The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson
Parker’s company had suffered seventeen casualties in Lexington eight hours earlier, but Parker and his men—perhaps a hundred or more—were keen to fight again. Two miles west of the Common, they dispersed above a granite outcrop in a five-acre woodlot thick with hardwood—hickory, beech, chestnut, red and white oak—and huckleberry bushes. Battle noise drifted from the west, and around two p.m. the thin red line came into view six hundred yards down Battle Road, moving briskly despite more than sixty wounded, not to mention the two dozen dead already left behind. A small bridge at a sharp bend in the road again constricted the column, and as the British vanguard approached within forty yards, the rebels fired. Bullets struck Colonel Smith in the thigh and Captain Parsons in the arm. Major Pitcairn galloped forward to take command as redcoats sprayed the woodlot with lead slugs. When enemy soldiers began to bound up both flanks, Parker and his men turned and scampered through the trees, drifting toward Lexington to join other lurking ambuscades.
The “plaguey fire,” as one British captain called it, now threatened the column with annihilation. “I had my hat shot off my head three times,” a soldier later reported. “Two balls went through my coat, and carried away my bayonet from my side.” Gunfire seemed to swarm from all compass points at Bloody Bluff and, five hundred yards farther on, at Fiske Hill. Pitcairn’s horse threw him to the ground, then cleared a wall and fled into the rebel lines. The major wrapped up his injured arm and pressed on. Ensign Jeremy Lister was shot through the right elbow; a surgeon’s mate extracted the ball from under his skin, but a half dozen bone fragments would later be removed, some the size of hazelnuts.
The combat grew even more ferocious and intimate at Ebenezer Fiske’s house, still thirteen miles from Boston Harbor. James Hayward, a twenty-five-year-old teacher, had left his father’s farm in Acton that morning with a pound of powder and forty balls. At Fiske’s well, he abruptly encountered a British soldier. Both fired. The redcoat died on the spot; Hayward would linger for eight hours before passing, shards of powder horn driven into his hip by the enemy bullet. Several wounded British soldiers were left by their comrades in the Fiske parlor, and there they died.
“Our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act,” Ensign Henry De Berniere later wrote. “We began to run rather than retreat.” Officers tried to force the men back into formation, but “the confusion increased rather than lessened.” Hands and faces were smeared black from the greasy powder residue on ramrods; tiny powder burns from firelock touchholes flecked collars. The ragged procession entered Lexington, with the blood-streaked Common on the left. Officers again strode to the front of the column, brandished their weapons, and “told the men if they advanced they should die,” De Berniere added.
And then, like a crimson apparition, more than a thousand redcoats appeared on rising ground half a mile east of the village: three infantry regiments of the 1st Brigade and a marine battalion, sent from Boston as reinforcements. Smith’s beleaguered men gave a hoarse shout and pelted forward into the new British line, “their tongues hanging out of their mouths, like those of dogs after a chase,” as a later account described them. Wounded men collapsed under the elm trees or crowded into Munroe Tavern, sprawling across the second-floor dance hall or in bunks normally rented by passing drovers. To the delight of those rescued, and the dismay of the insurgents close on their heels, two Royal Artillery guns began to boom near the tavern, shearing tree limbs around the Common and punching a hole in Reverend Clarke’s meetinghouse. Gunners in white breeches with black spatterdashes swabbed each bore with a sponge, then rammed home another propellant charge and 6-pound ball. Sputtering portfire touched the firing vents and the guns boomed again with great belches of white smoke. Cast-iron shot skipped across the ground a thousand yards or so downrange, then skipped again with enough terrifying velocity to send every militiaman—under British artillery fire for the first time ever—diving for cover.
Overseeing this spectacle from atop his white charger, splendidly uniformed in scarlet, royal blue, and gold trim, Brigadier Hugh Earl Percy could only feel pleased with his brigade and with himself. “I had the happiness,” he would write his father, the Duke of Northumberland, on the following day, “of saving them from inevitable destruction.” Heir to one of the empire’s greatest fortunes and a former aide-de-camp to George III, Lord Percy at thirty-two was spindly and handsome, with high cheekbones, alert eyes, and a nose like a harpoon blade. As a member of Parliament, he at times had opposed the government’s policies, including the coercive measures against Massachusetts. As a professional soldier, he was capable, popular—the £700 spent from his own pocket to transport his soldiers’ families to Boston helped—and a diligent student of war, sometimes citing Frederick the Great, whose maxim on artillery was proved here in Lexington: “Cannon lends dignity to what might otherwise be a vulgar brawl.”
A year in New England had expunged whatever theoretical affection Percy held for the colonists, whom he now considered “extremely violent & wrong-headed,” if not “the most designing, artful villains in the world.” To a friend in England he wrote, “This is the most beautiful country I ever saw in my life, & if the people were only like it, we should do very well.… I cannot but despise them completely.” Now he was killing them.
Two blunders early in the day had already marred the rescue mission. Gage’s letter directing the 1st Brigade to muster at four a.m. on the Common was carelessly mislaid for several hours. Then the marines failed to get word—the order was addressed to Major Pitcairn, who had long departed Boston—causing further delays. At nine a.m., five hours late, Percy’s column had surged across Boston Neck. “Not a smiling face was among them,” a clergyman reported. “Their countenances were sad.” To lift spirits, fifers played a ditty first heard in a Philadelphia comic opera in 1767, with lyrics since improvised by British soldiers:
Yankee Doodle came to town
For to buy a firelock;
We will tar and feather him
And so we will John Hancock.
Not until one p.m., after passing the village of Menotomy, five miles from Lexington, did Percy first get word that Smith’s beleaguered expedition was retreating in mortal peril. By that time, a third mishap was playing out behind him. Desperate to make speed from Boston, Percy had declined to take a heavy wagon loaded with 140 extra artillery rounds; until reprovisioned, his gunners would make do with the twenty-four rounds carried for each 6-pounder in their side boxes, just as each infantryman would make do with his thirty-six musket cartridges. Two supply wagons had eventually followed the column only to be ambushed by a dozen “exempts”—men too old for militia duty—at an old cider mill across from the Menotomy meetinghouse. Two soldiers and four horses were killed, and several other redcoats were captured after reportedly tossing their muskets into Spy Pond. Rebels dragged the carcasses into a field, hid the wagons in a hollow, and swept dust over bloodstains on the road.
At three-fifteen p.m., Percy ordered his troops, now eighteen hundred strong, back to Boston. The Royal Welch Fusiliers formed a rear guard, and Smith’s exhausted men tucked in among their fresher comrades. The wounded hobbled as best they could or rode on gun barrels or the side boxes, spilling off whenever gunners unlimbered to hurl more iron shot. Percy was unaware that his supply train had been bushwhacked and that rebel numbers were approaching four thousand as companies from the outer counties arrived. Despite those dignified cannons, he was in for a vulgar brawl.
Looting began even before the column cleared Lexington. In light infantry slang, “lob” meant plunder taken without opposition; “grab” was booty taken by force. “There never was a more expert set than the light infantry at either grab, lob, or gutting a house,” a British officer later acknowledged. Lieutenant Barker complained in his diary that soldiers on the return march “were so wild and irregular that there was no keeping ’em in any order.… The plundering was shameful.” Sheets snatched from beds served as peddler’s packs to carry beaver hats, spinning wheels, mirrors, goatskin breeches, an eight-day clock, delftware, earrings, a Bible with silver clasps, a dung fork. “Many houses were plundered,” Lieutenant Mackenzie wrote. “I have no doubt this enflamed the rebels.… Some soldiers who stayed too long in the houses were killed in the very act of plundering.”