the wrong font

I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN MINUTEMAN COUNTRY, and those guys were everywhere: at parades, at town celebrations, at Fenway Park. Our town newspaper was The Billerica Minuteman. I often rode my bike through Lexington and Arlington on The Minuteman Trail. And, yes, I made many visits to Concord to swim in Walden Pond, and was on a certain intimacy with Emerson’s “rude bridge that arched the flood,” the same flood that flowed downstream close by our house, and in which, alongside my brother, I cast for perch and pickerel.

The spirit of the Minutemen endures.

But how long did they endure? I mean, what effect did they really have, not just on April 19, 1775, but on the British forces in Boston and on the outcome of the War? Well, there were two kinds of effects–military and inspirational–and it appears they were less successful in the one than in the other.

I. The Call to Arms…

…was pretty awesome.

The alert system devised for tracking and communicating the movement of the British troops was brilliant—a stunning feat in an age before instant communication. And the image of a handful of colonists rowing across the Mystic River at night, immediately beneath the stern of a British frigate, is certainly cinematic.

It’s possible that the story would have been lost to history if not for the the poetry of Longfellow, so all due respect to Henry for that one. On the other hand, it’s a shame that he did not include the anonymous heroine who tossed her pantaloons out of a North End window so the rowers could muffle their oars. (I propose a new statue on the Harborwalk.)

II. Lexington, on the other hand…

…did not go well.

Rick Atkinson, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, takes a somewhat dim view of many of the Minutemen who answered the call. “Some militia units,” he writes, “were little more than rabble, saluting unsuspecting officers by firing blank charges at their feet or sneaking up on young women before shooting into the air in a weird courtship ritual.” Those who met the British column in Lexington, however, were “more disciplined.”

But did that discipline fail during the confusion on the Green? To this day, nobody knows who squeezed off the first shot, or why, and no order to fire was given. Atkinson conjectures that it might have been either a warning shot or a sniper.

Another view, though, is provided by historian David Hackett Fischer, in his book, Paul Revere’s Ride. Fischer writes that Revere, who was just behind the militia with his back to them, claimed later that it sounded like a pistol and, upon turning around, saw “a cloud of white smoke in front of the regulars.”

I asked historian Derek Maxfield, author of Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp–Elmira, NY and Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, about who at Lexington might have been likely to carry a pistol. He first warned me not to trust Paul Revere, but if it was a pistol, it might have been either an officer or one of the militia, as the Regulars would have been issued their arms.

Fischer writes that a British officer was, in fact, spotted carrying a pistol, and that “many believed” it was a very annoyed Pitcairn, who was not fond of the rebels to begin with—he once referred to them as “banditti”—and didn’t even want to be there in the first place. For my money, it could just as easily have been a misfire, pot-valiance from the meeting at Buckman Tavern, or even a sneeze. (It was April, after all.)

In any event, the whole thing became what the kids call a “shitshow.” The militia crumbled. According to Atkinson, “Few of [Captain] Parker’s men managed to fire more than once, if that.” And his final verdict:

Nothing was right, except the courage…Lexington had been not a battle, or even a skirmish, but an execution. The only British casualties were two privates, lightly wounded by gunshots, and Pitcairn’s horse, nicked twice in the flank. Eight rebels were dead, nice wounded. Of those slain, only two bodies lay in the original American line.

III. Concord

Things went more right for the “embattled farmers” when they advanced to meet the column at the “rude bridge that arched the flood.” Hundreds of Minutemen had gathered, each armed with his own personal assortment of weaponry. According to Atkinson, “They toted muskets, of course—some dating to the French war, or earlier—but also ancient fowling pieces, dirks, rapiers, sabers hammered from farm tools, and powder in cow horns…”

Unlike at Lexington, it’s known who shot first: a British soldier, who fired straight into the river. It was followed by a volley. Then, according to Fischer, “As men began to fall around him, Major Buttrick of Concord turned and cried, ‘Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake fire!’” It was “the shot heard ’round the world.” The Regulars soon broke and started to flee “pell-mell.”

This time, it was success that broke up the militia’s line. According to Fischer,

It had no idea what to do with its victory. This was the moment when one soldier…remembered that ‘after the fire every one appeared to be his own commander.’ Some advanced; others retreated. Order and discipline disintegrated.

A local housewife chased after one Minuteman who, simply deciding it was time to go home, insisted on leaving with a precious musket. (I propose another new statue near the Bridge.)

IV. The Battle Road

“No fifes and drums would play the British back to Boston,” Atkinson writes. And, in the words of Wordsworth,

You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

According to Atkinson, the British suffered 15% casualties during the course of the day. That the number wasn’t much higher—especially during their 8-hour retreat along the packed, narrow Battle Road—seems a miracle.

Was it bad marksmanship? One British officer had his hat shot off 3 times, which suggests that untrained militia might not been aware of the famous military maxim to “aim low.” Was it the weaponry? Atkinson writes that “[t]here was nothing precise about the Brown Bess—that ‘outspoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade,’ in Rudyard Kipling’s description,” and he calculates that over 75,000 American rounds were fired but that only 1 in 300 hit anybody.

“The shot heard round the world,” he concludes, “probably missed.”

Fischer, on the other hand, says that the “New England muskets rang out with deadly accuracy,” fired by militia taking cover behind rocks, trees, and walls. One harrowing figure was a “tall, gaunt man with long gray locks…a grim, gray-headed messenger of mortality, mounted on death’s pale horse.”

V. Back to Boston

Gray-headed messengers on pale horses firing pot-shots from ancient fowling pieces is no basis for a system of liberation. At the end of the day, the British simply limped back into Boston, where they remained ensconsed for almost another year. Gage sent a report back to England which read, “I have nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but an affair that happened on the 19th instant.”

The Colonists, however, were determined to take full rhetorical advantage of “the affair.” The Massachusetts Committee of Safety-—which, not surprisingly, included Paul Revere as a member—promptly published a letter that reads, in part:

The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren…have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of the inhuman soldiery, who, incensed at the obstacles they met in their bloody progress, and enraged at being repulsed from the field of slaughter, will, without the least doubt, take the first opportunity in their power to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword…An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who may survive the carnage.

Gage might have been surprised to hear that he was supposed to be contemplating any such thing. But, no matter—the countryside was on fire and the press was having a heyday.

Two months later came the Battle of Bunker Hill. There, as at Lexington, little went right for the militia “except for the courage.” Despite a brave and desperate stand, they were swept from the peninsula in great confusion by the British navy and marines, who then set fire to Charlestown for good measure.

The following month, George Washington set up camp in Cambridge and tried to turn the various militia into a Continental Army. According to Atkinson, things did’t go well: “My greatest concern,” Washington wrote to John Hancock, “is to establish order, regularity & discipline.” Chaos reigned. Everyone, it seems, was there for a different purpose. Numbers of men, in various stages of drunkenness, wasted scarce ammunition firing at random birds and into the trunks of trees.

The British would remain in Boston until March 17, 1776, driven out by the presence of guns on Dorchester Heights placed there by, IMHO, the real hero of Boston: bookseller Henry Knox, who had dragged them all the way from Fort Ticonderoga across the entire state of Massachusetts. From west to east. Over the Berkshires. In the winter.

VI. Whither the Militia?

“Every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.” –Carl Becker

The Revolution was ultimately won by trained armies with help from a foreign superpower. The militia, however, lived on for almost another 100 years, finally meeting its apotheosis during the Civil War. Allen Guelzo, in his book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, writes that, shortly before the battle in 1863, the people of Gettysburg were in a panic over the approach of the rebels, and they wired Corps Commander Darius Couch for a regiment of infantry.

“Couch had little enough in the way of infantry to spare from defending Harrisburg, so he sent the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia, together with its Gettysburg company, off to Gettysburg. Six miles out, their train hit a cow and derailed.”

And there let us leave them, milling about near the railroad tracks, made irrelevant by massive, trained armies and a barnyard animal.

Tim Smith, of the Adams County Historical Society, recently offered the ultimate takedown of the 26th in his video, “Monuments, Markers and Tablets in the Town of Gettysburg | 26th PA Emergency Regiment.”

Yet the idea of the militia lives on—in the Constitution, in Hollywood, and in protests against the federal government which, in the minds of some, “will, without the least doubt, take the first opportunity in their power to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword.” Paul Revere would agree, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, the Billerica Colonial Minute Men are currently raising funds for yet another Minuteman statue, this one to be placed on the Common of my home town. According to its president, Bill Brimer, “I believe a statue is an honorable, historical, fitting, lasting, and the ultimate tribute to the men and women who fought for our freedom.” (Agreed, but before donating, I would want to offer a proposal for its design to make sure the statue lives up to its description.)

There is still no statue to Knox in Boston, and March 17—Evacuation Day—has long been overshadowed by St. Patrick’s Day. But good luck trying to walk from Boston Common to Faneuil Hall during a tourist weekend in the summer without running into a Minuteman or two.

And I get it: Impressive feats of engineering and weeks of grueling labor just don’t have the romance of a Lexington or a Concord—or pantaloons, for that matter—a spirit that animates the conclusion of Longfellow’s poem:

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

It’s a nice idea, anyway.