Counterfactual 4: If No One Had Died at Lexington or Concord

Building on my counterfactual of what might have happened if Paul Revere and William Dawes had never brought their warning to Lexington, I reached the moment when the militiamen of Concord saw smoke rising above their town.

Under the scenario so far, the lack of urgent alerts out of Boston had no effect on the safety of John Hancock and Samuel Adams (who were never in great danger, despite their worries) or the quantity of military supplies the redcoats found (since James Barrett and his crew had already moved most of that stuff).

But that counterfactual situation would have delayed the response from towns around Concord, meaning fewer militia companies would have joined the local men on the hill overlooking the North Bridge.

We know those men were of two minds about confronting the regulars. They stayed on that hill for about two hours, marching down only after thinking other soldiers had set fire to the center of town. Then, after a fatal exchange of fire had chased the company from the bridge, they pulled back for another couple of hours.

Given those real-life details, I posited yesterday that the militia men would have been more wary about marching down on the bridge if there had been fewer of them. And eventually the smoke from town would have stopped, lessening the urgency.

In real life, after the shooting the militia companies moved around the north side of Concord and then massed east of the town. At Meriam’s Corner, once the regulars had left the most populated area, the provincials started to shoot at the column. Would that have happened the same way in this what-if scenario?

The very big difference in this counterfactual is that no one has yet been killed. There was no shooting in Lexington or at the North Bridge. Neither side had seen deaths to avenge. As long as the two groups of armed men remained at a distance, neither would have felt themselves to be under imminent threat.

In that case, the afternoon might have proceeded like the end of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie’s raid on Salem in February: with the regulars marching in order back to where they came from while the local militia regiments watched sullenly to be sure they left. Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s men would have met Col. Percy’s reinforcement column somewhere in west Cambridge, and they would all have returned to Boston.

As it happened in April 1775, the bloodshed along the Battle Road motivated a militia siege of Boston. The committee of safety and its generals didn’t have to choose that policy; it came about naturally as militia companies massed off the peninsulas of Boston and Charlestown. Without deaths, the provincials wouldn’t have felt so much fervency, so the situation might have remained as it was: no military siege, but the countryside beyond Boston outside of royal control.

In the ensuing days, the Patriot press would have made the most of the army incursion into people’s homes while also trumpeting how the raid had found so little. The newspapers would have celebrated the escape of Hancock and Adams. They would have lauded the strong unified response of the Massachusetts militia.

As for Gen. Thomas Gage, he would have been pleased not to lose any men but frustrated at not capturing all the artillery pieces and other weapons he wanted to destroy. And how would he explain the mission to his superiors in London after they’d advised him to do something else?

Of course, that scenario doesn’t include any of the near-random events that can ignite violence, like the first shot at Lexington. What if British troops and Massachusetts militia did bump into each other somewhere? What if military patrols stopping Revere or Dawes before they got to Lexington meant that one of those popular Bostonians had wound up dead?

And even if the 18–19 April expedition did end without bloodshed, the conflict and tensions in Massachusetts would have remained unresolved. Gen. Gage’s next mission could have started the war instead, just a few weeks later.