The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ to 265 families, it was a place where church attendance was compulsory, where the provincial congress sometimes met, and where, according to Gage’s spies, munitions and other war supplies had been secreted in bulk. He even had a hand-drawn map, crude but detailed, showing the houses, outbuildings, and other hiding places where caches could be found.

      The Americans, too, had informants. Gage would complain that the rebels collected “good, full, and expeditious intelligence on all matters transacting in England.” Reports sent from London to patriot leaders warned of regiments preparing for deployment and of the blunt new instructions sent Gage. Since early April, many families had fled Boston for country refuges. Among the most prominent patriot leaders, only Dr. Warren remained in town. Samuel Adams and John Hancock had retired to Lexington, east of Concord. The provincial congress adjourned on April 15 for three weeks—entrusting the Committee of Safety to oversee military matters—and various false alarms kept the province on edge. Gage’s concentration of longboats, grenadiers, and light infantry companies hardly passed unremarked. “Some secret expedition,” one merchant noted, was no doubt afoot.

      On Sunday, April 16, the Falcon glided into Boston Harbor. “In want of many men and stores, and very leaky” after her rough passage, as the Royal Navy reported, the sloop nonetheless carried Dartmouth’s original orders. Now Gage could complete his preparations. Using the discretion permitted him, he chose to ignore Dartmouth’s proposal of targeting “actors and abettors” like Hancock and Adams; chasing such scoundrels across the province seemed futile, if not capricious. A hard strike against the depot in Concord would be more fruitful, although disappointing late intelligence indicated that the cagey rebels had evacuated at least some military stocks to other sites. Opposition seemed unlikely except perhaps from scattered “parties of bushmen.”

      Gage drafted a 319-word order for Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith of the 10th Foot, appointed to lead the strike brigade. If corpulent and edging toward retirement, Smith was mature, experienced, and prudent. He was to march “with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord,” Gage noted, adding,

      You will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.

      The map enclosed with the order illustrated Gage’s demand that two bridges over the Concord River be secured by an advance “party of the best marchers.” Captured gunpowder and flour were to be dumped into the river, tents burned, salt pork and beef supplies destroyed. Enemy field guns should be spiked or ruined with sledgehammers. The expedition would carry a single day’s rations and no artillery; speed and surprise were essential. Sentries on horseback would be positioned to prevent rebel couriers from sounding an alarm.

      Gage concluded his order without sentiment: “You will open your business and return with the troops as soon as possible.”

      And now, as one loyalist wrote, “The war began to redden.… The iron was quite hot enough to be hammered.”

       2.

       Men Came Down from the Clouds

      LEXINGTON AND CONCORD, APRIL 18–19, 1775

      Shadows scuttled beneath the elm and linden trees along Boston Common. Hoarse whispers carried on the night air, along with the creak of leather and the clatter of a stone kicked down a lane. It would later be reported that a barking dog was bayoneted to enforce the silence. Not until the moon rose at ten p.m. on Tuesday, April 18, three nights past full but still radiant, did shape and color emerge from the hurrying gray figures to reveal hundreds of men in blood-red coats congregating on the beach near the town magazine, close to where Privates Duckett and Ferguson had been shot for desertion. Moonglow glinted off metal buttons and silvered the tall bearskin caps of the grenadiers. The soldiers reeked of damp wool and sweat, mingled with the tang of the brick dust and pipe clay used to scour brass and leather. Their hair had been greased, powdered, and clubbed into queues held with leather straps. The moon also gave tint to the facings on their uniform coats—purple or green, buff or royal blue, depending on the regiment from which each man had been plucked for the march to Concord.

      The navy had collected only twenty longboats, and two lifts would be needed to shuttle all eight hundred men to marshy Lechmere Point, a mile distant across Back Bay. Sailors bent to their ash oars against the tide, and the standing soldiers swayed with every stroke. Each man’s kit included the eleven-pound Brown Bess, three dozen rounds of ammunition in a cartridge box, and a haversack to carry bread and salt pork. Beneath the heavy coats and crossbelts they wore wool waistcoats, white linen shirts, breeches buckled at the knee, and canvas or linen gaiters to keep pebbles from their low-topped brogans. Most wore black leather caps or felt hats with the brim stitched up to give a forepeak and two corners. Gorgets hung by neck cords at the officers’ throats—small silver or gilt crescents worn as an emblem of rank, a last remnant of medieval armor.

      Loading was haphazard, and as the soldiers clambered from the boats to wade through the reeds on the far shore, sergeants hissed and clucked to reassemble the ten discomposed companies of light infantry and eleven of grenadiers. “We were wet up to the knees,” Lieutenant Barker later reported. Midnight had passed by the time the second lift arrived, and further delays followed as navy provisions in the boats were handed out—supplies that, Barker added, “most of the men threw away.” Fording a shallow inlet on the edge of Cambridge further wetted each shivering man to his waistcoat, but at last they reached the wide road leading west, unpaved except for napped stones and gravel shoveled into mud holes.

      Few knew their destination. Two a.m. had come and gone as they put on speed. With their wet shoes squelching at more than a hundred steps per minute, their pace approached four miles an hour. Past apple and plum orchards they tramped, past smokehouses and cider mills and oblique driftways that led into cow pastures. The heavy footfall rattled pewter dishes on dressers and in cupboards, and an eight-year-old boy, awake when he should have been sleeping, later recalled a wondrous sight on the road outside his window: a long bobbing column of red, “like a flowing river,” sweeping northwest beneath the gibbous moon.

      A brigade of armed men tiptoeing through Boston in the middle of the night had not gone unnoticed. “The town,” a British fusilier acknowledged, “was a good deal agitated.” Joseph Warren may have watched the mustering troops himself; he lived in a rented house on Hanover Street, barely a mile from the foot of the Common, and several companies had made for the boats from his North End neighborhood. Regardless, he was soon well informed. Two weeks earlier, the provincial congress had agreed that an enemy force greater than five hundred men leaving town with baggage and artillery ought to be considered a threat to the province and met by an assembled “army of observation … to act solely on the defensive so long as it can be justified.” This British force, even without heavy guns, was threatening enough for Dr. Warren. Before the first boats pulled off the Boston beach, he had summoned two couriers to carry the alarm to Samuel Adams and John Hancock, holed up in a Lexington parsonage, and to alert the wider countryside.

      The first herald was a beefy, slab-jawed tanner in a slouched hat. William Dawes, Jr., barely thirty, still lived in Ann Street, where he had been raised by Puritan stock so strict that children were forbidden to look outside the window on Sundays and the instructive School of Good Manners advised, “Let thy recreations be lawful, brief, and seldom.” Dawes had overcome such constrictions to become an adept smuggler, a patriot messenger, a militia adjutant, and an intelligence agent; while surveilling British officers, he supposedly sometimes posed as a vegetable peddler, sometimes СКАЧАТЬ