“Dug up–and took away two skulls”

In the summer of 1840, shortly after twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., got to see part of a British soldier’s skull with a bullet hole through it, his teacher John Thoreau proposed marriage to his sister, Ellen Sewall.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., opposed that union. Then Edmund’s other teacher, Henry David Thoreau, proposed marriage to Ellen as well. And the Thoreau family drama built from there.

In the decade that followed, John Thoreau died of tetanus. Henry moved in with the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, then moved out to a cabin in Walden Woods, then moved back in. He became a published author. He spent time in jail for protesting the Fugitive Slave Act by refusing to pay his taxes.

During those years, Henry David Thoreau kept a diary. In the late spring of 1850 he wrote this entry:

I visited a retired–now almost unused graveyard in Lincoln to-day where (5) British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April ’75. Edmund Wheeler—grandfather of William—who lived in the old house now pulled down near the present—went over the next day & carted them to this ground—

A few years ago one Felch a Phrenologist by leave of the select men dug up–and took away two skulls

The skeletons were very large—probably those of grenadiers. Wm Wheeler who was present–told me this—He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived opposite–say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of the ranks & fell dead. & he Wm Wheeler–saw a bullet hole through & through one of the skulls.

There were multiple families named Child in Lincoln around 1775, so it’s hard to identify which one gave that description of the dying redcoat to Wheeler.

The skull with the bullet hole was undoubtedly the same one that young Edmund Quincy Sewall had seen at the Concord Lyceum in 1840. The schoolboy had even recorded that it had come from Lincoln. Perhaps another of the skulls put out for the phrenologist was also from a regular’s body.

Concord had built a large monument near the gravesite of the first two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775. Those weren’t the only redcoats buried in that town, but those two bodies were the most significant because they showed the Americans effectively fighting back.

In contrast, more regulars had died on 19 April in Lincoln, but that town was less concerned about memorializing them. Some soldiers were buried near where they fell, or near the houses where they died days later. Those graves weren’t marked, even with “rough stones” as originally in Concord. It was up to men like William Wheeler to pass on the increasingly vague knowledge of where those bodies lay.

As for the British soldiers in the town burying-ground, Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896) would quote Mary Hartwell of Lincoln about the aftermath of the battle:

I could not sleep that night, for I knew there were British soldiers lying dead by the roadside; and when, on the following morning, we were somewhat calmed and rested, we gave attention to the burial of those whom their comrades had failed to take away.

The men hitched the oxen to the cart, and went down below the house, and gathered up the dead. As they returned with the team and the dead soldiers, my thoughts went out for the wives, parents, and children away across the Atlantic, who would never again see their loved ones; and I left the house, and taking my little children by the hand, I followed the rude hearse to the grave hastily made in the burial-ground.

I remember how cruel it seemed to put them into one large trench without any coffins. There was one in a brilliant uniform, whom I supposed to have been an officer. His hair was tied up in a cue.

In 1884 the town of Lincoln installed a marker in that cemetery stating simply:

FIVE
BRITISH SOLDIERS
SLAIN APRIL 19, 1775
WERE BURIED HERE

The approximate locations of other soldiers’ graves along the Battle Road in Lincoln have also been marked now.

But the diaries of Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau tell us that parts of the soldiers’ bodies were removed from the Lincoln burying-ground over forty years before the town marked the remains.

TOMORROW: To advance the cause of science.