Revolutionary Reader: Reminiscences and Indian Legends

by Sophie Lee Foster

These three men walked together in front, followed by Minute Men and militia in double file, training arms. They went down the hillock, entered the by-road, came to its angle with the main road and there turned into the causeway that led straight to the bridge. The British began to take up the planks; to prevent it the Americans quickened their step. At this the British fired one or two shots up the river; then another, by which Luther Blanchard and Jonas Brown were wounded. A volley followed, and Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer fell dead. Three hours before, Davis had bid his wife farewell. That afternoon he was carried home and laid in her bedroom. His countenance was pleasant in death. The bodies of two others of his company, who were slain that day, were brought to her house, and the three were followed to the village graveyard by a concourse of neighbors from miles around. Heaven gave her length of days in the land which his self-devotion assisted to redeem. She lived to see her country reach the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific; when it was grown great in numbers, wealth and power, the United States in Congress bethought themselves to pay honors to her husband's martyrdom and comfort her under the double burden of sorrow and of more than ninety years.

As the British fired, Emerson, who was looking on from an upper window in his house near the bridge, was for one moment uneasy lest the fire should not be returned. It was only for a moment; Buttrick, leaping in the air and at the same time partially turning around, cried aloud: "Fire, fellow soldiers! for God's sake, fire!" and the cry "fire! fire! fire!" ran from lip to lip. Two of the British fell, several were wounded, and in two minutes all was hushed. The British retreated in disorder toward their main body; the countrymen were left in possession of the bridge. This is the world renowned "Battle of Concord," more eventful than Agincourt or Blenheim.

The Americans stood astonished at what they had done. They made no pursuit and did no further harm, except that one wounded soldier, attempting to arise if to escape, was struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Barrett's might have been cut off, but was not molested. As the Sudbury company, commanded by the brave Nixon, passed near the South Bridge, Josiah Haynes, then eighty years of age, deacon of the Sudbury Church, urged an attack on the British party stationed there; his advice was rejected by his fellow soldiers as premature, but the company in which he served proved among the most alert during the rest of the day.

In the town of Concord, Smith, for half an hour, showed by marches and counter-marches his uncertainty of purpose. At last, about noon, he left the town, to retreat the way he came, along the hilly road that wound through forests and thickets. The Minute Men and militia who had taken part in the fight ran over the hills opposite the battle field into the east quarter of the town, crossed the pasture known as the "Great Fields," and placed themselves in ambush a little to the eastward of the village, near the junction of the Bedford road. There they were reinforced by men from all around and at that point the chase of the English began.

Among the foremost were the Minute Men of Reading, led by John Brooks and accompanied by Foster, the minister of Littleton, as a volunteer. The company of Billerica, whose inhabitants, in their just indignation at Nesbit and his soldiers, had openly resolved to "use a different style from that of petition and complaint" came down from the north, while the East Sudbury company appeared on the south. A little below the Bedford road at Merriam's corner the British faced about, but after a sharp encounter, in which several of them were killed, they resumed their retreat.

At the high land in Lincoln the old road bent toward the north, just where great trees on the west and thickets on the east offered cover to the pursuers. The men from Woburn came up in great numbers and well armed. Along these defiles fell eight of the British. Here Pitcairn for safety was forced to quit his horse, which was taken with his pistols in their holsters. A little farther on Jonathan Wilson, captain of the Bedford Minute Men, too zealous to keep on his guard, was killed by a flanking party. At another defile in Lincoln, the Minute Men at Lexington, commanded by John Parker, renewed the fight. Every piece of wood, every rock by the wayside, served as a lurking place. Scarce ten of the Americans were at any time seen together, yet the hills seemed to the British to swarm with "rebels," as if they had dropped from the clouds, and "the road was lined" by an unintermitted fire from behind stone walls and trees.

At first the invaders moved in order; as they drew near Lexington, their flanking parties became ineffective from weariness; the wounded were scarce able to get forward. In the west of Lexington, as the British were rising Fiske's hill, a sharp contest ensued. It was at the eastern foot of the same hill that James Hayward, of Acton, encountered a regular, and both at the same moment fired; the regular dropped dead; Hayward was mortally wounded. A little farther on fell the octogenarian, Josiah Haynes, who had kept pace with the swiftest in the pursuit.

The British troops, "greatly exhausted and fatigued and having expended almost all of their ammunition," began to run rather than retreat in order. The officers vainly attempted to stop their flight. "They were driven before the Americans like sheep." At last, about two in the afternoon, after they had hurried through the middle of the town, about a mile below the field of the morning's bloodshed, the officers made their way to the front and by menaces of death began to form them under a very heavy fire.

At that moment Lord Percy came in sight with the first brigade, consisting of Welsh Fusiliers, the Fourth, the Forty-seventh and the Thirty-eighth Regiments, in all about twelve hundred men, with two field pieces. Insolent, as usual, they marched out of Boston to the tune of Yankee Doodle, but they grew alarmed at finding every house on the road deserted.

While the cannon kept the Americans at bay, Percy formed his detachment into a square, enclosing the fugitives, who lay down for rest on the ground, "their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase."