Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  And that was that. Now, for the British, it was well past time to turn for home…but first there would be the march back to Lexington, scene of the day’s first confrontation between the British and the Americans.

  Recalled Lister: “[T]he Light Infantry March’d over a Hill above the Town[,] the Grenadiers through the Town, immediately as we descended the hill into the Road the Rebels begun a brisk fire but at so great a distance it was without effect.”

  Soon, the Americans were closer and the British grenadiers were firing back. “About that time,” said Ensign Lister, “I rec’d a shot through my Right Elbow joint which efectually disabled that Arme.”

  From there all the way to Lexington, added Lister, “it then became a general Firing upon us from all quarters, from behind hedges and Walls.” To be sure, the British returned fire at “every opportunity,” but the harassment by the aroused Colonials was unabating. Lister, in fact, doesn’t even begin to tell the full story.

  For one thing, when the rough dirt road to Lexington reached a creek and stone bridge at Meriam’s Corner, the British had to pull in their flanking parties to squeeze their column across…with an estimated six hundred Americans facing them at the bridge. After more American fire left more British casualties lying on the ground, the light infantrymen charged and chased off their tormentors. Half a mile long, the column hastened on down the road to Lexington, where reinforcements with two light cannon would be awaiting the beleaguered troops.

  First, though, there would be even more severe punishment in store. As an estimated 1,500 armed Americans swarmed about the fields on just one side of the road, the British stumbled onto Hardy’s Hill, where five companies of Minutemen greeted them with withering fire. More redcoats went down.

  Just beyond, at a crook in the road destined to be known as “Bloody Angle,” lurked Woburn’s Minutemen. The booming crack of a single volley took down thirty-one redcoats in an instant, eight of them dead, the rest wounded. The column was held up for thirty minutes clearing this one spot on the road.

  Buffered by natural obstacles alongside the road—swamps, creeks, and the like—the British this time moved on at a trot, with Lexington and relative safety just ahead. First the British had to pass a small wood and cross yet another bridge, then climb three hills to reach the town center.

  Waiting in the woods were the Minutemen from Lexington victimized by the very same British just hours before. To be sure, the Lexington men were spoiling for a fight this time—their lethal volley came as the British began crossing the small bridge. As a nasty fight at close quarters ensued, the delay allowed the Americans pursuing from the countryside to reach the tail end of the column and join in the attack once more.

  Seeing the column being picked to pieces, Major Pitcairn organized a line of defense on the first hill ahead. With his marines barely holding on for a few minutes’ delay of the swarming Americans behind, the rest of the column streamed ahead, only to encounter a fresh blast of fire from Minutemen hidden in the woods crowding the road at the second hill…hidden in nearby houses and barns as well.

  By the time the surviving fragments of the British column cleared the crest of the third and final hill, recalled one British officer later, “We began to run rather than retreat in order.”

  There was a pause just beyond Lexington, where Brigadier Hugh, Lord Percy, was waiting with his two cannon and a brigade of troops. Here at last, it seemed, was salvation for Ensign Lister and his shattered column. As Percy himself later said, “I had the happiness of saving them from complete destruction.”

  For Lister now, a few bad moments. A surgeon’s mate extracted the musket ball from his arm, “it having gone through the Bone and log’d within the Skin.” He blamed the long march, his loss of blood, and the fact he hadn’t eaten (or slept, for that matter) since the day before for his suddenly feeling faint.

  Recovering, he borrowed a horse, begged a mouthful of “Bisquet and Beef” from a soldier, and doused his head with a hatful of cooling water a grenadier obtained from a nearby horse pond. He felt greatly refreshed as the strengthened British column now turned for Bunker Hill and Boston itself, another thirteen miles down the road.

  The redcoats had hardly left Lexington when they met the same stinging harassment as before, with concurrent casualties. Said Lister: “When I had Road [ridden] about 2 Miles I found the Balls whistled so smartly about my Ears I thought it more prudent to dismount and as the Balls came thicker from one side or the other so I went from one side of the Horse to the other for some time.”

  But then a horse close by was shot dead. The animal had been carrying a wounded man on its back, with three more “hanging by his sides.” When they asked Lister for his horse, he readily complied.

  After a major battle at the village of Menotomy (now called Arlington), perhaps involving as many as 5,500 men from both sides, the British column at last staggered onto Charlestown peninsula, a neck of land next to Boston that lay under the cover of the naval guns aboard British warships. It was about 7 P.M. as the survivors of the daylong fracas reached this safe territory. By now, British losses amounted to 73 men killed, another 174 wounded, and 26 missing—373 all told. The American casualties numbered 49 known dead and probably 2 or 3 times that number wounded.

  The British wounded included Ensign Lister, who was greatly relieved to reach Bunker Hill on the Charlestown peninsula without further personal harm. At that point, though, he began to feel faint again. Unable to exercise command over his company’s surviving men, he was taken over to Boston by boat. He then made his way “through the Town” to his lodgings—“where I arrived about 9 oClock after a March in the whole of about 60 Miles in course of 24 Hours, about 24 Miles after I was Wounded.” In all that time, too, he had had no sleep and only a mouthful of food, back in Lexington.

  Unsurprisingly, the young English officer was exhausted by now, but when he arrived at his lodging place he asked for a spot of tea. A Loyalist couple named Funnel who had been driven into town by the rebels was staying at the same house. Others were visiting as well. They noticed that Lister was “light Headed” and urged him to go to bed immediately. But he insisted upon having his tea first, “notwithstanding I was interrupted with a Thousand Questions.”

  ***

  Additional note: Ensign Lister was a chance volunteer for the historic expedition to Lexington and Concord. He took the place of a Lieutenant Hamilton, who had feigned illness to stay behind in Boston rather than venture into the Massachusetts countryside with his troops.

  His Aim Was Death

  MANY AMONG THE REDCOATS STAGGERING BACK TO BOSTON APRIL 19, 1775, from their punitive raid on Concord and Lexington, wondered from that day forward who was that man on a white horse. Perhaps they even wished they had never seen that man on a white horse.

  All the way back on the road from Concord, they repeatedly had to warn one another, “Look out, there is the man on the white horse.”

  If any of them could have stuck around for about ninety years, they would have learned a bit more from West Cambridge’s Rev. Samuel Abbot Smith, a local historian who pieced together the story of the major battle fought that fateful April 19 in his own town, then named Menotomy, later West Cambridge, and finally, its present-day name, Arlington. Part and parcel of the Menotomy story is the running fight the British encountered all the way back to Boston after their raid on Concord, six miles beyond Lexington… where they first exchanged fire with the Patriot Minutemen about sunrise that day.

  It was hours later, of course, when the redcoats turned for home from Concord, harassed from both sides of the lone dirt road that had to be their route back to Boston.

  And it was from Concord onward that the redcoats saw and learned to fear that man on the white horse.

  “He was an old, grey-haired hunter, named Wyman of Woburn, and he rode a fine white horse,” wrote the Reverend Smith in 1864—during the Civil War. “He struck the trail as they [the British] left Concord, and would ride up within g
unshot, then turning the horse throw himself off, aim his long gun resting on the saddle, and that aim was death.” The man on the white horse mounted up again, then he just kept on following the tattered column of redcoats.

  Smith may have lived during another century, another cataclysmic war, but he was able to interview descendants of the many men and women alive during the Revolution. Smith obtained this glimpse of Old Man Wyman under pursuit by the British flankers who sometimes succeeded in clearing the sides of the long route home:

  James Russell, the father of James Russell, Esq., then a boy of a dozen years, from behind a house on Charlestown street, saw him gallop across the brook and up the hill, pursued by a party of the flank guard who kept the plains [clear] midway between Charlestown and Main streets.

  He turned, aimed, and the boy saw one of the British fall.

  He rode on, and soon the same gun was heard again, this time also with deadly effect.

  (The Reverend Smith’s account of the Battle of Menotomy appears as a facsimile booklet published by the Arlington Historical Society under the title West Cambridge 1775. The original, composed as a lecture, was published in 1864. At the time, Smith was minister of the First Congregational Parish Unitarian Church in West Cambridge, now Arlington.)

  Biggest Battle of the Day

  IN LITTLE MENOTOMY ABOUT TWO O’CLOCK THE MORNING OF APRIL 19, THE townspeople heard the tramp, tramp, of passing soldiers. They heard and felt the measured tread of hundreds of feet. In one house by the road running through town, the rattle of pewter plates on a dresser awoke a man and sent him scurrying to his window. He saw the British…out of Boston and on their way to Lexington and Concord.

  The redcoats didn’t stop. Off in those two distant towns, they would trigger the opening shots of the American Revolution. As a result, Lexington and Concord are the names remembered today.

  But later in the day, they would be coming back. They would be returning to their base in Boston, and they again would be passing through little Menotomy.

  And here, in the town later known as West Cambridge and today named Arlington, Massachusetts, the British and the American Patriots would be fighting the biggest battle of the day. Here, each side would suffer its greatest number of casualties. Here, a housewife returning home after the gunfire would find twelve bodies lying side by side in a giant pool of blood, including the body of her own husband.

  This was a bloody, sometimes hand-to-hand fight with gunfire and bayonet, between soldier and volunteer citizen-soldier, even between soldier and old men.

  After the first British column marched through in the dark hours of early morning, there would be three more British incursions at Menotomy. Between nine and ten o’clock that morning, Lord Hugh Percy’s relief column of one thousand men came tramping through town to meet the original expedition as it fought its way back to Lexington from Concord beyond. Eight-year-old Ephraim Cutter watched in awe—and many years later told his grandchildren that the marching men, their bayonets glittering in the sunlight, looked like a river flowing through the small village.

  The solemn symmetry was spoiled for one moment, however, as a cow left the roadside and ambled across, right through the serried British ranks. A small girl minding the cow for her mother ambled along beside the animal unscathed. According to local lore, the nearest soldiers said, “We will not hurt the child.” The British column moved on, sometimes marching to the spirited tune of “Yankee Doodle” in a calculated insult to any pretentious rebels who might be listening.

  Next to come along, also headed outbound, would be Percy’s supply train… fated, as events turned out, never to catch up with him and his troops. And finally, late in the afternoon, would come the two British columns seen earlier, but returning to base now, badly battered, many of the men exhausted, others wounded, and all fighting their way home through the swarms of angry militiamen harassing them from both sides of the road.

  But first, the fate of that supply train. It at one time had been close on the heels of Lord Percy’s marching troops and two accompanying field pieces, but all had been forced to a brief halt at Brighton Bridge because the bridge’s planks had been removed by area rebels. With the missing boards simply left on the far side, it didn’t take the redcoats long to replace them and cross over.

  However, the supply train and its cumbersome wagons did not have such an easy crossing. That was one delay separating the two segments of the relief column. Another was a mistaken direction taken by the wagoners. As a result, the supply train was reported approaching a fully alerted Menotomy long minutes after Lord Percy and his men had marched through the village on their way to Lexington.

  An alerted Menotomy at this hour did not necessarily mean a Menotomy in full fighting fettle, since most of the town’s young men, its Minutemen, had galloped off in the direction the British had taken, both during the night and again in midmorning. Those remaining, aside from the women and children, were the so-called “old men” of town—men who were certainly older and exempt from militia duty but in some cases combat-baptized veterans of the French and Indian War.

  Several of these old men met at Cooper’s Tavern, on the corner of the Medford and Charlestown roads, and decided to ambush the supply train as it passed through the very center of the village. They elected David Lamson, described as part Indian, as their leader, then took cover just down the road from their meeting place.

  When the supply convoy drew abreast minutes later, Menotomy’s “old men” rose with their firearms aimed at the horses—Lamson shouted orders to stop and surrender. But the teamsters instead urged their horses ahead. A crackling volley of rebel fire brought down several horses in their traces—and may have killed two of the British. The result was capture of all the supplies and provisions, an unexpected windfall for the area’s militiamen.

  The remainder of the drivers and guards, just a handful, really, then fled to a nearby pond and threw their weapons into the water. The local story is that they gave themselves up to an old woman digging dandelions nearby. She turned them over to a group of local men at the home of Captain Ephraim Frost on the Watertown Road, telling them: “If you ever live to get back, you tell King George that an old woman took six of his grenadiers prisoners.”

  They later were exchanged, and the story, if not all six men, did get back to England. It appeared in various newspapers with the line: “If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

  What happened the rest of the day in Menotomy, however, was no joke for anyone involved. It was nearly 4:30 P.M. when the returning British, now formed into one column, negotiated Pierce’s Hill west of town (today’s Arlington Heights), then plunged down the other side to the lower “Foot of the Rocks.” This was now a truly tattered British column under nearly constant militia fire from the sides of the road. Probably 1,700 men from 35 village militia companies were on hand as the weary redcoats passed from Foot of the Rocks into the center of Menotomy on the road known today as Massachusetts Avenue. Some of the rebels ventured so close, they and their adversaries fell into hand-to-hand struggle.

  In one such case, an American doctor from the Brookline and Roxbury companies, Eliphalet Downer, found himself under deadly threat from a redcoat employing the bayonet. No expert in this kind of fighting, the doctor reversed his grip and swung the butt end of his musket as a club. After knocking down his foe, Dr. Downer then made the intended use of his own bayonet.

  Just past the Rocks, meanwhile, Lord Percy halted his men long enough to fire his cannon and scatter their incessant pursuers—but only briefly. Then on into Menotomy proper and a burst of eighteenth-century street fighting. Before the British could emerge from this gauntlet in their path an hour or so later, forty or more of their troops were killed, along with at least twenty-five Americans. Houses were set on fire, ordinary civilians were shot, others bayoneted.

  On the western edge of town was the home of Jason Russell, fifty-eight and lame. He
had sent his wife and children to safe refuge earlier. Then, saying, “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” insisted on staying at the house and, if need be, defending it. He had hardly barricaded his gate when a group of Minutemen were surprised nearby by British flankers and ran for cover in Russell’s house. He turned to join them, but was last to reach his own doorway and fell with two musket balls lodged in his body. He also would suffer eleven bayonet wounds at the hands of the onrushing redcoats, who now burst through the door in pursuit of the Minutemen. Inside the house, the redcoats shot or used the bayonet on anybody else they could find—but they balked at going down the cellar steps when the armed Americans hiding below threatened to kill anyone coming down the stairs.

  One redcoat did try, and he was shot. Another apparently was killed in the melee upstairs. Before leaving, the British looted the house. Mrs. Russell later found her dead husband and eleven other bodies laid on the bloody floor of her home’s south room.

  In another soldier-civilian encounter, the British stormed into a church deacon’s house and found his wife and newborn infant on a bed. Unaware that five more children were hiding under the bed, they ordered her and the baby out of the house and announced they would burn it down. According to the account pieced together by local minister Samuel Abbot Smith nearly a century later, the children under the bed watched the feet of the intruders as they looted the room. One boy, just nine, peeked out for a better look and was seen by a soldier.

  “Why don’t you come out of there?” said the soldier.

  “You’ll kill me if I do,” answered the boy.