The Fight at Concord Bridge.
158. The Minute-Men; the Work they did, and how they did it.—The minute-men were bands of enrolled patriots pledged to start at a minute's notice to a call for their services. They had few good weapons, mostly shotguns for hunting birds and squirrels. They were short of powder and ball. In many of the families the women melted or pounded up their pewter spoons and dishes into bullets and slugs.
The minute-men were numerous in every town, and when the alarm was given, they would leave plow or shop, hurry home, take down the gun from its hooks over the fireplace, bid good-by to wife and children, and be off to help their country in its peril.
Israel Putnam, in leather frock and apron, was at work in a field on his farm in Connecticut when he heard of Lexington. Leaving the plow in the furrow, he jumped on his horse and rode the hundred or more miles to Cambridge in eighteen hours. John Stark was at work in his sawmill in New Hampshire when the news of Lexington came. He stopped the mill, hurried home, took down his rifle, and rode on horseback to Cambridge. In his haste he even forgot to put on his coat!
Every town had a company or two of minute-men and of militia soldiers, who regularly met and drilled. The soldiers and the officers of these companies were usually the best citizens of the towns. Thirty-one towns were represented among the patriots who hastened to the fight on the nineteenth of April.
159. Tablets now shown along this Historic Road.—If some day we should take a ride over this very road, we should notice along the way numerous landmarks of that famous contest—carved monuments, houses with bullet holes carefully preserved, bronze tablets on houses, marking some spot of special interest. At Fiske's Hill, in Lexington, an inscription records that at a well near by two soldiers met to drink. The British grenadier raised his gun and said to James Hayward, "You are a dead man!" "And so are you!" replied the minute-man. Both fired; one was instantly killed, and the other mortally wounded.
On Lexington Common we should see a stately monument with a long inscription reciting the event.
At Concord Bridge would be seen a noble statue of the Minute-Man, beneath which on the pedestal are Emerson's famous verses:—
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.