“In the afternoon there was a sham fight”

Back in 2011, guest blogger Roger Fuller quoted Albert W. Bryant’s recollection of watching a reenactment of the 1775 fighting on Lexington common that took place “on the 19th of April, 1822.”

Since Bryant shared that recollection at an 1890 meeting of the Lexington Historical Society, well over half a century after the event, I thought it was worth looking for evidence he got the date right.

And indeed, the 23 Apr 1822 Salem Gazette carried this item:

The 19th of April was noticed at Lexington by a military parade. In the afternoon there was a sham fight between the inhabitants of Lexington and its vicinity and the military corps, in imitation of the important event, which took place on the same day, in 1775.

An address on the occasion was delivered by the Rev Dr Stearns, of Lincoln.

That matches exactly with Bryant’s memory except he mistakenly recalled the minister coming from Bedford.

The Rev. Dr. Charles Stearns was sixty-eight years old when he delivered this address. According to a family history, he “preached his last sermon the first Sunday in July, 1826,” which was the 2nd. Living through the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, he died on the 26th.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) recalled being told as a boy that the “bulky” Stearns had published a poem in 1797 called “The Ladies’ Philosophy of Love.” Holmes wrote: “How I stared at him! He was the first living person ever pointed out to me as a poet!” Holmes wrote his own first poem at age thirteen, the same year as the commemoration in Lexington.