Farther on, a party of young men were playing cards in a shop by the road; they heard the soldiers and went to warn others. At the Tufts Tavern in Menotomy, the innkeeper was awake and toiling at his endless chores. He looked out and saw several Regulars moving toward his barn where he kept a handsome white horse. The Yankee innkeeper ran to intercept them, and said to an officer, “You are taking an early ride, sir!” The Regular replied, “you had better get to bed and get your sleep while you can,” and left, without the horse. 24
At a place called Foot of Rocks (near today’s Forest Street) the British column passed a house where a light was burning. They knocked on the door, and were told by a woman that her “old man” was ill, and she was brewing him a pot of herb tea. In fact she and her husband (who was hale and hearty) had been busy melting their pewter dishes into bullets. The next house (now 21 Appleton Street, Arlington) belonged to Menotomy’s militia captain Benjamin Locke. He also heard the column march past, and instantly set himself to rousing his neighbors. 25
Self-portrait of Captain William Glanville Evelyn, commander of No. 7 company, 4th (King’s Own) Foot. Evelyn marched with Percy’s Brigade to the relief of Smith’s force, and was in the thick of the fighting from Lexington to Charlestown. ~e’survived that day unscathed, but six weeks after inscribing this portrait to his mother he was mortally wounded at a small skirmish in Westchester County, New York. He was thirty-four years old. Evelyn left his estate to Peggie Wright, his servant who was with him in Boston. (Author’s Collection)
The leaders of the British expedition were increasingly concerned. They had been driving their men, hoping to make up the vital hours that had been lost in the Cambridge marshes. The column made remarkable time—a mile every sixteen minutes, a rapid clip for a night march in close order on a dark and muddy road. An officer noted that the pace was “hasty and fatiguing.” 26
But their commander was not pleased with their progress. Colonel Francis Smith was by nature a worrying sort of man. He worried about the late start and the early dawn that was now only a few hours away. Most of all, he worried about the bridges at Concord. What if the New England militia reached the bridges first? He might have to fight the “peasants” as he called them, or retreat as Colonel Leslie had done at Salem.
As the main body of the column moved into the village of Menotomy, Smith’s worries got the better of him. He halted his command, gave the men a short rest, and summoned his second-in-command, Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines. Pitcairn was ordered to take the six leading companies of light infantry and advance at the quick march to Concord. There he was told to seize the bridges north and south of the town, and hold them until the grenadiers came up.
Pitcairn set off instantly, leading his six light companies at a rapid rate. To set the pace, he put one of his best men at the head of the column—Lieutenant Jesse Adair, a hard-charging young Marine who could be trusted to keep the column moving. 27
With Adair in the van was a New England Tory named Daniel Murray, who had graduated from Harvard only three years before. He often tramped the roads between the college in Cambridge and his home in Worcester County, where his prominent family was much hated for their Loyalist sympathies; later his three brothers would take up arms for King and Empire. Also at the head of the column were several unattached officers: Lieutenant William Sutherland of the 38th Foot and Surgeon’s Mate Simms of the 43rd Foot. Behind them came an advance party of eight light infantrymen, among them Private James Marr of the King’s Own, a Scot whose speech carried a strong Aberdeen burr.
The hour was now near 4 a.m. Suddenly, the quiet of the night was broken by the heavy sound of hoofbeats from the west. In the vanguard of Pitcairn’s advance force, Adair whispered to Lieutenant Sutherland and the Tory guide Daniel Murray, “Here are two fellows, galloping express to alarm the country!” As the horsemen approached, Sutherland leaped out of the shadows and seized the bridle of one horse while Murray grabbed the other. Both riders were turned out of their saddles, and their horses were taken by the officers. The captives were Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson of Woburn. They were made to march with the column on pain of death. 28
The Regulars became highly skilled at the art of snaring Yankees on the road. Two light infantrymen were posted well ahead in the shadows on either side of the highway. When a rider approached they allowed him to pass, then rose and closed upon him from the rear while others stopped him from the front. Two and a half miles east of Lexington the British vanguard captured an angry young man named Simon Winship. He was returning to his father’s house, “peaceable and unarmed,” and was ordered to dismount. At four o’clock in the morning he gave the Regulars a defiant lecture on liberty, demanding to know by what right they had stopped him in the public road. At gunpoint, he was pulled off his horse and put with the other prisoners. 29
The column met more horsemen. It began to hear signal guns and alarm bells ahead and even behind. Colonel Smith halted the grenadiers, and ordered an aide to ride back to Boston with a message that surprise had been lost and reinforcements might be necessary. The British courier galloped away into the night. The column resumed its long march, moving deeper into the dark and hostile countryside.
THE CAPTURE
A British Patrol Takes Paul Revere, and Is Taken by Him
After they had taken Revere, they brought him within half a rod of me, and I heard him speak up with energy to them.”
—Elijah Sanderson, Deposition, December 17, 1824
WHILE THE BRITISH COLUMN was beginning its march through Cambridge, Paul Revere and William Dawes traveled out of Lexington on their second mission of the night. As they headed west toward Concord, they were overtaken on the road by a handsome young country gentleman, splendidly mounted and elegantly dressed. He introduced himself as Doctor Samuel Prescott, a physician of Concord.
Young Doctor Prescott had other things on his mind than politics or war that night. He had been in Lexington courting Miss Lydia Mulliken, a young woman much celebrated in Middlesex County for her grace and beauty. Many a hopeful swain had beaten a path to the Mulliken door, but Miss Lydia had pledged herself to Doctor Prescott, and they had agreed to be married.
It was about one o’clock in the morning when Doctor Prescott said farewell to his fiancee and started home to Concord. He met Paul Revere and William Dawes, and rode along beside them. They found the congenial young doctor to be a “high son of liberty,” and explained their mission to him. He instantly offered to help alarm the countryside. 1
Paul Revere proposed a plan. As always he was thinking several steps ahead, and preparing for the worst case. He told Dawes and Prescott about the roving British patrols, and warned them that they might expect to be captured. “I told them of the ten officers that Mr. Devens met,” he wrote later, “and that it was probable we might be stopped before we got to Concord … I likewise mentioned that we had better alarm all the inhabitants till we got to Concord.” 2
The others accepted his plan. Revere remembered that “the young doctor much approved of it, and said, he would stop with either of us, for the people between that [place] and Concord knew him, and would give the more credit to what we said,” The three riders decided to alarm every house, taking turns from one farmstead to the next. Knowing that British patrols were abroad in the night, they urged others to help spread the warning. Working together, they made rapid progress through the western part of Lexington.
Two miles beyond Lexington Green, they entered the town of Lincoln, a new community that had been created only twenty years before. Paul Revere reckoned they had come “about half way from Lexington to Concord.” Here the Great Road curved westward through open fields and pastures, interspersed with patches of swamp and woodland. 3 Very near the boundary between Lincoln and Lexington, the road ran past a little cluster of farmsteads, three or four of them, a few hundred feet apart. Each house was set only a few feet from the north edge of the highway, facing south toward the warmth of the sun, accordi
ng to the Yankee custom. All were occupied by families called Nelson. This pattern of settlement was typical of old New England. It was the custom for sons to settle close to their fathers’ land, while the daughters moved away. As a consequence, many town centers in Massachusetts were surrounded by small hamlets of households with the same surname. 4
As the riders approached the Nelson farms, Dawes and Prescott left the road to awaken a family while Revere rode several hundred yards ahead, perhaps intending to stop at the next farm. 5 Suddenly in the bright moonlight he saw two horsemen lurking under a tree, “in nearly the same situation as those officers were, near Charlestown.” Revere turned in his saddle and shouted a warning to his companions. They came riding up to him. Revere instantly proposed to attack, saying “There are two, and we will have them.” Dr. Prescott turned the butt end of his riding whip and gamely prepared to give battle. 6
As they advanced, the two horsemen suddenly multiplied into four British Regulars in full regimentals, with swords and pistols in their hands. One shouted, “God damn you! Stop! If you go an inch further you are a dead man!” 7
The New England men spurred their horses forward, trying to force a passage. “We attempted to git through them,” Revere wrote, “but they kept before us.” The ambush site had been chosen with cunning. Revere remembered that the shoulders of the narrow road “inclined each way,” and left little room for maneuver. The armed British officers herded them at pistol-point toward a pasture north of the Great Road. The bars across the entrance to the pasture had been taken down. The officers “swore if we did not turn into that pasture they would blow our brains out.” 8
The New England men left the highway, with the British officers hovering about their flanks and rear. As they entered the pasture, Doctor Prescott saw an opportunity. He turned to Paul Revere who was riding beside him, and whispered urgently in the old Yankee dialect, “Put on!” Both men dug their heels into their horses’ sides and galloped for their lives. Prescott turned left, jumped a low stone wall, and disappeared on a dark and narrow path that ran through woods and swamps. Several British officers gave chase, but Prescott knew the countryside, and his horse was strong and fresh. He vanished into the night. 9
When Prescott turned left, Paul Revere headed to the right toward a tree line at the bottom of the pasture, hoping to escape into the woods. His splendid animal was very tired, but responded nobly to urgent command. Revere surged ahead of his captors. But just as he reached the trees, six more horsemen suddenly appeared. Now ten British Regulars surrounded him. They pointed their pistols at his heart, seized his bridle, tore his reins from his grasp, and held him firmly in their grasp.
In that moment of confusion, William Dawes got away. When the officers went after Revere and Prescott, Dawes turned back into the highway. He tried to confuse his captors by shouting “Halloo, my boys, I’ve got two of ’em!” As the officers went after Revere, Dawes galloped away in the opposite direction, to what appeared to be the safety of a nearby farm. As he approached the house in the darkness, his horse took fright and stopped so abruptly that Dawes pitched forward, out of his seat. He tumbled to the ground, losing his watch, his horse, and what remained of his composure. His frightened animal ran away, with empty stirrups banging crazily on the long leathers that were then in use.
The dark house that Dawes took to be a place of refuge turned out to be an abandoned building, perhaps inhabited by wild animals that had frightened his horse. Badly shaken, William Dawes decided that enough was enough. He went limping back toward Lexington in the moonlight, keeping in the shadows and out of sight. 10
Meanwhile the British Regulars gathered around their prisoner. They were angry men. Ten of the King’s officers had failed to snare two out of three suspicious countrymen who had ridden straight into their trap. They turned their hostility toward the one who remained in their hands. Revere was ordered to dismount. Some of the Regulars began to abuse him.
Suddenly another officer intervened. Paul Revere thought him “much of a gentleman.” The officer addressed his captive as a gentleman too, with the elaborate courtesy of that distant age.
“Sir,” the British officer said politely, “may I crave your name?”
“My name is Revere,” the captive answered.
“What?” the officer exclaimed in surprise, “Paul Revere!”
“Yes,” came the reply. 11
Paul Revere was well known to these British officers. They began to talk among themselves with high excitement, then angrily turned back toward their captive. “The others abused me much,” Paul Revere remembered, but their leader continued to treat him correctly. “He told me not to be afraid; they should not hurt me.” 12
Paul Revere began to look around him. He discovered that he was not the only prisoner. The officers had been stopping every suspicious rider who passed them on the road. They had caught Elijah Sanderson and Jonathan Loring, who had been sent from Lexington to watch them, and had also bagged Solomon Brown, a messenger who had been dispatched to Concord. Along the way, they also captured an innocent one-armed pedlar named Allen who had nothing to do with either side. 13 All of the prisoners had been interrogated at length. “They asked as many questions as a Yankee could,” Sanderson later testified. He remembered that they “put many questions to us, which I evaded … they particularly inquired where Hancock and Adams were.” 14
The officers turned to Revere and began to question him in the same way. He answered truthfully. They demanded to know if he was an express, and were told yes. The other captives were too far away to hear all of the questions, but close enough to make out Paul Revere’s replies. With six pistols pointed at him, Revere spoke with a spirit that the British officers found infuriating in a provincial prisoner, who seemed not to know his place, or to care about the danger he faced. One of the prisoners, Elijah Sanderson, listened at a distance and later remembered, “I heard him speak up with energy to them.” 15
“Gentlemen,” Revere told them, “you’ve missed of your aim.”
“What of our aim?” one answered in a “hard” tone. Another insisted that they were out after deserters, a frequent employment of British officers in America.
“I know better,” Paul Revere boldly replied. “I know what you are after, and have alarmed the country all the way up.”
Even as the British officers posed the questions, Paul Revere began to control the interrogation. Before the Regulars realized what had happened, the prisoner himself became the inquisitor. Paul Revere proceeded to tell his astonished captors more than they knew about their own mission. He informed them that Colonel Smith’s expedition had left Boston by boat across the Back Bay, and that “their boats had catched aground” at Lechmere Point, and that the Regulars had come ashore in Cambridge.
He also told them what he had been doing that night, and warned that he had alarmed the militia at Lexington, and their lives would be at risk if they lingered near that town. “I should have 500 men there soon,” he said, adding, “if I had not known people had been sent out to give information to the country, and time enough to get fifty miles, I would have ventured one shot from you, before I would have suffered you to have stopped me.” 16
As the conversation continued, the British officers grew more and more agitated. They were outraged by the effrontery of this infernal Yankee scoundrel who dared to threaten the King’s officers even while their pistols were pointed at his breast. They were also increasingly disturbed by the unwelcome news that he brought them.
After Paul Revere had spoken, one of the Regulars rode off some distance to the highway, and came back at full gallop with his commander, Major Edward Mitchell of the 5th Foot. The major was an excitable man, and not in a happy frame of mind. He ordered that Revere be searched for weapons. None were found. Had he been carrying arms, the story of the midnight ride might have ended differently.
Then Major Mitchell himself came up to Paul Revere in a high temper. “He clapped [a] pistol to my head,” Revere rem
embered, “and said he was agoing to ask me some questions, and if I did not tell the truth, he would blow my brains out.” 17
Paul Revere was angered by those words, and told the major that “he did not need a threat to make him speak the truth,” He added contemptuously, “I call myself a man of truth, and you have stopped me on the highway, and made me a prisoner I knew not by what right. I will tell the truth, for I am not afraid.”
That is precisely what Paul Revere proceeded to do. He told the truth without hesitation, while surrounded by armed and hostile horsemen in that dark pasture on the Concord Road. He spoke with a serene self-confidence, even to these armed and angry men who pointed their pistols at him, and were not happy to hear what he had to say.
Later, Paul Revere remembered that “the officer who led me said I was in a damned critical situation. I told him I was sensible of it.” But even in this moment of mortal peril he spoke boldly to the British officers with the courage of an urgent purpose. Paul Revere had a particular object in mind. Everything, without exception, that he said and did to his captors was consistent with a single goal. He was trying to move these men away from Lexington— away from Hancock and Adams. Revere had reason to believe that the mission of the patrol was to arrest those two Whig leaders. He warned the British officers that if they remained in the vicinity of Lexington Green, they also would be in extreme danger, and he hinted that the expedition coming after them could start a war unless it was warned of the trouble that awaited them at Lexington center. In fact, trouble was gathering for them in many places that night, but Revere stressed only one place in particular—Lexington, where he had left Hancock and Adams. 18
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