Sgt. Monroe on Capt. Parker

Yesterday I quoted the Rev. Theodore Parker telling the story of his grandfather John Parker’s words to his Lexington militia company on 19 Apr 1775: “If they want [or mean] to have a war, let it begin here.”

In 1858 Parker told the historian George Bancroft his sources for that quotation:

They were kept as the family tradition of the day, and when the battle was re-enacted in 1820 (or thereabout), his orderly sergeant took the Captain’s place, and repeated the words, adding, “For them is the very words Captain Parker said.”

We know from other sources that the reenactment occurred in April 1822. Theodore Parker was then eleven years old.

The men Parker identified only as his grandfather’s orderly sergeant was William Munroe, who by 1822 had obtained the rank of colonel in the Massachusetts militia. He was a major figure in town whose house and tavern is now operated as a museum by the Lexington Historical Society.

In 1825, three years after that reenactment, Munroe provided a detailed deposition about the fight. He stated:

Between day-light and sunrise, Capt. Thaddeus Bowman rode up and informed, that the regulars were near. The drum was then ordered to be beat, and I was commanded by Capt. Parker to parade the company, which I accordingly did, in two ranks, a few rods northerly of the meeting-house.

When the British troops had arrived within about a hundred rods of the meeting-house, as I was afterwards told by a prisoner, which we took, “they heard our drum, and supposing it to be a challenge, they were ordered to load their muskets, and to move at double quick time.” They came up almost upon a run. Col. Smith and Maj. Pitcairn rode up some rods in advance of their troops, and within a few rods of our company, and exclaimed, “Lay down your arms, you rebels, and disperse!” and immediately fired his pistol. Pitcairn then advanced, and, after a moment’s conversation with Col. Smith, he advanced with his troops, and, finding we did not disperse, they being within four rods of us, he brought his sword down with great force, and said to his men, “Fire, damn you, fire!” The front platoon, consisting of eight or nine, then fired, without killing or wounding any of our men.

In fact, Lt. Col. Francis Smith was not on the common to converse with Pitcairn (not that Munroe would have recognized either officer at that time), and most historians now agree that no British officer gave an order to fire. But for the purpose of this inquiry, what matters most is that in 1825 Munroe did not quote Capt. Parker as saying anything stirring at all.

That 1825 volume by the Rev. Elias Phinney quoted several other Lexington veterans as well. Ebenezer Munroe said, “Capt. Parker ordered his men to stand their ground, and not to molest the regulars, unless they meddled with us.” Joseph Underwood stated:

Capt. Parker gave orders for every man to stand his ground, and said he would order the first man shot, that offered to leave his post. I stood very near Capt. Parker, when the regulars came up, and am confident he did not order his men to disperse, till the British troops had fired upon us the second time.

But no one remembered Capt. Parker saying something like, “If they mean [or want] to have a war, let it begin here.”

In 1835 the famed orator Edward Everett spoke in Lexington, giving a detailed account of the battle, and he didn’t quote Parker saying that, either. If Munroe had indeed repeated those words at the ceremony in 1822, they hadn’t become part of the town lore. They didn’t see print until Theodore Parker told the story in 1855.

In the 1880s the Rev. Carlton A. Staples prepared a “Report of the Committee on Historical Monuments and Tablets” for Lexington and a paper for the Lexington Historical Society. Both appear to quote Parker quoting Munroe quoting Parker. And Staples’s research was the authority for carving “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here” onto the boulder on Lexington green.

Joshua Simonds: potential suicide bomber

Joshua Simonds was a Lexington farmer who, though he didn’t actually blow himself up to kill British soldiers on 19 April 1775, told people in later years that he'd been prepared to.

At dawn on that day, the British column marched into Lexington from the east. There were about seventy militiamen drawn up in lines on the Green. Between the British column and the provincial lines stood Lexington’s meeting-house, the town’s only public building of substantial size. The locals therefore also used it as the town schoolhouse and, in April 1775, the town gunpowder repository.

Simonds was in the meeting-house as the troops arrived. We know that because in the wake of the battle a pro-Crown newspaper suggested that someone had fired from that building at the regular troops, and the Rev. William Gordon sought to refute that idea in his “ACCOUNT of the Commencement of Hostilities between Great Britain and America, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay” published in the 7 June 1775 Pennsylvania Gazette. Gordon insisted there were very few men in the meeting-house:

And who do you imagine they were? One Joshua Simonds, who happened to be getting powder there as the troops arrived; besides whom I believe there were not two, if so much as one, for by reason of the position of the meeting house, none would have remained in it thro’ choice, but fools and madmen.

Indeed, being in the meeting-house was dangerous—but it was even more dangerous to try to leave. In 1824, John Munroe of Lexington, age 77, gave the town minister, Elias Phinney, a deposition that said:

Caleb Harrington was shot down on attempting to leave the meeting-house, where he and some others had gone, before the British soldiers came up, for the purpose of removing a quantity of powder that was stored there.

Joseph Comee was wounded while trying to leave with Harrington. A fourth man, unnamed, hid up in the meeting-house gallery.

Back to Joshua Simonds. In 1775 he was 35 years old and one of the ensigns (the lowest level of officer) in the Lexington militia company. Some of his tales came down in his son William’s family to Eli Simonds (born 1817), who was an informant for Abram E. Brown’s Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896). Writing in Joshua’s voice, Brown said:

I was in charge of the town's stock of ammunition on the eventful morning. The magazine was the upper gallery of the meeting-house, and in the discharge of my duties I was there filling the powder-horns of my comrades when the regulars came into the town.

My associate glancing out saw the situation, and said, "We are all surrounded!" He then hid in the opposite gallery.

I then determined to blow up the house and go with it rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. I cocked my gun already loaded, placed the muzzle upon the open cask of powder, and waited for their course to determine their fate and mine as well.

That account echoes the deposition of 72-year-old Ebenezer Munroe on 2 April 1825:

When the British came up in front of the meeting-house, Joshua Simonds was in the upper gallery, an open cask of powder standing near him, and he afterward told me, that he cocked his gun and placed the muzzle of it close to the cask of powder, and determined to “touch it off,” in case the troops had come into the gallery.

At that moment, according to the Simonds family account, Lt.-Col. Francis Smith arrived on the Green below and called the British troops back into line. The soldiers who had entered the meeting-house left, and the column marched on to Concord.

Imagine if events had proceeded differently—if regulars had climbed the stairs to the gallery, and Simonds had fired his gun into the casks of powder. The explosion would have been fatal, and would have severely damaged Lexington's religious and civic center. Locals would have blamed the British soldiers. The soldiers would have blamed the locals. Both sides would have felt that their worst thoughts of the other had been confirmed. A one-sided skirmish might well have turned into a free-for-all in the middle of the small town. The Revolutionary War would have started on a very different note from what we Americans have come to know.

Joshua Simonds's suicidal commitment also makes me think of Prof. Robert Pape's study of suicide bombers worldwide from 1980 to 2003, Dying to Win. That book concluded that, in its publisher's words:

Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

There was no "terrorist campaign" at Lexington, obviously. Simonds didn't plan his attack, and it's not certain that he would have gone through with it. But he did see military forces arriving in territory that he viewed as his own.