Paul Revere's Ride (45 page)

The Charles River still lay between the British column and safety, and the only bridge was just ahead in Cambridge. This was the same span that Percy had used coming out. Commanders on both sides had given much thought to the bridge. On the American side, one of General Heath’s first acts was to send a detachment of Watertown militia with orders to remove the planking from the bridge. This was done, but the thrifty Yankee soldiers carefully piled the planks to the side for safekeeping. General Gage sent a party of engineers under Captain Montresor, who repaired the bridge and departed. The Americans came back, and removed the planks once again, this time hurling them into the Charles River.
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As Percy’s brigade marched into Cambridge, Lieutenant Barker in the vanguard looked ahead and observed that the bridge was “broken down,” and blocked by a large force of American militia, with “a great number of men to line the road.” The British column was in grave danger of being cut off and pinned against the riverbank.
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Instantly Percy made a bold decision. He abruptly turned his column away from the bridge, and sent it eastward on a narrow track called Kent Lane, toward another road that led to Charlestown. This sudden change of direction, and the brilliant use of an obscure and unexpected road, took the New England men by surprise. It broke the circle of fire around Percy’s brigade. The militia scrambled to get into position again. Another American force moved quickly toward high ground called Prospect Hill,
which dominated the road to Charlestown. Percy advanced his cannon to the front of his column, and cleared the hill with a few well-placed rounds. It was the last of his ammunition for the artillery.
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The militia kept after him, and its numbers continued to grow. A large force from Salem and Marblehead at last arrived, and could have created a major problem for Lord Percy. But its commander, Colonel Timothy Pickering, was reluctant to engage. He had dallied earlier that day until urged forward by his men. Now he stopped at Winter Hill, north of Percy’s route, and allowed the British brigade to pass. Pickering later fought bravely in the War of Independence. But he was conservative in his politics, and some have suggested that in 1775 he hoped for compromise, and wished to avoid total defeat for the British troops. Pickering later insisted that this was not the case, that he was halted on Heath’s orders—which Heath strongly denied. Whatever the truth, Percy’s brigade was allowed to pass by the last American force that could have stopped it.
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At the rear of the British formation, the New England men continued to fight stubbornly. A flurry of firing broke out in that quarter, and Percy turned once again to the British Marines. Major Pitcairn, the senior officer when the first shot was fired at Lexington, also commanded the rear guard in the last engagement of the day. While Pitcairn’s Marines held the militia at bay, Percy’s brigade at last reached Charlestown and safety.

The Second Battle of Lexington and Concord

I have now nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but an affair that happened on the 19th instant.”

—General Gage’s report on Lexington
and Concord, April 22, 1775

All eyes are turned upon the tragical event of the 19th.… We are unanimous in the resolution,
to die, or be free.”

—A letter from a gentleman of rank in New England, April 25, 1775
¹

IT WAS NEARLY DARK when Lord Percy’s men entered Charlestown. Behind them the sun was setting on the ruins of an empire. A great blood red disc of fire sank slowly into the hills of Lexington, as the long column of British Regulars marched doggedly down to the sea. The militia of New England followed close at their heels. Fighting continued into the twilight, as fresh regiments continued to arrive from distant towns. On Boston’s Beacon Hill, crowds of spectators could see the muzzle-flashes twinkling like fireflies in the gathering darkness.
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Night had fallen when the last weary British troops crossed over Charlestown Neck and took up a strong position on high ground, supported by the heavy guns of HMS
Somerset.
American General William Heath studied their deployment and decided that “any further attempt upon the enemy, in that position, would have been futile.” He ordered the militia to “halt and give over the pursuit,” and called a conference of senior officers to make his dispositions for the night. Fearing a British attack, General Heath decided to withdraw the main body of the militia a few miles to the rear. He ordered “centinels to be planted down the neck,” and
“patrols to be vigilant in moving during the night.” The rest of the New England troops were sent to Cambridge, and told to “lie on their arms.”
³

Attack was the last thing in British minds. As the rear guard of British Marines passed over Charlestown Neck, Lord Percy looked at his watch and noted that the hour was past seven o’clock. His men were utterly exhausted. The grenadiers and light infantry had not slept for two days. Some had marched forty miles in twenty-one hours. Most had been under hostile fire for eight hours. The soldiers sank gratefully to the soggy ground on the heights above Charlestown, and fell instantly asleep. One British officer, unconscious of the irony, noted that their refuge was a place called Bunker Hill.
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Later that night a cold rain began to fall, as it did so often after an American battle—as if heaven itself were weeping over the pain that mortal men inflicted on one another. Andover militiaman Thomas Boynton remembered that “there was a smart shower and very sharp lightning and thunder, the most of us wet to the skin.”
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The many British casualties were ferried across the Charles River to Boston by seamen of HMS
Somerset.
Ensign De Berniere noted in his diary that “all her boats were employed first in getting over the wounded.” Long rows of broken men with bloody bandages and smoke-stained faces lay quietly at Charlestown’s landing, shivering from the shock of their wounds. One by one, seamen of the Royal Navy lowered them gently into longboats with the special tenderness that men of violence reserve for fallen comrades.
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A spectator wrote that the boats were busy “till ten o’clock last night bringing over their wounded.” So numerous were the British casualties that the navy needed three hours to ferry them across the river. Later that night, the remaining light infantry and grenadiers were also carried back to Boston. Fresh troops of General Gage’s 2nd Brigade were sent to replace them on the hills of Charlestown.
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In the morning, the Regulars awoke to find themselves besieged by a vast militia army, which had marched from distant parts of New England. “The country is all in arms,” wrote Lieutenant Evelyn of the King’s Own on April 23rd, “and we are absolutely invested with many thousand men, some of them so daring as to come very near our outposts on the only entrance into town by land. They have cut off all supplies of provisions from the country.”
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Fresh food instantly disappeared from the beleaguered
garrison. Ensign De Berniere wrote, “In the course of two days, from a plentiful town, we were reduced to the disagreeable necessity of living on salt provisions, and were fairly blocked up in Boston.”
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British soldiers who strayed into American hands were now treated as enemies. One of Gage’s officers reported that “the rebels shut up the [Boston] Neck, placed sentinels there, and took prisoner an officer of the 64th who was trying to return to his regiment.”
¹⁰
Many of the British wounded had been taken captive, and remained in American hands. A private soldier’s wife poured out her woes on paper. “My husband was wounded and taken prisoner,” she wrote, “but they use him well and I am striving to get to him, as he is very dangerous; but it is almost impossible to get out or in. We are forced to live on salt provisions.” She ended, “I hear my husband’s leg is broke, and my heart is broke.”
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Regulars of every rank felt the sharp sting of defeat, and many displayed a growing hatred of the “country people” who had humiliated them. A wounded survivor wrote home, “They did not fight us like a regular army, only like savages behind trees and stone walls, and out of the woods and houses, where in the latter we killed numbers of them.”
¹²
Many repeated in their letters the story of the wounded Regular who had been killed with a hatchet. That atrocity made a great impression, and grew with every telling. One soldier wrote, “These people are very numerous, and as bad as the Indians for scalping and cutting the dead men’s ears and noses off, and those they get alive, that are wounded, and cannot get off the ground.”
¹³

From General Gage to the humblest private, men of every rank had never imagined in their darkest dreams that such an event could happen to British infantry. Many searched for someone to blame. Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own held Colonel Francis Smith to be responsible. “Had we not idled away three hours on Cambridge marsh waiting for the provisions that were not wanted, we should have had no interruption at Lexington,” he wrote in the privacy of his diary. Lt. Barker believed that Colonel Smith could also have prevented the fighting at Concord, if he had moved more quickly to the North Bridge when trouble threatened. “Being a very fat, heavy man,” the angry young officer wrote, “he would not have reached the bridge itself in half an hour though it was not half a mile.”
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Others blamed their much hated commander in chief. “The fact is,” Lieutenant Mackenzie of the Welch Fusiliers confided to
his diary, “General Gage… had no conception the Rebels would have opposed the King’s troops in the manner they did.”
¹⁵

The senior officers themselves could not understand what had happened to disrupt their plans, and differed among themselves as to what should be done. Colonel Smith, in much pain from his wound, was still wondering what had hit him. He concluded that he was the victim of a deep-laid American conspiracy. “I can’t think,” he wrote, “but it must have been a preconcerted scheme in them, to attack the King’s troops at the first favorable opportunity.”
¹⁶

Lord Percy, who alone emerged with credit from the affair, took a different view. He strongly advised a change of attitude, and warned his superiors they must not continue to underestimate their American opponents. “You may depend upon it,” he wrote bluntly, “that as the Rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go through with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home. For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the King’s troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday.”
¹⁷

Gage later came to agree with Percy. He wrote to Dartmouth on June 25, “The Rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be, and I find it owing to a military spirit encouraged amongst them for a few years past, joined with an uncommon degree of zeal and enthusiasm that they are otherwise.… In all their wars against the French they never showed so much conduct, attention and perseverance as they do now.”
¹⁸

Admiral Samuel Graves, commanding the Royal Navy in Boston, responded in yet another way. Before the battle he had been outspoken in his contempt of Americans. Afterward, he gave way to alternate moods of rage and fear. He reported scathingly to the Admiralty, “The Rebels followed the Indian manner of fighting, concealing themselves behind hedges, trees and skulking in the woods and houses whereby they galled the soldiers exceedingly.”
¹⁹

In a moment of panic he ordered his captains to make elaborate preparations for his personal evacuation if the Americans should storm the town. He instructed them to “have your ship ready for action every Night, with Springs upon your cables, and in case the rebels should attempt to force the lines, you are to send a Boat armed with a Lieutenant and a Midshipman in her to what is commonly called the Admiral’s Wharf or to Wheelwright’s
Wharf, as the tide shall best serve. The Officer to come to me, the Boat to wait his return upon their oars.”
²⁰

The next day Graves surrounded Boston with a ring of boats and ordered his men (much to their disgust) to stop every woman and child who tried to leave the town. His avowed object was to hold them hostage as a deterrent against attack. Afterward the admiral boasted that the decision “to keep the women and children in the town” helped to “prevent an attack upon Boston.”
²¹
When the moment of immediate danger passed, the admiral’s panic gave way to fury. He proposed to destroy the entire towns of Roxbury and Charlestown. His flag secretary later recalled that “it was indeed the Admiral’s opinion that we ought to act hostile from this time forward by burning and laying waste to the entire country.”
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