The Strategy of Victory

CHAPTER 1

The Fırst Stroke

On April 19, 1775, in the grey interval between dawn and sunrise, some thirty-eight Americans formed two uneven lines on the wet, dandelion-speckled grass of the triangular two-acre common in the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. They had answered the summons of the rolling beat of sixteen-year-old William Diamond’s brightly painted drum. Big, burly Captain John Parker, a veteran of the French and Indian War, had given the order to sound this call to arms. Most of the men had spent the night in Buckman’s Tavern, a white clapboard building just east of the green; others hurried from twelve houses that faced its three sides. As more men joined the ranks, Parker’s numbers grew to seventy-seven, still considerably short of the 130 names on his muster list.

William Diamond’s drum had rolled, and the men had formed up in response to a shouted warning from a rider sent out by Captain Parker to scout the road to Boston. A British column, the excited man said, was only fifteen minutes away and marching fast. Parker and his men were on the north end of the common, close to where one branch of the Boston Road led to Bedford. Another branch bent left past the opposite side of the common and continued to Concord. The town’s bulky two-and-a-half-story meeting house—where they gathered each Sunday to hear the minister, the Reverend Jonas Clarke, tell them that the British were plotting to deprive Americans of their liberty and that it was every man’s sacred duty to resist—blocked their view of the fork, from which the road ran to Boston.

The crisis had been gathering momentum for more than a year—ever since a group of Bostonians disguised as Indians had dumped £9,000 worth of British tea into the harbor to protest the three-cent tax on it. The reaction of Britain’s king and parliament had been extreme. They had made the commander of the British army in America, General Thomas Gage, the governor of Massachusetts and passed a series of punitive laws that deprived the people of the state of basic rights, such as the freedom to hold a town meeting without the governor’s permission.

Although they had guns in their hands, these men of Lexington were not regular soldiers. They were part-time warriors, known as militia. Under the royal government, every man between sixteen and sixty belonged to the militia. He was supposed to own a gun and a modest supply of ammunition and had to report for military drill at least once a year on training day. Militiamen wore their everyday clothes—loose brown or grey homespun cloth coats and leather knee breeches. They elected their officers once a year and wrote their own rules and regulations.

Since the tea party crisis began, a third of Lexington’s men had been meeting every week; supposed to be ready to fight on sixty seconds’ notice, they had been designated “minutemen.” The same policy prevailed in the province’s other towns. Everyone was preparing for a surprise attack by the British army in Boston.¹

About a quarter of the men were related to Captain Parker by blood or marriage. Most of them came from families that had been living in Lexington for three, four, even six generations, and almost all shared some degree of kinship. The company clerk, Daniel Harrington, whose house stood only a few steps from the common, was a son-in-law of sixty-three-year-old Robert Munroe, one of the company’s ensigns—the eighteenth-century term for second lieutenant. Another Harrington—Jonathan—lived in the house next door with his wife and small son. Thirty-eight-year-old William Tidd, the company’ s lieutenant, was also married to one of Ensign Munroe’s daughters. The men included grandfathers like Jonas Parker, the captain’s cousin, and Moses Harrington, who were there with their married sons. Six younger men such as John Muzzy were also there with sons in their teens or early twenties.

Incongruous among the two rows of white faces was the glistening black skin of the slave Prince Estabrook. He had become a member of the company by majority vote, in accordance with the regulation that stated, “Any Person Desiring to be Admitted… shall have a vote of the Company for the same.”

If Captain Parker and his men had any plan, it was to keep as far away as possible from the Concord Road. Thanks to hardworking spies in Boston, they knew Concord was the British column’s destination. Earlier in the evening, when riders from Boston had brought the first alarm to Lexington, they told the militia that the British numbered between 1,200 and 1,500 men. Captain Parker and his men had conferred and decided “not to… meddle or make with the Regular troops.”

The Lexington men soon heard hundreds of feet striking the ground with military precision. The British were very close. Parker and his company waited, their eyes on the Concord Road. But around that side of the meeting house came only a single British officer on a horse, gesturing with a sword. Around the Bedford Road side of the meeting house came six companies of red-coated British light infantry, three abreast, twelve men to a file. Beside them were several officers on horseback and at least six civilians they had captured on the way, hoping to keep their expedition a secret.

There was a split-second pause in the British pace. Then the light infantrymen raced toward the Americans. Shouting furiously, the two lead companies formed a line of battle twelve abreast and three deep. The officer waving the sword was Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines. He commanded these light infantrymen, traditionally the toughest, most aggressive soldiers in their regiments. “Lay down your arms,” he shouted to Parker’s men.

From the other officers on horseback came contradictory commands. “Disperse, ye rebels,” one roared. “Surrender,” cried another. “Damn them we will have them,” bellowed a third.

The appalled Captain Parker turned to his men and told them to disperse without firing. Most of them began to drift away in various directions. Old Jonas Parker and a few others hesitated. Grandfather Parker had vowed never to retreat if the British attacked.

“Surround them,” shouted Pitcairn to the furious light infantrymen. But they were not listening to him or to anyone else. Later, Major Pitcairn said he thought he saw a gun held by a man behind a stone wall on the edge of the green “flash in the pan.” (The powder in the musket’s firing pan flamed but did not ignite the cartridge in the barrel, so the gun failed to go off.) American witnesses—about forty men, women, and children stood around the green or watched from the windows and doorways of the adjacent houses—said one of the British officers on horseback fired a pistol. If either occurred, it only supported the intentions of the light infantrymen from the moment they saw the militia facing them on the common.

The red-coated soldiers in the two lead companies stopped, and the second rank stepped a half pace to the right. The third rank stepped another half pace to the right. The maneuver took the men no more time than it takes to read these words. They had practiced it repeatedly during the preceding winter months. Now every man in the two companies could fire without hitting the soldier in front of him.

Thirty-six muskets crashed on the left, then thirty-six more on the right. A huge billow of white gun smoke swirled in the murky dawn air. Murderous one-and-a-half-ounce bullets tore into Captain Parker’s men. Ensign Robert Munroe was dead when he hit the ground. A cousin, John Munroe, gasped as a bullet smashed his arm. Young Isaac Muzzy died at his father’s feet. Jonathan Harrington, hit in the chest, crawled painfully to the doorstep of his house and died there, before the eyes of his horrified wife and son.

A wild melee erupted as Parker’s men began firing back. A number of men who had lingered in Buckman’s Tavern opened fire from the first- and second-floor windows. More guns boomed from the windows of other houses around the common. The rear companies of light infantry stormed into the fight, some returning the shots from the tavern and houses, others charging Parker’s men, firing from the hip and lowering their bayonets.²

Old Jonas Parker, hit in the first volley, fired his musket from a sitting position and struggled to get a fresh cartridge and flint from his hat, which he had placed on the ground between his feet. A light infantryman stopped him with a bayonet thrust. Asahel Porter of Woburn, one of the men captured on the road, tried to run and was shot dead. He and a Lexington man died north of the common, on the other side of the stone wall. A half dozen more Lexington men were wounded in this vicinity.

“Cease firing. Cease firing,” shouted Major Pitcairn. He rode among the milling light infantrymen, striking up their guns with his sword. But they paid no attention to the marine officer—or to any other officer. “The men were so wild they could hear no orders,” said Lieutenant John Barker of the King’s Own Light Infantry. Squads of furious soldiers rushed toward Buckman’s Tavern and the houses, swearing they would kill every man they found in them.

Into this chaos of swirling gun smoke, shrieking women and children, roaring light infantrymen, and cursing officers rode corpulent Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith. He commanded the seven hundred men who had left Boston at 9:30 P.M. the previous night with orders to destroy the American gunpowder, cannon, and supplies at Concord. Success, they hoped, would cripple resistance to British authority in Massachusetts.

With the help of a lieutenant, Smith found a drummer and ordered him to beat “cease fire.” This familiar sound restored some sanity to the berserk light infantrymen. As the companies reformed, some Lexington men on the third floor of Buckman’s Tavern fired three shots at Lieutenant Colonel Smith. The soldiers begged for permission to go after them. Smith angrily refused and rebuked them for ignoring the commands of their officers and breaking their ranks.

In perhaps ten minutes, the light infantrymen were in marching formation on the common. Near them, four Lexington men lay dead or dying. Four more were in the same condition just off the green, and another ten were staggering or limping to safety with painful wounds. The British had one soldier wounded in the leg. Major Pitcairn’s horse had taken two bullets.³

The British officers held a hurried conference. Should they continue their march to Concord now? They knew that every town had companies of militia like the one they had just routed at Lexington. Lieutenant Colonel Smith saw no reason to deviate from his orders. He told the light infantrymen to give three cheers and fire a volley—a British tradition on winning a victory.

By this time the rest of the seven-hundred-man British force had reached the green. They waited on the Concord Road, eleven companies of grenadiers, the biggest soldiers in their regiments, and four additional companies of light infantry, during the performance of the brief victory ceremony. Major Pitcairn’s six light infantry companies rejoined the column. In a compact body, their drums beating and fifes skirling, the British marched for Concord, five miles away, oblivious of the fact that they had started a war.⁴

BEFORE TWILIGHT descended on April 19, one in five of these victorious British soldiers would be dead or wounded. Compounding the irony, they found no gunpowder and very few weapons in Concord, whose residents had, with the help of those numerous American spies, anticipated their haphazard searches and hidden well everything the British hoped to find. While redcoats groped through barns and attics, more than 5,000 infuriated minutemen and militia gathered from dozens of towns in the vicinity and made the soldiers’ return to Boston a nightmare. Again and again blasts of bullets hurtled into their ranks from ambushes along the curving road. Only reinforcements from Boston, led by a veteran brigadier, Lord Hugh Percy, rescued them from annihilation. More fierce fighting erupted when the Americans attacked the reinforced column in the final miles to Boston. But they could not pose a serious threat to the British, now over 2,000 men strong.

The British suffered 73 men killed and 174 wounded. Another twenty-six were missing; some had been wounded and left behind along the road; a few had deserted or surrendered. Massachusetts’s losses are more difficult to compute. The colony had no organized system for reporting casualties. We are fairly certain that forty-nine died, but the semiofficial estimate of only forty-one wounded is suspicious. The ratio of killed to wounded is usually one to three in land battles. Many of the wounded may have gone home and never reported their injuries.

As the battle fury died away, men on both sides began assessing the experience. Lieutenant Barker wrote in his diary, “Thus ended this expedition, which from beginning to end was as ill-plan’d and ill-executed as it was possible to be.”⁵ Captain William Glanville Evelyn of the King’s Own was convinced that the “Yankey scoundrels” were “the most absolute cowards on the face of the earth.” He attributed the valor they had displayed on April 19 to “such a degree of enthusiasm and madness that they are easily persuaded the Lord is to assist them in whatever they undertake, and that they must be invincible.”

The chagrined Lieutenant Colonel Smith could only complain, “Notwithstanding the enemy’s numbers, they did not make one gallant attempt during so long an action.” By gallant attempt he meant a face-to-face confrontation in the traditional battlefield style.

Lord Percy took a more balanced view of Massachusetts’s tactics. It was true that the minutemen and militia had attacked in a “very scattered, irregular manner,” but Percy noted that they did so with “perseverance & resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body. Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so.” Grimly, Percy concluded, “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.” He was now convinced that “the rebels… are determined to go thro with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home.”⁶

Percy recognized, with the eye of an intelligent soldier, one of the least understood realities of April 19. The Americans who responded to the British challenge were not a mass of disorganized individuals; they were a well-supplied rudimentary army that had been organizing and training for six months. They were in a state of battle readiness, much better prepared to fight than the British soldiers who marched out of Boston.

A heavy proportion of the American officers were veterans of previous wars who knew how to lead men into battle. Their training and the knowledge that they outnumbered the British five to one added to the confidence with which they responded to the alarm when the fighting began. In short, April 19, 1775, was a victory of preparedness, not a product of spontaneous enthusiasm. The minutemen and militiamen of Massachusetts knew their superior strength and, more importantly, were confident that their months of training would enable them to use that advantage effectively. Unfortunately, this lesson was lost even before it was learned.