Patriots (36 page)

—

At Lexington, the dead had been cleared from the green. John Parker ordered William Diamond to beat his drum as the order for survivors to fall in, and although some Minute Men were bandaged and aching, they answered Parker’s call. Six hours after losing one
third of their ranks to the British onslaught, Captain Parker’s men were on the road to Concord.

—

The British were now withdrawing from Concord with surprising ease. Because General Gage had conceived the mission as routine, he hadn’t sent along a military doctor. While Colonel Smith had fretted about his next move, injured British troops had been taken to local doctors around Concord, who agreed to dress their wounds. Soldiers who couldn’t walk were hoisted onto horses, and chaises were commandeered for those who couldn’t ride. With no drums or martial airs, Colonel Smith led his limping troops out of Concord. The Minute Men seemed content to watch them go. The British moved quietly along toward a bend in the road called Meriam’s Corner.

Here the road to Lexington veered right, joining with another road, from Bedford. As the British were marching down the Lexington road, Concord’s Minute Men and their new reserves had cut across the meadows and reached Meriam’s Corner before them. Lining up behind houses and barns, behind trees and stone fences, they waited.

Nearby, a narrow bridge stretched across a brook. Colonel Smith’s light infantry came down from the ridges where they had been surveying the road and bunched together to cross over. At that moment, with the British troops trapped in a slow and unprotected file, shots burst on them from every fence and tree trunk. The Americans were not fighting by the accepted rules of war. They were sniping at their enemies and picking them off. To Colonel Smith and his men, this was not warfare, it was murder. Within minutes, the road at Meriam’s Corner was bright with blood.

At first the British fought back in the classic manner they had been taught. Standing their ground, they tried to return shot for shot. But they were exposed under the noon sun, their attackers mere fleeting shadows. As they pushed past the Corner, the British commanders realized that this was no isolated ambush. The Minute Men had launched their own variation of street fighting. They fired, rushed ahead behind walls or the embankment, reloading as they ran, and popped up ready to fire again two dozen yards down the road. Their crossfire kept Colonel Smith and his men pinned to the road, and they faced fifteen more miles to Boston.

As he came up the road from Lexington, Captain Parker heard the British soldiers rushing toward him, and he ordered his men to take cover. The Lexington Minute Men began to avenge the comrades killed that morning. Once again, the British had no idea how many enemy were lurking along the road. One officer was sure, from the amount of gunfire, that there must be five thousand. When the shooting intensified, the British troops broke and ran under the barrage, leaving their dead and wounded on the road. They paused only for Colonel Smith, who had been struck in the leg. His men pushed him up on a horse, but he made so visible a target that he slipped back to the ground to hobble along as best he could. Major Pitcairn was thrown from his horse, which ran across the fields toward the Minute Men. Whenever a British soldier fired now, it was aimlessly. Once in a while a British shot did hit home, and
Deacon Haynes was killed as he reloaded his musket. Two of Captain Parker’s Minute Men died.

One British regular came out of a house where he had been searching for snipers and ran into James Hayward of the Acton militia. The British soldier pointed his musket and said, “You’re a dead man.”

Hayward raised his weapon and answered, “So are you.”

They fired together.

For Colonel Smith’s men the mission had now lasted more than fifteen hours. Wounded, exhausted, short of ammunition, stumbling under the weight of their uniforms, they ignored their commanders as they ran toward Lexington. Finally, a line of officers managed to get in front of them. They turned, facing their men with bayonets drawn. If you run another step, the officers warned, you will die. The soldiers were coerced into loose ranks and marched dazed and ragged to Lexington. At two-thirty that afternoon, they once again entered Lexington and learned that they were saved. Lord Percy’s reinforcements had arrived.

—

Hugh Percy was shrewder at strategy than Colonel Smith. His men had towed two cannon from Boston, and Percy had put one on each of the hills overlooking Lexington. He had halted his forces well short of the green, at about where Major Pitcairn had left the infantry to ride ahead and tell John Parker’s Minute Men to throw down their arms. From the hills, Percy’s men could watch
the Americans bob up from behind walls and fences. Whenever a group formed, a cannon shot sent them running.

Percy wanted only to get Smith’s men and his own back to Boston with the fewest casualties. The infantrymen had fallen panting to the ground after their dash down the Lexington road. Percy let them rest there for half an hour while he shot his cannon to discourage the Minute Men from approaching. It was quarter to four before Percy and some eighteen hundred soldiers began their retreat. A third of them were wounded or so badly shaken by the American barrage that they were useless.

—

In their hiding places, the Minute Men rested. A new commander had come to take charge, Major General William Heath, who had been appointed in February by the Provincial Congress. Heath, a farmer stouter than Colonel Smith, was a devoted reader of military tactics with a long service in the militia. His extensive study of past battles counted for less now than the Minute Men’s instinctive strategy of finding cover and picking off the enemy whenever he showed himself. As the British organized their retreat, the Americans got ready to repeat what they had been doing successfully since noon.

This time, the British were not caught by surprise. Lord Percy ordered three houses near the green burned to the ground so that no snipers could harass the men at the rear of his column. Along the route, the British were told to storm houses from which gunfire was coming, kill the snipers and burn the houses.

As the retreat began and the Americans fired from behind trees and fences, Percy’s enraged men forced their way into every suspicious house and shot any man they found there. The British excused their behavior by saying they were being unfairly provoked. Why wouldn’t the Americans make one open, manly attack? Instead, they went on
skulking like dastards behind their hedges. Sometimes a rebel yelled,
“King Hancock forever!”

British flankers were plundering the houses they were supposed to be searching, and the Minute Men chased them faster and sniped with greater determination. As sunset approached, Percy realized that he had to use the last hour of light to get his men to Boston, and he had to decide which route to take. He knew that if he went by way of Cambridge, he couldn’t cross the Charles because
General Heath had sent Minute Men to take up planks of the only bridge. The other route would take Percy to Charlestown. Once there, his men would be protected by the guns of the
Somerset.
Heath anticipated Percy’s choice. Mustering a band of Minute Men, he ordered them to come out into the open and hold the Charlestown road. But one shot from Percy’s cannon sent them back into hiding.

—

The Minute Men had a final chance to engage Percy. Fifteen miles north of Boston, Colonel Timothy Pickering of the Salem militia had heard within three hours about the shooting at Lexington. Pickering had convinced himself that Colonel Smith probably had taken his troops back to Boston immediately afterward and that they were already in their camp by this time. Pickering’s men had pleaded with him to set out for Lexington all the same. He had refused. At last the townspeople had compelled him at least to try to intercept the British on their return march. But Pickering’s heart was not in the attempt. He held up his men repeatedly while he waited for messengers. The well-trained troops from Salem and Marblehead were outraged when they heard at nightfall that the British had reached safety in Charlestown only thirty minutes ahead of them.

—

The British troops had traveled about fifteen miles since noon. American losses had been heavy, but the figures told the story: Forty-nine Americans killed compared to seventy-three British soldiers. Thirty-nine Americans wounded against one hundred and seventy-four British casualties. Five Americans and twenty-six British soldiers missing. The ratio of casualties was even more damning for Colonel Smith. Twenty percent of the British officers and men who had taken part in the day’s operation had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. A few had run away.

The day had been shameful for most of the British commanders from General Gage down. Only Hugh Percy had played a bad hand to a draw. For a few Americans, the outcome was also damaging. Colonel Pickering did not live down his hesitation. General Heath hadn’t won the full victory that his numbers and the terrain might have assured him. But Dr. Joseph Warren, the most uncompromising of the younger theorists, had become a warrior. The next day the Minute Men were praising the nerve with which he had charged in to treat the wounded, even as musket balls burst around him and once grazed his wig. Overnight, Samuel Adams’ protégé became an American hero.

Roster of Americans killed and wounded at Lexington and Concord

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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The fighting along the Lexington road had created a new army for Joseph Warren to deal with. General Gage’s four thousand men were now trapped in Boston while reports about the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord were bringing thousands of patriots to the scene. On behalf of the Committee of Safety, Warren wrote an account of the events of April 19, asking all available men to come to Cambridge and enlist in an American army. He language was urgent:

“Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who may survive the carnage.”

He set up a headquarters in Cambridge at Harvard Yard. General Artemus Ward arrived at the head of the Shrewsbury militia to take charge. General Heath’s command had lasted one day. The appeal from Dr. Warren reached far across the countryside. Israel Putnam, a lieutenant colonel in the Connecticut militia, got the summons at his farm in Pomfret. Colonel Putnam, known as
“Old Put,” had already endeared himself to the patriots by driving a herd of sheep into Boston to ease the food shortage. Now, without stopping to change clothes, he left his plow and rode the eighteen hours to Cambridge. Elsewhere in Connecticut, the commander of the New Haven guard was wrangling with the town selectmen. They were reluctant to release their powder and ball to the militia on the basis of the rumors out of Lexington, but Captain Benedict Arnold assured them that if they delayed him any longer he would break the lock on the powder house and take whatever his men needed.

Within a day, Joseph Warren was surrounded by a throng of twenty thousand men, impulsive soldiers who had been drawn by the emergency. They had turned out the year before because of reports of an attack on Boston but within hours had drifted back to their farms. This time, Warren was better prepared to harness his volunteers. Keeping General Gage’s troops penned up in Boston would take fewer than half of the men who had answered
his call. He drew up a quick plan for enlisting eight thousand men for seven months’ duty or a shorter period should the crisis be ended sooner. Warren’s first version of the order of battle would have reduced the rank of some local militia officers, and he knew that would offend them. He divided the new army into companies of fifty men, allowing him to name more officers.

Other complications weren’t so easily resolved. Colonel Pickering, Salem’s reluctant commander, thought over the events of a day in which the Americans had killed or wounded two hundred and forty-seven British soldiers and decided that war was not inevitable. Pickering announced that the Americans could still work out a settlement with General Gage. When the other officers ignored him and went on preparing for war, Colonel Pickering led most of his men back to Salem.

Two days after the battle, Dr. Benjamin Church surprised the Committee of Safety in Cambridge by saying he intended to go into Boston the next morning. By now, the patriots had heard about Church’s courage under fire and considered him almost equal to Joseph Warren. Church had shown Paul Revere blood on his stockings and told him it had come from a dying man as Church was leading the militia forward. For such a well-known patriot to try to slip into Boston now seemed foolhardy.

“Are you serious, Dr. Church?” Warren asked him. “They will hang you if they catch you in Boston!”

Since Church was determined to go, the committee asked him to bring back medicine for the wounded Minute Men. But Church didn’t return to Cambridge until Sunday. He explained to Revere that he had been arrested and taken to General Gage’s headquarters. He was held there, Church said, and finally released. Back in Cambridge, Church was eager to aid the cause. He agreed to write an account of the battles at Lexington and Concord, and his version gave an accurate description of the British troop movements on April 18 and 19. It incorporated the most grisly rumors of British atrocities—unarmed old men shot in their houses, women driven into the street just after giving birth. As Church’s narrative circulated in newspapers throughout the colonies, his stories were improved—now the new mothers were naked when they were forced out of doors. Dr. Church’s report was taken as one more proof of his commitment to the patriot cause.