Many men armed themselves with weapons not designed for war. One man from Lynn carried a “long fowling piece, without a bayonet, a horn of powder, and a seal-skin pouch, filled with bullets and buckshot. 37 Some carried arms of great antiquity, whose origins told the history of the province. A witness wrote, “Here an old soldier carried a heavy Queen’s arm with which he had done service at the conquest of Canada twenty years previous, while by his side walked a stripling boy with a Spanish fusee not half its weight or calibre, which his grandfather may have taken at the Havana, while not a few had old French pieces, that dated back to the reduction of Louisburg.” None of these Massachusetts militia are known to have carried long rifles such as were becoming popular in Pennsylvania and the southern backcountry. Despite the urgings of the Congress, few had cartridge boxes or bayonets. Their few precious lead bullets were carefully wrapped in handkerchiefs and carried in pockets or under their hats. Gunpowder was carried in horns that had been passed down from father to son for many generations. Inscriptions carved onto these powder horns told their history. Lexington’s historical society cherishes a powder horn that descended from generation to generation in the Harrington family of that town. One of its owners carved his name into its side: “Jonathan Harrington His Horne, May the 4 AD 1747.” It was later owned by the boy fifer Jonathan Harrington, the youngest soldier who mustered on Lexington Green on April 18, 1775. New England powder horns were elaborately decorated by professional carvers, in a manner much like scrimshaw. One ambivalent horn by Jacob Gay displayed the Royal arms of Britain on one side, and Paul Revere’s print of the Boston Massacre on the other. Another made in Roxbury depicted “Tom Gage” as a diabolical figure, with a forked tail, sharp horns, and a serpent in his hand. Some showed idyllic scenes of town commons, and New England churches. Many were adorned with folk motifs, patriotic slogans, personal inscriptions, and snatches of homespun poetry that expressed the values of this culture. It is interesting to compare these objects with the artifacts of other American wars. The inspiring scenes and slogans carved into the powder horns of the American Revolution were profoundly different from the sentiments of alienation, anomie, self-pity, and profound despair inscribed on helmet covers and field equipment in Vietnam. In 1775, even young militia privates who were still in their teens, clearly understood what they were doing, and deeply believed in the cause that they were asked to defend. 38
Among the variety of edged weapons carried by militia, one type often appeared in New England. It was a short rapier with a flattened diamond blade that had been made in Europe during the 17th century. At a later date, a New England blacksmith gave it a simple American grip. Many of these austere but efficient weapons have been found in Middlesex and Essex counties, where they had been in use since the mid-17th century—another material indicator of continuity in New England’s culture. (Museum of Our National Heritage, Lexington)
Officers and some private soldiers carried swords that were also material expressions of New England’s culture and history. Their edged weapons were as various as firearms, but one distinctive type often appeared in eastern Massachusetts. It was short rapier with an antique steel blade that had been imported from continental Europe, and reset with a plain but functional grip by a Yankee blacksmith. This weapon was austere and very old-fashioned in its appearance, much like the short swords of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In America the Middlesex sword was another cultural artifact, like the powder horns and firelocks and dress, that revealed the origins of the New England way, and the continuity that extended from the founding of the Puritan Colonies to the revolutionary movement of 1775. 39
Some units carried flags of great antiquity, which had been passed down from the Puritan founders of New England. One of them survives today in the town of Bedford, Massachusetts. It was made in England sometime in the 17th century, and used as early as 1659 in Massachusetts. Against a crimson background, it shows the arm of God reaching down from the clouds, with a short sword in a mailed fist. A Latin motto reads, “Vince aut Morire” (Conquer or Die). According to the traditions of the town, this flag was carried on the morning of April 19, 1775, by Cornet Nathaniel Page of the Bedford militia. 40
The Bedford Flag is thought to be the oldest surviving banner in English-speaking America. (Bedford Public Library)
Like their Puritan ancestors whose banner they carried, these citizen-soldiers of Massachusetts were very clear about their purposes. They called to mind Oliver Cromwell’s plain russet-coated captain, who knew what he fought for, and loved what he knew.
Many years later Captain Levi Preston of Danvers was asked why he went to war that day. At the age of ninety-one, his memory of the Lexington alarm was crystal clear, and his understanding was very different from academic interpretations of this event. An historian asked him, “Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord Fight?”
“What did I go for?” the old man replied, subtly rephrasing the historian’s question to drain away its determinism.
The interviewer tried again. “… Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?” he asked.
“I never saw any stamps,” Preston answered, “and I always understood that none were ever sold.”
“Well, what about the tea tax?”
“Tea tax, I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard.”
“But I suppose you have been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?”
“I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ psalms and hymns and the almanacs.”
“Well, then, what was the matter?”
“Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.” 41
THE GREAT FEAR
A Rural Panic in New England
Nor will old Time ever erase the horrors of the midnight cry preceding the Bloody Massacre at Lexington.
—Hannah Winthrop
AFTER THE MILITIA marched away, early in the morning of April 19, the mood was dark in the towns they left be-JLJL hind. Nearly everyone believed that this was no mere drill or demonstration. On both sides, there was a strange and fatal feeling that bloodshed was inevitable.
The people of New England did not wish for war. This was not a warrior culture. It did not seek glory on the field of valor, and showed none of the martial spirit that has appeared in so many other times and places. There were no cheers or celebrations when the militia departed—nothing like the wild exultation of the American South at the outbreak of the Civil War, or the bizarre blood-lust of the European middle classes in 1914.
The people of New England knew better than that. In 140 years they had gone to war at least once in every generation, and some of those conflicts had been cruel and bloody. Many of the men who mustered that morning were themselves veterans of savage fights against the French and Indians. They and their families knew what war could do. The mood in Massachusetts was heavy with foreboding.
In the town of Acton, Hannah Davis always remembered the terrible moment when her husband left her. He was about thirty years old, and the captain of Acton’s minute company. She was twenty-nine. Their children were very young, one of them a babe in arms. The season had been sickly in the Davis household. That morning all the children were ill, some with the dreaded symptoms of canker rash, a mortal disease that ravaged many a New England household. The Davis household had been awakened before dawn by an alarm rider. While Hannah comforted her crying children, the minutemen of Acton trooped into her kitchen, filling that small feminine space with the strong masculine presence of their muskets, bayonets, tomahawks, and powder horns.
Hannah remembered later that “my husband said but little that morning. He seemed serious and thoughtful; but never seemed to hesitate as to the course of his duty.” As he left the house, Isaac Davis suddenly turned and faced his wife. She thought he wanted to tell her something, and her hea
rt leaped in her breast. For a moment he stood silent, searching for words that never came. Then he said simply, “Take good care of the children,” and disappeared into the darkness. Hannah was overwhelmed by an agony of emptiness and despair. By some mysterious power of intuition, she knew that she would never see him again. 1
Other women shared that feeling as they watched their husbands march away. After the men were gone these individual emotions flowed into one another like little streams into a river of fear that flooded the rural towns of Massachusetts. On a smaller scale, it was not unlike the grande peur that swept across the French countryside in 1789, when ordinary people were suddenly consumed with a sense of desperate danger. 2
The great fear in New England began with the first alarm that was spread by Paul Revere and the other midnight riders. We remember that moment as a harbinger of Independence. For us, it was an event bright with the promise of national destiny. But at the time it was perceived in a very different way—as a fatal calamity, full of danger, terror, and uncertainty. Many years afterward, Hannah Winthrop recorded her feelings of the moment, which were still very strong in her mind. “Nor will old Time ever erase,” she wrote, “the horrors of the midnight cry preceding the Bloody Massacre at Lexington.” 3
Hannah Winthrop lived in Cambridge, where her husband John taught natural science at Harvard College. He was an elderly man, and not in good health. They lived near the Lexington Road, and felt themselves in harm’s way. In company with many others, Hannah Winthrop’s first impulse was to flee. She later wrote, “Not knowing what the event would be at Cambridge … it seemed necessary to retire to some place of safety till the calamity was passed. My partner had been a fortnight confined by illness. After dinner we set out not knowing whither we went, we were directed to a place called Fresh Pond about a mile from the town.”
On the road they met a throng of fugitives who also sought safety in flight. When they reached Fresh Pond, the Winthrops stopped at a home by the road, and found it full of terrified refugees. “What a distressed house did we find there,” Hannah wrote, “filled with women whose husbands were gone forth to meet the assailants, 70 or 80 of these, with numbers of infant children, crying and agonizing over the fate of their husbands.”
The great fear had already taken possession of that teeming crowd. Hannah Winthrop and her invalid husband decided to flee again, this time to northern Massachusetts. “Thus,” she wrote, “with some precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintances, five of us to be conveyed by one tired horse and chaise.” The burden was too heavy for the horse, and the five refugees had to take turns in the chaise. “We began our passage alternately walking and riding,” Hannah Winthrop later recalled, “the roads [were] filled with frightened women and children, some in carts with their tattered furniture, others on foot fleeing into the woods.” 4
The narrow country roads were jammed with traffic. Militiamen were advancing toward Lexington and Concord—some as individuals, others in small parties, many in entire companies marching behind a fife and drum. At the same time, women and children and noncombatant men were fleeing in the opposite direction. Carts and coaches were piled high with cherished possessions. Along the shoulders of the roads were forlorn groups of fugitives, the broken shards of shattered families who were traveling sadly they knew not where—anywhere that took them farther from the great fear that followed them.
While some people took to the roads, others hid themselves in the woods. In Lexington many families of the militia left their homes and disappeared into patches of forest. It was later remembered of Rebecca Harrington Munroe, whose male relatives made up a large part of Captain Parker’s company, that this “worthy lady,” with “other families in Lexington, fled on the 19th of April 1775, with their children to the woods, while their husbands were engaged with the enemy and their houses were sacked or involved in flames.” 5
Others ran to their neighbors and sought safety in the midst of others, sometimes in places very bizarre. In Charlestown on April 19, Jacob Rogers remembered, “I… put my children in a cart with others then driving out of town. … We proceeded with many others to the town’s Pest House.” This was a remote building where smallpox victims were confined. Others in Charlestown went to a building near the training field, “full of women and children in the greatest terror, afraid to go to their own habitations.” 6
Many hoped to find a place of sanctuary in the churches of New England. Lexington’s meetinghouse was a large but fragile wooden building, sheathed in clapboards that could scarcely have stopped a pistol ball. It stood directly in the path of the approaching British Regulars, and very much in harm’s way. Even so, the people found spiritual strength in their place of worship. 7
Some of the clergy did what they could to help their frightened congregations. A craven few fled for their lives. In Weston after the militia left town, clergymen Samuel Cooper and Samuel Woodward became refugees themselves, fleeing first to Framingham ten miles west and then to Southborough, taking with them a cow and a skillet and a few provisions. 8 In Menotomy, Deacon Joseph Adams fled from his own house to the home of the minister Samuel Cooke, and buried himself in the hayloft of the minister’s barn. 9 But most ministers stayed and tried to comfort members of their congregations who came for help. At Concord, on the morning of April 19, many terrified people hurried to the house of their minister, the Reverend William Emerson. Even as the fighting went on only a few yards away, an eyewitness remembered that “the lane in front of the house was nearly filled with people who came to the minister’s house for protection,” While soldiers marched and countermarched, William Emerson worked outside in the yard, moving among the women and children, and giving them bread and cheese and comfort. 10
The minister’s wife, Phebe Bliss Emerson, was deeply frightened. According to family tradition, Phebe was “delicate,” a euphemism that commonly referred to a mental state rather than a physical condition. She had heard the alarm from her African slave Frank, who came running into her chamber with an axe in his hand, shouting that the Redcoats were coming. Phebe Emerson turned as white as a Concord coverlet and fainted away on the spot. When she revived, she looked around for her husband and saw him outside in the yard, helping people of the town who had gathered in front of the Old Manse. Phebe Emerson rapped sharply on the windowpane to get her husband’s attention, and told him that “she thought she needed him as much as the others.” 11
Many people managed their fear by keeping very busy. In Watertown, tax collector Joseph Coolidge went off as a volunteer to show a militia company the road to Lexington. His wife busied herself by digging a hole, and burying the town’s tax books for safekeeping. 12 Alice Stearns Abbott, then a child of eleven, later remembered that she and her sisters Rachel and Susanna awakened early. “We all heard the alarm,” she recalled, “and were up and ready to help fit out father and brother, who made an early start for Concord. We were set to work making cartridges and assisting mother in cooking for the army. We sent off a large quantity of food for the soldiers, who had left home so early that they had but little breakfast. We were frightened by hearing the noise of the guns.” 13
Drinking men, of whom there were many in the rural towns of Massachusetts, dealt with their fears in a different way. In Menotomy two brothers-in-law named Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman took refuge in the Cooper Tavern. While confusion reigned around them, they ordered large mugs of flip, a potent drink much favored by tavern topers in the 18th century. They were sitting directly in the path of the British soldiers. Others warned them to flee for their lives. But as the alcohol warmed their spirits, they began to forget their fear. Jabez said to Jason, “Let us finish the mug, they won’t come yet.” 14
The great fear was great because it was so general and all-encompassing. It became a broad undifferentiated emotion, feeding on anxieties that had nothing to do with the immediate cause. In the town of Framingham, ten miles southwest of Concord, a local inhabitant reme
mbered that “soon after the men were gone, a strange panic seized the women and children living in the Edgell and Belknap district. Someone started the story that ‘the negroes were coming to massacre them all!’” An historian of that town remembered that “nobody stopped to ask where the hostile negroes were coming from; for all our own colored people were patriots. It was probably a lingering memory of the earlier Indian alarms, which took this indefinite shape, aided by a feeling of terror awakened by their defenceless condition, and the uncertainty of the issue of the pending fight.” 15
Here was another parallel between this American great fear and the grande peur in France in 1789. The same range of apprehensions appeared in different forms: French peasants worried about “brigands,” while Americans feared the rising of their slaves.
In both countries, strangers became suspect. The women of Framingham prepared to defend themselves against they knew not what. One townsman remembered that “the wife of Capt. Edgell and other matrons brought the axes and pitchforks and clubs into the house, and securely bolted the doors, and passed the day and night in anxious suspense.” Many accounts stress the effect of “anxious suspense” on the nerves of noncombatants. A large part of the great fear arose from uncertainty. 16
But others were clear enough about what should be done. A case in point was the town of Pepperell, twenty miles northwest of Concord. When the men of Pepperell marched away the women came together and held their own town meeting. They organized themselves into a military company, and elected as their captain Prudence Cummings Wright, wife of a leading townsman, and mother of seven children. “Prue” Wright, as she was called, was a deeply religious woman who had joined the Congregational church in 1770. Her family was divided in politics. Her brothers were active Tories, but she and her husband were staunch Whigs. They christened their infant son Liberty Wright.
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