Paul Revere's Ride (26 page)

While the town of Concord was awakening, Prescott stopped at his own home where he lived with his father and brother—three physicians under one roof. In the town’s tax list, they were assessed for four saddle horses, a greater number than any other household. Samuel Prescott asked his brother Abel to help spread the alarm. Abel quickly agreed, and went to saddle his horse—yet another physician who served as a courier that night.

Then, according to local memory, Dr. Samuel Prescott mounted his horse again and carried the alarm west from Concord into the town of Acton. He galloped to the house of militia captain Joseph Robbins. One of the children in that household remembered waking with a start, when the messenger “struck with a large heavy club … the corner of the house, never dismounting,” While the wooden building reverberated from that blow, Doctor Prescott cried in haste, “Captain Robbins! Captain Robbins! Up! Up! The Regulars have come to Concord.” Within minutes Captain Robbins mounted his “old mare” and carried the news to west Acton. He rode first to the house of Isaac Davis, captain of Acton’s minutemen. Then he continued to the home of Deacon Simon Hunt who commanded Acton’s “west company.”
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Doctor Prescott galloped on, over a wooden bridge to the garrison house in South Acton where Major Francis Faulkner lived. In his nightshirt Faulkner fired his musket three times as fast as he could load—the prearranged signal for assembly in the town. Others repeated the signal. Major Faulkner’s young son later remembered listening in fascination as the signal guns echoed in the distance.
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From Acton, a courier named Edward Bancroft took up the message and carried it northwest to the towns of Groton and Pepperell. Another messenger galloped north to the town of Billerica, where the militia were awakened between 3 and 4 o’clock. They mustered on the Common and at Pollard’s Tavern. Yet a third express rider named Weatherbee galloped into Littleton in the early morning, and then continued across Beaver Brook Bridge to the towns beyond.
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A prearranged system of beacon fires and signal guns was used to muster the militia in what is now the town of Carlisle, north of Concord and Acton. An historian of the town writes that they “were wakened by the cannon and musket fire relay signal system, gathered up their muskets, powder and ball, and began to assemble at the First Parish Meeting House in Carlisle Center at about 7 a.m.”
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While Doctor Samuel Prescott was alarming the towns west of Concord his brother Abel Prescott traveled south to Sudbury and Framingham. He went to Thomas Plympton, the leading Whig in Sudbury, and the town’s alarm bell began to ring about 3:30 or 4 o’clock in the morning. Warning guns were fired to summon militia companies on the west side of the Sudbury River and also in East Sudbury, now the green country town of Wayland. Within thirty-five minutes the entire town of Sudbury had been awakened.
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From Sudbury, Abel Prescott and other messengers continued south to Framingham and Natick, where the militia began to muster between 5 or 6 o’clock. The news was relayed from Framingham to Needham and Dover Farms by another “express” who was not known in those towns, but would be long remembered as the “bare-headed alarm rider.” He “brought the news to Bullard’s Tavern,” where “Ephraim Bullard fired three musket shots from the hill behind his house, giving the agreed-upon signal to arouse the town,” Distant parts of Needham were awakened by the trumpet of African slave Abel Benson.
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From Needham the alarm spread east to Newton, and from Dover Farms it raced south into what is now Norfolk County, circling back toward Boston whence it had begun.
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The large town of Dedham, a few miles southwest of Boston, did not get the word until about 9 o’clock in the morning, when the alarm arrived by way of Needham and Dover, in a wide circuit of express riders from the west and north.
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Roxbury, next to Boston, was not alerted until dawn. William Heath, the ranking military officer in that town, remembered that he was not “called from his bed” until daybreak. Here again, the news that had left Boston seven hours earlier arrived from the west in a long circuitous journey.
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In Watertown, the militia were not alarmed until word finally reached them indirectly from the northern towns that Paul Revere had alarmed, and from the western communities that had been awakened by the Prescotts. The alarm arrived in a manner that left the Whig leaders of Watertown in much uncertainty. While they debated what to do, Newton’s militia companies marched into town on their way to Lexington. The men of Watertown promptly joined them.
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Thus the circle was complete. The alarm had passed from Paul Revere and William Dawes to Samuel Prescott, then to Abel Prescott, and on to other riders who spread the word to Natick, Framingham, Needham, Dover, Dedham, Roxbury, and Watertown,
curving back to Boston in a great chain of alarm-riders.
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To study in detail the spread of the alarm, and to observe the towns from which the militia marched to Lexington and Concord, is to understand another layer of significance in Paul Revere’s ride. In the flow of information one may discover the importance of the preparations he had made, the impact of his decisions along the way, and the role of his associations with other Whig leaders. Many of the links in that chain had been forged in advance. Others were improvised by Paul Revere and his friends who prudently prepared for the worst case.
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Had they acted otherwise, the outcome might well have been different. A few hours’ delay in the alarm—perhaps less than that—might have been enough for General Gage’s troops to have completed their mission and returned safely to Boston before an effective force could muster against them. The result would have been a small success for British arms, and an encouragement to the Imperial cause at a critical moment. On the other side, the revolutionary movement would have lost a moral advantage that had a major impact on events to come.

What made the difference was a complex sequence of contingencies, shaped by the interplay of individual choices and collective effort within a social frame. A major event happened that night in a way that was profoundly different from the popular image of solitary hero-figures, and also from the naive determinism of academic scholarship in the 20th century. Here was another part of Paul Revere’s message for our time.

The Rising of the Militia

It seemed as if men came down from the clouds.

—A letter from Boston,
April 19, 1775

I
MMEDIATELY
after the alarm was received, the men of Massachusetts began to assemble in their towns. Lexington’s Congregational minister Jonas Clarke remembered that within moments of Paul Revere’s arrival “the militia of this town were alarmed, and ordered to meet on the usual place of parade,” Everyone knew what to do. Literally within minutes, men throughout the town were dressing hastily and reaching for their muskets, while wives packed a few provisions in their shoulder bags, and small children sat up in their trundle beds and rubbed the sleep from their eyes.
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The commander of Lexington’s militia, Captain John Parker, lived two miles from the Common in the southwest corner of the town. He had been elected by his fellow townsmen, and they had chosen well. John Parker was the sort of leader other men willingly follow in the face of danger. His grandson, the future minister Theodore Parker, remembered him as “a great tall man, with a large head and a high, wide brow.” He was forty-six years old, and not in good health. Members of his family remembered that he had gone to bed ill the night before, and had slept only a few hours. Like many others in New England, John Parker suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. Its ravages were far advanced in his lungs, and would have left their telltale signs in the burning intensity of his sunken eyes and the gauntness of his hollow cheeks.
Even so, he felt fit enough for military service, and his neighbors could think of no better man to lead them.

By occupation, John Parker was a Yankee farmer and mechanic. By long experience he was also an old soldier who had survived many a hard colonial campaign. He had been present at the siege of Louisbourg and the conquest of Quebec, and probably had done a tour of duty with Robert Rogers’s American Rangers. Captain Parker had seen more of war than most of the British Regulars who were marching into his town. In the early hours of April 19, he gathered up his battered equipment that had seen many years of service, and set off to meet his company.
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The time was between 1 and
2
o’clock when Captain Parker’s Lexington militia began to muster on the Common. Men drifted in for many hours. A fitful wind was blowing that April night, and played strange tricks with sound. Some householders at a far distance were awakened immediately by the alarm. Others close to the Common slept soundly in the arms of their wives until morning.
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The home of Caption John Parker was a typical Lexington farmsted—a simple wooden saltbox house which had been in the family since 1712. Parker’s son and grandson Theodore Parker (1810–60) were born and raised in it.

As the Lexington militia gathered on the Common, Captain Parker exchanged a few words with each individual. He did so less as their commander than as their neighbor, kinsman, and friend. These sturdy yeomen did not expect to be told what to do by anyone. They were accustomed to judge for themselves. Many were hardworking dairy farmers in a community that was already known as a “milk town” for the Boston market. Their ages ranged from sixteen to sixty-six, but most were mature men in their thirties and forties. They were men of property and independence who served on juries, voted in town meetings, ran the Congregational church, managed their own affairs, and felt beholden to none but the Almighty.

The men of Lexington did not assemble to receive orders from Captain Parker, much as they respected him. They expected to participate in any major decisions that would be taken. Their minister wrote that the purpose of the muster was first and foremost to
“consult
what might be done.”
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They gathered round Captain Parker on the Common, and held an impromptu town meeting in the open air. The town minister Jonas Clarke was there, with John Hancock and Sam Adams. Possibly Paul Revere and William Dawes also attended briefly, before they left for Concord.
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The muster of the Lexington militia was the product of a long historical process in New England—a process that has been much misunderstood in popular histories of the event. The same legends that celebrate the myth of the solitary midnight rider tell us that the Middlesex farmers rose spontaneously in response to the alarm. This idea is very much mistaken. The muster of the minute-men in 1775 was product of many years of institutional development. Like the alarm itself, it was also the result of careful planning and collective effort.