America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (18 page)

Dr. Joseph Warren and silversmith Paul Revere represented the extremes of the American independence movement; one from the ranks of the Puritan elite for whom the term “Boston Brahmin” would be coined; the other from the working class of “mechanics.” The tall, handsome Warren had set his sights on a medical career at age four-

| 143 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
teen, when he saw his father fall from a ladder while picking apples on his Roxbury farm. With no physician nearby, his father died. After opening his surgery, Warren married Elizabeth Hooten, a wealthy teenage heiress, in 1764, and the couple had four children. Warren was prosperous, much admired, and progressive in his thinking—one of the chief proponents of the controversial practice of inoculations to prevent the spread of smallpox. In modern American terms, Warren might be said to “have it all.” It would hardly seem to be the profile of one of Boston’s most prolific dissidents and patriot organizers.

Yet by the end of the 1760s, Warren had emerged as a committed idealist at the center of patriot politics, and his home served as a gathering place for the inner circle of Boston’s most visible leadership, including Samuel Adams; his younger cousin, attorney John Adams; the legendary but increasingly erratic attorney James Otis, who would soon go completely mad; and fellow physician Dr. Benjamin Church, the doctor who had tended Crispus Attucks, the half-African, half-Indian man who had been mortally wounded in the Boston Massacre.

Warren frequented the Green Dragon, a tavern that was one of the chief incubators of the revolutionary spirit in Boston. It would later become the home of the Masonic lodge in which Warren was made Grand Master. Dr. Warren also began to write articles for the
Boston
Gazette,
the patriots’ chief propaganda voice, whose offices were another locus of Boston’s rebellious mood. In fact, Warren could often be found in one of Boston’s several patriot hotspots.

Despite his young wife’s death in 1772, the physician helped Sam Adams draft a document that year detailing the rights of Americans under the British constitution. In it, Warren composed a section reciting a litany of complaints against Great Britain, a document that presaged many of the sentiments found four years later in Jefferson’s | 144 \

Warren’s Toga

Declaration of Independence. 18 While the First Continental Congress was in session in Philadelphia, Warren had also issued the Suffolk Resolves, a document adopted by a convention of Massachusetts towns.

Drafted by Warren and Samuel Adams, the Resolves derided Britain’s coercive measures as “the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America.” They also called for the creation of a militia, with-holding taxes to cripple British authority, and a renewed embargo on trade with Great Britain. Carried to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia by Paul Revere, who covered the three-hundred-mile journey in a prodigious and nearly unthinkable six-day ride, Warren’s Suffolk Resolves were read on September 17, 1774, to Congress, which then unanimously endorsed them. Immediately afterward, Congress also adopted the embargo on trade with Great Britain. Revere returned to Massachusetts with news of this reaction, further cheering and emboldening the Massachusetts rebels.

Warren and fellow Freemason Paul Revere were widely thought to have led the Sons of Liberty on December 16, 1773, the night of the Tea Party. At least that was what the author of a popular Boston ditty thought. Sung on the streets of Boston, the ballad went, in part:
Our Warren’s there, and bold Revere
With hands to do and words to cheer.

For Liberty and laws.19

Although successful, Paul Revere came from the other end of Boston’s economic spectrum, the “mechanic” class of tradesmen, laborers, and dockworkers. He was the son of Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot immigrant who arrived in Boston at age thirteen, bound as an indentured apprentice to a New England silversmith. Expertly learn-

| 145 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
ing the trade, Rivoire purchased his freedom following his master’s death and set up shop as a silver and goldsmith. When New Englanders struggled with his French surname, he changed it to Revere.

In 1729, he married Deborah Hitchborn, whose large Yankee family was descended from an indentured servant who had arrived during the Puritan migration. On December 21, 1734, their first son, Paul Revere, was born.

Apprenticed to his father, Revere grew up in Boston’s boisterous North End, receiving a basic education but acquiring a lifelong love of reading. His father died when he was nineteen, and Revere inherited the business. Working mostly in silver, he crafted buckles, a brandy cock for Samuel Adams, pins and other jewelry, and the tea sets and household items that now fill museum shelves. He also made frames for the miniatures painted by John Singleton Copley and learned the art of engraving and the setting of false teeth—he would later make a set for Joseph Warren. In 1757, he married Sarah Orne. After bearing eight children, she died in 1773. He remarried five months later.

Prosperous although never wealthy, Revere belonged to the colonial American version of the middle class. A regular church member and active in Boston’s civic affairs, Revere was a joiner. He had served in the militia during the French and Indian War and became an active Mason. In a fitting summary of what Freemasonry may have meant to men such as Revere, David Hackett Fischer wrote, “All his life he [Revere] kept its creed of enlightened Christianity, fraternity, harmony, reason, and community service.”20 Revere also joined the North Caucus Club, the political organization founded by Samuel Adams’ father.

And in 1765, as resistance to the Stamp Act coalesced in Boston, he became a member of the newly formed Sons of Liberty. Turning his engraving skill to politics, he was an aspiring political cartoonist. But | 146 \

Warren’s Toga

his greatest accomplishment may have been the engraving he crafted after the 1770 Boston Massacre. Showing the British soldiers firing point-blank at their prostrate victims, it was one of the most effective pieces of patriotic propaganda ever created.

With this substantial patriot resumé, Revere was eventually invited to join the Long Room Club, another secretive group that met above the print shop where the patriotic propaganda journal the
Boston
Gazette
was published. He was now in the heart of Boston’s patriot inner sanctum, along with some of Boston’s most notable lawyers, doctors, and men of wealth. Most were products of Harvard. Lacking their education and status, Paul Revere was pulled into this tight-knit group as a link to Boston’s “street.” He became a trusted lieutenant to Samuel Adams, organizer of a group of fast-riding messengers who carried Adams’ “circular letters.” Revere also formed a ring of spies to shadow British troop movements. Drawn largely from Boston’s world of laborers and other mechanics who moved almost invisibly past the aristocratic British, their intelligence was relayed back to Warren and Adams.

Given the order by Warren to warn Adams and Hancock that British troops were moving to arrest them, Revere still feared his own capture by Gage’s troops. Through his spy network—and Benjamin Church in particular—Gage knew about Revere’s corps of messengers and had dispatched patrols to intercept any patriot couriers on the roads between Boston and Concord. But Revere had made his own contingency plans. Once he knew how the British troops were moving, a signal would be sent using lanterns hung by trusted men in the tower of Christ Church, known as Old North Church. In Charlestown, riders from Revere’s stable of messengers awaited the signal: a single light (the poetically famous “one if by land”) if they were march-

| 147 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
ing south across Boston Neck, the thin isthmus connecting the peninsula on which Boston was built to neighboring Roxbury; two lanterns meant the British were moving out of Boston in longboats (“two if by sea”). When the Charlestown Whigs saw the two signal lights in the steeple, they dispatched yet another rider for Lexington. His identity and fate remain a mystery.

Arriving in Charlestown by boat, Revere was given a fast, powerful mare named Brown Beauty. Around 11:00 P.M., he set off for Lexington but was nearly intercepted by a pair of British soldiers. The speedy Brown Beauty easily outdistanced them, and the silversmith was first to reach Lexington, where Adams and Hancock were staying before departing for Philadelphia and the Second Continental Congress.

The pair were at the Clarke parsonage, built by Hancock’s grandfather, who had been the minister in Lexington. When Revere arrived after midnight, the two patriot leaders were sleeping in the downstairs parlor. To a guard at the parsonage, Revere reported sharply, “The regulars are coming out.”

William Dawes, active in the Boston patriot militia and a tanner by trade, arrived about half an hour later. He and Revere had both covered the approximately eleven miles from Boston before the British even finished crossing the Charles. The Royal Navy had failed to provide enough boats to transport all seven hundred troops, and no senior commander was on hand to organize the crossing. Not until four hours after they had first assembled, at 1:30 A.M. on April 19, did the British even finish the crossing. Then they faced a long march through darkness to Lexington and Concord.

By then, Revere and Dawes had delivered Warren’s warning to Lexington and the town bell tolled, bringing members of the village’s militia to form up on the two-acre common. There Captain John Parker, a | 148 \

Warren’s Toga

much-respected townsman and veteran of the French and Indian War now suffering from tuberculosis, gathered his men. It was agreed that they would not “meddle with the regulars.”

Dawes and Revere, in the meantime, left for Concord, where the munitions were hidden, to continue spreading the alarm. Along the way, they encountered Dr. Samuel Prescott, a twenty-three-year-old Concord doctor who had been courting his fiancée in Lexington. An avowed member of the Sons of Liberty, Prescott joined the other two and they began to knock on farmhouse doors, alerting the people in the countryside between Lexington and Concord. Their message was not, as poetic legend put it, “The British are coming,” but “The regulars are coming out.”

Out of the darkness, the trio was suddenly confronted by a British patrol near Lincoln, between Lexington and Concord. All three men were seized at gunpoint and held alongside a number of other locals captured by the British patrol. Some of them were patriots spreading the word, others merely innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. As they were forced from the road into a nearby pasture, Prescott cried, “Put on,” and broke away, galloping through the forest, familiar territory to the young man. Some of the British gave chase, but they soon quit as the young physician disappeared into the thick, swampy wood and made his way to Concord to sound the alert.

Back in Lexington, Hancock and Adams argued about what to do.

Hancock wanted to join with the militia and face down the regulars.

“That is not our business; we belong to the cabinet,” argued Adams.

After considerable debate, the two men left for the safety of quarters in nearby Woburn before setting off for Philadelphia in Hancock’s large, fashionable carriage.

Meanwhile, the British officers who had let Revere and the others | 149 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
go had encountered the advancing British troops as they neared Lexington. When they told Smith, the British commander, of the reports of as many as five hundred American militiamen gathering at Lexington, Smith sent word back to Boston requesting reinforcements.

It would prove to be one of the wisest decisions he made. He then ordered Pitcairn to take six light infantry companies and march at top speed to take the bridges at Concord.

As this British advance guard approached Lexington, Pitcairn was told by locals that upward of one thousand men were now waiting to confront the British troops at Lexington—a gross exaggeration, but it put Pitcairn on high alert. When a lone American alongside the road discharged his musket—perhaps only a “flash in the pan,” with no actual ammunition loaded—Pitcairn ordered his men to load their guns. In the distance, they could hear church bells tolling in Lexington and other nearby towns.

Over the course of the next hours, America was transformed. A still-mysterious shot fired on Lexington Green led Major Pitcairn to order a British volley into the ranks of the American militia. The first Americans to die in the Revolution fell there, most shot in the back.

The action quickly shifted to Concord, where more Massachusetts men had rallied. Then smoke was seen rising above Lexington. The British had set fire to some stores, but the Massachusetts men thought that their homes were being torched. As a smattering of shots were exchanged in Concord, the British began to withdraw for the long march back to Boston. But thousands of Massachusetts militiamen were now streaming to the route that the British regulars would have to travel.

For the next few hours, over miles of road surrounded by Massachusetts woods, the American minutemen fired on the British ranks, constantly harassing the British and inflicting sharp casualties.

| 150 \

Warren’s Toga

The day’s bloodiest fighting was not at Lexington or Concord but still to come in Menotomy (now Arlington), where American forces were being led by Brigadier General William Heath in a more disciplined attack. Using a moving “ring of fire,” Heath directed a constant, withering rain of musketry down on the British troops. By the time British reinforcements finally reached the bloodied, exhausted redcoats and used cannons to drive off the patriot militia, the damage was done. As William Hallahan summarized, “One of the finest military units in the world—some 1,800 men—had been humbled, decimated in a shooting gallery slaughter by thousands of New England farmers. Some 73 soldiers were dead. Another 174 were wounded and 26 were missing (captured, in most cases). The casualty rate among British regulars was nearly 10 percent, while the casualty rate among the 3,500 militia was much lower—less than 2 percent. For the families and friends of the militia casualties, there was also much to mourn over—49 dead, 30 wounded, 4 missing.”21