The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson
of those deluded people.” After a final sputter of gunfire, gray smoke drifted off, revealing dying lumps on the greening grass, blood and so much more leaking away.
Lexington had been not a battle, or even a skirmish, but an execution. The only British casualties were two privates, lightly wounded by gunshots, and Pitcairn’s horse, nicked twice in the flank. The American tally was far worse. Eight rebels were dead, nine wounded. Of those slain, only two bodies lay on the original American line. Several had taken bullets in the back while dispersing, including one man captured earlier in the morning and killed while ostensibly trying to escape a hundred yards to the east. Jonathan Harrington was shot close to his house on the western lip of the Common and reportedly died on his doorstep, within view of his wife and son.
Samuel Adams, upon hearing of the gunplay, exclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” But Adams had not been there to see the divine clay smeared on Lexington’s green, along with the litter of hundreds of torn paper cartridges. Reverend Clarke was there, watching from several hundred yards’ distance as Smith, who had prevented his men from pillaging the nearby houses, agreed to allow them a celebratory salute. The redcoats “drew up and formed in a body on the Common,” Clarke reported, “fired a volley and gave three huzzahs by way of triumph.” Then, forming again by companies, they turned and marched west, toward Concord.
Concord was ready for them. Paul Revere had been captured by a British mounted patrol at a bend in the road near Folly Pond, but William Dawes managed to escape at a gallop. Continuing his charmed morning, Revere—saucy and unrepentant, even with a pistol clapped to his head—was soon released, though without his brown mare, to make his way on foot back to the Clarke parsonage. But others had carried warnings into Concord, where a sentinel at the courthouse fired his musket and heaved on the bell rope. The clanging, said to have “the earnestness of speech” and pitched to wake the dead, soon drove all fifteen hundred living souls from their beds.
Reports of shooting in Lexington “spread like electric fire,” by one account, though some insisted that the British would only load powder charges without bullets. Many families fled west or north, or into a secluded copse called Oaky Bottom, clutching the family Bible and a few place settings of silver while peering back to see if their houses were burning. Others buried their treasures in garden plots or lowered them down a well. Boys herded oxen and milk cows into the swamps, flicking at haunches with their switches.
Militiamen, alone or in clusters or in entire companies with fife and drum, rambled toward Concord, carrying pine torches and bullet pouches, their pockets stuffed with rye bread and cheese. They toted muskets, of course—some dating to the French war, or earlier—but also ancient fowling pieces, dirks, rapiers, sabers hammered from farm tools, and powder in cow horns delicately carved with designs or calligraphic inscriptions, an art form that had begun in Concord decades earlier and spread through the colonies. Some wore “long stockings with cowhide shoes,” a witness wrote. “The coats and waistcoats were loose and of huge dimensions, with colors as various as the barks of oak, sumac, and other trees of our hills and swamps could make them.” In Acton, six miles to the northwest, nearly forty minutemen gathered at Captain Isaac Davis’s house, polishing bayonets, replacing gunlock flints, and powdering their hair with flour. Davis, a thirty-year-old gunsmith with a beautiful musket, bade good-bye to his wife and four youngsters with a simple, “Hannah, take good care of the children.”
“It seemed as if men came down from the clouds,” another witness recalled. Some took posts on the two bridges spanning the Concord River, which looped west and north of town. Most made for the village green or Wright Tavern, swapping rumors and awaiting orders from Colonel James Barrett, the militia commander, a sixty-four-year-old miller and veteran of the French war who lived west of town. Dressed in an old coat and a leather apron, Barrett carried a naval cutlass with a plain grip and a straight, heavy blade forged a generation earlier in Birmingham. His men were tailors, shoemakers, smiths, farmers, and keepers from Concord’s nine inns. But the appearance of tidy prosperity was deceiving: Concord was suffering a protracted decline from spent land, declining property values, and an exodus of young people, who had scattered to the frontier in Maine or New Hampshire rather than endure lower living standards than their elders had enjoyed. This economic decay, compounded by the Coercive Acts and British political repression, made these colonial Americans anxious for the future, nostalgic for the past, and, in the moment, angry.
Sometime before eight a.m., perhaps two hundred impatient militiamen headed for Lexington to the rap of drums and the trill of fifes. Twenty minutes later, eight hundred British soldiers hove into view barely a quarter mile away, like a scarlet dragon on the road near the junction known as Meriam’s Corner. “The sun shined on their arms & they made a noble appearance in their red coats,” Thaddeus Blood, a nineteen-year-old minuteman, later testified. “We retreated.”
They fell back in an orderly column, as if leading an enemy parade into Concord, the air vibrant with competing drumbeats. “We marched before them with our drums and fifes going and also the British drums and fifes,” militiaman Amos Barrett recalled. “We had grand music.” Past the meetinghouse the militia marched, past the liberty pole that had been raised as an earnest of their beliefs. A brief argument erupted over whether to make a stand in the village—“If we die, let us die here,” urged the militant minister William Emerson—but most favored better ground on the ridgeline a mile north, across the river. Colonel Barrett agreed, and ordered them to make for North Bridge. Concord was given over to the enemy.
The British brigade wound past Abner Wheeler’s farm, and the farms of the widow Keturah Durant and the spinster seamstress Mary Burbeen and then the widow Olive Stow, who had sold much of her land, along with a horse, cows, swine, and salt pork, to pay her husband’s debts when he’d died, three years earlier. They strode past the farms of Olive’s brother, Farwell Jones, and the widow Rebecca Fletcher, whose husband also had died three years before, and the widower George Minot, a teacher with three motherless daughters, who was not presently at home because he was the captain of a Concord minute company. Into largely deserted Concord the regulars marched, in search of feed for the officers’ horses and water for the parched men. From Burial Ground Hill, Smith and Pitcairn studied their hand-drawn map and scanned the terrain with a spyglass.
Gage’s late intelligence was accurate: in recent weeks, most military stores in Concord had been dispersed to nine other villages or into deeper burrows of mud and manure. Regulars seized sixty barrels of flour found in a gristmill and a malt house, smashing them open and powdering the streets. They tossed five hundred pounds of musket balls into a millpond, knocked the trunnions from several iron cannons found in the jail yard, chopped down the liberty pole, and eventually made a bonfire of gun carriages, spare wheels, tent pegs, and a cache of wooden spoons. The blaze briefly spread to the town hall, until extinguished by a bucket brigade of regulars and villagers.
With the pickings slim in Concord, Colonel Smith ordered more than two hundred men under Captain Lawrence Parsons to march west toward Colonel Barrett’s farm, two miles across the river. Perhaps they would have better hunting there.
Since 1654, a bridge had spanned the Concord River just north of the village. The current structure, sixteen feet wide and a hundred feet long, had been built for less than £65 in 1760 by twenty-six freemen and two slaves, using blasting powder and five teams of oxen. The timber frame featured eight bents to support the gracefully arcing deck, each with three stout piles wedged into the river bottom. Damage from seasonal floods required frequent repairs, and prudent wagon drivers carefully inspected the planks before crossing. A cobbled causeway traversed the marshy ground west of the river.
Seven British companies crossed the bridge around nine that Wednesday morning, stumping past stands of black ash, beech, and blossoming cherry. Dandelions brightened the roadside, and the soldiers’ faces glistened with sweat. Three companies remained to guard the span, while the other four continued with Captain Parsons to the Barrett farm, where they would again be disappointed: “We did not find so much as we expected,” an ensign acknowledged. A few old gun carriages were dragged from the barn, but searchers failed to spot stores hidden