“The foremost, Paul Revere,
At Warren’s bidding has the gauntlet run
Unscathed, and, dashing into Lexington,
While midnight wraps him in her mantle dark,
Halts at the house of Reverend Mister Clark.”
As compared with Concord, though both were rural towns, Lexington was then, and long remained, more rustic than its westward neighbor; with less trade, less culture and fewer of the tendencies toward literature which early showed themselves in the parish of the Bulkeleys and Emersons. When Theodore Parker, in his career of scholarship and reform, began to look outward from his father’s Lexington farm, it was towards Concord, as well as towards Boston, that he turned his eyes; he taught a district school in Concord, and preached in its pulpit as a candidate to stand beside Dr. Ripley, the pastor of the Old Manse. In after years he thus described the event which gave Lexington its chief title to fame, before Parker’s own birth there:
“The war of Revolution began at Lexington, to end at Yorktown. Its first battle was on the Nineteenth of April. Hancock and Adams lodged at Lexington with the minister. In the raw morning, a little after daybreak, a tall man, with a large forehead under a three-cornered hat, drew up his company of 70 men on the Green,—farmers and mechanics like himself; only one is left now (1851), the boy who played the men to the spot. (It was Jonathan Harrington the fifer.) They wheeled into line to wait for the Regulars. The captain ordered every man to load his piece with powder and ball. ‘Don’t fire,’ were his words, ‘unless fired upon; but if they want a war, let it begin here.’ The Regulars came on. Some Americans offered to run away from their post. Captain Parker said, ‘I will order the first man shot dead that leaves his place.’ The English commander cried out, ‘Disperse, you rebels! lay down your arms and disperse!’ Not a man stirred. ‘Disperse, you damned rebels!’ shouted he again. Not a man stirred. He ordered the vanguard to fire; they did so, but over the heads of our fathers. Then the whole main body levelled their pieces, and there was need of ten new graves in Lexington. A few Americans returned the shot. British blood stained the early grass which waved in the wind. ‘Disperse and take care of yourselves!’ was the captain’s last command. There lay the dead, and there stood the soldiers; there was a battle-field between England and America—never to be forgot, never to be covered over. The ‘Mother-country’ of the morning was the ‘enemy’ at sunrise. ‘Oh, what a glorious morning is this!’ said Samuel Adams.”
Seven men had been killed on the spot, nine wounded,—a quarter-part of all who had stood in arms on the Green, under the eyes of Hancock and Adams.
One of the Lexington Munroes, Ensign Robert, was the first man killed by Pitcairn’s volley; he was sixty-four years old, and had been color-bearer in the capture of Louisburg by assault in 1745. Two of his sons and two sons-in-law were in his company on Lexington Green, and eleven of the Munroe clan were in arms that day. Captain Parker did not long survive the battle, dying the next September; but when the Civil War came on, his grandson Theodore had bequeathed to Massachusetts, and Governor Andrew had placed in her Senate Chamber, beside the trophies sent by Stark from Bennington,
“two fire-arms, formerly the property of my honored grandfather,—to wit, the large musket or King’s arm, which was by him captured from the British in the battle of Lexington, and which is the first fire-arm taken from the enemy in the war for Independence; and also the smaller musket used by him in that battle.”
Theodore Parker had died in May, 1860.
Pitcairn and his redcoats, delayed only half an hour by this bloody overture to Washington’s grand career, marched on towards