, notwithstanding the efforts of the Officers to prevent it.” Mackenzie speculated that this behavior “influenced the Rebels, and many of them followed us further than they would otherwise have done.”¹⁷

THERE REMAINED ONE MORE MAJOR building to pass before Percy’s column could rid itself of Menotomy. This was the Black Horse Tavern, at what is now the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Tufts Street. When it was finally cleared, the British troops were able to cross Alewife Brook and proceed toward Cambridge. The fight at Menotomy had not only cost Percy valuable men but valuable time as well. It was well past five o’clock, and darkness would be upon his command within two hours. In Menotomy alone, the British lost forty men killed and about eighty wounded, about half their casualties for the entire day’s fighting. On the rebel side, it was more difficult to assign figures to this piece of ground, but estimates totaled twenty-eight killed, at least ten wounded, and three captured.¹⁸

Now, with Cambridge looming up ahead, Percy faced perhaps his most important decision. Having just endured the passage through Menotomy, Percy worried that Cambridge, long a hotbed of rebel sentiment, might give him an even warmer reception. On its northern outskirts, two roads diverged. One was the route over which Percy had ridden so confidently at midday: through Cambridge, across the Charles River bridge, and back to Boston via Roxbury, Brookline, and Boston Neck. The rebels were expecting him to return by this route. The other led almost due east to Charlestown. Although this second route would not return his command to Boston proper, it was slightly shorter, and once in Charlestown, Percy would have both a strong, defensible line at the narrows of Charlestown Neck—in those days about as narrow as Boston Neck—and the protection of the British men-of-war guarding the Charlestown-to-Boston ferry crossing.

There was also the matter of the bridge over the Charles River. Percy simply could not be sure that it was intact. His column had found planks missing on its crossing that morning—thanks to General Heath’s diligence. His men had encountered little difficulty repositioning them, but this slowed their supply wagons and may have contributed to one wagon being captured by the feisty old-timers of Menotomy.¹⁹ Now, however, the Watertown militia had removed the bridge planks once again and taken up positions to defend the crossing.

There has been speculation as to whether Percy himself could see that the bridge was impassable and/or heavily defended—or at the very least whether he had scouting reports that it was—before he made his decision to detour around Cambridge and strike for Charlestown. If Percy sent his column cutting eastward in the vicinity of the back road of Kent Lane in Cambridge (south of the present-day Massachusetts Avenue and Somerville Avenue intersection), as seems likely, it would have been impossible for him to observe the bridge himself from that distance.²⁰

In hindsight, Percy made the correct decision to bypass Cambridge, but he seems to have done so in order to avoid another Menotomy rather than because he knew for certain that the Charles River bridge was impassable. In fact, the draft of Percy’s report to General Gage supports this: “We retired… under an incessant fire all round us, till we arrived at Chastown, wh road I chose to take, lest the rebels shd have taken up the bridge at Cambridge (wh I find was actually the case), & also the country was more open & the road shorter.”²¹

It is certainly clear that Percy’s sudden turn to his left flank momentarily disrupted the rebel strategy. “We threw them,” Lieutenant John Barker later gloated, “and went on to Charles Town without any great interruption.”²² But it wasn’t quite that easy. There was indeed a warm welcoming committee spread throughout Cambridge, and there likely would have been a pitched battle at the bridge. As it was, some militia once again moved rapidly to get in front of Percy’s advance, taking up positions on Prospect Hill, a piece of high ground en route to Charlestown Neck. Percy was down to the last of his cannonballs, but he fired them to scatter the rebels until his troops could plod by. Even then, he might have been cut off from the safety of Charlestown Neck but for the inaction of militia from Salem, which would add one final controversy to the day’s events.

ONE CAN SUPPOSE THE MEN of Salem felt both anger and a sense of obligation regarding the events of the prior February—anger at the British regulars who had then marched so boldly through their town and a sense of obligation to the minutemen from neighboring towns who had come so quickly to the town’s aid. Twenty-nine-year-old Colonel Timothy Pickering commanded the Essex County regiment, composed of militia companies from Danvers, Salem, and Marblehead. This April morning, he was working quietly at his office in the Registry of Deeds at Salem when sixty-four-year-old Captain Daniel Epes of the Danvers company reported with news of the initial British march and asked for orders. Pickering and Epes agreed that because the Danvers company was already assembled and closer to the action, it would march and not wait for the rest of the regiment. This decision itself was to have major ramifications as Epes and his Danvers men rushed into the fight at Menotomy and suffered horrible casualties at the Russell house.

Meanwhile, Colonel Pickering’s next move was to call a meeting of Salem’s board of selectmen. Given the distance between Salem and Concord, and not yet knowing what would ensue on Percy’s retreat through Menotomy, many militiamen in Salem assumed that the regulars would be safely back in Boston before they could take the field. But the public relations side of the equation prompted a show of support for their neighboring towns. Pickering formed his companies of Salem men, numbering about three hundred, or roughly half his regiment, and started west. The Marblehead company did not join this advance because many of its members were absent, having gone fishing, and the remainder were reluctant to leave their town unguarded with a British warship anchored in its harbor.

The subsequent controversy centered on the speed of Colonel Pickering’s march. Had he delayed several hours at the start, he might not have been faulted, but to some his conduct appeared to be just fast enough to satisfy neighboring towns that Salem was doing its share but not so quick as to make a headlong rush into action. Like their British counterparts, the Salem men took refreshment along the way at the only places available: the roadside taverns. Twice Pickering ordered long rest stops near such establishments, each time in full expectation of receiving news of the British withdrawal. When none was forthcoming, it was the murmurs of his troops that encouraged him onward, not his own impatience.

Finally, Pickering received reports that far from being in a backwater, the Salem men were very close to the line of Percy’s surprise withdrawal to Charlestown. Pickering finally quickened the pace, and as the Salem militia crested Winter Hill, near Charlestown Neck, they found Percy’s column strung out below. Had Pickering instantly attacked, at the very least Percy would have had to fight one more bloody encounter as he pushed his beleaguered troops across the neck and onto the defensible heights of Bunker Hill. It is also possible that Pickering’s strong fire on Percy’s left would have delayed his advance and permitted the militia assembled in Cambridge to catch up and wreak more havoc, particularly as by all reports Percy’s ammunition was almost exhausted.

But instead of attacking, Pickering sent a messenger in search of General Heath, asking for orders. According to Pickering, Heath responded “that the British had artillery in their rear, and could not be approached by musketry alone; and that he [General Heath] desired to see me.” Percy’s disposition of artillery had, of course, been the case all afternoon and had not dissuaded other attacks. Heath’s memoirs recounted the arrival of “an officer on horseback”—perhaps Pickering himself—but did not recount any orders Heath gave in return, only the speculation that had the men from Salem “arrived a few minutes sooner, the left flank of the British must have been greatly exposed.” The end result was that the Salem men did not fire on Percy’s brigade, and his troops completed their withdrawal across Charlestown Neck.

Timothy Pickering went on to a far more successful career than William Heath, serving as the Continental Army’s quartermaster general and much later as secretary of state. Although Heath was appointed a major general in the Continental Army, he botched actions during the Trenton and Princeton campaigns and was relieved of serious command. What brought this 1775 incident to the forefront years later were political claims made against Pickering when he was a senator from Massachusetts. Pickering was a dedicated Federalist, and some, including Mercy Warren, in her history of the Revolution, speculated that his delay in engaging Percy that day was “owing to timidity, or to a predilection in favor of Britain.”²³ Regardless of Pickering’s actions that evening of April 19, General Heath posted patrols on Charlestown Neck and ordered the remainder of his fledgling army into camp in Cambridge as Percy’s troops moved into Charlestown.

Under threat of being bombarded by the British fleet and burned, Charlestown did not resist Percy’s arrival. Instead, the selectmen assured Percy that if he would not attack the town, they would see that his troops were not molested and would do all in their power to get them across the ferry to Boston, but that did not keep Percy’s frazzled soldiers from being edgy after the events of the day. As his men marched into town, a lad of fourteen perched in the window of his house to watch their procession. Having endured hostile fire from many such windows, soldiers let loose some shots and struck the unarmed boy dead.²⁴

For all it had been a very long day. Its fury was evidence of the long-simmering frustrations on both sides. The rebels were sick of chafing under the yoke of what they considered second-class status, conferred by a repressive system. The regulars were just as fed up with their perceived roles as royal nursemaids to an ungrateful brood. According to historian Robert Middlekauff, the retreat from Lexington through a countryside in arms foreshadowed the reality that the British would face throughout the coming struggle: “how to subdue not just another army but a population in rebellion.”²⁵

As the twilight darkened and the moon once again rose over Boston Neck, there was many a British soldier who thankfully tumbled into the safety of his lodgings or tent and wondered what in the world had happened during that long, long day. On the rebel side, as these men also fell exhausted in homes, taverns, and on the roads leading toward Boston, there was a common refrain: “What have we done?”