Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  About three hundred yards to the northwest of the bridge was a low, flat-topped hill on which one of the companies of British troops was positioned. Leaving the women and children and dogs on Punkatasset Hill, the American militiamen began marching toward the British position, about a thousand yards away. The New Englanders were relieved to watch the company of regulars hurriedly abandon their initial position and join the other company closer to the bridge.

  For the next hour, the American militia and the British regulars stood at ease watching each other, with only a few hundred yards between them. The Concord River flooded each spring, and the road leading down to the North Bridge had to curve around an inlet of seasonal marshland, where a causeway connected the road to the bridge. A cool westerly breeze surged across the surrounding meadow. According to tradition, the militia company from nearby Bedford carried a crimson flag (which still exists) depicting an armored arm reaching out of the clouds with a sword clenched in its fist. The Latin phrase “Vince aut Morire” (Conquer or Die) was emblazoned around this forbidding, celestial-looking appendage, which, thanks to the wind direction, would have been clearly visible to the regulars on the bridge, especially if one of the officers had a spyglass.

  Flags such as this had been carried into battle during the English Civil War; they’d also accompanied the militiamen’s forefathers during King Philip’s War, when the region’s Wampanoags, Nipmucks, and Narragansetts had been reviled by the English as the literal children of Satan. Now that New England’s original inhabitants had been defeated, this most recent generation of colonists looked back on the struggles of the past with some nostalgia. Rather than despise the foes of their ancestors, they had begun to invoke and even honor their memory. Whether they disguised themselves as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party or had come to recognize the tactical advantages of what their forefathers had once dismissed as the Indians’ “skulking way of war,” these men had moved in directions that would have been inconceivable to the Puritans of the past. After generations of adapting to their surroundings, they had become a people who were profoundly different from the British regulars watching them tensely from the North Bridge.

  At least one militiaman, however, was a relative newcomer to Massachusetts. At some point, James Nichols, the owner of a farm in Lincoln and recently emigrated from England, handed his musket to one of his townsmen. “I will go down and talk to them,” he said. He walked to the bridge and struck up a conversation with the British officers. After a while, he returned to the hill. Nichols, who was described as a “good droll fellow and a fine singer,” clearly had no heart for what was about to transpire. It was time, he said, to head home. With gun in hand, James Nichols walked away.

  —

  The alarm had reached the town of Acton around 3:00 a.m. Thanks to the thirty-year-old gunsmith Isaac Davis, Acton had one of the best-equipped militia companies in the province. Not only did Davis have a beautiful musket of his own manufacture but he had equipped each of the men in his company with a bayonet. They were also well practiced, having met at Davis’s home twice a week since November 1774.

  But on the morning of April 19, as he prepared to lead his men to Concord, about six miles to the southeast, Davis was, according to his wife, “anxious and thoughtful.” Several of their four children were suffering from scarlet fever. By about seven o’clock, more than twenty militiamen had collected at the Davis house, and Isaac decided they must leave. His wife believed that he had “something to communicate” as he took up his musket and cartridge box, but, unable to find the words, he simply said, “Take good care of the children,” and walked out the door.

  They marched quickly past the Acton Meetinghouse and, soon after that, past Brooks Tavern, where they were greeted by handkerchiefs waving from the windows and doorway. All the while additional members of their company kept catching up to them and falling into line until they eventually comprised thirty-eight men, close to the entire company.

  After following the road for several miles, they took a shortcut along a woodland path and two miles later found themselves at the edge of a field overlooking the home of Colonel Barrett. They could see Captain Parsons and his men moving about the property, looking for stores. Staying off the main road and marching on a direct line through the fields, they passed a tavern kept by the widow Brown, about a mile from the North Bridge. Thirteen-year-old Charles Handley was living at the tavern then; years later he would remember hearing Davis’s fifer play “The White Cockade,” a bouncy Scottish tune that memorialized Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed attempt to overthrow the British king. During that 1745 uprising the prince had placed a white rose on his bonnet, and thus the “white cockade” became an emblem of rebellion. With the fife and drum playing this song of defiance, Captain Isaac Davis and his men marched toward the North Bridge of Concord.

  —

  By about nine that morning, somewhere between four and five hundred militiamen had assembled on the flat-topped hill overlooking the river. In addition to those from Concord, Lincoln, and Bedford, officers and men had arrived from Carlisle, Chelmsford, Groton, Littleton, and Stow, including Lieutenant Colonel John Robinson, who had just arrived ahead of his militia companies from Westford. At some point, they were joined by Captain Davis’s company from Acton.

  As they had been doing for several hours now, Colonel Barrett and his officers were discussing what to do next. Then someone pointed out that smoke had begun to rise from the center of Concord. This was the opportunity for which Lieutenant Hosmer had been waiting all morning.

  Hosmer had a history of taking adversarial positions at town meetings. He was also a militant patriot, and he’d probably grown increasingly impatient with Colonel Barrett’s reluctance to engage the British. As billows of smoke continued to rise into the windy sunshine, he turned to Barrett and said, “Will you let them burn the town down?”

  —

  Colonel Smith and Major Pitcairn had fared no better than Captain Parsons in their search for military stores in Concord’s town center. The townspeople were, Colonel Smith later reported to General Gage, “sulky,” and in one instance a man even attacked Major Pitcairn, who scored one of the few successes that morning when he came upon three rusty cannon barrels. As the burly grenadiers moved about the houses, some of the officers sat in the sun on chairs that they’d temporarily confiscated, sipping hard cider.

  As at the Barrett farm, the regulars came upon a few wooden gun carriages, which they burned in the road along with some other wooden objects, including the town’s liberty pole. When the wind took hold of the flames and the conflagration spread to the nearby Town House, local matron Martha Moulton urged the officers to put out the fire. When they equivocated, saying, “Oh, Mother, don’t be concerned,” Moulton took up a pail of water and shamed them into helping her. Soon a bucket brigade had succeeded in extinguishing the flames, creating the cloud of smoke that the militiamen saw from the hill on the other side of the Concord River. The regulars weren’t burning the town; they were doing their best to save it.

  —

  All of this was lost, however, on the militiamen and their officers. As far as they were concerned, Concord was about to be burned to the ground by the regulars. Colonel Barrett reluctantly decided that they must challenge the soldiers at the bridge and rescue the town. If they got lucky, the regulars would let them pass unmolested. If not and the bridge became a scene of brutal fighting, the company leading the militiamen must have bayonets. Other captains volunteered, but their companies were not as well equipped as the men from Acton, and Isaac Davis was given the honor of leading them toward the regulars gathered at the North Bridge. “I have not a man that is afraid to go,” he assured the other militia officers. Concord’s schoolmaster was present that morning, and years later he remembered how Davis’s face “reddened at the word of command.” Davis’s cheeks may have been suffused with a flush of pride and resolve, but he may have also been sufferin
g, like his children, from scarlet fever.

  Davis’s Acton company moved from the left of the line to what became the front of the column. Marching beside Davis were Concord’s Major John Buttrick and Westford’s Lieutenant Colonel John Robinson. The militia followed behind them in files of two, normally not a fighting formation. In the rear and on horseback, Colonel Barrett repeated to each passing company not to fire first.

  —

  Even though men had already been killed at Lexington, many later looked to what was about to happen at the North Bridge as the start of the American Revolution. But, in truth, this was hardly the first time that armed colonists had actively opposed the British military. Back on December 14, the citizens of New Hampshire had attacked Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth and taken the king’s gunpowder and artillery. Two and a half years before that, on June 9, 1772, a British customs schooner, HMS Gaspée, had been boarded and burned by a group of Rhode Islanders led by the merchant John Brown. In both incidents, American colonists had initiated an attack with the intention of taking or destroying the crown’s property.

  But the events at the North Bridge were to be different. The militiamen were not out to storm a fort or scuttle a hated customs vessel. They simply wanted to save their town. But first they must cross a river.

  —

  The three companies of British regulars at the bridge were commanded by Captain Walter Laurie, who had long since sent a message to Colonel Smith calling for reinforcements. Laurie’s hundred or so soldiers were clustered on the west side of the bridge, but when they realized that the militiamen were headed toward them, marching, one of his officers wrote, “with as much order as the best disciplined troops,” Laurie ordered his own men back across the bridge. Now most of his force was concentrated in a single group on the east side of the river, with the bridge between them and the approaching militiamen.

  Two of Laurie’s officers lingered on the bridge and began to pull up some of the planks so as to impede the progress of the militiamen. In the meantime, Laurie tried to assemble two of his companies into what was known as a street-firing formation. After firing, the soldiers kneeling in the front rows would peel off to the sides to reload as those behind moved forward to continue the firing. Maximizing firepower in a confined space, street-firing, if performed properly, might have succeeded in holding the bridge until reinforcements arrived. But as it turned out, Laurie, like Lexington militia captain John Parker before him, hadn’t given himself enough time to prepare his men.

  As Laurie struggled to get his troops organized, Lieutenant William Sutherland and a handful of men leaped over the wall on the left side of the road leading to the bridge. Sutherland immediately realized that since the road on the other side of the river curved as it approached the bridge, he and his men would have a clear shot of the right flank, or side, of the militia companies before they crossed the river. By this time Concord’s Major Buttrick was yelling at the regulars to stop pulling up the planks as Captain Laurie’s soldiers did their best to follow their own commander’s undoubtedly hurried orders.

  Sutherland or one of the men who were with him on the left may have fired the first shot—what seems to have been a warning shot that skipped across the surface of the river. Two more shots were fired, and then came the British volley.

  In an engraving based on the testimony of eyewitnesses collected within weeks of the fighting, gray-brown powder smoke billows from the muskets of the regulars bunched on the narrow road to the right. To the left, on the west side of the river, are the militiamen, who have just reached the other side of the bridge, a crude hundred-foot arch of posts and boards. Beneath the bridge, the river flows past, a tranquil strip of blue between the two opposing columns.

  —

  The regulars’ muskets had a muzzle velocity of approximately a thousand feet per second, meaning that the ball left the barrel at less than a third the speed of a bullet fired by a modern rifle. In an effort to offset the effects of gravity and increase the musket’s range, the regulars tended to fire high. At the North Bridge, many of them fired too high.

  Militiaman Amos Barrett of Concord remembered that “their balls whistled well.” Isaac Davis’s brother Ezekiel’s head was grazed when a bullet passed through his hat. Virtually the same thing happened to Joshua Brooks of Lincoln. The many high, slashing wounds prompted one militiaman to conclude that “the British were firing jack-knives.”

  But some of the regulars had better aim. A ball that passed under the arm of Lieutenant Colonel Robinson grazed the side of fifer Luther Blanchard before it hit the Concord minuteman Jonas Brown. Acton private Abner Hosmer was shot through the face and killed instantly. Captain Isaac Davis, marching in the front row beside Major Buttrick and Lieutenant Colonel Robinson, was hit in the chest, and the musket ball, which may have driven a shirt button through an artery and out his back, opened up a gush of blood that extended at least ten feet behind him, drenching David Forbush and Thomas Thorp and covering the stones in front of the North Bridge with a slick of gore.

  Captain David Brown had never uttered a profanity in his life, but when he realized that the regulars were firing with deadly intent, he could not help himself. “God damn them,” he cried, “they are firing balls!”

  —

  Reverend William Emerson’s house was on the east side of the river and overlooked the bridge. Just as Punkatasset Hill had become a gathering point for the women and children of Concord, so had his parsonage attracted a large number of the town’s inhabitants. He’d spent much of the morning attending to these people—until his wife had huffily tapped on the windowpane and motioned for him to come inside and pay attention to her.

  By the time the militiamen began to march toward the North Bridge, Emerson had walked from his house toward the river. When the first shots were fired, he was closer to the regulars than the nearest provincials, which meant that he had a clear view of the devastating volley that killed Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer.

  A month before, on March 13, Emerson had delivered a sermon in which he assured his parishioners that “a consciousness of having acted up to the principles of our religion . . . when we go forth to battle will be a most comfortable antidote against fear and cowardice, and serve to stimulate us to the most heroic actions.” He believed every word of that sermon but still could not help but wonder how these farmers and artisans would respond to the volley. Later, he admitted to his fellow clergyman William Gordon that he was “very uneasy until he found that the fire was returned.”

  —

  Major John Buttrick leaped into the air and cried, “Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake fire!” According to Thaddeus Blood, “The cry of fire, fire was made from front to rear. The fire was almost simultaneous with the cry.”

  Lieutenant Sutherland and the men on the British left flank soon discovered that they were dreadfully exposed to the militiamen’s musket balls. Sutherland got spun around by a hit to the chest, and two privates fell beside him dead or mortally wounded. Captain Laurie’s attempts to maintain a blistering rate of fire were stymied by the almost immediate loss of four of eight officers. As the militia and minutemen made their way across the bridge, those in front kneeling so that those behind could fire over their heads, British resistance crumbled, and the regulars, despite Laurie’s protestations, turned and fled. “The weight of their fire was such,” Lieutenant Jeremy Lister wrote, “that we was obliged to give way, then run with the greatest precipitance.” According to militiaman Amos Barrett, “There were eight or ten that were wounded and a running and a hobbling about, looking back to see if we were after them.”

  The provincials streamed across the bridge but seemed unwilling to continue the fighting. Part of the problem was that the regulars’ commanding officer, Colonel Smith, had arrived from the center of Concord with reinforcements. The militiamen may have also realized by this point that Concord was not in fact burning. The shocking l
oss of Captain Isaac Davis could have also contributed to the sudden absence of resolve. But perhaps the biggest reason the militia stopped firing on the British was the realization that something truly momentous had just occurred. They had done much more than fire on British troops; they had forced three companies of light infantry to retreat. It was a victory, of sorts, but for what purpose? The town, it turned out, was not in flames. The British had fired the first shot, but the provincials had clearly forced the issue by marching on the bridge, and people had died on both sides. The only directive the Provincial Congress had provided was the necessity of not firing the first shot. Now that the shot had been fired, should the militiamen continue to fight? Or should they return to waiting for the other side to make the next move? Instead of iron resolve, hesitation and confusion reigned in the aftermath of the confrontation at the North Bridge.

  Colonel James Barrett and roughly half his force backtracked to the other side of the river and eventually returned to Punkatasset Hill. Major Buttrick and a few hundred minutemen continued across the bridge and climbed into the ridge of hills that overlooked the road leading into Concord, where they took up a position behind a stone wall. Below them on the road, about 250 yards away, Colonel Smith and the grenadiers met up with the remnants of Captain Laurie’s three companies. “There we lay,” the militiaman Amos Barrett remembered, “behind the wall, about 200 of us, with our guns cocked expecting every minute to have the word—fire; . . . if we had fired, I believe we would have killed almost every officer there was in front. . . . They stayed there about 10 minutes and then marched back and we after them.”

  No provincial officer seemed willing to take charge after the fighting at the North Bridge. According to Thaddeus Blood, “everyone appeared to be his own commander.” In this vacuum of leadership, Private Ammi White, in his early twenties, came upon one of the infantrymen who had fallen on the British left flank. Like several others, the regular had been left behind in the chaotic retreat from the North Bridge. Exactly what happened next is difficult to determine. The soldier was injured but still very much alive, and he may have tried to defend himself with his bayonet. Whether it was out of anger or fear, Ammi took up his hatchet and struck the wounded soldier repeatedly in the head. The Reverend Emerson watched the attack and seems to have been more disturbed by the incident than Ammi, who years later confided that he simply did what he thought was expected of a soldier in the midst of battle.