“The unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood”?

I’ve written several postings about Solomon Brown, even suggesting he might have been responsible for the first shot in Lexington on the morning of 19 Apr 1775.

There’s one source about him I haven’t been able to nail down.

In an 1880 issue of The Magazine of American History, the Rev. Horace Edwin Hayden of Pennsylvania quoted a local obituary of Solomon Brown like this:

Deacon Solomon Brown

The individual whose name heads this article, and a notice of whose death appeared in this paper, a short time since, was one of the oldest inhabitants of New Haven in this county [in Vermont], and died claiming the respect of all who knew him, for his virtues both as a man and a citizen. . . . 

Deacon Brown was a soldier of the Revolution, and bore a part in that memorable struggle, which should immortalize him in the annals of his country. He was a participator in the first battle for freedom on the plains of Lexington, and has the unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood in defence of American liberty, at the battle of Lexington on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775.

This battle was the opening scene of the bloody drama which closed with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and in this scene the subject of this notice stands forth the most prominent actor. He wrote in blood the first word in the charter of American freedom. Let his name be registered among the noblest of his country's benefactors and heroes, and honored by posterity as the most dauntless of their heroic sires. Deacon Brown served five years in the revolution as a sergeant of artillery, and encountered all the perils and hardships of that memorable and glorious struggle. He died mourned by his friends, lamented by the church, and respected by all. 

But as to the source of that encomium, Hayden could only say: “Middlebury, Vt., Free Press, about 1830.”

Two years later, Hayden published A Biographical Sketch of Captain Oliver Brown, an Officer of the Revolutionary Army who Commanded the Party which Destroyed the Statue of George the Third. Solomon was Oliver’s younger brother, so he tagged along in that booklet. Unfortunately, Hayden’s citation only got worse with Middlebury turned into “Middleburg.”

I went looking for the newspaper article Hayden quoted. It doesn’t appear in the newspaper database I access. Furthermore, I discovered that there was no Middlebury Free Press in 1830. The printer E. D. Barber was still calling his young newspaper the Anti-Masonic Republican.

In the Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont compiled by Hiram Carleton in 1903, I found a statement that Solomon Brown died on 6 June 1837. That date does fall in the period when Barber called his newspaper the Middlebury Free Press, just before he sold out to Hamilton Drury and it became the Vermont Argus and Free Press. So we should be able to narrow the search down to the summer of 1837—if copies of the newspaper survive from then.

Another voice speaking to Solomon Brown’s primacy was Josiah Bushnell Grinnell (1821–1891, shown above). He was a U.S. Representative from Iowa and namesake of Grinnell College. In 1887 he returned to his home town of New Haven, Vermont, to deliver a historical address, later published. Grinnell stated:

Dea. Solomon Brown also lived and died here fifty years ago. To him belongs the honor of having fired the first effective shot at the red coats in the revolutionary war. I attended his funeral, at which his memorable shot was mentioned, and I just remember the story from his own lips. . . . He did not wait for orders and sighted an honest gun at a red coat spy, where was found blood, and to him belongs the honor of that first shot which “echoed round the world.”

Both Hayden and Grinnell cited the depositions collected by Elias Phinney in his 1825 History of the Battle of Lexington as supporting Brown’s claim. The evidence in that book is more equivocal.

It’s worth noting that in 1775 no British officers reported that the regulars on Lexington common suffered any wounds, and they had every reason to do so in the effort to cast blame on the provincials.

Solomon Brown might well have shot at the redcoats—he could even have been the first to do so. But that doesn’t mean his shots hit anyone.