-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Lost Men of American History Stewart H. Holbrook(C)1946 The Macmillan Company New York, NY ----- CHAPTER III The Strange "Battle of Lexington IN AN inspired moment Ralph Waldo Emerson termed it the Shot Heard Round the World. He could also have called.. it, and with more accuracy, the triumph of Sam Adams's brand of agitating, but that would hardly have been poetry. Old Sam would not have cared, anyway, just so long as the shooting began. . . . So, with mounted scouts well in advance, the British foot column moved quietly and swiftly out of Boston, then marched on through the night along the road to Lexington. In that hamlet, meanwhile, Captain John Parker,. after consultation with Adams and John Hancock, roused his drummer boy, William Diamond, and the two went to the Green. The handsome village common was silent. All was still dark, and the air was damp with morning mist, but the drumhead was taut and true and the lad beat a long alarm roll that soon pounded into the ears of the sleeping militia, the Minutemen. Although they scarcely could have known that the day was to make them, alive or dead, American heroes with few peers, the militia were fairly prompt. They rolled out of their straw ticks, took their muskets or fowling pieces, and congregated at the Buckman tavern, which stood square across the road from the Green. It was yet night, though the faint twilight of early morning was beginning to show when the last 'man appeared. Parker put them into company formation. They stood there a bit. Then Parker dismissed them, some going to their homes, others to the tavern. Yet, a little later Parker assembled them again. Why did he do so? There are times when the narrative of history should be halted briefly to consider, on the spot, so to speak, the actions and also the possible motives of certain of the actors. The so-called Battle of Lexington is one such moment, for it was one of the oddest moments in our history. For well over a century a cloud of doubt has misted this minor yet celebrated action, and little wonder. Captain John Parker, he who called the Minutemen, dismissed, then re-assembled them, was a soldier of considerable rough-and-tumble fighting experience in the French and Indian War. The Green where he stationed his handful of farmers was smack on the road down which the British must pass. Hills and thick woods, ideal for observation, were hard by; or, they could have served for ambush cover. Yet Parker chose the Green-open, level, and so close that his men must almost be brushed by the passing regulars, who were known to be on their way. Why did Parker pick this suicidal spot? It was merely asking for trouble, he and his rustics, all armed, standing by the wayside, inviting insult and molestation. Was Captain Parker acting under orders, possibly orders from the Great Agitator, Sam Adams? Adams, had been hiding in Lexington for days. He was the dynamo that started the revolutionary idea and kept it in motion. He had ably used the blood shed in King Street to rouse sluggards. He had diverted or perverted every possible incident in a successful effort to inflame the colonies. Now, on the 19th of April, 1775, did he feel it was time to draw the British fire again, to make some more Patriot Martyrs? Here on the Green was a scattering of farmers, commanded by an experienced soldier who would be the last person, under ordinary circumstances and acting under his own free will, to oppose a long column of professional troops with a squad of rustics. Yet there he and they stood, looking squarely into the face of death. They must have been powerfully urged, more likely ordered, to take their impossible stand. Any old Indian fighter like Parker would automatically have picked the nearby Woods. On came the British, and Major Pitcairn of the column saw the assembled Minutemen. He ordered them to disperse, calling them rebels, which they were. They started at once to disperse. Pitcairn wished to surround them in order to take away their arms. Killing, even wounding one of them was his last thought. But as the militia were dispersing, Pitcairn saw the flash of a pan from behind a fence. Another flash. Pitcairn's horse was hit, and it reared, throwing the Major to the ground. Now the British began firing--without orders, Pitcairn always maintained--and Americans fell on the Green. The "battle" of Lexington was over, and without further ado the British column moved on toward Concord. Let them move while we consider briefly the history of the history of the affair on Lexington Green. I cannot name another incident which has undergone so many mutations, and they are mutations, moreover, that can be accurately measured. It all began, did this oddly changing history of the Battle of Lexington, in 1824, almost fifty years afterward, when the Honorable Samuel Hoar, in welcoming the Marquis de Lafayette on his visit to Concord, Massachusetts, spoke of the Battle of Concord, which occurred after the Battle of Lexington, as being "the first forcible resistance to the Crown." The people of Lexington did not take kindly to the reference. They objected to being; thus nosed out. of first-blood honors; and an endless controversy with Concord began at once, and with odd and fascinating results. These results are to be seen in a succession of prints of the Battle of Lexington, made between 1775 and 1886, which shows a remarkable and steadily increasing resistance on the part of the Lexington patriots. The first print, made by Doolittle and Earle in 1775, and after consulting the Americans involved, shows the Minutemen dispersing in every direction. Not one of them displays an attitude of fight, those farmers are getting out of there as quickly as they can. The second print, made about 1830--or six years after Samuel Hoar's famous oration on firstblood-by Pendleton, shows that although the Minutemen may still be said to be dispersing, yet nine devoted souls are facing the foe, and of these seven Are firing, two loading. The. third sketch, made by Billings in 1855, shows the dispersing to be confined to the extreme left of the line, while the firing and loading have been extended to no less than eighteen stout-hearted patriots. And now. comes the mural, done in 1886 -by Hy Sandham, expressly for the Lexington town hall. This throws off all restraint. There is no dispersing, not even a shadow of wavering. Here is battle. The patriot line holds from end to end, like a stone fence. Some of the Minutemen are dying, but all others are either loading or firing--emptying their muskets into the glittering target offered by the British light infantry. . . . Let them who will, write a nation's history. Give me the boys who draw the pictures. Few of us ever question the authenticity of a historical picture, unless it conflicts with our desires, or preconceived views. 'Yet of all the pictures of the Battle of Lexington, that first print by Earle and Doolittle, drawn from information given the artists themselves by the obviously, truthful men who were present when the shooting started, must be accepted as the most accurate; and it would seem also to give weight to the supposition that the Minutemen were stationed on, the Green, not with the idea of, attempting battle with the great column of British regulars but to provoke the regulars into an "incident." I believe the affair was staged in cold blood by Samuel Adams.* [*For a thorough resume of the Lexington prints, see Harold Murdock, The 19th of April, 1775, Boston, 1923.] It of course matters little who fired first at Lexington.. What matters is that this little band of farmers stood there, insultingly close to the road, and precipitated bloody shooting. It should be remarked, too, that it was the rattle of British and not American musketry on that hot dawn which brought from Adams his oft-quoted line: "Oh what. it, glorious morning is this!" It is a grand, a. stirring line, one eminently fit to be cut in marble, one that came from deep in the soul of him who felt that at last his mission had been accomplished. He had supplied, the formal battle, the martyrs, to fan the Revolution into intense flame. The smoke had hardly cleared when Adams and his crew of propagandist helpers had dodgers, well bordered with the inevitable black coffins, in circulation. Adams's version of the fray, characteristically enough, was that it had been a wanton and brutal and unprovoked assault on a few peaceful villagers. The British only paused at Lexington that morning. On they marched to Concord, and there still more patriots met them at the famous bridge that arched the flood. Here there was real fighting. And fighting continued. As every schoolboy knows, the embattled farmers gathered from a dozen towns, following the British out of Concord, back to Lexington, and on half a mile to the Monroe tavern. Here Lord Percy, with supporting troops for the harassed light infantry, made a brief stand, but the farmers were becoming thick-and ornery as hornets. Percy formed his troops into the classic hollow square, planted two small cannon on high ground above the tavern, and, received the retreating British within his lines. They needed this respite, too, for many had their tongues hanging out, says an old account, like those of dogs after a chase. Percy stood long enough for "light refreshments" to be served; then, after firing a salvo from his battery, the combined British forces started back to Boston. On came the farmers, who pressed so close at West Cambridge that Percy stood about and a sharp skirmish ensued. Dr. Joseph Warren, Sam Adams's noted lieutenant, was in this fray and barely escaped with his life when a British bullet knocked a pin out of an ear-curl in his hair. Harassment of the miserable British continued until they reached the safety of Boston, after dark. It had been a great day for the Americans, this 19th of April in '75, and out of it has issued some of the most glorious bombast we possess. Listen while Benson J. Lossing, one of our early historians, sums it up for posterity: "The events of that day," says he, and echoes can still be heard in our holiday oratory, "formed the first disruption of the chrysalis of old political systems, whence speedily came forth a noble and novel creature, with eagle eye and expansive wings, destined speedily to soar far above the creeping reptiles of despotism that brood amid the crumbling relics of old dynasties." Then, in full cry, Lossing reaches his climax. "These events," says he, "formed the significant prelude, to, that full diapason, whose thundering harmony, drawn forth by the magic touch of the new spirit of Freedom, filled the nations with wonder, and ushered in the New Era so long predicted and so long hoped for." Lossing, like many another American writer since, then went on to indicate that the embattled farmers, dead shots to a man, had all but wrecked the British army in America. This cherished idea that Americans are by nature and practice veritable marksmen is a belief that has caused the United States incalculable harm, this past century and a half. Because of it we have believed that our citizen army, which would magically spring to arms instantly-and which is another greatly cherished fatuity--would be composed almost wholly of men who could shoot the eye out of a squirrel at a hundred yards. If the battles of Concord and Lexington proved anything, they manifestly proved that our farmer-militia were anything but accurate with a gun. That they wreaked as much destruction as they did was because there were so many of them shooting. The British lost 73 killed, 174 wounded, and 26 missing, or a total of 273. The American losses were 49 killed, 39 wounded, and 5 missing, or a total of 93. The British engaged numbered 1,800 men', while no less than 3,763 Americans took part. Not one American in ten hit a redcoat that seething day, and this is certainly not the sharpshooting related in so many American history books. It was no discredit to the Americans that they were rather poor marksmen. They hardly could have been otherwise. Powder had been uncommonly scarce for about five years. The muskets used were not dependable above eighty yards, and the best range was sixty yards; no rifles were in use. There had been no good hunting in eastern Massachusetts for many years. And when farmers there did see and shoot at a deer they used buckshot--much different than using a ball in a smoothbore. Moreover, true shooting men are made by constant practice. The yearly musters in Massachusetts had long since degenerated into convivial gatherings, hardly distinguishable from mass drunks. It is true that by 1774, considerable attention began to be devoted to these musters, but habit was still strong and powder was still scarce. What these brave farmers used was a firelock gun. A flint struck the lip or frizzen of the lock, the spark went into a covered pan of powder; a slow flash set off the charge; slowburning powder sent a slow bullet along a heavily dropping trajectory. In other words, a man had to aim very high over his target if it were more than eighty yards distant, and probably if it were more than sixty yards away. There was no uniformity of powder or bullets. The bullets were made at home, usually by the women, folk. A few of the Yankee farmers may still have carried the 'romantic powder horn as late as 1775--and to the glory of all Revolutionary murals since--but those of the so-called organized militia used cartridges made of a roll of paper containing ball and powder., Holding the cartridge by the bullet end, the soldier bit off the paper at the other end; he shook enough powder for priming into the pan, then poured the rest of it down the barrel, dropped in the ball, then stuffed the paper after it as wadding, and rammed it home. That these farmers did so much damage on the 19th of April, was due to their numbers and to the fact that they did take aim. British regulars were drilled in the French and Prussian school, which did not go in for aiming a piece. The British Manual -of Arms said nothing about aiming, only "leveling." The priming and loading was accomplished "by the numbers," requiring eight different commands, which were to be executed in twelve movements. Used to close fighting in Europe, the British still clung to fire by volleys. The stone walls along the roads from Concord to Boston were responsible, for most of the casualties inflicted on the British, and for many of those on the Americans. Israel Putnam remarked more than once - of Americans that while they were anxious about their legs, they had no fear for their heads. Cover them up to their shoulders, said- Old Put, and they would fight forever. Thus the second line of stone fences (the first line was too close to the road) back from the British march were the places favored by the Yankee bushwhackers. And it was also back of the fences that the bushwhackers fell prey to British flankers, who came upon them from behind. All glory and credit to the gallant farmers of Essex and Middlesex, but let us not call them sharpshooters. To-do so, in the face of the record, is to imply that; their aim had been affected by what a good many of them, if tradition be correct, were drinking that day. As for Samuel Adams, Lexington was doubtless the high point of his life. He was of little help in prosecuting the war, or in forming the colonies into the United States. He served in Congress, was Governor of Massachusetts, and lived unblemished in "honorable poverty" until his, death in 1803. His real work was done when the shooting began at Lexington. If George Washington was the Father of his Country, then Samuel Adams was Assuredly the Father of the Revolution. pp. 33-41 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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