The accounts on the British side are almost equally numerous, including the official reports of Gage, Percy, and Smith, already referred to. General Gage sent (April 29)[536] to Gov. Trumbull, of Connecticut, a statement, which was printed at the time in a handbill as a Circumstantial Account, and he refers to it "as taken from gentlemen of indisputable honor and veracity, who were eye-witnesses of all the transactions of that day."[537]
In 1779 there was printed at Boston a pamphlet containing General Gage's instructions to Brown and De Bernière,[538] from a MS. left in Boston by a British officer, to which is appended an account of the "transactions" of April 19, with a list of the killed, wounded, and missing,[539] and in 1775 there was printed at London a contemporary summary in The Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Dispute.[540]
The question of firing the first shot at Lexington was studiously examined at the time, each side claiming exemption from the charge of being the aggressor, and Frothingham[541] and Hudson[542] collate the evidence. It seems probable that the British fired first, though by design or accident a musket on the provincial side flashed in the pan before the regulars fired.[543] That some irregular return of the British fire was made seems undeniable, though at the time of the semi-centennial celebration certain writers, anxious to establish for Concord the credit of first forcibly resisting the British arms, denied that claim on the part of the neighboring town. The controversy resulted in Elias Phinney's Battle of Lexington, published in 1825,[544] with depositions of survivors, taken in 1822; and Ezra Ripley's Fight at Concord, published in 1827.[545] The parts borne by the men of other towns have had their special commemorations.[546]
PART OF EMERSON'S RECORD IN HIS DIARY, APRIL 19, 1775 (from Whitney's Literature of the Nineteenth of April).
PERCY.
From Andrews's Hist. of the War, Lond., 1785, vol. ii. A portrait engraved by V. Green is noted in J. C. Smith's Brit. Mezzotint Portraits, ii. 576. Cf. also Evelyns in America, 304; Memorial Hist. of Boston, iii. 57, 58; "Percy family and Alnwick Castle" in Jewitt's Stately Homes of England. In the Third Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission there are (1872) various papers of the Percy family touching the American war. Some of these papers have been procured from England by the Rev. E. G. Porter, of Lexington. Several letters of Percy, addressed to Bishop Percy, sold not long since at a sale of the Bishop's MSS., were bought by a London dealer, and are now in the Boston Public Library. They are quoted from in this and other chapters. On July 30, 1776, a picture of Percy was placed in Guildhall, London, by the magistrates of the city and liberties of Westminster, in token of his services in America. Cf. also Doyle's Official Baronage, ii. 670.