Tories
Page 8
Daniel Murray’s war began when he was accompanying Royal Marine lieutenant Jesse Adair at the head of the advance British force on the road to Concord. Around four a.m., near Menotomy (now Arlington), they heard hoofbeats on the road ahead. Assuming the horsemen were express riders spreading reports of the march, Murray and Adair waited until the riders neared, then dashed from the side of the road to seize the horses’ bridles. After appropriating the horses, Murray and Adair forced the Patriots, Asahel Porter and Josiah Richardson, to march along with the troops.12 This was the first action of the day.
General Gage possessed enough intelligence to provide his Concordstrike force with a map showing exactly where militiamen had hidden “Artillery, Ammunition, Provisions, Tents, Small Arms and … Military Stores.” He gave detailed instructions on how to disable discovered cannons and what to do with other stocks: “The Powder and flower [flour] must be shook out of the Barrels into the River, the Tents burnt, Pork or Beef destroyed in the best way you can devise. And the Men may put Balls of lead in their pockets, throwing them by degrees into Ponds, Ditches &c., but no Quantity together so that they may be recovered afterwards.”13
As the British marched off toward Lexington, the alarm had already been spreading along that same Cambridge road.
The British had learned that Sam Adams and Hancock—two of the “principal actors & abettors” Lord Dartmouth wanted arrested—were somewhere in Lexington. The two Rebel leaders, along with Hancock’s fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, and his aunt Lydia, had been staying at the parsonage of the Reverend Jonas Clarke in Lexington. Dr. Joseph Warren, watching over Boston in Adams’s absence, had sent Paul Revere and William Dawes, by separate routes, to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock that the Regulars were coming. (Dr. Church learned of Revere’s ride from his wife, Rachel, who wrote Paul a letter—” take the best care of yourself”—with £150 enclosed, and entrusted it to Church to deliver. Church passed the letter on to Gage; what happened to the money is not known.)14
Revere and Dawes reached Lexington at just about the time the British had begun their march. Arriving separately, the two riders stopped to warn Hancock and Adams, then set off for Concord.15 On the road they met Samuel Prescott, a young doctor heading home to Concord after an evening spent courting a Lexington woman. A mounted British patrol stopped the riders. Dawes and Prescott managed to gallop away, Dawes back to Lexington, Prescott to Concord. Revere, his horse taken, was held for a while and later released. Other riders, part of a complex militia warning system, sped the Concord Alarm throughout Middlesex County.
About seventy militiamen were mustered on the Lexington green when the leading British troops came up the road.16 Asahel Porter, who had been captured by Murray and Adair, was near the head of the column. Adair wheeled his forward companies toward the militiamen. “No sooner did they come in sight of our company,” Clarke later wrote, “but one of them, supposed to be an officer of rank”—apparently Adair—” was heard to say to the troops, ‘Damn them! We will have them!’” Porter tried to run away from his captors, but he had been doomed by the chance encounter with a British officer and his Loyalist ally. Shot as he ran, he was one of eight Patriots killed at Lexington.17 What happened next to Daniel Murray is not known. The names and exploits of Loyalist volunteers did not usually find their way into official British battle reports.
Capt. John Parker, commander of the Lexington militia, was a battle-hardened veteran of Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian War. He knew what to do when he saw the size of the British force and realized how outnumbered he was. “I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse and not to fire,” he later wrote.18 Maj. John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines, who led the British advance guard into Lexington, said in his official account that when his men got within one hundred yards of the militiamen “they began to File off towards some stone Walls on our Right Flank… . I instantly called to the Soldiers not to Fire,” and “some of the Rebels who had jumped over the Wall, Fired Four or Five Shott at the Soldiers.”
After the militiamen fired more shots, Pitcairn wrote, “without any order or Regularity, the Light Infantry began a scattered Firing … contrary to the repeated orders both of me and the officers that were present.”19 Militiamen’s accounts quote Pitcairn as ordering the Rebels to disperse and then shouting: “Damn you! Why don’t you lay down your arms?” Another remembered an officer yelling: “Disperse, you damned Rebels! You dogs, run! Rush on, my boys!”20 The men kept on shooting until officers managed to get them under control.
“We had a man of the 10th Light Infantry wounded, nobody else was hurt,” a British officer later wrote. “We then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders.” He could not tell how many Rebels were killed “becausethey were behind walls and into the woods… . We waited a considerable time there, and at length proceeded our way to Concord.”21
Neither Revere nor Dawes had reached Concord, but Prescott had, and his news started the Concord Alarm. “This morning between one and two o-clock we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell,” wrote the Reverend William Emerson, whose name was on the Militia Alarm List. Local militiamen began assembling at Wright’s Tavern while militias from other towns headed for Concord.22 A militia officer sent a rider galloping off to Lexington to see if the British were there. He arrived back to report the Lexington firefight.
People in Concord hurried about, finding new hiding places for hoards of ammunition, arms, and supplies. About one hundred and fifty eager young minutemen wanted to confront the British as they approached Concord. But militias were democratic, and a majority voted for a strategic withdrawal to a ridge north of town. Others crossed the North Bridge across the Concord River.
When the British troops arrived, they split into three groups: one at the North Bridge, confronting the minutemen; another in town as a search party for Rebel caches; and a third that crossed the North Bridge to the farm of Col. James Barrett, a French and Indian War veteran who was commander of the militia and overseer of the biggest caches of arms and provisions. Barrett’s collection included twenty thousand pounds of musket balls and cartridges, fifteen thousand canteens, a great number of tents and tools, seventeen thousand pounds of salt fish, thirty-five thousand pounds of rice, and large quantities of beef and pork.23 A great deal of the supplies had been rehidden in nearby towns before the British arrival.
As militiamen began streaming into Concord from other towns, the Patriot force beyond the bridge grew to at least five hundred men, strung out along a ridge overlooking the town center, now populated only by women, children, and men too old or infirm for militia service. British soldiers moved among the glowering residents, dug up three cannons, and knocked off their trunnions, the projections forming an axis on which a cannon pivots up or down; this was the fastestway of disabling the weapon. And they discovered only a small portion of the Rebel stores they had come to find.
Disobeying Gage’s orders, the weary searchers did not load their pockets with bullets. Instead they dumped a large amount of bullets into a millpond, from which they would be recovered the next day. The soldiers piled up wooden gun carriages and set fire to them. They cut down the flag-flying Liberty pole and burned that, too. A couple of buildings began to burn, apparently because of carelessness. The soldiers, who had been ordered not to destroy property, joined the citizens in dousing the fires.
On the ridge, militiamen saw the smoke curling up. Barrett, suddenly in command of townsmen and strangers alike, had good reason to hold back from battle. He faced a superior force and lacked any authority to fire on the British, who had not fired upon his men. Barrett’s adjutant was the minuteman Joseph Hosmer, whom, the Loyalist Daniel Bliss had not long before called Concord’s most dangerous man. Now the fiery Patriot pointed to the smoke rising from the center of Concord, turned to his commanding officer, and said, “Will you let them burn the town down?” Other officers spoke up. Capt. Isaac Davis, who had led his minutemen down the
road from Acton, said, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”
Barrett ordered his men to load their muskets. Many of them remembered that he told them to withhold their fire until the British fired. The militiamen advanced from the ridge, downward toward the North Bridge and the Regulars. The British soldiers pulled back from the bridge, ripping up planks. They formed a volley-firing formation on the other side of the bridge and opened fire, killing Captain Davis and a private.
At a range of about fifty yards the militiamen responded with a volley that killed four of the eight British officers at the bridge. Milling about in panic and confusion, the British began a ragged retreat. Their fat, inept commander, Lt. Col. Francis Smith, managed to get control and stop the retreat. A young American—never positively identified—walked up to a badly wounded Redcoat and, in the wordsof the Reverend Emerson, “not being under the feelings of humanity, very barbarously broke his skull and let his brains out with a small ax,” an auxiliary weapon for many militiamen. “The poor object lived an hour or two before he expired.”24
This first known atrocity of the Revolution would cast a long shadow. Some Patriots would deny it happened, but it triggered savage acts of hate, revenge, and retribution involving British versus Rebels—and Tories versus Rebels.25 British soldiers, angry in retreat, saw the bloody head of their comrade. An enduring rumor swept through their ranks: The Rebels are scalping their foes. The rumor even found its way into official reports. One said that Rebels had “scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded men who fell into their hands.”26
The British withdrew from Concord, bearing some of their wounded in commandeered horse-drawn open carriages. Smith led them to the road they had taken from Lexington. “When we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail, and … we began to run rather than retreat in order,* wrote Henry De Ber-niere in his report to Gage. A month before, De Berniere had been a Gage spy in Concord. On his return to Concord as a soldier, De Berniere survived to report 73 men killed, 154 wounded, and 21 missing.3 American losses were estimated to be 50 killed and/or dead of wounds, 39 wounded, and 5 missing.27
Some thirty-six hundred militiamen were assembling in, or heading for, Lexington.28 Around noon, as the British reached a bend in the road, militiamen struck, ambushing the staggering columns. The militiamen fired from behind rocks, trees, and stone walls on both sides of the narrow road. Several British, many of them targeted officers, were killed. Sergeants took over, leading their men about five hundred yards farther down the road—and into another ambush. About thirty men fell, dead or wounded. Survivors struggled on toward Lexington. Militiamen on a hill fired down, wounding Colonel Smith and knocking him from his saddle. Redcoats charged the hill, killing at least one militiaman. Pitcairn’s horse bolted, throwing himto the ground. Some men stumbled to the side of the road, unable to march any farther. That morning the British had outnumbered the Rebels. In this murderous afternoon, the British were outnumbered, and, it seemed, doomed.
Nearly twelve hours before, Colonel Smith, suddenly aware that the militias were rising, had sent a courier to Gage in Boston asking for reinforcements. Gage had dispatched a brigade under his adjutant, Brig. Gen. Lord Hugh Percy. As the eldest son of the Duke of Northumberland, Percy would inherit the dukedom and an immense fortune, if he did not die on a battlefield. A soldier for half of his thirty-two years, he had arrived in Boston in 1774 as commander of his regiment, the Fifth Foot. He developed a haughty dislike for Bostonians—” a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls, cruel, & cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them compleately,” he wrote to a cousin in England soon after his arrival.29
Now, riding at the head of about one thousand men and two field guns, with fifes and drums playing “Yankee Doodle,” Percy marched with other Americans—Friends of the King, armed Loyalists in civilian clothes, including Winslow, George Leonard, and Samuel Murray. Winslow later reported that his horse had been shot from under him and that Percy had personally cited him for bravery.30 Murray was captured that day and taken to a jail in Worcester. On June 15 he was released “to his father’s homestead in Rutland,” about sixty miles west of Boston.31
The other Loyalists who accompanied Percy are not known. But curiously, there is a record showing that on April 19 a number of “gentlemen volunteers” joined the Loyal American Association under the command of Brigadier Ruggles.32 Some of those gentlemen probably marched off with Percy.
A record in Gage’s files states Leonard’s role: “George Leonard of Boston deposes that he went from Boston on the nineteenth of April with the Brigade commanded by Lord Percy upon their march to Lexington. That being on horseback and having no connexion with the army, he several times went forward of the Brigade.” On a sortie as a spy for Percy about a mile south of Lexington, Leonard met awounded man who “said Some of our pepol fired upon the Regulars; and they fell on us Like Bull Dogs and killed eight & wounded nineteen.” Leonard reported that two other men had told him the same. He added a line that would please Gage, who officially emphasized that the Rebels had fired the first shot at Lexington: “All three Blamed the rashness of their own pepol for fireing first.”33
Instead of marching along the longboat-to-Cambridge route that Smith’s force had taken, Percy led his brigade across Boston Neck, through Roxbury and Brookline, to the Great Bridge that crossed the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Patriots had removed the bridge planks. Percy, anticipating this, had brought along tools, planks, and carpenters. But the thrifty Patriots had put the removed planks nearby, so all Gage’s craftsmen had to do was walk along the risers, retrieve the planks, and replace them.34
In Cambridge, a lieutenant noted, “few or no people were to be seen; and the houses were in general shut up.”35 Percy had hoped for some intelligence from friendly Tories. When he asked a citizen for directions to the Lexington road, the man courteously obliged—and was spotted giving aid to a Redcoat. He was so harassed by angry Patriots that he quickly got out of town.36
As Percy’s men neared Lexington, they heard a rattle of musketry and then saw, under a cloud of dust up the road, the swirling panic of Smith’s force. Percy stopped at Lexington, scanned the scene before him, and acted swiftly. He put his field pieces on two hills and fired on the militiamen, who backed off, stunned. Percy had his men form a hollow square that encompassed the road and stretches of land on either side. The square opened to admit Smith’s exhausted troops, “their tongues hanging out of their mouths, like those of dogs after a chase.”37 Within the defensive square were houses. Percy, seeing them as snipers’ nests, ordered them burned. Flanking troops forced their way into other houses, and, a lieutenant later wrote, “All that were found in the houses were put to death.”38 Another officer noted, however, that “some soldiers who staid too long in the houses were killed in the very act of plundering by those who lay concealed in them.”39 On the march back to Boston, Percy later wrote, his men were “underincessant fire, which like a moving circle surrounded and followed us wherever we went.” As many as five thousand militiamen hounded the British along the eleven-mile gauntlet. The sun had nearly set when the brigade reached Cambridge, where Patriots waited in still another ambush. Redcoats on the flank found them, killing three. Instead of returning on the morning’s route, Percy surprised his pursuers by crossing Charlestown Neck, between the Charles and Mystic rivers, to the hills of Charlestown, protected by the guns of HMS Somerset, anchored near the Charlestown ferry slip.
Percy met with the selectmen of Charlestown and negotiated an armistice. He promised to restrain his men, and the town promised not to attack the troops as they took Somerset longboats and other craft to reach Boston and the refuge of their garrisons.40 Percy’s appraisal of his foe had changed. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob,” he wrote the next day in a letter, “will find himself much mistaken; they have men amongst them who know very well what they are about… .”41
The battle reverberated the next day i
n Marshfield, where about one hundred soldiers of the Queen’s Guards had been quartered on the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Reacting to the attack on Lexington and Concord, militias near Marshfield began preparing for a massive attack on the Guards. On the road to Marshfield, a militia officer, Maj. Judah Alden, happened to meet a slave named Cato.4 The slave told Alden that Captain Balfour had sent him out as a scout to watch for Rebels. Alden told Cato to go back to Balfour and tell him that he had seen a large militia force on its way to Marshfield.
The next morning some five hundred militiamen did march on Marshfield. Crews of fishing boats spotted the marchers and came ashore to join them. But, as the Patriots were preparing to advance on the Thomas estate and attack the Guards, two sloops hove into sight. They anchored off Brant Rock, near Plymouth, and sent off boats for the Guards, who successfully escaped to Boston. The Patriots, primedfor a fight, had to be satisfied with collecting the equipment and supplies left behind in the Guards’ hasty withdrawal.42
A week before the battles of Concord and Lexington, Rebel militiamen from the Taunton area had struck. A large force marched on the Tory-dominated Assonet section of Freetown, about thirty-five miles south of Boston, where the Loyalist militant Thomas Gilbert, aided by his brother Samuel, had organized a Tory countermilitia armed by Gage and nicknamed “Gilbert’s Banditti” by the Patriots. Gilbert claimed to have raised and commanded three hundred Loyalists. In the melee, Samuel Gilbert later said, he lost the sight of his right eye and was rendered “deaf and Stupified by the Blow” he had received to make him sign “what Paper the Rebels desired.”43