Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Most of the militiamen, however, never even fired their guns. Several were killed while sprinting for cover. Jonathan Harrington lived on the west side of the common and was shot down as he ran for the safety of his house. His horrified wife and children watched as he crawled across the dusty road and died on their doorstep. Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson, the two men from Woburn who had been captured earlier that night by the British advance guard, were released on the Lexington Green. Both were warned to walk and not run as they made their way to safety. Richardson did as ordered and survived, but Porter panicked and was gunned down as he ran from the British troops. Several horses were spooked by the blast and crackle of gunfire and carried their riders—including Lieutenant Sutherland—on wild rides around the green and beyond. In the meantime, Major Pitcairn, whom a patriot minister described as “a good man in a bad cause,” tried desperately to put a stop to the chaos and “struck his . . . sword downwards with all earnestness” as a signal to cease fire.

  Order wasn’t restored until Colonel Smith and the grenadiers finally caught up to the light infantry. With the help of Lieutenant Sutherland, Smith found a drummer, whom he commanded to sound the beat to arms, which was the signal for the men to regroup into ranks. According to Sutherland, this did not prevent a few more shots from being fired by the provincials in Buckman’s Tavern. Now that most of the militiamen had been sent “scampering off,” the infuriated infantrymen were about to turn their attention to the tavern and the meetinghouse. Smith wrote that the soldiers were “much enraged at the treatment they had received, and having been fired on from the houses repeatedly were going to break them open to come at those within.” If something was not done quickly, anyone still in those buildings was sure to be killed. What Smith and the regulars didn’t know was that in the attic of the meetinghouse, the militiaman Joshua Simons waited with the barrel of his musket thrust into a keg of powder. If the soldiers attacked, he was going to make sure that none of them lived to claim the town’s powder.

  Luckily, Colonel Smith succeeded in “putting a stop to all further slaughter of those deluded people.” The infantrymen reluctantly fell into line and after firing a victory salute gave three rousing huzzas. Besides Pitcairn’s twice-wounded horse and two soldiers who had received minor injuries, all the casualties had been suffered by the provincials, with eight dead and ten wounded, including Prince Estabrook, who became the first African American casualty of the Revolution since the death of the black sailor Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre.

  —

  From the standpoint of the British, the skirmish at Lexington had been a disaster. For a frighteningly extended period of time, Colonel Smith and his officers had lost control of their men. Even after the infantrymen had been induced to stop firing their muskets, it took a while to calm them down. “We then formed on the Common,” Lieutenant John Barker wrote in his diary, “but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders.”

  Part of the problem had to do with Gage’s decision to put together an expedition made up of grenadiers and light infantrymen rather than go with one of the three brigades that made up the force he had in Boston. Although these seven hundred men represented the elite in his army, they had never trained together and were unfamiliar, for the most part, with the officers who were now commanding them. The trust and cohesion that went with a group of men who had been training and living together for several years did not exist among Smith’s expedition. Throughout the long day ahead, orders given by the British officers were either misinterpreted or ignored, an inevitable result of unfamiliarity in a time of crisis.

  Compounding the difficulty was the fact that they were already fourteen miles into what they now knew was enemy territory. The prospect of the march back to Boston through a countryside that was rapidly filling up with militiamen was daunting, to say the least. In fact, when shortly after the incident at Lexington, Colonel Smith revealed for the first time the purpose of their mission, several of his officers advised him to turn back. “From what they had seen . . . ,” Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie wrote, “they imagined it would be impracticable to advance to Concord and execute their orders.” Colonel Smith simply told them that he was “determined to obey the orders he had received,” and they continued on to Concord.

  —

  The encounter at Lexington was just as disastrous for the town’s militiamen, who suffered what might be termed the country equivalent of the Boston Massacre. It apparently made no difference that, unlike the Bostonians, who had been armed with only clubs, rocks, and snowballs, the militiamen were equipped with muskets. Once the king’s troops had been goaded into firing their weapons, the Lexington militia suffered casualties that were as lopsided as those suffered by the crowd in Boston in 1770. Just as determining who was at fault became a hotly contested political issue in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, so was what happened at Lexington about to spark a controversy that persists to this day as to who was the first to discharge his musket or pistol.

  The real question was not who fired the first shot, but why were Parker and his men on the Lexington Green in the first place? Seventy or so militiamen had no chance of stopping an advance guard of more than two hundred British regulars. Instead of spending much of the early-morning hours drinking at Buckman’s Tavern and then stubbornly lingering on the green, the Lexington militia should have already been in Concord, where they could have helped hide and ultimately defend the military stores. As it was, they had almost called attention to what few kegs of powder they had hidden in the town’s meetinghouse. What purpose was to be served by standing out there on the grass as the soldiers marched by?

  Years later, General William Heath, who was about to join with Joseph Warren and play an important role in subsequent events that day, commented that by standing so near the road, Parker and his men had been guilty of “too much braving for danger [since] they were sure to meet with insult, or injury, which they could not repel.” If they were intent on engaging the British, they should have been where many of them ended up: behind a stone wall.

  Some have speculated that Samuel Adams may have been responsible for the militia being on the Lexington Green. Since Adams had a reputation for stage-managing events, whether it was the selection of the province’s delegates to the Continental Congress in June or Warren’s Massacre Day Oration in March, perhaps he accompanied John Hancock to the Lexington Green and convinced Captain Parker to make a stand against the British. However, Hancock, not Adams, was Lexington’s local hero, and he had been the one who, according to William Munroe, proclaimed just minutes before the skirmish, “If I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops.” Parker may very well have had Hancock’s words in mind when he initially told his men to stand their ground.

  Thanks to Reverend William Gordon’s account of the events of that day, we know that as Adams and Hancock beat a hasty retreat from Lexington, Adams proclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” Hancock missed his meaning entirely and thought his companion was talking about the weather. “I mean,” Adams insisted, “this is a glorious day for America.”

  Hancock was not as thickheaded as Samuel Adams, who apparently recounted the exchange to Gordon, seemed to imply. Being a businessman, Hancock possessed a practical sense of the human resources required to get a job properly done. Adams was more of a theorist, a man who always had his eye on the bigger picture and who never seems to have allowed the paltry concerns of individuals to interfere with his pursuit of American liberty. For him, any event that furthered the cause—even a confused and heartrending event such as the Boston Massacre—was “glorious.” Hancock, on the other hand, had seen for himself the men who were about to face the British at Lexington, and he appears to have been less taken with the patriotic possibilities of what was about to unfold. According to his fiancée, he described the militiamen as “but partially provided with arms and those they had were in most
miserable order.” He may have quite rightly suspected that he and Adams were leaving a slaughter in their wake.

  Hancock, in the end, had the wisdom not to take the field at Lexington Green. In just a few hours’ time, Joseph Warren was about to make a very different decision.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Bridge

  The morning of April 19, 1775, marked the beginning of a beautiful spring day in New England. The unusually warm winter meant that the trees and flowers were ahead of themselves that April, and the foliage dotting the surrounding fields was hazed with blossoms and the bright green buds of emerging leaves. Now that the column’s presence was no longer a secret, Colonel Francis Smith ordered the fifers and drummers to strike up a tune during the six-mile march to Concord.

  Mary Hartwell lived in the town of Lincoln, just to the west of Lexington. Her husband Samuel was a sergeant in the local militia, but that did not prevent her from appreciating what she saw that morning when she looked out her window. “The army of the king was coming up in fine order,” she later told her grandchildren, “their red coats were brilliant, and their bayonets glistening in the sunlight made a fine appearance; but I knew what all that meant, and I feared that I should never see your grandfather again.”

  Colonel Smith seems to have made a special effort to instill a renewed sense of discipline among his troops that morning. The British army had a long and distinguished tradition to uphold, and Smith later claimed that despite being shot at twice from the surrounding woods, his men marched from Lexington to Concord “with as much good order as ever troops observed in Britain or any other friendly country.”

  The fact remained, however, that they were not in a friendly country. But was this truly enemy territory? Twenty years before, the regulars had been looked to as the allies, if not the saviors, of the New Englanders as they marched together over these same country roads on their way to battle the French and Indians. Now that the enemy in that war had been defeated, the New Englanders were acting as if the New World of their Puritan ancestors was theirs and theirs alone. It was left to Colonel Smith and his regulars to remind these people that this was still British soil.

  —

  Concord is a town surrounded by hills. In 1775, it was also a town where open fields, crisscrossed by stone walls, predominated. This meant that the small group of militiamen gathered on Meriam’s Hill at the intersection of the road to Concord and the road to Bedford, about a mile from the center of Concord, had plenty of time to watch the long line of British troops approaching from the east. And like Mary Hartwell before them, they were transfixed by the spectacle of seven hundred British regulars marching through the clear morning air. “The sun was rising and shined on their arms,” the magnificently named Thaddeus Blood remembered, “and they made a noble appearance in their red coats.”

  Unlike what had happened just a few hours before in Lexington, when in the dim light of dawn the troops had burst upon the green in a terrifying rush, the people of Concord had ample, if not too much, time to contemplate what these colorfully dressed soldiers were about. Definitive word of what had happened at Lexington had not yet reached Concord. Since the militiamen had been directed not to fire the first shot, there were to be several tense and agonizing hours to come as the militia’s leaders, full of hesitancy and indecision, tried to figure out what to do.

  —

  On a hill overlooking the town’s meetinghouse, which just the week before had been the temporary home of the Provincial Congress, stood most of Concord’s militia along with a group of civil, military, and religious leaders. Near this collection of elders was a liberty pole topped by a flag, which like the flag in Taunton may have read “Liberty and Union.” One of the youngest members of this distinguished group was the minister William Emerson, thirty-two. All winter and spring he had been encouraging the town’s residents to resist British attempts to limit their God-given liberties. “Let us stand our ground,” he insisted that morning. “If we die, let us die here!”

  Others, such as Colonel James Barrett, sixty-five, a veteran of the French and Indian War whose house on the other side of the Concord River was where many of the most critical military stores were now hidden, had less enthusiasm for forcing a confrontation. The debate continued even as the advance guard of militia that had been monitoring the British rushed into town with the regulars at their heels. Finally they decided to abandon their position beside the liberty pole and retreat with the town’s women and children across the North Bridge to the militias’ prearranged meeting place at Punkatasset Hill, about a mile from the town center, where they could monitor the British and yet be out of the regulars’ immediate reach.

  It irked them to watch as the soldiers marched into the almost empty town, cut down the liberty pole, and began searching for the cannons, ammunition, and other military equipment that Gage’s spies had reported to be hidden in the inhabitants’ homes. Most alarming for Colonel Barrett was the sight of seven companies of light infantrymen heading for the North Bridge in the direction of his farm. Once at the bridge, the commander of the British detachment, Captain Lawrence Parsons, left three companies to guard the crossing in anticipation of his eventual return as he pushed ahead with four companies toward the Barrett homestead, about two miles from the bridge. By that time Colonel Barrett had left Punkatasset Hill and was on his way to warn his wife and family that the regulars were coming.

  —

  The Barretts had spent the previous day and night preparing for this eventuality. Barrett’s fourteen-year-old grandson, James, had led a team of oxen towing a cart full of military supplies to a nearby swamp, where he and his companions hid the stores under pine boughs. South of the barn, others plowed up a thirty-foot-square section of field and, instead of sowing it with seed, laid muskets in the trenches. Some of the cannons were laid under a bed of sage; other pieces of artillery were buried beneath a mound of manure.

  As soon as he arrived that morning, Barrett encouraged his wife, Rebeckah, to flee. “No,” she replied. “I can’t live very long anyway, and I’d rather stay and see that they don’t burn down the house and barn.” While her husband returned to Punkatasset Hill by a back route through the woods, she and her family made some final preparations in anticipation of the soldiers’ arrival.

  —

  Captain Parsons was led to the Barrett farm by Ensign Henry DeBerniere, one of the two British spies that Gage had sent out that winter into the New England countryside. Upon meeting Mrs. Barrett, Parsons immediately realized that this was not going to be easy. She expected, she sternly informed him, that he and his men would “respect private property.” Once he assured her that this was the case, she proceeded to shadow his every move, repeatedly reminding him of his promise and in several instances providing enough of a distraction to steer his men away from hidden caches of bullets and other stores. By 8:00 a.m., they’d managed to find only a few wooden gun carriages, which they burned on the road near the corn barn after Mrs. Barrett insisted that they move them away from the larger barn near her house.

  Tired, frustrated, and hungry, Captain Parsons requested something to eat. Mrs. Barrett obliged, and the soldiers enjoyed a meal of brown bread and milk in the same large room the colonel used to muster and organize the Concord militia. When the soldiers insisted she take some coins as payment, Mrs. Barrett replied, “This is the price of blood.”

  —

  By the time Colonel Barrett returned to Punkatasset Hill, the number of militiamen had increased significantly as companies continued to arrive from towns to the west and north of Concord. At the beginning of the morning, the British column of seven hundred men had possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage, but now with the arrival of additional militia companies and with the division of Smith’s force into several isolated battalions, the situation had changed dramatically. At present only about a hundred regulars were at or near the North Bridge, waiting for Captain Parson
s’s return from the Barrett house. The militia leaders assembled on Punkatasset Hill began to contemplate moving their force of somewhere between three and four hundred men closer to the regulars near the bridge.

  Accompanying Colonel Barrett were Major John Buttrick, forty-three, leader of the local regiment of minutemen, as well as five Concord company captains, three of whom were related by blood or marriage to Colonel Barrett. Not all the officers present that morning were inclined to agree with Colonel Barrett; for example, Lieutenant Joseph Hosmer, thirty-nine, already had a well-established reputation for making the lives of the town elders uncomfortable. Instead of deferring to rank when making decisions, these New Englanders followed, in the tradition of the town meeting, a more consensual approach. Eventually they decided that the time was right to make a move toward the North Bridge.