the Boston Tea-Party,—it was declared as the voice of the town:
“That we will, in conjunction with our brethren in America, risk our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his Majesty King George the Third, his person, crown, and dignity; and will also, with the same resolution, as his freeborn subjects in this country, to the utmost of our power and ability, defend all our charter-rights, that they may be transmitted inviolate to the latest posterity.”
Three months after this, when the Boston Port Bill was in agitation, and two months later, when it had passed Parliament, the farmers of Concord took a bolder tone,—“conscious,” as they said in town-meeting, “of no alternative between the horrors of slavery, and the carnage and desolation of a civil war,” except non-importation of British goods, to which the good citizens bound themselves. Still later, in a county convention which met in Concord, August 31, 1774, it was resolved:
“That we by no means intend to withdraw our allegiance from our gracious Sovereign; that when our ancestors emigrated from Great Britain, charters and solemn stipulations expressed the conditions, and what particular rights they yielded; what each party had to do and perform, and what each of the contracting parties were equally bound by. Therefore a debtor may as justly refuse to pay his debts, because it is inexpedient for him, as the Parliament deprive us of our charter privileges, because it is inexpedient to a corrupt administration for us to enjoy them.... And a sense of our duty as men, as freemen, as Christian freemen, united in the firmest bonds, obliges us to resolve that every civil officer in this Province, now in commission, and acting in conformity to the late act of Parliament, is not an officer agreeable to our charter—therefore unconstitutional, and ought to be opposed.... As we are resolved never to submit one iota to the Act, we will not submit to courts thus constituted, and acting in conformity to said Act.... In consequence of this resolve, all business at the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, and Court of General Sessions of the Peace, next to be holden in Concord, must cease.”
This was peaceful revolution, proceeding, not upon any vague notion of a general “Social Contract,” but on formal violations of a written contract, the Colony Charter, as explicitly stated. I ask attention to this, because it has been a favorite fancy of some modern writers, who praise the Puritans and disparage Jefferson and Franklin, that our Revolutionary fathers had gained through those two latitudinarians a glimpse of the levelling French doctrines, and gave themselves up to be guided by Rousseau and Voltaire, in dereliction of their Puritan ancestry. Precisely the opposite is true; the French author whom Jefferson may have had in mind, when he was not thinking of Pym and Hampden, Sergeant Maynard, Locke, and Algernon Sidney,—I mean Montesquieu,—having derived his theories more from the English constitutionalists than they from him. Probably not one of the men of Middlesex, who thus led the way to revolution in this law-abiding town of Concord (the seat of county justice), ever heard of Rousseau; but they were lawyers, deacons, country justices and farmers, accustomed to sit on juries; and they understood the law of contract and the obligations of fair trade as well as any English lord could tell them.
They voted further, on this eventful summer day, that “a Provincial Congress is absolutely necessary, in our present unhappy situation,”—and they named October, and Concord, as a suitable time and place for its assembling. This first Provincial Congress did meet, October 7th, at Salem, but adjourned to Concord that day; it first met here, October 11, 1774, and, finding the county court-house too small for its three hundred members and clerks, and the people who gathered to support them, it moved over to the parish meeting-house (built in 1712), and remained in session there five days, when it removed to Cambridge, for the sake of being nearer Boston, then held as a garrison by British troops. The second Provincial Congress, of 1775, also met in Concord for four weeks of March and April; and it had only been adjourned four days when the British grenadiers made their midnight march from Boston to Lexington, hoping to catch there the arch-rebels Hancock and Sam Adams, who had gone to Lexington as members of the Committee of Public Safety (of which Dr. Warren was chairman), then the executive of Massachusetts under the new revolutionary government. The Provincial Congress, the legislature of the Province, met again for the last time in Concord, April 22, 1775, to consider the results of the eventful 19th. It finally dissolved May 31st, after hearing a sermon from Dr. Langdon, the President of Harvard College; and Concord ceased forever to be the legislative capital of Massachusetts. It became temporarily, however, the seat of Dr. Langdon’s College, which in October, 1775, began its recitations in the court-house and meeting-house, and so continued till June, 1776.
Even Harvard College was at that time revolutionary; it gave up its few buildings in Cambridge to the army of Washington, and its president, a cousin of the wealthy New Hampshire patriot, John Langdon, made the prayer for Bunker Hill battle, as the troops marched out of Cambridge to give a feeble support to Prescott and his Middlesex farmers, entrenched on the hill. Washington had not yet reached Cambridge, to take command; had his strategic eye taken in the situation that morning, the result at Bunker Hill would have been different.
Lexington, the town which gave its name to the battle of April, 1775, more decidedly than Concord,—though both names occur from the first,—was an offshoot from the older towns of Cambridge, Watertown and Woburn, rather than an original church seat, and was not established as a town until 1712. A range of hills separates it from the valley of the Musketaquit, and Paul Revere, in his night ride of April 18th, celebrated by Longfellow, could not cross those hills, but left his message of war to be borne on to Concord village by young Prescott, distantly related to Prescott of Bunker Hill. But Lexington, though little more than half so populous as Concord at that time, had a warlike people, many of them descended from the fighting Monros of Scotland, captured by Cromwell, and exiled for their loyalty to the Stuarts. In Lexington they again turned out against the house of Hanover, and they were commanded that April morning by the grandfather of Lexington’s most famous son, Theodore Parker. Captain John Parker, though ill on the 19th of April, did his soldier’s duty from two in the morning till midnight; and some of his men returned the British fire in early morning, against hopeless odds. Their turn came in the afternoon, when the retreating British were only saved from total defeat by the cannon of Lord Percy. Those first heroes of the Revolution, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who had been at the Provincial Congress in Concord, at Lexington were in the early morning in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Clark, a kinsman of Hancock, and narrowly escaped capture by the British soldiers, who had special orders to seize them.
John Pierpont, a poet whose Pegasus balked now and then, in his verses at Acton, April 19, 1851, anticipated Longfellow by this Wordsworthian version of Revere’s ride to Lexington: