“Not for boys who haven’t signed muster sheets,” said Caleb. “Those who have may follow their conscience. The rest are to return to their rooms.”
Just then a rider came pounding up the road and right into the courtyard, adding to the confusion. “Hey, lads! There’s men rippin’ up the bridge. We need help.”
They all knew him—John Hicks, a burly man with big, nail-scarred hands, another carpenter. He lived in a neat white house near the river, and if any man’s life defined the arguments of those days, it was his. His older son published a Tory newspaper, the
Boston Post Boy
. His younger son, a former student of Caleb’s Anatomical Club, was a doctor and a known patriot. And it was an open secret that Hicks himself had been one of the “Indians” who had dumped tea into Boston Harbor.
“By whose order are they tearing up the bridge?” said Caleb, trying to infuse calmness into his voice.
“Who cares?” said Richardson. “We’ll burn it and build it again later.”
Hicks said, “General Heath ordered the Watertown militia to tear it up this mornin’. But they piled the planks on the side of the road like they was plannin’ a barn raisin’. The king’s men laid the planks down again and marched across as pretty as you please. Now Cap’n Gardner’s lads are throwin’ the planks in the river.”
“Gardner of Brookline?” said Caleb. “Class of ’forty-seven?”
“A good man.” Hicks looked up the road toward the cloud of dust above the British column. The sound of the drums had almost faded. “Gardner’s fixin’ to follow ’em once he’s done at the bridge. However Percy gets out to Lexington, he’ll have hell to pay on the way back.”
“You joinin’ Gardner?” asked Richardson.
“I’m fifty,” answered Hicks. “Too old for a real militia unit, but I can still fight.”
“That’s my thinkin’, too,” said Richardson.
Hicks looked at Caleb. “What about you, Tutor Wedge?”
Richardson said, “Tutor Wedge don’t drill, and he don’t carry a musket, and his grandfather would rather live under Gage’s wing in Boston than among strong Whigs like us. So don’t count on him, any more than you’d count on Tutor Smith.”
Caleb saw that a dozen students were listening, so he said, “Tutor Smith is right about one thing, Richardson. A carpenter should know his place.”
“I know my place.” Richardson hefted his musket. “Do you know yours?”
“Excuse us, Tutor Wedge.” It was Sterret and Digges.
Caleb was glad for the distraction. It was unseemly for a tutor to engage in angry discussions with the college staff, even on a day such as this. “What is it?”
“Jeremiah and I have our names on muster sheets,” said Sterret. “Him for Salem, me for Danvers. We’d like to join Captain Gardner, sir, but we don’t have muskets.”
“Neither do our tutors,” said Richardson.
Without another look at the college carpenter, Caleb said, “Come with me.”
Tory Row was choked with people, carts, horses, and wagons, all fleeing for the safety of Fresh Pond and Watertown. Caleb thought of Exodus, and such terrified flight made the reality of war even more vivid than the passing of the British army.
“Caleb! Caleb Wedge!” A chaise pulled by a chestnut gelding rolled up. Mrs. Winthrop was driving. Her husband was beside her, wheezing.
“A calamity, Caleb!” she said. “Did you see them? Marching like ferocious barbarians . . . Oh, God, what a day! What a horrible day!”
Professor Winthrop leaned forward, bringing his gray face into the light. “Have you . . . have you made your decision, Caleb?”
“I have, sir,” answered Caleb. “Tutor Smith stepped forward to show Harvard’s loyalty. Another tutor should show Harvard’s more rebellious spirit.”
“True enough,” said Winthrop. “True enough.”
Caleb smacked the horse on the rump and the chaise kicked ahead. “Keep safe.”
“Much blood must be shed this day,” cried Mrs. Winthrop.
“See that yours stays in your veins,” added the professor.
Caleb watched the chaise a moment, then led the two students to his grandfather’s house. He armed each boy with a musket and outfitted himself with his favorite fowling piece and two pistols. “Now, then, let’s show Lord Percy what Harvard really thinks.”
By afternoon, the road from Concord through Lexington to Cambridge was drawn in the red of British uniforms and drying blood. The mighty serpent of morning was now a beast that, having kicked over a hive, could not escape the swarm, no matter how far or fast he fled. And the farther he went, the larger the swarm became. And the more furious the stinging, the more ferocious became the beast. In the last mile before the British recrossed Alewife Brook, there was hand-to-hand fighting. Prisoners were shot. Houses were put to the torch. Innocents were massacred.
What resembled a swarm of militia would later be called “a moving circle of fire.” Units from dozens of towns had been following the British retreat, firing, then running or riding ahead, along fences, through pastures, in and out of woods, stopping and firing again before scrambling for the next stone wall or streambed.
About a mile south of Alewife Brook, at a place called Watson’s Corner, Caleb Wedge waited in a blacksmith shop. He had been gripping his gun for so long that his hand was cramped. So he rested his weapon on the windowsill and flexed his fingers. Then he mopped his brow. Though he was no more than a mile and a half from the college where he had spent most of his life, he felt as if he had come to the edge of the earth to face a demon. But he had stepped forward at last.
Sterret and Digges crouched on either side of the main door. John Hicks waited at the other window. Moses Richardson knelt behind the trough outside. And across the road, shielded by a barricade of water casks, Captain Isaac Gardner and a dozen or so Brookline irregulars waited.
They could see the British column now, some half a mile north, spouting smoke and flame into the fields and farmhouses and stands of trees that flanked the Menotomy Road. Caleb and the others had agreed that when the vanguard reached the farmhouse about fifty yards north, they would volley and run.
Caleb listened to the voice in his head, telling him over and over that he could do it. He would not listen to John Hicks, who was nervously whistling “Yankee Doodle”; or to Moses Richardson, who gave out with a hooting laugh every time another explosion of musket smoke blew into the British column; or to the students, both of whom were muttering psalms while they waited.
Then Captain Gardner rose from behind his barricade. “Another few minutes, lads, ’twill be hotter than blazes along this stretch. Best wet our whistles.” And he walked to a well a short distance beyond the water casks.
The bucket splashed and echoed. How comforting such a simple sound could seem, thought Caleb, on such a terrible day.
And suddenly, a volley of musket fire exploded from the trees beyond the well. Gardner was knocked backward, and a dozen Regulars appeared, as if from thin air.
As Caleb stood and aimed his musket, another volley exploded somewhere behind him, sending half a dozen balls smacking against the blacksmith shop and one right through Moses Richardson, who spouted a mist of blood from his mouth and fell dead in the road.
These moment’s-notice soldiers had not reckoned with the tactics of professionals. Now, there were flanking parties behind them, on both sides of the road. And already they were finishing Gardner with their bayonets.
So the Brookline men fired a ragged volley and ran.
At the same time, the back door of the blacksmith shop burst open. Young Sterret whirled and fired, blowing an infantryman back into several others.
The explosion of the gun was so loud that it had physical force, like the blow of a hammer against the side of a head. For a moment, Caleb was stunned, but two more soldiers were forcing their way through the door. So Caleb pointed his musket and pulled the trigger. Instead of a blast, he heard the pop-click of a pan flash. Then a bayonet was thrusting straight at him.
But John Hicks fired his musket into the chest of the soldier doing the thrusting and saved Caleb’s life. Then Hicks grabbed the door and slammed it shut. “Run!” he screamed at Caleb.
“No!” Caleb fumbled to pull out his pistols.
More soldiers were trying to push through the door, and from the corner of his eye, Caleb saw a flash of red at the north window, so he whirled and fired.
“Run!” Hicks pushed hard at the door. But an infantryman was forcing his way in, bayonet first, and he managed to stick Hicks in the side.
The big carpenter cried out in pain and the soldier was able to get through the opening, but Caleb grabbed the smithy’s hammer and smashed it against the soldier’s head, sending his helmet and its owner flying toward the furnace.
The weight of Hicks’s body forced the door shut again, and again he shouted at Caleb, “Run! Run now! Save those boys.”
Jeremiah Digges fired at a soldier who stopped at the window on the south side.
“See that!” cried Hicks. “We’re flanked. And flanked means dead!”
The door was pushed. So Hicks roared up his strength and pushed back, despite a stain of blood widening under his rib cage. But a pistol found its way through the opening, and like the head of a snake, it turned to Hicks and went off against his belly.
Caleb fired his pistol into the face of the man holding the gun, and the door slammed shut again.
“Run!” cried Hicks as his body slid down the door toward the dirt floor. “Run!”
So Caleb shoved the two boys out the front and they ran. They had to parry bayonet thrusts, and they heard muskets scattering lead after them. But there was no marksman worse than a British Regular, and no pursuit slower than a soldier who had been marching since the middle of the night.
v
A few days later, Caleb wrote a letter to Lydia and had it smuggled into the city:
Tell Grandfather I have taken a stand. I have thrown my lot with those who would resist the rulings of a distant government. It will pain him, but it would pain him more were I untrue to my beliefs. Tell him to remember the words of the Lord: “Be ye either hot or cold. If ye be lukewarm, I shall spit you out of my mouth.”
Horrible is the only word for the fighting. I will leave to your imagination the effect of a pistol ball on a man’s face. Consider instead the bravery of a man who lays down his life that others may live. That was what our good neighbor John Hicks did. Badly wounded, he held off the Regulars until two students and their tutor could escape from a blacksmith shop that had become a charnel house.
We retreated—nay, we ran—all the way to the Common, wherefrom we were ordered to join thousands of militia gathered at the river. But Percy, seeing what awaited him if he came through the village, avoided us by taking the Charlestown Road. This was all for the best, as the furious Regulars, who had been burning houses and fighting with vengeful fury all afternoon, must surely have put the college to the torch.
After the battle, I went with John Hicks’s son back to the blacksmith shop. We found a cart and loaded on the mortal remains of his father and Moses Richardson and brought them to the graveyard beside Christ Church. And what a scene of melancholy was there! As we buried them in a common grave, the son of Richardson cried out that they did not deserve to have dirt thrown onto their faces, then he leapt into the hole and laid his father’s cape on them both. My emotions, and those of other observers, were very strong, for the dirt falling upon those shrouded faces was surely the face of war.
And we are come to this—you besieged in Boston, I serving as a doctor’s apprentice, and the dear old college now headquarters for an army unlike any the world has ever seen, twenty thousand men—farmers, merchants, ministers, Negro freedmen, Indians, boys of seventeen, men of forty-five—all come together under the command, I am glad to say, of Harvard men: Artemas Ward, ’43 and Dr. Joseph Warren, ’59.
Where this will lead, who can know? But word has reached me of a truce, whereby the Loyalists in the countryside may go into Boston while the Whigs of Boston may leave. I have written to Christine and pray that she and her family will come out.
The next morning, Lydia hurried down to Dock Square with an envelope in her apron.
Any who wished to leave were required to turn in their weapons at Faneuil Hall, so hundreds of wagons had collected there, and dozens of soldiers were shouting orders amid chaos that grew as the rumor spread: Boston Tories were begging Gage to stop the exodus and keep the Whigs in the city as insurance against the rebels burning it.
After ten minutes of searching the crowd, Lydia found the Cowgills’ wagon, piled high with trunks, furniture, two children, a fretting mother, and Christine, who in truth seemed almost happy to be leaving.
“Lydia!” she shouted. “Your brother has done us proud!”
“Will you go to him?” asked Lydia.
“He’s made a decision. Even if he stays in Cambridge, ’twill be a changed place.”
Lydia pressed an envelope into her hands. “See that he gets this. It contains a poem called ‘John Hicks and Other Heroes.’ It expresses my patriotic emotions. And a letter explains why I must stay with my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather needs you,” said Christine. “None would say otherwise.”
Lydia was loath to lose the company of the Cowgills, who had treated her more amiably than anyone else in Boston, so she walked along beside their wagon as it rolled down Orange Street in the train leaving the city.
As they approached the gates on the Neck, Lydia looked out across the Back Bay and yearned to go with them. But then the train slowed. Mrs. Cowgill wrung her hands, Mr. Cowgill clucked at the horses, and Christine talked of Caleb’s courage, as if to summon her own. When they were six wagons from freedom, the gates were closed. Gage had decided that the Tories were right, and the Cowgills were trapped.
On the morning of June 16, the Provincial Congress ordered that the college library be removed to Andover. By that time the students had no need of books because the Committee of Safety had sent them all home.