Memories of “A Bee Line for Boston”

Earlier this month at the Emerging Revolutionary War blog, Kevin Pawlak described the impressively fast journey of the Virginia rifle companies to the siege of Boston:

On June 14, the Continental Congress declared that “six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia.” Once formed and equipped, “each company…shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

The Virginia companies went to Daniel Morgan, who organized his company in Winchester, and Hugh Stephenson, the leader of the company rendezvousing at Mecklenburg. Joining soldiers signed one-year enlistments. . . .

It took less than seven days to raise each company to the strength of 100 men. Only the delay in getting enough rifles to arm the entire Mecklenburg company prevented them from leaving immediately after filling the ranks.

Once mustered, Stephenson and Morgan agreed to meet in Frederick, Maryland, and march to Boston together. On July 15, Morgan’s men marched first, stealing a step on the Mecklenburg men, who left Morgan’s Grove on July 17. “Morgan having the start we used every exertion to overhaul him, in Vain, altho’ we marched (always in single file) from 30 to 36 miles a number of days,” said [company lieutenant Henry] Bedinger.

Food and cheering citizens greeted Stephenson’s men along the march and kept their marching feet moving at the blistering pace needed to catch Morgan. Only two men failed to make the entire march (one was court-martialed, and the other was accidentally wounded).

On August 11, after a march of over 500 miles in 25 days and just behind Morgan’s men, Stephenson’s company halted in front of General George Washington in Cambridge.

In 1860 Rep. Alexander Robinson Boteler of Virginia referred to the men from his state as having made “a bee-line for Boston.” He used this phrase both in a speech in the House of Representatives and in the anonymous book My Ride to the Barbecue, or Revolutionary Reminiscences of the Old Dominion. He was trying to make a case for national unity, arguing that slavery wasn’t a divisive issue in 1775 so it shouldn’t be now.

The U.S. Civil War followed. The town where the riflemen’s march started, Shepherdstown, Virginia, became Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But Boteler’s phrase survived in writings of the late 1800s and became the root of the label Pawlak used for the Virginia soldiers’ feat, “the Beeline March.”