Independence Page 17

  The regulars at the bridge fled after one volley, joining their comrades in town. Colonel Smith had long since known that the hoped-for secrecy of his mission had been lost. With the arsenal nearly destroyed, and faced with a march to Boston that would require hours, he immediately abandoned further work in Concord and set his force on its return home. Throughout that golden afternoon, a seemingly endless stream of American militiamen arrived and took up positions along bucolic Concord Road. Before the sun set, men from at least twenty-three Massachusetts villages were present and fighting, and their numbers had swelled to almost three thousand, providing the colonists with a considerable numerical superiority. Firefights raged up and down the road. Militiamen, concealed behind stone walls, trees, barns, and haystacks, laid down a triangulated fire on the retreating regulars. It was a bloodbath, and only the arrival of redcoat reinforcements summoned after the skirmish in Lexington prevented the killing or capture of the entirety of Smith’s original force.

  War brings out the best and the worst in people. Catherine Louisa Smith, Abigail Adams’s sister-in-law, who lived about halfway between Concord and Lexington, helped a badly wounded grenadier into her house and tried to nurse him; the soldier died and was buried on the Yankee farm.51 Heroism was displayed by the fighting men on both sides, but wanton cruelty was in evidence as well. Victimized by snipers who fired from inside houses, contingents of regulars at times stormed dwellings in search of partisans. When the soldiers invaded a home, they often gave no quarter. Those who entered the houses following the battle sometimes found bodies strewn about, and one witness exclaimed that the butchery in one residence was so immense that “Blud was half over [my] Shoes.” Others reported finding civilians who had been stabbed, bludgeoned, and shot, and one told of discovering the inhabitants’ “brains out on the floor and walls.” Not infrequently, the king’s soldiers plundered and burned houses and killed livestock.52

  As darkness spread over the blood-soaked landscape, the regulars at last reached Boston, and safety. By then, 94 colonists were dead or wounded. The British army had suffered 272 casualties. Dartmouth had said in his order to use force that Gage should not expect much opposition. Sixty-five of Gage’s men lay dead at day’s end on April 19.53

  As that cold, gray spring of 1775 little by little crept toward disaster, George Washington, who was more than a thousand miles removed from Lexington and Concord, frequently hunted, passionately landscaped Mount Vernon, and oversaw the preparation of his fields for the season’s crop of wheat.54 He had returned home from Congress doubting that war was likely, but the imperial crisis was never far from his thoughts.

  Washington had attended the Continental Congress persuaded that North’s ministry was advancing “a premeditated Design and System … to introduce an arbitrary Government into his Majesty’s American Dominions.” He had thought of the Tea Act and Coercive Acts as “despotick Measures” that were part of a “regular, systematic plan” to “fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us.” No less important, Washington had come to understand that Britain had “a separate, and … opposite Interest” from that of the colonies. He had openly stated that the colonies must be “treated upon an equal Footing with our fellow subjects” in England under a “just, lenient, permanent, and constitutional” framework.55 He was fed up with “Petitions & Remonstrances” even before Congress met. Truth be told, he probably already favored American independence. What seems abundantly clear is that long before the march on Lexington and Concord, Washington had been prepared to go to war unless the British government backed down.56

  The events in Lexington and Concord made it apparent that London would not back down. Washington was convinced that the colonists must not give in. A “Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast,” he immediately declared when word of the carnage in Massachusetts reached Mount Vernon late in April. He added that the “once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood, or Inhabited by Slaves.” His choice was never in doubt. Indeed, he emphasized that no “virtuous Man” could “hesitate in his choice.”57

  Washington departed Mount Vernon for Philadelphia and the Second Continental Congress on May 4, 1775, taking with him his military uniform. He was going to war. Unlike Dartmouth and North, Washington harbored no illusions that this would be an easy war. “[M]ore blood will be spilt” in the coming conflict, he predicted, “than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”58

  CHAPTER 5

  “A RESCRIPT WRITTEN IN BLOOD”

  JOHN DICKINSON AND THE APPEAL OF RECONCILIATION

  IT TURNED COLD AND RAINY overnight in Boston, but all through the jet-black evening that followed the battle-scarred day in Lexington and Concord, armed men from throughout New England had descended on the city. Some had abandoned workbenches and farms on a moment’s notice to take up arms. Israel Putnam, for instance, a fifty-seven-year-old yeoman who had endured a lifetime of adventure while soldiering in the French and Indian War, literally dropped his plow in his field in Pomfret, Connecticut, picked up his sword and musket, and headed for the scene of action, ready to serve yet again. One company of exhausted minutemen from Nottingham, New Hampshire, arrived outside Boston at daybreak on April 20, having made an incredible fifty-five-mile march in twenty hours.1

  By morning’s gray dawn on April 20, thousands of armed men had congregated on Boston’s doorstep. They came as four separate armies, one from each of the New England colonies. But as they were on Massachusetts soil, the highest-ranking officer in the Bay Colony, General Artemas Ward, a forty-seven-year-old Shrewsbury farmer, businessman, and judge with two degrees from Harvard College, was in overall command. His army swelled rapidly. Men arrived all through April 20 and the days that followed, until, after a week, some sixteen thousand Yankee soldiers were present. While the rage for soldiering prevailed, Ward wisely had the men take an oath to serve for the remainder of the year. Impassioned and eager for heroics—and confronted with incredible peer pressure—most of the men signed on. A few thought better of it and went home, in many instances fearing that their farms and families would suffer during their prolonged absence. Some, however, may have suspected that the chaos all about them was an augury of miseries ahead. After all, the newborn army lacked tents, hygienic conditions were deplorable, and a thousand and one logistical details were yet to be worked out.

  (Gary J. Antonetti, Ortelius Design)

  Nevertheless, after a few days Ward knew that he had an army of roughly twelve thousand men, more than double the number that Gage was thought to possess. Yet Ward never considered attacking the British. At least until the Continental Congress reconvened as scheduled on May 10, nearly three weeks in the future, Ward saw his army’s mission as one of containing the British army within Boston. New England newspapers quickly dubbed the siege army the “Grand American Army,” and General Ward just as rapidly deployed his men all along the periphery of Boston in a twelve-mile arc that stretched from east of the Mystic River to the north to Roxbury and Dorchester to the south of the city.2

  Those who had been chosen to sit in the Second Congress were preparing to leave for Philadelphia, and their responses to the outbreak of hostilities differed wildly. Galloway, though reelected, had decided to resign his seat and quit the Pennsylvania assembly as well. He did not wish to be part of any government that was at war with the mother country. Galloway also feared for his safety. It was bad enough to be regarded as an “apostate” by the other congressmen, but he was badly unnerved when someone sent a box to his home containing a noose and a note asking that he kill himself and “rid the World of a Damned Scoundrel.”3 New York’s Robert R. Livingston, who was every bit as conservative as Galloway, was elected to Congress on the day before word of the Lexington and Concord battles reached Manhattan. Friends urged him not to attend the Congress, but he refused to listen. “My property is here [and] I cannot remove it,” he told them. “I am resolved to stand or fall with my country.”4 J
ohn Dickinson, who charged London with having started an “impious War of Tyranny against Innocence,” was eager to be part of this congress.5 So too was Richard Henry Lee, who raged that General Gage had launched “a wanton and cruel Attack on unarmed people … brutally [killing] Old Men, Women, & Children.”6

  John Adams declared that Britain’s use of force had “changed the Instruments of Warfare from the Penn to the Sword.” He laid aside his quill, mercifully bringing to an end his Novanglus essays, and hurried to Lexington, wishing to speak with witnesses to the incident on Lexington Green, as well as to residents along what was now and ever after called Battle Road. He found that his fellow colonists were ready for war. The “Die was cast, the Rubicon passed,” they told him, adding that they had fought on April 19 because “if We did not defend ourselves they would kill Us.” He saw abundant evidence of the recent engagement. Adams rode down Battle Road, still littered with the rotting corpses of horses and other residue of the bloody clash, and he spoke with civilians and militiamen, some with ghastly wounds. It was a profoundly disturbing experience. Aside from any haunting questions that might have troubled him regarding his accountability for having brought on hostilities, Adams was anxious for the well-being of his wife and four children, who lived even closer to Boston than did the inhabitants of Lexington and Concord. Would they, too, face similar horrors? Overwrought by his day at the scene of suffering, Adams fell ill that evening “with alarming Symptoms.”7

  War created a new set of political problems for Samuel Adams. For one thing, he feared that some Americans, including the most conservative congressmen, might be swayed by Lord Chatham’s February peace proposal. Chatham, after all, was lionized in America, and his plan for saving the empire could be distilled to a simple and possibly attractive means of avoiding war: The colonies would recognize parliamentary sovereignty in return for Parliament’s renunciation of American taxation. Adams went on the offensive, writing some of his congressional colleagues to implore them to “take Care lest America in Lieu of a Thorn in the Foot should have a Dagger in her heart.”8

  Notwithstanding what his cousin John had written in excitement, Samuel Adams, and the coterie of radical leaders who surrounded him, realized that the pen, as well as the sword, was an essential weapon in this war. They rapidly set out to convince colonists throughout America that the British regulars, acting on orders from London, had been responsible for firing the first shot. They also wished to persuade both colonists and residents in the mother country that the American militiamen had bravely stood up to the British regulars and, in fact, had defeated them.

  On the day after the fighting, Revere saddled up again. This time he rode at the behest of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which from the Hastings House in Cambridge directed day-to-day activities for the defiant rebel government in Massachusetts. Revere spent seventeen days on the road disseminating the committee’s account of what had occurred on Lexington Green and the North Bridge in Concord. One Boston firebrand called the story that Revere broadcast an “authentick account of this inhuman proceeding.” In fact, the purpose of the Committee of Safety was to wage what historian David Hackett Fischer has called “the second battle of Lexington and Concord”: the battle for public opinion. It moved quickly to tell its version of the events of that historic day, dispatching numerous riders to committees of correspondence inside Massachusetts and beyond. The Committee of Safety also published a broadside—a single-page handbill—with a description of the attack on Captain Parker’s militiamen under the screaming headline BARBAROUS MURDERS. It additionally subsidized the Massachusetts Spy, whose editor had wisely removed his printing press from Boston to the safety of Worcester just three days before the fighting. In the days following, that newspaper ran repeated hyperbolic accounts of the engagements. Its motto was “Americans! Liberty or Death: Join or Die!”9

  As the Massachusetts Committee of Safety hoped would be the case, newspapers across America promptly ran accounts of the events of April 19, virtually all of them utilizing materials distributed through the committees of correspondence. Within seventy-two hours the story was in print in every New England colony, and in less than a week residents of New York and Philadelphia could read a narrative of what had transpired. The newspaper accounts played on a few simple themes: “his Brittanick Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People” of America; the tragedy was the result of the “sanguinary Measures of a wicked Ministry”; the citizens of Lexington and Concord, and the residents along Battle Road, had suffered cruelties no “less brutal than what our venerable Ancestors received from the vilest Savages of the Wilderness”; and by day’s end the British regulars had been “decisively defeated.”10 Some newspapers ran their stories inside black borders. One ran the headline: BLOODY NEWS. A New England broadside depicted a row of coffins beneath the headline BLOODY BUTCHERY BY THE BRITISH TROOPS. The New-York Journal told its readers that “our good mother [country is] … at last revealed to all the world … a vile imposter—an old abandoned prostitute—crimsoned oe’r with every abominable crime, shocking to humanity.”11

  These lurid though vague accounts of what had occurred were augmented by the publication of depositions taken from more than one hundred civilians and militiamen—and even captured British regulars—who had been in Lexington or Concord or somewhere along Battle Road on April 19. Within four days of the fighting, representatives of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety began taking sworn statements, which were rushed into print. Needless to say, these accounts stated that the regulars had fired the first shots in both Lexington and Concord. There were slight differences in the various accounts of the historic instant when the first shot was fired on Lexington Green, but all fixed the blame on the redcoats:

  A British officer shouted “damn them, we will have them,” and immediately the regulars “shouted aloud, run, and fired on the Lexington Company, which did not fire a gun before.”

  The regulars’ commander “flourishing his sword and with a loud voice giving the word fire; which was instantly followed by a discharge of arms by said Regular Troops.”

  The regulars’ commander ordered his men, saying “Fire, by God, Fire; at which moment we received a very heavy and close fire from them.”

  “[W]hilst our backs were turned on the Troops we were fired on by them … Not a Gun was fired by any person in our Company.”

  “[S]ome of our Company were coming to the parade with their backs towards the Troops, and others on the parade began to disperse, when the Regulars fired … before a gun was fired by any our Company on them.”

  The commander of the regulars shouted “ ‘Fire! Fire, damn you, fire!’ and immediately they fired before any of Captain Parker’s Company fired.”12

  The Massachusetts Committee of Safety additionally published several letters that it claimed had been written by captured or killed British soldiers. On encountering the “peasants” in Lexington, wrote one redcoat, his commander “ordered us to rush them with our bayonets fixed … and the engagement began.” Another divulged that “We … burnt some of their houses.” Several mentioned the suffering of Boston’s residents. As there “is no market in Boston, the inhabitants [are] all starving,” one reported, while a comrade wrote that the “people in Boston are in great trouble, for General Gage will not let the Town’s people go out” to gather provisions.13

  On April 25 the Committee of Safety learned that General Gage’s report of the battle was to be conveyed to London that same day by the Sukey, a two-hundred-ton brig loaded with cargo and owned by a Boston merchant. Knowing the importance of first impressions, the committee moved hurriedly to present its version to London before the Sukey crossed the Atlantic. It chose as its courier Captain John Derby of Salem, owner of the Quero, a lean and speedy sixty-ton vessel with a schooner’s rigging. He departed from Salem four days after the Sukey weighed anchor in Boston. To hasten his voyage, Derby sailed without cargo. He did not even carry any correspondence, save for that provided by the comm
ittee: copies of the hastily transcribed eyewitness depositions; two issues of the Salem Gazette, each of which carried accounts of the April 19 engagements; and a letter from the committee addressed “To the Inhabitants of Great Britain.” Written by Dr. Joseph Warren, the letter declared that the regulars had started hostilities by firing on the Lexington and Concord militiamen, acts that he characterized as a premeditated mark of “ministerial vengeance against this Colony.” Warren vowed that Americans “will not tamely submit … we determine to die or be free.”14

  Derby won the race. In a day when Atlantic crossings often took six weeks or more, the Quero sped across the white-capped ocean in thirty days. Despite his rival’s head start, Derby outpaced the Sukey by nearly two weeks. Within forty-eight hours of the docking of the Quero, Arthur Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s brother, who lived in the English metropolis, put a note in a London newspaper revealing that the depositions were available for public perusal at the office of the lord mayor of London. Edward Gibbon, a member of Parliament who later achieved greater renown as a historian, was one of many who read Lee’s squib and hurried to the mayor’s Mansion House to read what Derby had brought. Gibbon’s reaction was not untypical. “This looks serious,” he exclaimed, but Gibbon was less startled by the bloodshed on April 19 than by the news that the “next day the Country rose” to besiege Boston.