Concord, little knowing what would meet them there. As they climbed the hills in Lexington and Lincoln, they could surmise, however, that the country was rising, for the church-bells were ringing an alarm of fire. Pierpont, at Acton, overlooking the neighboring towns named by him, gave the geography of this rising in spirited couplets:
“Now Concord’s bell, resounding many a mile,
Is heard by Lincoln, Lincoln’s by Carlisle,
Carlisle’s by Chelmsford,—and from Chelmsford’s swell
Peals the loud clangor of th’ alarum bell,
Till it o’er Bedford, Acton, Westford spreads,
Startling the morning dreamers from their beds.”
These are the small towns lying along the Concord and Merrimac rivers, and their tributaries, which sent forth the minute-men to fight at Concord Bridge.
Prescott had done his warning work well; and as Emerson said in 1835:
“In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years (King Philip’s War), the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls, to make good the resolute words of their town debates. These poor farmers acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing.”
It was Emerson’s grandfather, the town minister, who met them on Concord Green, before his church, and who entered that night in his almanac the events he had witnessed, as soon to be quoted.
By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander and Cæsar—even Hannibal and Bonaparte—continue to receive admiration for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.”
“Behold our river bank,
Whither the angry farmers came
In sloven dress and broken rank,—
Nor thought of fame:
Their deed of blood
All mankind praise;
Even the serene Reason says
‘It was well done.’ ”