How Many British Soldiers Are Buried beside the North Bridge?

How many British soldiers are buried beside the North Bridge in Concord?

On some night late in 1891, George R. Brooks and other local worthies took a cranium given up by the Worcester Society of Antiquity and interred it in the patch of ground beside the bridge long marked as the grave of two redcoats.

In doing so, they believed they were restoring one of two skulls that had been removed from that grave decades before.

That would have left slightly less than two British soldiers buried there.

Those men were convinced that the phrenologist Walton Felch had dug up those skulls with the permission of the Concord selectmen back around 1840, shortly after the town had erected its obelisk monument to the fighting on 19 Apr 1775.

They were also convinced that the skull they had failed to return was damaged, based on a series of musts:

• If the two skulls were unearthed in Concord, they must have come from the grave beside the North Bridge because that was the only grave of British soldiers in town with two bodies.
• If the skulls came from the grave at the North Bridge, they must have belonged to the soldiers killed at that bridge, including the one Ammi White hit in the head with a hatchet.
• If one of those skulls came from a man killed by a hatchet blow to the head, that skull must have shown severe damage.

And thus, even though no one reported actually seeing a damaged second skull in the latter half of the 1800s, people became convinced that it was “demoralized.”

But what if the initial premise of that logical chain was wrong? Because that’s what the evidence from ante-bellum Concord says.

First of all, in 1840 schoolboy Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., went to hear the phrenologist Walton Felch at the Concord Lyceum. Right afterward, Edmund wrote in his diary that the man had the top part of the skull of a British soldier with a bullet hole through it, and that cranium had been “dug up in Lincoln,” not Concord.

Second, in 1850 Henry David Thoreau spoke with William Wheeler, who described seeing Felch dig up two skulls years before in an “almost unused graveyard in Lincoln.” Wheeler’s description of a bullet hole through one cranium matched young Edmund’s.

Third, in 1836 the town of Concord chose to erect its monument near where two soldiers had been shot and buried. Lots of people paid attention to that spot, including the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other town leaders. There was also a contingent in Concord who had wanted the monument built elsewhere. The selectmen couldn’t have authorized opening the soldiers’ graves without people in town knowing, and at least some of them criticizing the idea. There would have been no secrets.

In contrast, Lincoln had had a lot more British soldiers to bury back in April 1775. So many that local men simply carted those bodies to the town burying-ground and placed them in a single grave in the paupers’ section. By the 1830s that old cemetery was largely ignored. Lincoln didn’t put up any marker for those bodies until 1884. In sum, few people in Lincoln probably cared whether those bodies were disturbed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln’s town records from the late 1830s show the selectmen granting Felch permission to explore the cemetery. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those records say nothing about Felch’s request; the selectmen may not have cared enough to take formal action. Unlike in Concord, how to treat the remains of British soldiers in Lincoln wasn’t a monumental decision.

In the following years Felch described his skulls as those of soldiers killed in the “Battle of Concord.” Some listeners heard, or remembered, that as meaning the soldiers had died in the town of Concord. By the time Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave were asking his widow about the skulls, Felch wasn’t around to correct that idea. So those men and their Worcester Society of Antiquity colleagues understood the skulls as having come from Concord.

That mistaken belief led to museum labels and newspaper articles about the remaining skull from Concord—reportedly unearthed with the selectmen’s approval. Men from Concord started to whisper about how that reflected on them and their forefathers. They constructed the logical chain above. And ultimately we reach the moment in 1891 when Concord antiquarians were secretly digging in the dirt beside the North Bridge, not to investigate but to partially rectify a breach of etiquette from fifty years before.

But that wasn’t really necessary. The last time that skull had been in Concord, it was still healthy, even if its owner might have come under fire. That soldier didn’t die until a bullet pierced his brain in Lincoln. In 1891 the rest of that man’s body was still in Lincoln, and whatever remains of it is there now.

Buried in the grave beside Concord’s North Bridge are slightly more than two British soldiers.

“The skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge”

James H. Stark (1847–1919) was born in Britain and brought to Boston at the age of nine.

Stark became an American citizen but maintained ties with his native country, promoting immigration and friendly relations.

Like Isaiah Thomas, the Rev. Albert Tyler, Daniel Seagrave, and other men who took up studying and preserving history without a college education, Stark started out in the printing business. In his case, he mastered the new technology of electrotyping and ran the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston.

In the late 1800s Stark published several guides to the British West Indies illustrated with photographs by himself and others.

He also published books on local history through his firm: Illustrated History of Boston Harbor (1880) and Antique Views of ye Towne of Boston (1882) both reproduced many historic images of the town.

Stark might have made the biggest splash with his thick book The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution, published in 1910. Coming at the end of the Colonial Revival, he challenged the accepted American view of the Loyalists as aristocrats and traitors, highlighting their complaints of being mistreated. For this, critics charged that Stark was a historical muckraker and a controversialist, and indeed he probably was.

Among the stories Stark examined was the tale of the two British soldiers’ skulls dug up by a phrenologist. In doing so, however, he spread misinformation about that tale.

This chapter of the story started in 1908 with a man named Albert Webb coming from Worcester, England, to Worcester, Massachusetts, on a sister city project. On 31 March 1909, Webb wrote to the Boston Transcript suggesting that someone should place a larger marker near the North Bridge in Concord, commemorating the two British soldiers killed and buried nearby with some lines by James Russell Lowell.

The editor of the Transcript wrote a response endorsing the idea but also insisting that the grave had been maintained with “old New England reverence.”

Stark replied with a letter to the newspaper’s “Notes and Queries” department asking:

1. Can anyone give the names of the two British soldiers killed at Concord Bridge, or inform me it there were any papers taken from their bodies that would identify them? I have been informed that there were.

2. One of the soldiers was left wounded on the bridge; what was the name of the “young American that killed him with a hatchet”?

3. When did the selectmen of Concord give Professor Fowler permission to dig up the two bodies of the British soldiers and remove the skulls to be used for exhibition purposes?

The only response to the newspaper was: “before the alleged action of the selectmen excites the Concord people, they should insist upon his producing adequate evidence.”

But in The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Stark published this 12 April letter from Ellery B. Crane, librarian of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, as what he deemed adequate evidence:

Mr. Barton has handed your letter to me and I write to say that the skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge in Concord were once the property of this Society, we having purchased them of the Widow of Prof. Fowler, the phrenologist, who some years ago went about the country giving lectures and illustrating his subjects.

Prof. Fowler got permission to dig up those skulls from the Selectmen of Concord, and he carried them about with him and used them in his lecturing. After his death one of the members learned of them and we purchased the skulls and they were in our museum some time.

The late Senator [George F.] Hoar learning that we had them, came to know if we would be willing to return them to Concord that they might be put back in the ground from whence they were taken. As he seemed quite anxious about it, consent was given, and they were sent to Concord to be placed in their original resting place. Presume they are there at the present time.

This letter offers yet another version of our story, with two skulls returned to the grave in Concord. Otherwise, it accords with what Hoar wrote in his 1891 letter returning one skull, and with what people in Concord gossiped about according to an 1895 Boston Sunday Globe article.

But that account doesn’t match what the Rev. Albert Tyler wrote out for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905, in a paper read to members by none other than Ellery B. Crane. Nor what Crane had told society members during an excursion to Concord in April 1906. Both of those accounts had recently been printed in the society’s Proceedings, presumably under Crane’s direction.

Nor does the belief that the Worcester Society of Antiquity owned two British soldiers’ skulls match the intermittent newspaper accounts in the late 1800s about its display of a single skull.

Furthermore, Stark and Crane got the name of the phrenologist wrong. Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1810–1896) were prominent proponents of that new science in the mid-1800s. (Lest we think of the Fowler brothers as total loons who did nothing for American society, they also quietly paid Walt Whitman’s costs for printing the second edition of Leaves of Grass.) But all other sources are clear that the phrenologist who lectured with British soldiers’ skulls was Walton Felch.

Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts was widely distributed. It’s useful on some points of genealogy and real estate, notoriously misleading on others, such as the engraving of Paul Revere as a bearded rider with a coonskin cap and a pistol. Stark’s book and Ellen P. Chase’s Beginnings of the American Revolution, also published in 1910, appear to be the first books to print the name of Ammi White as the young man who killed a wounded soldier at the North Bridge.

A thick book, especially one in lots of local libraries for genealogists to consult, is harder to ignore than a gossipy newspaper story. The Loyalists of Massachusetts turned the tale of Concord’s selectmen letting a phrenologist make off with the two soldiers’ skulls into a long-lasting part of the town’s local lore.

Even though that lore was based on a mistake.

TOMORROW: Back to the disinterment.

“Grave of British Soldiers Opened”

In the late 1800s, the Google Book Ngram Viewer shows, there was a spike in the use of the phrase “Old Concord.” That seems to be an effect of the Colonial Revival and nostalgia for pre-industrial America, including not only the Revolution but the “American Renaissance.” Margaret Sidney wrote a book with that title.

On 25 Aug 1895, the Boston Sunday Globe played off that newish trope with an anonymous article headlined “IN NEW CONCORD.”

The subheads were:

Only Pilgrims Preserve its Old Traditions.
“Immortals” Seem as Remote as Actors in Revolutionary Drama.
Grave of British Soldiers Opened—Changes Among Inhabitants.

The article was gossipy, not easy to follow unless one already knew a bit about Concord already. There were inside anecdotes about the Hoar family. After discussing the 1889 attempt to break into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave, the journalist segued to:

There was another and more successful violation of a grave in Concord a long time ago, the story of which has never been published, and which will be interesting to the recent visitors to the revolutionary sites there. . . .

Somewhat more than 50 years ago a phrenologist named Felt [sic] was lecturing upon his science in Concord. The story runs that he obtained permission from some authority to open and examine the soldiers’ grave, which he interpreted as a license to make what professional use he pleased of the remains therein.

At all events, Felt took the two skulls from the spot and carried them off, and as far as is known, nobody in Concord was any the wiser for nearly half a century!

Only five or six years since Mr George Tolman of the Concord historical society heard to his surprise that a skull marked as one of the British soldiers buried at Concord was in the museum of antiquities at Worcester.

Investigation showed that it was given by Mr Daniel Seagrave, a member of the society, and a worthy citizen of that town, still living. He had been a fellow-member of a lodge with Felt, and when the latter died at Natick [sic] many years ago he had assisted the widow with the funeral expenses, and had bought these two skulls, one of which was pierced with a musket shot and the other shattered as if with an axe. The shattered skull had been given to a surgeon in Worcester, and had been placed with other bones, so that it was not recognizable.

The other was courteously and promptly given up by the Worcester society, and was reverently restored to its resting place by Judge [George M.] Brooks, the president of the Concord antiquarian society.

As a verification of the story of the abstraction of the heads, which seemed perfectly coherent and plausible, it may be said that, though the other bones were distinctly seen, no traces of the skulls, the most enduring portion of the human skeleton, were found.

George Tolman (1836–1909) was secretary of the Concord Antiquarian Society and wrote many articles for that organization. Here’s a collection of his work and others catalogued under the title of one paper only. Though Tolman’s name didn’t come up in yesterday’s source, he may well have been involved in an effort to get the skull from Worcester.

Like George F. Hoar, Tolman appears to have been protective of his town’s reputation. This page shows him stating that a British soldier whom militiaman Amos Barrett described as “almost dead” was “quite dead a few moments later” without reporting that the change was brought about by a young local striking that wounded soldier’s head with a hatchet.

Whoever wrote the Boston Sunday Globe article wasn’t so reticent. In fact, that journalist didn’t just describe how a young man delivered “a coup de grace with an axe.” He or she was also, so far as I can tell, the first person to name that man in print as Ammi White.

The upshot of this article is that the secret reburial of the British soldier’s skull in 1891 was a matter of public record, or at least public gossip, in 1895.

TOMORROW: A “demoralized” skull?

(The photo above, courtesy of the New York Public Library and Lost New England, shows Concord’s North Bridge as it looked around 1885, before it was pared back to look like the bridge in the Amos Doolittle print.)

“Two rough stones mark the spot”

Back in 2013, Boston 1775 published a series of postings about the British soldiers killed at the North Bridge in Concord, and what happened to their bodies.

Based on reports from army officers, the royal authorities complained in print that a soldier left wounded at the bridge had been “scalped” and otherwise mutilated.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress vigorously denied that charge. It published this deposition, taken down by justice of the peace Duncan Ingraham:

We, the subscribers, of lawful age, testify and say, that we buried the dead bodies of the King’s troops that were killed at the North-Bridge in Concord, on the nineteenth day of April, 1775, where the action first began, and that neither of those persons were scalped, nor their ears cut off, as has been represented.

Zechariah Brown,
Thomas Davis, jun.

Concord, May 11th, 1775.

Privately, however, militiamen who had been at the bridge deplored what they had seen. To begin with, that soldier had still been alive. Thomas Thorp of Acton recalled in 1835: “I saw him sitting up and wounded, as we had passed the bridge.” His killing “was a matter of horror to us all.”

In June 1775 the Rev. William Gordon acknowledged in print that “A young fellow…very barbarously broke his scull and let out his brains, with a small axe.” Gordon did not excuse that act, but he did insist it wasn’t scalping.

Still, Gordon’s source, the Rev. William Emerson of Concord, and other locals kept the young killer’s name secret. Charles Handley of Acton recalled: “The young man man who killed him told me, in 1807, that it had worried him very much; but that he thought he was doing right at the time.” It took more than a century before his name came out: Ammi White.

As for the dead soldiers, in 1827 the Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote: “The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot where they were laid.”

In 1793 the town of Concord built a new bridge downstream. The span of the old bridge was dismantled, but some end portions remained. The pieces on the south side served as another landmark reminding locals where the two British men were buried.

TOMORROW: Erecting a monument.

“They came three thousand miles and died”

So how many British soldiers died at the North Bridge in Concord? How many were buried nearby? Those questions have answers, but not definite ones.

As I quoted earlier in the week, one of the British officers there, Lt. William Sutherland, described leaving two men “dead on the Spot.” But Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie reported losing three men overall. And Capt. Lawrence Parsons reportedly saw three men dead at the bridge as he later passed that spot—or was that count influenced by Laurie’s report?

When Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis, Jr., described burying corpses of the regulars who died at the bridge, they said “neither” had been scalped, suggesting there were two. But their testimony was probably selective. Had another corpse already been moved away?

In 1827, Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote that in the firing at the North Bridge “Two of the British were killed and several wounded,” with the dead still lying “near the bridge” when their comrades returned from Col. James Barrett’s. Furthermore:

The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot were they were laid. Their names were unknown. Several others were buried in the middle of the town.

Ripley wrote nothing about Ammi White and his hatchet.

In his 1835 history of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that “Three British soldiers were killed” at the bridge, but only two were “left on the ground” there and later interred nearby. “One of the wounded died and was buried where Mr. Keyes’s house stood,” Shattuck added. Many later authors have therefore written that two British soldiers were killed immediately at the bridge and another badly wounded, making it back to the center of Concord before dying there.

And who were the “Several others” that Ripley said were interred in central Concord? Shattuck reported that one was Pvt. John Bateman, who died under the care of Dr. John Cuming “at the house then standing near Captain Stacy’s”—Daniel Bliss’s house, according to other authors. (This despite Bateman giving a deposition in Lincoln, not Concord, on 23 Apr 1775.) Bateman “was buried on the hill,” Shattuck wrote.

Don Hagist has reported that Bateman was a grenadier in the 52nd Regiment. The companies at the bridge came from the 4th, 10th, and 43rd. So Bateman must have been fatally wounded in the British withdrawal from Concord, not at the bridge. (It’s notable that some founding settlers of Concord were named Bateman; perhaps people of that town brought him back out of some feeling of kinship.)

According to Shattuck, therefore, there were four British soldiers buried at three sites in Concord soon after 19 Apr 1775. According to Ripley, there might have been “Several others,” but that’s too vague to track down.

TOMORROW: Commemorations and looking for names.

“Very barbarously broke his scull and let out his brains”

As I quoted two days ago, in the spring of 1775 five British soldiers testified to seeing one of their comrades with “the Skin over his Eye’s Cut and also the Top part of His Ears cut off” near the North Bridge in Concord. On 19 April, army officers were already interpreting that as a scalping.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress published a deposition, quoted yesterday, in which two men who buried the British soldiers at the bridge denied any of them had been scalped. Did that lay the controversy to rest, along with the dead men?

No, it didn’t, because the Rev. William Gordon of Roxbury acknowledged the attack in a letter published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 7 June 1775:

The narrative [from Gen. Thomas Gage] tells us that as Capt. [Lawrence] Parsons returned with his three companies over the bridge, they observed three soldiers on the ground, one of them scalped, his head much mangled, and his ears cut off, tho’ not quite dead; all this is not fiction, tho’ the most is. The Rev. Mr. [William] Emerson informed me how the matter was, with great concern for its having happened.

A young fellow coming over the bridge in order to join the country people, and seeing the soldier wounded and attempting to get up, not being under the feelings of humanity, very barbarously broke his scull and let out his brains, with a small axe (apprehend of the tomahawk kind) but as to his being scalped and having his ears cut off, there was nothing in it. The poor object lived an hour or two before he expired.

In addition to appearing in a major American newspaper, Gordon’s account was also published in a New England almanac for 1776.

Thirteen years later, Gordon (working with a ghostwriter) adapted his letters into The Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America. Still presented as a series of letters written as the war went on, that book said:

The fire was returned, a skirmish ensued, and the troops were forced to retreat, having several men killed and wounded, and lieutenant Gould (who would have been killed, had not a minister present prevented) with some others taken. One of their wounded, who was left behind, attempting to get up, was assaulted by a young fellow going after the pursuers to join them, who, not being under the feelings of humanity, barbarously broke his skull with a small hatchet, and let out his brains, but neither scalped him nor cut off his ears. This event may give rise to some malevolent pen to write, that many of the killed and wounded at Lexington, were not only scalped, but had their eyes forced out of the sockets by the fanatics of New-England; not one was so treated either there or at Concord. You have the real fact. The poor object languished for an hour or two before he expired.

In 1775, Gordon named Emerson as the eyewitness he heard about the event from. In 1788 he credited “a minister present” with saving Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould’s life, and that could only have been Emerson. And in both cases Gordon acknowledged that “a young fellow” had indeed hatcheted one of the wounded British soldiers.

Thus, very early on an American source, sympathetic to the Patriot cause, acknowledged this attack on a wounded man at the bridge and condemned it. Both that author and his source were ministers, and they clearly wanted their condemnation of that act in the public record. It was therefore very difficult for Americans to maintain the position implied by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s report, that nothing had happened.

Instead, later American authors offered excuses for that act. Some wrote that the young local was acting in self-defense, or out of mercy. Others said he was a black slave or a children, implying that the respectable people of Concord should not be responsible. In fact, he was Ammi White, a young militiaman who remained in Concord for years.

TOMORROW: The British soldiers buried at the bridge.

Burying the Bodies at the North Bridge

At the end of 19 Apr 1775, the people of Concord faced a big problem. Massachusetts was, of course, now in armed rebellion against the royal authorities holding the province’s capital. There were dead and dying royal soldiers in town. But Concord shared those problems with other towns.

The big problem specific to Concord was that one of those British soldiers had not only been shot but had obviously suffered a major head wound inflicted at close range. An inhabitant named Ammi White, born about 1754, had struck a wounded and defenseless man with his hatchet. The town’s minister, the Rev. William Emerson, had apparently seen him do this. See D. Michael Ryan’s article for more detail.

Concordians dug a grave for the soldiers who died near the North Bridge, put the bodies inside, and covered them up. But then Gen. Thomas Gage had a “Circumstantial Account” of the battle published in Boston, and (as quoted yesterday) it said that one soldier at the bridge had been “scalped, his head much mangled, and his ears cut off, though not quite dead.” So that required a response.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress published its own report complaining about British soldiers’ behavior, particularly later in the day. That narrative also stated:

A paper having been printed in Boston, representing, that one of the British troops killed at the bridge at Concord, was scalped, and the ears cut off from the head, supposed to be done in order to dishonour the Massachusetts people, and to make them appear to be savage and barbarous, the following deposition was taken that the truth might be known.

We, the subscribers, of lawful age, testify and say, that we buried the dead bodies of the King’s troops that were killed at the North-Bridge in Concord, on the nineteenth day of April, 1775, where the action first began, and that neither of those persons were scalped, nor their ears cut off, as has been represented.

Zechariah Brown,
Thomas Davis, jun.

Concord, May 11th, 1775.

Those men gave their oath to magistrate Duncan Ingraham. As a merchant captain, he had been part of the genteel mob that attacked Loyalist printer John Mein in Boston in 1769. He retired to Concord in 1772 and two years later acted friendly enough with British army officers to have a Patriot mob attack him—symbolically, by attaching a sheep’s head and guts to his chaise.

By May 1775, however, Ingraham was firmly among the Patriots. The deposition he helped create deflected Gage’s specific charges: scalping and cutting off ears. Brown and Davis didn’t say anything about whether they’d noticed if one of those soldiers had suffered a terrible head wound. As with many other depositions that the Massachusetts Whigs collected in the 1770s, I think this testimony was the truth but not the whole truth.

TOMORROW: Did that bury the controversy?

“Several Men killed and wounded, by the Rebels”

As I described yesterday, the online archive of the London Gazette allows us to read the British government’s official line on the conflict in America. Here is Gen. Thomas Gage’s official report on the Battle of Lexington and Concord, as it was published in the Gazette on 10 June 1775, the same day that report finally reached London.
The phrase “a large Quantity of Military Stores” seems deliberately vague, especially in light of the next paragraph’s claim that the soldiers “effected the Purpose for which they were sent.” Gage had detailed intelligence about what the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s agents had hidden out at Col. James Barrett’s farm in Concord. But the British troops failed to find most of that ordnance—which Gage never mentioned.

The next paragraph mixes up the sequence of actions. Lt. Col. Francis Smith didn’t dispatch companies to secure the bridges beyond central Concord until after his column had passed through Lexington and exchanged fire there. Despite that confusion, the general’s main point is clear: at both Lexington and at the North Bridge in Concord, the rebels attacked first.
In describing the troops’ withdrawal from Concord, the most difficult part of the mission, Gage minimized the damage they suffered, and blamed the enemy for atrocious tactics.
The “scalping” actually referred to a single incident: a Concord cabinetmaker named Ammi White (1754-1820) hatcheted a wounded British soldier soon after the shooting near the North Bridge. As the three companies who had searched Barrett’s farm marched past that man’s body, they interpreted his bloody head wound as a scalping, and the rumor grew.

For at least a couple of generations, people in Concord were so ashamed of this action that they tried to deny it ever happened. As D. Michael Ryan wrote in an article about the incident, at various times American authors blamed an enslaved black man, claimed that a half-witted boy had wielded the hatchet, and said that White had acted to put the soldier out of his misery. Even people who acknowledged the incident chose not to name White, who lived in Concord for years after 1775, regretting his impetuous violence.

Gage continued to give his London superiors the best possible picture of his situation in Massachusetts.
The actual number of militia casualties was less than a hundred, and thus less than half what the British suffered.

Gage finished by praising the officers he’d sent out that day. Had he cast blame on any of them, there might have been a considerable backlash against him for planning the mission in the first place.
Gage went on to report 65 men killed, 180 wounded, and 27 missing, broken out by their various units. That count was basically accurate, though some of the wounded men later died, bringing the British dead to more than 70.

Perceptions Matter, and Perceptions Linger

I recently read She Would Not Be Moved, by Herbert Kohl, which discusses how elementary-school textbooks, reading books, and lesson plans discuss Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. Kohl naturally takes issue with school presentations that show blacks and whites both protesting against segregated buses, or a quick ending to the confrontation. But he’s also upset by how many books continue portray Parks as a tired seamstress.

Calling Parks a seamstress is accurate—she worked in the tailoring department of a department store. But it’s not complete. Parks was also a trained political organizer, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for over ten years. She had participated in discussions of the bus segregation problem and helped prepare the African-American community to boycott the bus lines. That full story has now been well told in recent histories of the civil rights movement.

However, that story was not publicized at the time. On 23 Feb 1956, the New York Times ran a front-page article about the boycott, with a photograph of Parks being arrested for helping to organize it, and on 22 March referred to her in an update on the protest. Both times the paper called her a “seamstress.” Although the Times mentioned N.A.A.C.P. leaders involved in the bus boycott, it didn’t note that Parks was active in the organization. I suspect that other non-segregationist newspapers reported much the same, and I suspect that’s how Parks and her colleagues wanted it. They made her story more universal by presenting her as a tired working woman, not a well prepared political activist.

Even within African-American families, the story of Parks as a tired seamstress dominated for years. In an article for Time magazine in 1999, Rita Dove wrote of hearing that simple version from early childhood, and only later learning the complexities. It is, after all, a good story with a clear moral and a happy ending. Kohl’s book says nothing about the press coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956 and how that probably affected later descriptions of events to kids, so I think it misses a crucial part of the historiography. Perceptions do matter, and they can last a long time.

This situation came back to me this week when I took notes on the diary of Joseph Secomb, published in 1921 in the Danvers Historical Society Collections. Secomb started his report on 19 Apr 1775 by transcribing an account of the Battle of Lexington from the Essex Gazette; it placed all the blame on the British soldiers, saying they attacked the locals without provocation. Secomb then wrote:

After halting awhile they retreated again and kept on firing upon our men, Pillaging almost every house they Passed by breaking and destroying Doors, Windows, Glasses, &c. and carrying off clothing and other valuable Effects: Burnt some houses. It appeared to be their Design to burn & destroy all before them and nothing but our vigorous Pursuit (under Providence) prevented their infernal Purposes from being put in execution.

But the savage Barbarity exercised upon the Bodies of our unfortunate Brethren who fell, is almost incredible. Not content with shooting down the unarmed aged and infirm they disregarded the cries of the wounded, killing them without mercy and mangling their Bodies in the most shocking manner as they Retreated back to Charlestown.

We had seven men belonging to Danvers killed & a number belonging to other Towns but ye number of the Regulars was far greater. We have the Pleasure to say that notwithstanding the highest Provocation given by the Enemy not one Instance of Cruelty that we have hard of, was committed by our victorious Militia; but listening to the Merciful Dictates of the Christian Religion they breathed higher Sentiments of Humanity.

Of course, the British soldiers at Lexington and Concord had a very different view of events. They had seen and heard American militiamen gathering before the confrontation at Lexington, a detail that Patriot newspapers left out. Most British soldiers believed that an American had fired first. The companies at the North Bridge in Concord had seen a large body of provincials march toward them before they opened fire.

Furthermore, the best documented case of “Barbarity exercised upon the Bodies” on 19 Apr 1775 was committed by a Concord youth, Ammi White, on a wounded regular. He struck the man in the head with his hatchet, finishing him off. Other British soldiers who then saw that corpse came to believe it had been scalped.

With over two hundred years of perspective, most historians now agree it’s unclear who fired the first shot at Lexington. They describe the outbreak of fighting at the North Bridge as the culmination of growing aggression and fears from both sides. It took several decades for the story of Ammi White to get into American history books, but writers now acknowledge that unsavory wrinkle of a complex story.

But Joseph Secomb didn’t know those things in 1775. He relied on his newspaper, reports from his neighbors, and his understanding of the royal government’s actions over the preceding several months. So did thousands of other Americans of 1776, which helps to explain how the fighting on 19 April united so many British colonists against the Crown. Even after New Englanders began to acknowledge their preparation for military action, it took decades before American writers abandoned the story of an unprovoked British attack in Lexington and barbarous behavior in the retreat from Concord.

It will also take some years before all elementary-school books stop emphasizing Rosa Parks’s job as a seamstress and also discuss her work as a political organizer. Both are significant, but one got into the historical record ahead of the other.