The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (61 page)

The column of regulars met no opposition for several hours, though one of the Concord companies marched down the road toward them as they approached the center of town. These militiamen simply showed themselves and then marched back; they fired no shots. Nor did those on the first ridge, even though Smith sent his light infantry along it. Instead, the militia on it pulled back -- they were badly outnumbered -and reinforced their comrades on the second ridge. Smith's infantry soon occupied this ridge too, while the militia withdrew ahead of them to Punkatasset Hill.

After sending three light companies over the North Bridge to Colonel Barrett's house and posting another three on the bridge itself, Smith turned the grenadiers to searching the houses, taverns, and other buildings. Not much was found -- some flour, 500 pounds of musket balls, trenching tools, a few wooden spoons -- but the search itself proved disastrous, for while it was going on the blacksmith shop and the courthouse were set afire, whether by accident or deliberately is not known. The smoke alarmed the militia on Punkatasset Hill, now swollen to some 400 men by companies from Acton, Bedford, Lincoln, Westford, and by unattached volunteers from the countryside. Joseph Hosmer, Barrett's adjutant, asked, "Will you let them burn the town?" The answer was "no" and a resolve "to march into the middle of the town for its defence or die in the attempt." So down from the hill they came to North Bridge, which lay about half a mile from the main buildings of the village. There they met the three light companies of regulars which, fortunately for the militia, were badly deployed one behind the other, thereby masking the fire of two.
The front company could fire and

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did. The first few shots went astray and brought a cry of surprise from an American officer -- "God damn it! They're firing ball!" Then the ball bit into flesh, and two militiamen fell dead and another was wounded. The American fire, from men spread out more effectively, took a heavier toll, as three red-coated privates fell and nine officers and men were wounded.
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The shock of the American fire confused the regulars, who soon broke and retreated in disarray, leaving their dead and one wounded man behind. The Americans showed little more discipline. Soon they were milling about and were unable to re-form until they reached the village. In this confusion the three British companies which had been at Barrett's slipped back across the bridge and rejoined the main body. It was now about eleven in the morning. By noon Colonel Smith had his forces together once more and began the march to Boston, carrying the wounded in two chaises.

The first mile passed without opposition. At Meriam's Corner the column ran into the militia, and the battle began. The battlefield was in reality a gauntlet, about sixteen miles long and never more than three or four hundred yards wide. In places where the woods pressed close by at a stream crossing, it was less than fifty yards in width. The Americans poured fire into the column, or sniped at it from behind trees, rocks, and occasionally buildings and fences. The British replied as well as they could from the column -- and sometimes quite murderously when the flankers from the light infantry trapped the militia against the road. Although the advantage of numbers and cover and knowledge of the terrain lay with the militiamen, they squandered their edge as they lost all control of their units and proceeded to fight as individualists. The British companies also soon lost their integrity under the galling fire from the roadside. They were a rabble when they reached Lexington, where they first attempted to re-form on the outskirts and then again on the Green.
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Fortunately for Smith's command, Brig. General Percy arrived in Lexington with a relief brigade of about a thousand troops at two-thirty in the afternoon. Smith's exhausted soldiers rested an hour, while Percy's artillery worked the militia over. An hour later the enlarged column set out once more. Opposition did not show itself in strength until the column reached Menotomy, where fresh militia from other towns

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and the trailing militia from Concord caught up with it. The fighting now took an especially vicious turn marked by hand-to-hand encounters with bayonet against hatchet and club. The British commanders, sharing their troops' frustration, made no attempt to stop their pillaging and plundering. Civilians were attacked; houses were smashed and burned; looting was common.

At Cambridge, Percy shook off his pursuers and drove his column to Charlestown. There he reached safety shortly after the sun went down. Behind him lay stragglers, wounded, dead, and missing men; and behind him too, an increasing number of militia. In all the British had received 273 casualties; the Americans, 95.
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In several respects the battle was unlike any other in the Revolution. Never again would there be a "front" sixteen miles long. But different as the battle was, it forecast the central problem the British would face: how to subdue not just another army but a population in rebellion. Of course the war would often resemble many of the eighteenth century, with conventional armies facing one another using well-known tactics. But it was different at times in the enlistment of civilian populations and the discard of the usual methods of battle. It never became an entirely civilian war, a people-in-revolt against an army. There were moments when that threatened, however. And throughout the long struggle, the passions of the people and their moral strength played a far more important part than in any eighteenth-century war before the French Revolution.

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The first message telling of the combat at Lexington was written around ten in the morning at nearby Watertown and sent to other towns in Massachusetts and to Connecticut. Its prose was spare: the British had attacked the militia; six men were dead and four others wounded; more regulars were coming out of Boston. The writer, Colonel Joseph Palmer, dispatched Israel Bissel with this note after adding an appeal that Bissel be supplied with fresh horses whenever he needed them. Bissel, a postrider who customarily traveled between Boston and New York, wore out his mounts and himself for the next five days until he reached Philadelphia. While he was on the road, other riders followed; several with wildly inaccurate accounts of the fighting that had occurred between Boston and Concord -- the most extravagant of which reported that the British expedition was trapped on Winter Hill by 20,000 Americans. This story held that Earl Percy, who had led the party that rescued Smith's detachment on its return, had been killed. Far from dead, Percy was at that moment enjoying the adulation of the army and its friends for his conduct on April 19.
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Such mistakes in the messages sent out from the battle could not obscure their essential matter which was that war had begun and that the other colonies should be notified as soon as possible.
One of the

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messages carries the urgent endorsements of its readers south of Philadelphia as they hastened it along the way:

Wednesday night, Christeen Bridge, twelve o'clock, forwarded to Col. Thomas Couch, Esquire, who received it this moment, and he to forward it to Tobias Randolph, Esquire, head of Elk, in Maryland. Night and day to be forwarded.

Dumfries, April 30, Sunday. Gentlemen: The enclosed came to hand this morning, about ten o'clock. In one hour I hired the bearer to convey it to your place.

As the message moved along, the urgency to forward it seemed to increase. "For God's sake send the man on without the least delay; and write to Mr. Marion to forward it by night and by day." "Pray don't neglect a moment in forwarding." "Pray order the express you send to ride night and day." I request, for the good of our Country, and the welfare of our lives and liberties, and fortunes, you will not lose a moment's time." Charleston, South Carolina, received the news with an endorsement that commanded attention: "We send you momentous intelligence, this instant received."
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Momentous it was, and it produced an immense reaction. In New England, militia from the neighboring colonies converged on Boston; within a few days thousands had gathered on the hills around the town, effectively cutting it off from the countryside. Further south, recruitment into the militia picked up, arms and ammunition were gathered, and more news from Massachusetts was eagerly sought. Undoubtedly the war plunged many still loyal to their king into despair, or stiffened their resolution to support royal authority. But for weeks after Lexington and Concord, loyalists dared not sound their sentiments. Rebels exercised less restraint: they felt betrayed, let down by his majesty's army, and felt too that the barbarous face of the conspiracy against their liberties now stood exposed. In this mood they craved action, wanted to strike back, as if, Thomas Jefferson remarked in a letter, their "last hopes of reconciliation" had been cut off. A "phrenzy of revenge," Jefferson noted of the Virginians, "seems to have seized all ranks of people."
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Prudence as much as revenge moved the Americans who seized Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain early in May. The fort lay on the southwestern side of Lake Champlain, commanding the entrance to it from Lake George. The French had built Fort Carillon there in 1755, a massive fortification which Montcalm had held against James Abercromby in 1758. The next year Amherst, with an overwhelming force, took it. The English repaired the damage they had inflicted on the fort during its capture and renamed it Ticonderoga.
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By 1775 the walls, the bastions, and the blockhouses were in a dilapidated condition -- not exactly in ruins, but badly in need of reconstruction. The garrison seemed appropriate for this pile -- two officers and fortyeight men with twenty-four women and children. Although this collection lived within Ticonderoga, they were incapable of defending it.

But men in New England and New York worried about the fort, and a few who knew the place coveted the heavy guns and mortars still emplaced there from the time of the French and Indian War. The worry fed on rumors that Guy Carleton, the British commander in Quebec, would bring a party of French, Indians, and all the regulars he could muster up the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu River, down Lake Champlain and Lake George, and through the Hudson River Valley to cut the colonies in two. Among the Americans determined to block the British were Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold.

Allen, who was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, a sometime lead miner and farmer, had moved to the New Hampshire Grants (now Vermont), an area claimed by New York and much in dispute between New Hampshire and New York. There had been violence between Allen's Green Mountain Boys and New York settlers, and Allen carried a price on his head in New York. Colonel Allen, as his frontier followers called him, was not the typical backwoodsman, though he was physically large and strong, swore like a demon, and loved the rough and tumble. He enjoyed reading and he wrote, most notably a deistical tract
Reason the Only Oracle of Man
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