Independence (21 page)

The tract that appears to have reached the largest audience between Congress's adjournment and the outbreak of hostilities was written by neither Adams nor Hamilton, but by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lee, a native of Great Britain who had been a redcoat officer for nearly twenty years. He had fought in America in the French and Indian War, suffering wounds in an engagement at Fort Ticonderoga. Shortly after that war, he resigned his commission and moved to Virginia. An acid-tongued eccentric, Lee, who was well educated and capable of wielding a corrosive pen with panache, answered one of the Loyalist pamphleteers. With a writing style that was seldom equaled in rhythm and cadence, Lee defended Congress and devoted some space to the argument that the best way to prevent a war was to prepare for one. But the heart of his piece addressed the question of whether the Americans could win a war against Great Britain. Lee left no doubt that the colonists would be victorious. The British soldiers were overrated and often led by incapable officers who owed their positions more to wealth and politics than to talent. The Americans were inexperienced, he acknowledged, but the art of soldiering was not a mystery. Americans could learn combat skills in short order. Besides, the Americans had a psychological asset. They were fighting for something tangible and invaluable: their liberty. The colonists seemed to welcome Lee's pamphlet as evenhanded and illuminating. For many, it demystified war; while for others, it tore down the mystique of invincibility that shrouded the British army.
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The colonists' world changed forever on April 19, 1775, the day that General Gage acted on Dartmouth's order to use force to smash the American rebellion.

Three months elapsed between the dispatch of the American secretary's order and its implementation, a delay occasioned because the ship carrying Dartmouth's order to America was forced by storms to return to England. On its second attempt, the vessel succeeded in making the long, slow Atlantic crossing, docking in Boston during the second week in April. Gage had already drawn up plans for an operation to destroy an arms depot that the rebels had constructed in Concord, about twenty miles west of Boston. It was hardly the only rebel arsenal, but it was the one closest to Boston, and attacking it offered the best hope of completing a lightning strike before the American militiamen in the surrounding countryside could respond. Dartmouth had also ordered Gage to seize the ringleaders of the Massachusetts insurrection. Gage's intelligence had correctly reported that John Hancock and Samuel Adams were residing in Lexington, a tiny village about seven miles east of Concord, near where the rebel provincial assembly was meeting. Like a good soldier, Gage acted rapidly to carry out his orders. He spent a few days ironing out the final details of the march on Lexington and Concord. All the while, he took precautions to keep his plans secret. No one knew better than Gage that surprise was vital to the success of his operation.

Gage's efforts at stealth came to grief. The rebels had their own surveillance network. Through spies, abundant clues, and loose-lipped British officers (and possibly their wives), American intelligence gleaned a day or two in advance that Gage was preparing a march. By about ten P.M. on April 18 the rebels knew that Concord was the target. An hour later Paul Revere set off on his most famous ride, and at about the same time William Dawes, a Boston tanner, also set off to carry the alarm to Lexington, though he rode a different route. Revere had been given Brown Beauty, the fastest horse available. Speed was crucial for Revere. He was to race westward from Charlestown and alert Hancock and Adams to flee before the regulars arrived. While in Lexington, Revere was also to awaken the residents and let them know that Gage's soldiers were coming. Next, he was to spur his mount to Concord and spread the alarm. It is likely that Revere and Dawes were only two of several riders who set off from near Boston on that clear, mild night. Others likely rode different routes to towns scattered through the hinterland. Their mission was to awaken militiamen—and especially the so-called minutemen, some one third of the men in each Massachusetts militia company who were to be ready to march “on a minute's notice”—so that they could descend on the Concord Road and intercept the redcoats' formidable striking force of more than nine hundred men. Furthermore, once a town was alerted, it almost always sent one of its own to neighboring towns to sound the alarm.

Thinking the lobsterbacks were only a step behind, Revere pushed Brown Beauty to her limit. He had more time than he realized. At midnight, the regulars marched to Boston's Back Bay, but the navy bollixed the plans for rapidly transporting the soldiers across the Charles River. It was past two A.M. before the redcoats actually stepped off along Concord Road. The first streaks of sunrise were visible in the eastern sky by the time they finally reached Lexington. Nearly five hours had elapsed since Revere, whose ride was four miles shorter than Dawes's, had reached the town, sounded the alert, and persuaded Hancock and Adams to flee. Long before the regulars arrived, some sixty Lexington militiamen under Captain John Parker, a forty-six-year-old farmer and mechanic who was deep in the fatal clutches of tuberculosis, had assembled on the village green to await them.

When the regulars entered Lexington, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, whom Gage had put in charge of the day's operation, detached six companies—about 240 men—under Major John Pitcairn to disband and disarm the rebel militiamen under Captain Parker. Pitcairn marched his regulars toward the village green. The immaculate, red-clad regulars advanced smartly on the ragged, white-faced Americans. As the early-morning light glinted off the bayonets of his soldiers, Pitcairn wasted no time on pleasantries. Visibly contemptuous of the armed yeomen and tradesmen before him, Pitcairn loudly and curtly commanded, “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels!” One of the villagers heard another British officer cry out, “Ye villains, ye rebels, disperse, damn you, disperse!” Seeing that he was outnumbered by as much as four to one, and hardly wishing to be arrested and charged with treason, Parker rapidly ordered his men to hold their fire and disperse. But he did not command them to surrender their arms. As the men disbanded, someone fired a shot. It might have been a horribly ill-timed accidental discharge of a weapon. Or, just as likely, a nervous or trigger-happy soldier on either side may have squeezed off the shot. Many thought it was fired by someone hiding behind a nearby stone wall, someone who was not a soldier. Whoever it was that discharged his weapon, he had fired the first shot in what was to be an eight-year war.

The musket's loud blast set off a chain reaction among the edgy redcoats. Several fired into ranks of the militiamen. To Revere, who was still in Lexington, the volley sounded like a “continual roar of musketry.” A handful of militiamen answered with fire of their own, though most of the citizen-soldiers broke and fled for safety. British officers screamed the order to cease firing, but they had difficulty controlling their men, who were now flooded with adrenaline. With a febrile intensity, scores of redcoats charged after the bolting Americans. By the time order was restored, a pall of white smoke and the odor of burnt powder hung heavy over Lexington Green. Bodies littered the commons—some the victims of gunfire, some of bayonets. From start to finish, the incident in Lexington had lasted no more than a couple of minutes, but the carnage was incredible. Seventeen Americans were casualties, many suffering horrid wounds. Eight colonists were dead. One regular had been hit, though his wound was not life-threatening.

Colonel Smith did not linger in Lexington. His objective was Concord, nearly seven miles away. Revere and Dawes, who had rendezvoused in the village, had long since departed to warn the residents of Concord and those who lived along the way. Neither Revere nor Dawes succeeded in reaching their destination. Near Lincoln, about halfway to Concord, Revere was taken captive by a patrol of British regulars, but he was released after a brief detention. He returned to Lexington and witnessed the shooting. Dawes barely escaped the same patrol, after which he too came back to Lexington. But Concord was warned during the still, dark night by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a local physician who was courting his girlfriend in Lexington when he heard the alarm carried by Revere. He galloped home to spread the word.

Thus, by nine A.M., when the redcoats at last marched into Concord under a bright sun high in a blue sky, the residents had known for several hours that they were coming. Nevertheless, the regulars marched into the village unopposed. Colonel James Barrett, the Middlesex regimental commander who was the officer in charge of the five trainband companies that were present in Concord—probably a bit fewer than two hundred men—found himself, like Captain Parker, badly outnumbered and unwilling to order his men to resist the king's troops.

The regulars set right to work destroying the arsenal. During their first hours in town, few of the hardworking, sweaty soldiers saw the Concord militia, which remained passively on its muster field across the Concord River, nearly a mile away. As the morning progressed, Concord's militiamen were joined by minutemen who arrived from neighboring towns. Slowly, steadily, the American force grew. By midmorning nearly five hundred militiamen were present. Wired and eager for a fight, some pleaded with Colonel Barrett, a sixty-year-old miller who had taken the field this day wearing his soiled leather work apron, to do something. Still outnumbered, Barrett refused to budge. But around eleven A.M. the militiamen spotted black smoke curling above the bare trees in Concord. Though the regulars had torched only ordnance in the arsenal, word spread like wildfire that the British army was burning the town. Barrett could wait no longer. He ordered his men to load their pieces and march to the North Bridge that spanned the river. The Americans found 115 redcoats guarding the bridge on the other side. Men on both sides were jittery and armed, a dangerous combination. The lead element among the militiamen crowded onto the bridge and moved forward. As the rebels advanced, a shot rang out. This time there was no mistaking its source. A British soldier had fired his musket. As had happened at Lexington, the sharp, jolting sound of the shot caused men on both sides to open fire. The exchange was brief but deadly. Six Americans were wounded, two fatally. One who died was Captain Isaac Davis, an Acton farmer who had built a firing range behind his house to hone his skills as a marksman; he was shot through the heart in the first nanosecond of his combat experience. Twelve regulars were cut down by the return fire of the rebels. Three suffered mortal wounds, the first of the king's soldiers to perish at the hands of colonists.

The regulars at the bridge fled after one volley, joining their comrades in town. Colonel Smith had long since known that the hoped-for secrecy of his mission had been lost. With the arsenal nearly destroyed, and faced with a march to Boston that would require hours, he immediately abandoned further work in Concord and set his force on its return home. Throughout that golden afternoon, a seemingly endless stream of American militiamen arrived and took up positions along bucolic Concord Road. Before the sun set, men from at least twenty-three Massachusetts villages were present and fighting, and their numbers had swelled to almost three thousand, providing the colonists with a considerable numerical superiority. Firefights raged up and down the road. Militiamen, concealed behind stone walls, trees, barns, and haystacks, laid down a triangulated fire on the retreating regulars. It was a bloodbath, and only the arrival of redcoat reinforcements summoned after the skirmish in Lexington prevented the killing or capture of the entirety of Smith's original force.

War brings out the best and the worst in people. Catherine Louisa Smith, Abigail Adams's sister-in-law, who lived about halfway between Concord and Lexington, helped a badly wounded grenadier into her house and tried to nurse him; the soldier died and was buried on the Yankee farm.
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Heroism was displayed by the fighting men on both sides, but wanton cruelty was in evidence as well. Victimized by snipers who fired from inside houses, contingents of regulars at times stormed dwellings in search of partisans. When the soldiers invaded a home, they often gave no quarter. Those who entered the houses following the battle sometimes found bodies strewn about, and one witness exclaimed that the butchery in one residence was so immense that “Blud was half over [my] Shoes.” Others reported finding civilians who had been stabbed, bludgeoned, and shot, and one told of discovering the inhabitants' “brains out on the floor and walls.” Not infrequently, the king's soldiers plundered and burned houses and killed livestock.
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As darkness spread over the blood-soaked landscape, the regulars at last reached Boston, and safety. By then, 94 colonists were dead or wounded. The British army had suffered 272 casualties. Dartmouth had said in his order to use force that Gage should not expect much opposition. Sixty-five of Gage's men lay dead at day's end on April 19.
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As that cold, gray spring of 1775 little by little crept toward disaster, George Washington, who was more than a thousand miles removed from Lexington and Concord, frequently hunted, passionately landscaped Mount Vernon, and oversaw the preparation of his fields for the season's crop of wheat.
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He had returned home from Congress doubting that war was likely, but the imperial crisis was never far from his thoughts.

Washington had attended the Continental Congress persuaded that North's ministry was advancing “a premeditated Design and System … to introduce an arbitrary Government into his Majesty's American Dominions.” He had thought of the Tea Act and Coercive Acts as “despotick Measures” that were part of a “regular, systematic plan” to “fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us.” No less important, Washington had come to understand that Britain had “a separate, and … opposite Interest” from that of the colonies. He had openly stated that the colonies must be “treated upon an equal Footing with our fellow subjects” in England under a “just, lenient, permanent, and constitutional” framework.
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He was fed up with “Petitions & Remonstrances” even before Congress met. Truth be told, he probably already favored American independence. What seems abundantly clear is that long before the march on Lexington and Concord, Washington had been prepared to go to war unless the British government backed down.
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