American Tempest (33 page)
Authors: Harlow Giles Unger
After much discussion, Hancock and Adams rode away to safety at dawn, leaving Hancock's aunt and fiancée behind in the manse to face the British. In fact, they were far safer in the parsonage with the minister's family than they would have been with the fugitives. Except for a British shot that whizzed by her head as she watched the action on the green, Hancock's aunt was unharmed, as was his fiancée, who later helped care for two wounded Minutemen.
Years later, Elizabeth Clarke, the minister's daughter, described the scene:
Oh! I now can see from this window . . . in my mind just as plainâall the British troops marching off the common . . . how [Hancock's] aunt was crying and wringing her hands and helping mother dress the children. Dolly going round with father to hide money, watches, and anything down in the potatoes and up garret . . . and in the afternoon, father, mother, with me and the baby, went to the meeting-house. There was the eight men that was killed . . . all in boxes made of four large boards nailed up, and, after Pa had prayed, they were put into two horse carts and took into the graveyard.
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The following day, Patriot messengers galloped off in all directions with copies of a dispatch from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety:
Watertown, Wednesday Morning near 10 o'clock
To all the friends of American liberty. Be it known that the morning before break of day a brigade consisting of about 1000 or 1200 men landed at Phillips' Farm at Cambridge and marched to Lexington, where they found a company of our colony militia in arms, upon which they fired without any provocation and killed 6 men and wounded 4 others; by an express from Boston this moment we find another brigade are now upon the march from Boston, supposed to be about 1000.
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The revolutionary teapot had finally come to a boilâand turned into a tempest that would engulf the North American continent.
Savage Barbarities and
Diabolical Cruelties
H
ancock's lightweight phaeton had just raced off the Lexington-Concord road when he and Samuel Adams heard the shots behind them in Lexington. They did not last long. As the British had approached Lexington, militia Captain John Parker positioned the Minutemen in two lines on the green, one behind the other. They ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-fiveâalmost half the town's populationâand included eight pairs of fathers and sons who stood together, side by side, to face the dreaded Redcoats.
Major John Pitcairn led the advance guard of some seven hundred troops of the crack British field artillery into town, convinced that “one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.”
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Pitcairn ordered the Patriots to lay down their arms and surrender, but Parker ordered them to hold their ground. When Pitcairn saw some Minutemen break ranks and run to cover behind nearby stone walls, he commanded his men to move against the Minutemen. Amidst the confusion and shouting that followed, someone fired the “shot heard 'round the world.”
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No two accounts agree on the details of the engagement, and like so many events leading up to the Revolutionary War, the number who claimed to have witnessed the exchange at Lexington green far exceeded the actual
number of people at the scene. Although the Massachusetts Provincial Congress heard many testimonials, only a handful of British accounts remain, including this written report by Pitcairn to General Gage:
I gave directions to the troops to move forward, but on no account to fire, or even attempt it without orders; when I arrived at the end of the village, I observed drawn upon a green near 200 of the rebels; and when I came within about one hundred yards of them, they began to file off toward some stone walls on our right flankâthe light infantry observing this, ran after them. I instantly called to the soldiers not to fire, but to surround and disarm them, and after several repetitions of those positive orders to the men not to fire etc., some of the rebels who had jumped over the wall, fired four or five shots at the soldiers, which wounded a man of the Tenth, and my horse was wounded in two places from some quarter or other and at the same time several shots were fired from a meeting house on our leftâupon this, without any order or regularity, the light infantry began a scattered fire and continued in that situation for some little time, contrary to the repeated orders of both me and the officers that were present.
Your most obedient humble servant,
John Pitcairn
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When the firing ceased, eight Minutemen, including Parker, lay dead and ten lay wounded. Although Parker suffered only a musketball wound in the initial skirmish, a British soldier subsequently ran him through with a bayonet. The Minutemen wounded only one British soldier and Pitcairn's horse, but they ignited a revolution that would send the world's greatest empire into irreversible decline.
As the smoke of gunshot drifted across the silent wood, the British troops marched off to Concord, and Dr. Benjamin Church, the Whig leader, tended the wounded but ran out of medical supplies and rode off to Boston to find more.
While the British force searched in vain for Patriot arms at Concord, Minutemen attacked a platoon the British had posted to guard Concord's North Bridge. Realizing the Patriots had removed most of the arsenal, the
British commander ordered his men to return to Lexington. On the way, they met a growing rain of sniper fire. Minuteman ranks had swelled into the thousands. Musket barrels materialized behind every tree, every boulder, every stone wall. Facing annihilation unless they returned to Boston, they abandoned plans to search for Hancock and Adams and stepped up their pace to double time. Although General Lord Hugh Percy met Pitcairn's men in Lexington and added 1,000 more troops to the British contingent, the Minuteman force had grown to 4,000. They came from every direction, with town after townâWatertown, Roxbury, Needham, Danvers, and othersâeach sending one hundred, two hundred, or whatever number it could muster to join their fellow countrymen. Had there been a supreme commander to organize the growing force and plan the attack, the colonists would have wiped out the British force. Their relentless, albeit uncoordinated, assault nevertheless left 73 British soldiers dead, 174 wounded, and 26 missing before the expedition reached cover at Charlestown and boarded boats to Boston across the bay. The Patriots suffered 49 killed, 42 wounded, and 5 missing. The humiliated British troops had wreaked revenge in every town, looting and burning houses, bayoneting anyone who stood in their way, civilian or military. But in the end, a disorganized group of untrained, ill-equipped farmers had defeated crack troops from the world's most powerful, best trained, best equipped, professional army, leaving Boston's Patriotsâand, indeed, the rest of America's Patriotsâconfident they could win the war against Britain and end Parliament's rule over America.
Before the British debacle on the retreat from Concord, Lord Percy had scoffed at colonists as “cowardsâfrightened out of their wits . . . whenever we appear.”After the retreat from Lexington, he conceded,
Whosoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians, and this country being much covered with wood and hill, is very advantageous for their method of fighting. . . . For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the King's troops, or have the perseverance I found in them yesterday.
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The Patriot propaganda machine that Sam Adams had built sent riders like Revere with word of victory throughout the colonies, along with reports of alleged British atrocities. Besides accusing the British of setting fire to homes, shops, and barns in Lexington, the Patriot dispatches claimed the British had “pillaged almost every house they passed by, breaking and destroying doors, windows, glasses, etc. and carrying off clothing and other valuable effects. It appeared to be their design to burn and destroy all before them. . . . But the savage barbarity exercised upon the bodies of our brethren who fell, is almost incredible; not contented with shooting down the unarmed, aged and infirm, they disregarded the cries of the wounded, killing them without mercy; and mangling their bodies in the most shocking manner.”
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The propaganda had its desired effect, inflaming passions across the colonies and provoking at first hundreds then thousands of colonists from farms and villages and cities to gather their arms and set off to Boston to rally to the side of the Minutemen.
The British countered with reports that Patriot soldiers had “scalped and otherwise ill-treated one or two of the men who were either killed or wounded.” One report claimed that “the Rebels . . . scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded men who fell into their hands.” And the sister of a Boston customs officer wrote a friend in England that British soldiers had “found two or three of their people lying in the agonies of death, scalped and their noses and ears cut off and eyes bored out.”
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As for who fired first, both sides tried to sway public opinion in England and America, with each side gathering as many depositions as possible to support its claim that the other side fired first.
As the Redcoats had marched into Lexington, Hancock and Adams had taken refuge at Woburn, less than five miles northeast of Lexington, off the Concord road. They left for Worcester, Massachusetts, the next morning to rendezvous with John Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine to begin the journey to Philadelphia together. Sam Adams, however, was not dressed to attend an intercolonial congress. His clothesâalways the coarse cloth of workingmenâwere soiled and torn. Despite Adams's angry pro tests, Hancock bought him a new suit, wig, shoes, and silk hose and gave him some pocket money.
Cushing and Paine arrived the next day with a military escort and breath less reports of seventy thousand Minutemen on the march to lay siege to Boston. Volunteers by the thousands were pouring into Cambridge from everywhere in New England. In addition, Connecticut's Benedict Arnold was raising a force in western Massachusetts to try to capture the huge cache of British artillery and military supplies at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. Although Patriot leader Dr. Benjamin Church had been captured in Boston, General Gage issued a proclamation permitting inhabitants, including Church, to evacuate the city with all their belongings, except weapons. In an uncharacteristically generous move that puzzled Patriot leaders, Gage released Church with a wagon load of medical supplies and allowed him to return to Lexington to tend the wounded Minutemen.
On April 28, Hancock, Sam Adams, Cushing, and Paine set off for Philadelphia. John Adams caught up with them in Hartford, Connecticut, where, on April 29, they met with Governor Jonathan Trumbull, another Harvard graduate and former merchantâand the only royal governor in America to go over to the Patriot side. After the British defeat at Concord and the retreat to Boston, civil government in other colonies had disintegrated, with every royal governor except Trumbull fleeing to the safety of the nearest British military enclave.
After an overnight rest in Hartford, Hancock and the others resumed their journey along the dusty, rutted road to New York, where thousands turned out to cheer. As the city's church bells pealed, a marching band and hundreds of mounted militiamen and infantrymen awaited Hancock's carriage to lead him in triumph through the city to Wall Street. New York merchants hosted a dinner at Fraunces' Tavern at the southern tip of Manhattan Island overlooking New York Bay. Both the Adamses agreed it was the most elegant dinner either had ever seen.
