The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson

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Percy, “from woods and orchards and stone walls, and from every house on the road.… They are the most absolute cowards on the face of the earth.” The day’s bloodiest fighting erupted in Menotomy—street to street, house to house, room to room. Here twenty-five Americans and forty British would die, with scores more wounded. “All that were found in the houses,” Lieutenant Barker wrote, “were put to death.”

      Over a hundred British bullets perforated Cooper’s Tavern while the innkeeper and his wife cowered in the cellar. Two unarmed patrons were killed upstairs, according to a deposition, “their brains dashed across the floor and walls.” At the Jason Russell house, Danvers militiamen piled up shingles as a breastwork in the yard only to be outflanked and caught in a British cross fire. Some fled into the house as balls poured through the windows, “making havoc of glass.” Russell was shot on his doorstep and bayoneted nearly a dozen times; Timothy Munroe ran for his life and escaped, despite a bullet in the leg and buttons on his waistcoat shot away. Eight militiamen who barricaded themselves in the cellar survived after shooting a regular who ventured down the stairs, but others upstairs were killed, perhaps executed. A dozen bodies later were laid side by side in the south room, their blood soaking the plank floor.

      “We retired for 15 miles under an incessant fire, which like a moving circle, surrounded and followed us wherever we went,” Percy would write the following day. “It was impossible not to lose a good many men.” He would have lost a good many more had he not made the best British tactical decision of the day. As his vanguard approached Cambridge around five p.m., Percy studied two paper sheets pinned together as a sketch map of the road ahead. Rather than returning via the only bridge over the Charles River to reach Roxbury and Boston Neck, he ordered the column to pivot left into Kent’s Lane and head for Charlestown. The route would require ferrying his men into Boston, but Somerset and other warships would offer protection. As he suspected and later confirmed, a large rebel force had tossed the bridge planks into the Charles and militiamen waited in ambush behind barricades. Had the column not veered away, a senior British general later concluded, “there would have been an end that day of British government in America.”

      The final miles to Charlestown were harrowing enough—casualties climbing, ammunition dwindling, sun sinking, men at the last pitch of exhaustion. The column avoided an ambush at Harvard Square, but several soldiers died in another gunfight near the future Beech and Elm Streets while three rebels who had built a redoubt at Watson’s Corner were encircled and bayoneted. William Marcy, described as “a simple-minded youth” who thought he was watching a parade, was shot dead while sitting on a wall, cheering. Percy’s white charger was also hit; he found another, nonplussed to see American gunmen who, he wrote, “advanced within ten yards to fire at me & other officers.” Ensign Jeremy Lister, slumped on a horse and faint with blood loss from his shattered elbow, “found the balls whistled so smartly about my ears I thought it more prudent to dismount.” It was said that footsore soldiers flung themselves onto low ground near the Charles and “drank like dogs from an old pond.” Now everyone’s tongue was hanging out. “Taking the whole together,” a militiaman wrote, “it was the most fatiguing day’s work I ever heard of.”

      Of Cambridge’s eight hundred residents, many hid a mile west at Fresh Pond. Hannah Winthrop, the wife of a Harvard mathematics professor, wrote that a remote house there was “filled with women whose husbands had gone forth to meet the assailants, seventy or eighty of these, with numbers of infant children, weeping and agonizing for the fate of their husbands.” In Charlestown, the chatter of musketry and an occasional cannon boom carried from Milk Road on the approach to Charlestown Neck.

      Dusk brightened each muzzle flash, and scarlet bursts limned the line of retreat. Some Charlestown residents fled across the Mystic River at Penny Ferry or scurried along the marshes toward Medford. Others hid in clay quarries below the high pasture that would soon be known as Breed’s Hill. Terrified women and children huddled in the local Pest House, usually reserved for the infectious. Returning British officers crowded a tavern near the town hall. “All was tumult and confusion,” a witness reported, “nothing but drink called for everywhere.” Edward Barber, the fourteen-year-old son of a sea captain, was shot dead while watching the column from his front window. Rumors spread quickly that the British were massacring children.

      The shooting ebbed and finally faded away, along with this very long day. Percy ordered the grenadiers and light infantry to the Charlestown wharves, where boat crews waited to row them the half mile to Boston. Five hundred fresh regulars arrived to garrison the heights below Charlestown Neck, including Bunker Hill. Militiamen scraped beds from the hillsides north of the Neck or stumbled back into Cambridge to sleep on their arms. “The civil war was begun at Concord this morning,” a parson told his diary. “Lord direct all things for His glory.” A Roxbury physician said simply, “Well, the nail is driven.”

      The great spire atop Old North loomed above the river. Keening carried from the homes of the dead. The moon rose, a bit later than the previous night, and found the world changed, changed utterly.

      A thousand campfires glittered from the high ground in a semicircle around Boston, tracing the contours of the siege that would last for almost a year. Rebel sentinels posted the Neck at Roxbury, and patrols scuffed through the night. “We had as much liquor as we wanted,” Private Samuel Haws wrote in his journal, “and every man drawed three biscuit which were taken from the Regulars the day before, which were hard enough for flints.” British ships remained cleared for action, with guard boats doubled and the Charlestown ferry lane closed but for the steady shuttling of soldiers back to their barracks. In a tense conference with General Gage late Wednesday night, the Royal Navy urged “burning and laying waste the whole country” before insurgents could attack the garrison. Gage rejected the proposal as “too rash and sanguinary,” and soon pulled his exposed troops from the Charlestown peninsula. British rule in New England now ended at Boston’s town limits.

      The countryside hardly slept. Horses, cattle, pigs, and men lay dead across a twenty-mile corridor from the Charles to the Concord River. A rumor that redcoats were on the march northeast of Boston sent civilians fleeing into the woods, the village streets behind them strewn with bedding and cookware that had tumbled from farm carts. “Men and horses driving post up and down the roads,” a deacon in Brighton noted in his diary. “People were in great perplexity.” More family silver was lowered down wells or tucked into tree hollows. Horses were saddled and unsaddled, oxen yoked and unyoked. Some farmers armed themselves with pikes, whittled sharp and fire-hardened.

      Women in Framingham clutched axes and pitchforks, convinced that black servants incited by the British were intent on murder. A similar report in Menotomy prompted a woman to ask her approaching slave, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?” The Anglican church in Cambridge became a field hospital, and wounded men jammed private homes. Nathaniel Cleaves of Beverly would receive a three-shilling bill from a surgeon for “amputating finger, sutures, &c.,” and Israel Everett was also charged three shillings, for “extracting a bullet from the cubitus,” the forearm. Samuel Whittemore, said to be eighty-one when he fought with musket, pistols, and sword behind a stone wall west of Cambridge, was treated for bayonet wounds and a gunshot that carried away part of his cheek; he would live to see his great-great-grandchildren, according to the obituary published when he died at ninety-eight in 1793. Young John Tolman, shot between the shoulder blades and left for dead, also recovered to write, in his old age, “Freedom or independence was the hobby I mounted, sword in hand, neck or nothing, life or death.”

      In Boston, surgeons toiled in the barracks and wherever wounded regulars had collapsed, snipping off bloody uniforms, lopping away ruined arms and legs, dosing their patients with Jesuit’s bark in an effort, often vain, to prevent mortification. Officer casualty rolls listed the wounds with anatomical simplicity: “thigh,” “breast,” “throat.” One British doctor complained in a letter home that American balls were deliberately scored to shatter on impact and inflict greater damage. Perhaps, but more typically hand-cast bullets often had a ridged seam that left hideous, ragged wounds. The butcher’s bill was grim indeed. British casualties totaled 273, nearly 15 percent of the total force that marched into Middlesex on April 19; of those, 73 men were killed or would die of their wounds. American casualties numbered 95, over half of them—49—dead.

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