“A youth,” says Hawthorne, “in the service of the clergyman [Parson Emerson], happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the Bridge, he left his task and hurried to the battle-field, with the axe still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated, the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground—one was a corpse—but, as the young New Englander drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees, and gave a ghastly stare in his face. The boy—it must have been a nervous impulse, without purpose—uplifted his axe, and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.”
To a certain extent, Bancroft, in his account of the fight, confirms this tale, saying:
“The Americans acted from impulse, and stood astonished at what they had done. They made no (immediate) pursuit, and did no further harm,—except that one wounded soldier, rising as if to escape, was struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Col. Barrett’s might have been cut off, but was not molested.”
It is traditional that when this party, which had been sent to destroy the military stores at Colonel James Barrett’s, two miles to the westward, came back to the Bridge, alarmed by the firing, and saw their countrymen lying dead there, one of them with his head laid open, they were struck with fear and ran on to the main body in the village, telling of what they had seen. And it was this single incident, very likely, which led the English officers, and Lord Percy himself, to report “that the rebels scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded who fell into their hands.” Bancroft indignantly denies this, saying, “The falsehood brings dishonor on its voucher; the people whom Percy reviled were among the mildest and most compassionate of their race,”—which is true.
It is no wonder that the British troops on
their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties, should themselves have committed some barbarities,—for their defeat and humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and officers,—more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of the yeomanry was only ninety-one—a third of the British loss,—while all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side. From that day, the Revolution was begun,—to end only with the creation of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town.
Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two foci of the American revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later, with Emerson for its Washington,—and with results that seem as permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe cared to read,—a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two or three sermons and as many essays by Channing.
Into the stagnation of this shallow pool of American letters, Emerson, in 1836, cast the smooth stone of his philosophical first book,—Nature. It made little immediate stir; the denizens of the pool paid small heed to it, and few of them guessed what it meant. It was written in Concord, and chiefly at the Old Manse, where Emerson dwelt with his mother and kindred before his second marriage in 1835, and where Hawthorne afterward made the house and himself widely known. The fixing of his own residence in this town by Emerson was due in part to ancestry, and still more to a perception of the fitness of the region for the abode of a poet and sage. The same perception, by Hawthorne, Alcott, Ellery Channing and others,—together with the important fact that it