“Are you serious, Dr. Church?”

In a letter to the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap, Paul Revere recalled a dramatic moment on 21 Apr 1775:

The Friday evening after [the Battle of Lexington and Concord], about sun set, I was sitting with some, or near all that Committee [of safety], in their room, which was at Mr. [Jonathan] Hastings’s House at Cambridge. Dr. [Benjamin] Church, all at once, started up—

Dr. Warren, said He, I am determined to go into Boston tomorrow—

(it set them all a stairing)—

Dr. [Joseph] Warren replyed, Are you serious, Dr. Church? they will Hang you if they catch you in Boston.

He replyed, I am serious, and am determined to go at all adventures.

After a considerable conversation, Dr. Warren said, If you are determined, let us make some business for you. They agreed that he should go to git medicine for their & our Wounded officers.

He went the next morning; & I think he came back on Sunday evening.

As part of his medical mission, Dr. Church carried in a note from Dr. John Homans of Brookline to his mentor Dr. Joseph Gardner, asking for surgical knives.

Revere recalled speaking to Church after his return:

After He had told the Committee how things were, I took him a side, & inquired particularly how they treated him? he said, that as soon as he got to their lines on the Boston Neck, they made him a prisoner, & carried him to General [Thomas] Gage, where He was examined, & then He was sent to Gould’s Barracks, & was not suffered to go home but once.

In Igniting the American Revolution, Derek W. Beck guessed that the Gould of “Gould’s Barracks” was Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould, who on that day was a wounded prisoner of war outside of Boston. But I think the answer appears in a letter of merchant John Andrews on 11 January:

This morning the soldiers in the barrack opposite our house, left it, and took quarters with the royal Irish in Gould’s auction room or store—in the street leading to Charlestown ferry.

Bostonians often referred to barracks by the name of the local landlord who had rented those buildings to the army, making “Gould’s barracks” a big building on Back Street in the North End.

Robert Gould was a merchant who in August 1773 announced that the Boston selectmen had authorized him to set up as an auctioneer. He advertised heavily over the next several months (usually signing those notices “R. Gould”) before the Boston Port Bill hit. Renting his store to the army might have seemed like the best possible deal.

Robert Gould had also invested in Maine land along with Francis Shaw, Sr., a settlement that became Gouldsboro. He had trained Francis Shaw, Jr., in business, and newspaper ads in 1770 show that the younger man was selling ceramics out of “the store lately improved by Mr. Robert Gould.” In June 1776, Francis, Jr., and his wife Hannah had a boy they named Robert Gould Shaw. That man would pass the name on to his grandson, the Civil War hero.

Robert Gould remained in Boston after the British evacuation, but the Patriot authorities were suspicious of his dealings with the king’s army. The selectmen recommended detaining him for questioning, but the Massachusetts General Court decided to drop him from the list. Gould went back to advertising as a regular merchant in late 1776. But then he died unexpectedly, intestate and in debt, in January 1777, aged 57.

TOMORROW: The doctor’s documents.

“I suppose they have all read it years ago”

In defending himself against the Crown’s charge of seditious libel in July 1777, the Rev. John Horne wanted to show it was reasonable of him to write two years before that Americans had been “inhumanly murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.”

As a radical political activist, Horne probably also wanted to get the evidence behind that belief out to the public.

The Crown authorities, meanwhile, wanted to squelch Horne and his message.

One of Horne’s sources was a deposition signed in April 1775 by Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould, then a wounded prisoner in American hands. The trial record shows Horne’s struggle to get Gould’s words out in court over the obstacles of his prosecutor, Attorney General Edward Thurlow (shown here), and the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.

Horne’s questioning of Gould continued like this:

I shall ask you no questions that you dislike; give me a hint if there is any one you wish to decline—Did you make any affidavit?

Yes, I did.

Will you please to read that? [Giving the witness the Public Advertiser, May 31, 1775.] I believe that to be the exact substance of the affidavit that I made.

Lord Mansfield. It cannot be read without the Attorney-General consents to it.

Attorney General. I don’t consent.

Lord Mansfield. If he consents to it, I have no objection.

Mr. Horne. May I give it to the jury?

Lord Mansfield. No; I suppose they have all read it years ago.

Mr. Horne. My lord, that is my misfortune that it is so long ago. [Mr. Horne begins to read it.]

Lord Mansfield. You must not read it.

Mr. Home. I have proved the publication by the printer.

Lord Mansfield. It will have a different consequence, if you only mean to prove that there was such an affidavit published. If you mean to make that use of it, then you may produce the affidavit, or have it read.—If you mean to prove the contents of it, they must come from the witness, and then you will have a right to have it read.

Mr. Horne. I mean both to prove the contents true, and the publication of the affidavit: that indeed, I have already proved.

Lord Mansfield. Then you may read the affidavit, if you make use of the publication of it.

Mr. Horne. I make use of both; that it was so published, and charged, and that it is true. “The Public Advertiser, Wednesday, May 31st, 1775.” [The affidavit read.]

Gould’s deposition still wasn’t included in the published trial record.

The former lieutenant agreed that the published text was accurate, but he reminded the jury he had said those things “at the time I was wounded and taken prisoner.”

Gould then went on to testify about how he and other officers marching to Lexington could see and hear the Middlesex County militia mobilizing around them. He talked about hearing “alarm guns,” even “cannon.” (“Did you say cannon?” asked Lord Mansfield.)

A juryman asked for clarification: “Pray who did the alarm guns belong to; to the Americans or our corps?” Gould affirmed those were signals from the provincials to each other.

The testimony that Horne elicited thus portrayed the Massachusetts populace as turning out for a military fight. He decided not to call Lord Percy, then in the courtroom, to add any details and rested his case.

Attorney General Thurlow then delivered a long legal argument, calling no witnesses. Chief Justice Mansfield summed up the case, particularly citing Gould’s testimony.

The jury took ninety minutes to decide the Rev. John Horne was guilty of seditious libel. He spent the next year in prison.

“Were you present at Lexington and Concord?”

The Rev. John Horne (later John Horne Tooke) was one of Britain’s political radicals in the 1770s.

He started the decade as a minister allied with John Wilkes. They quarreled, and he resigned his pulpit in order to study law (though eventually the bar wouldn’t accept him on the excuse that he had taken holy orders).

When London received the first word of the Revolutionary War breaking out, Horne immediately criticized the royal government. He even announced that he was raising money for the families of Americans “murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.” He had fully adopted the version of the first day of the war propagated by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

The Crown brought Horne into court on the charge of seditious libel for using the word “murdered.” On 4 July 1777, coincidentally one year after the Declaration of Independence, he went on trial in London with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield presiding. A detailed record of the trial was made and published many times since.

Horne tried to call Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State, and Gen. Thomas Gage as witnesses. When the judges unsurprisingly didn’t allow that, he called Edward Thornton Gould, a former lieutenant in the 4th Regiment.

That young, wealthy officer had been wounded and captured in the battle. While in American hands, Gould signed a deposition that I quoted way back here.

In describing the skirmish at Lexington, Gould said, “which party fired first I can not exactly say.” About Concord he stated, “the provincials came down upon us, upon which we engaged and gave the first fire.” While this was far from supporting the charge of “murdering,” it differed from most army officers and Gen. Gage’s official report in not blaming the provincials for firing first.

At the trial, Horne, representing himself, questioned Gould this way:

Did you in the year 1775 serve in a regiment of foot belonging to his majesty?

I did.

Were you present at Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April 1775?

I was.

How came you to be there?

As a subaltern officer, ordered there.

Ordered by whom?

General Gage.

At what time did you receive those orders?

I don’t recollect immediately the time.

Was it on the 19th, 18th, or 17th of April?

I believe it was on the 18th in the evening.

Did you receive them personally from general Gage?

No such thing.

Whom then?

From the adjutant of the regiment.

When did you set out from Boston for Lexington?

I cannot exactly say the time in the morning, but it was very early, two or three o’clock.

That is in the night in April, was it dark?

It was.

Did you march with drums beating?

No, we did not.

Did you march as silently as you could?

There were not any particular orders given for silence.

Was it observed?

No, it was not observed, not particularly by me.

Were you taken prisoner at Lexington or Concord, or either of them?

At the place called Monottama, in my return from Lexington.

Then Horne turned to introducing the testimony that Gould had sworn to when he was a wounded prisoner.

TOMORROW: Getting testimony on the record.

The Guns that Didn’t Bark

One of my big unanswered questions about the Battle of Lexington and Concord on 19 Apr 1775 is why the provincial forces didn’t deploy any of the cannon they had just spent months collecting and preparing for a fight.

The guns that James Barrett had been overseeing in Concord were probably unavailable after being rushed into hiding-places in other towns. But what about the rest?

We can assume that the men of Lexington and Cambridge, towns along the British route, didn’t want to see an all-out battle along one of their main roads, with houses and possibly civilians nearby. Better to hurry the redcoats along than to make them desperate and angry with artillery.

But what about Watertown, which had actually deployed two cannon on 30 March, according to a British army captain? Jonathan Brown was “captain of the train”—Watertown’s own militia artillery company. The town wasn’t on the regulars’ route but was close enough to reach the road from Concord with mounted cannon. But there’s no mention of the Watertown guns coming out.

What about Newton, where a shot from one of the two cannon John Pigeon had given to the town summoned the militia company on 19 April? Those men reportedly gathered beside the cannon and then marched off to confront the king’s troops, leaving their most powerful weapons behind.

Other towns had also formed artillery companies, but those men marched out with muskets. Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould reported hearing cannon used as alarm guns during the march west, but neither he nor any other British officer saw them.  

Indeed, out of the scores of Massachusetts militia units that mustered independently on 19 April, sometimes zealously and sometimes after long conversations among local leaders, I haven’t found any that brought out their cannon as well. I haven’t read even a mention of that as a possibility under discussion.

Uncounted numbers of veterans of the 19th of April left descriptions of that day, some immediately and some decades later. In 1775 there may have been pressure not to mention the province’s artillery because that would acknowledge the countryside had prepared for war. Eventually, however, men did speak of topics that had been politically awkward before. Yet no one talked about cannon.

One possible explanation is that those artillery pieces weren’t as ready for combat as people had been saying. Back in February, representatives from four towns described the four iron cannon as “Nearly Compleated,” but 99% done isn’t done, especially if you’re going into combat. Provincial records show people were still scrambling to finish equipping some pieces in late April and May.

In particular, militia officers may have felt they didn’t have enough gunpowder for an artillery engagement, and the supply they did have was better divvied out to infantrymen. Or they might not have had the horses necessary to drag iron cannon across country and into battle—which farmer was willing to risk his livestock? For that matter, did the provincials dare to risk the guns themselves when there was probably bigger fighting ahead?

I suspect another factor is that on 19 April the men of Massachusetts weren’t yet ready to make an all-out attack on the king’s soldiers. Did they really want to wipe out hundreds of their fellow subjects? Instead of halting and capturing the expedition, wasn’t it better to keep it moving back toward Boston? Like a dog chasing a car, the Massachusetts militiamen wouldn’t have known what to do with that column if they’d caught it.

The Hunt for Reuben Brown’s Chaise

Reuben Brown rode from Concord to Lexington early on the morning of 19 Apr 1775, scouting the road at the request of his neighbors.

He arrived just in time to see the first shots on Lexington common, then turned around and rode back with news that the regulars were coming—and they were shooting.

Later that day, the British were preparing to withdraw from Concord, having suffered casualties and aware that militiamen were massing against them. Some officers looked for vehicles to carry wounded men—well, fellow officers—back to Boston. According to Lemuel Shattuck in 1835, “A chaise was taken from Reuben Brown, and another from John Beaton, which were furnished with bedding, pillaged as were many other articles from the neighbouring houses.”

Those officers didn’t make it. In a footnote Shattuck added that Joseph Hayward of Concord, a veteran of the previous war, “took these two chaises in Cambridge, and brought them to Concord, having killed a man in each.” That casualty count might be an exaggeration.

Another report appeared in the 24 Apr 1824 Concord Monitor: “Mr. Brown’s chaise was found a few days after in Lexington, with bullet holes through it, much stained with blood.”

We have more contemporaneous evidence about Brown’s chaise from an advertisement that appeared in the 17 Aug 1775 New-England Chronicle:

Lieut. Joseph Hayward of Concord gives Notice, that on the 19th April last, in the Fight, he took from the Regulars in Menotomy, a Horse and Chaise; the Chaise was owned by Mr. Reuben Brown of Concord; what remains in his Hands is a mouse-colour’d Horse, near 13 Hands high, old, poor and dull; a good Bed Quilt, Tammy on both Sides; a good camblet Ridinghood, brown colour; one Pillow; and a Piece of Bed-Tick. The Owner may have them by telling the Marks and paying the Charge of this Advertisement.

Yesterday I posited that Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould and Lt. Edward Hull were together in one of those chaises. Soon people in Boston knew that they had been captured.

However, the British commanders didn’t know the fate of an officer in the other chaise until days later. That officer had apparently been taken back to Concord and turned over to…Reuben Brown.

TOMORROW: The lieutenant at Mr. Brown’s house.

The First Captured British Officer to Die in the Revolutionary War

When provincial militia companies fired at the British soldiers holding the North Bridge in Concord, they wounded four army officers:

• Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould of the 4th Regiment, in the foot.
• Lt. Waldron Kelly of the 10th, in the hand or arm.
• Lt. William Sutherland of the 38th, only slightly.
• Lt. Edward Hull of the 43rd, in the arm.

Unable to march back to Boston, Gould commandeered a chaise in Concord and set out with Hull, who seems to have been more badly hurt. They raced back to safe ground through the hostile countryside.

Somewhere east of Lexington, the lieutenants met up with Col. Percy and the British relief column. Gould briefed the colonel about what had happened in Concord and drove on. But by the time the chaise reached Meontomy, the provincial militia was out in force.

Someone fired at the vehicle, wounding Hull again. Gould surrendered and was taken to Medford. Hull was carried into a deserted house beside the road. When the homeowners, Samuel and Elizabeth Butterfield, returned at the end of the day, they found a provincial man, Daniel Hemenway, shot in the chest but relatively healthy, and Lt. Hull, grievously wounded.

The next day, the Rev. David McClure had been in the Butterfields’ house. He wrote:

I went into a house in Menotomy, where was a stout farmer, walking the room, from whose side a surgeon had just cut out a musket ball . . .

In the same room, lay mortally wounded, a british Officer, Lieut. Hull, a youthful, fair & delicate countinance. He was of a respectable family of fortune, in Scotland. Sitting on one feather bed, he leaned on another, & was attempting to suck the juice of an Orange, which some neighbour had brought. The physician of the place had been to dress his wounds, & a woman was appointed to attend him. His breaches were bloody, lying on the bed. . . .

I asked him, if he was dangerously wounded? he replied, “yes, mortally.” That he had received three balls in his body. His countenance expressed great bodily anguish. I conversed with him a short time, on the prospect of death & a preperation for that solemn scene, to which he appeared to pay serious attention.

A rumor about Hull’s captivity circulated among his fellow officers in Boston, as recorded by Lt. Frederick Mackenzie on 30 April:

Lt. Hull of the 43rd Regiment who was dangerously wounded on the 19th Instant, was left in a house in the Village of Menotomy. ’Tis said the Rebels placed three deserters from the 43rd Regt over him while he lay on a bed unable to move, and that one of those Villains threatened to shoot him for having formerly brought him to a Court Martial.

There’s no hint of such treatment in provincial sources. The head of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, Dr. Joseph Warren, had written to Gen. Thomas Gage assuring him that Hull and Gould were getting medical care. He invited the general to send out any British army surgeon he chose.

In Igniting the American Revolution, Derek W. Beck writes that toward the end of the month, as Hull weakened, Warren sent Gage another note saying that the lieutenant hoped to see his regimental adjutant. That was Lt. William Miller; he was promoted to captain at the end of the year and was still at that rank when he died in 1789.

Hull died on 2 May. The next day, Gen. Artemas Ward ordered three lieutenants and three adjutants to escort the lieutenant’s coffin to Charlestown and turn it over to the British military. A barge from H.M.S. Somerset carried it across the Charles River to Boston.

On 4 May Lt. John Barker of the 4th Regiment wrote in his diary:

The late Lt. Hull of the 43d was buried today: he was wounded and taken Prisoner on the 19th and the day before yesterday died of his wounds; they yesterday brought him to town as he had requested it.

They won’t give up any of their Prisoners, but I hear they treat ’em pretty well.

(The photo above shows the monument to two British privates killed and buried near the North Bridge in Concord. We don’t know where Lt. Hull’s body was interred.)

Reuben Brown, the Link Between Lexington and Concord

Reuben Brown was born in Sudbury in 1748. In 1770, soon after coming of age, he moved to Concord and established himself as a saddler. Three years later, on 12 May 1773, he married a girl from his old town, Mary (Polly) How. Their daughter Hepzibath arrived four months later on 15 September, and their second daughter Sally on 9 Mar 1775.

Also in early 1775, according to Concord historian Lemuel Shattuck, Brown made “cartouch-boxes, holsters, belts, and other articles of saddlery” for local militiamen. The town’s Liberty Pole stood in a field behind his shop.

But those weren’t Brown’s most significant contributions to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He had a unique perspective on the action, as described in his highly wrought obituary in the 3 Oct 1832 The New England Farmer (reprinted from the Boston Courier):

Died at Concord, Mass. on the 25th ult. [i.e., of last month] Mr Reuben Brown, a rare specimen of that hardy, industrious, intelligent and fearless yeomanry which, fifty years ago, was the glory of the Commonwealth and the bulwark of the Union.

Mr Brown, who was a native of Sudbury and a grandson of the first minister of that ancient settlement, removed to Concord about the year 1771, and was of course just in season to witness the earliest scenes of the great Drama of the Age. He did witness them literally, indeed, for on the eventful morning of the 19th of April, long before day-break, he was on his way, alone, at the request of some of the Concord authorities, to reconnoitre the advance of the British to Lexington.

He reached the “Common” just as they were seen marching up the Boston road. He advised the American officers, who were wholly unprepared to meet an enemy, to withdraw; but they declined, chiefly from the firm belief, which their men shared with them, that the British would never think of firing upon them at all events.

Mr Brown waited to see the issue of the meeting—the blood of the first martyrs of American liberty—and he then returned rapidly to Concord and reported progress.

His work had now but commenced. His shop was closed—a large saddler’s establishment in which he had already fitted out several companies of cavalry and infantry—and then his house—standing on the main road in the village—and his wife with her infant children instructed to manage for herself in the woods north of the town, with many other females and infirm people of the place—

Mr. Brown then mounted his horse again, it being now about day-break, and commenced the task of alarming the neighboring country. And his efforts will need no comment when we say that he rode that day about 120 miles in the performance of this noble duty. The result of the exertions in which no single man probably bore so active a part as himself, is well known to all readers of a history which “the world has by heart.” On many other occasions he was equally efficient, though he did not happen to be at any time engaged in fighting the enemy in the field. Two of his brothers were at Bunker Hill.

Universally respected by his fellow citizens for his sound judgment, his energy, his industry, his public spirit, his cordial benevolence, and, above all, for that staunch old fashioned honesty which knew no shadow of turning—his gray hairs were crowned with the praise of a Patriot, and his death with the peace of a Christian. He came to his grave at the venerable age of 84.

Brown was thus the communication link between Lexington and Concord at the start of the fight. His report that the British troops were willing to shoot warned his own neighbors to be cautious about confronting those soldiers, putting off the confrontation in Concord for a few hours until more militia units arrived.

Reportedly, before leaving town the regulars took a chaise from Brown’s shop, perhaps to transport a wounded man. That man might well have been Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould—at least, men in Cambridge later took control of both Gould and Brown’s chaise. Reuben Brown also had a connection to another prisoner, Lt. Isaac Potter of the Marines: the provincials held him for a while in Brown’s house.

Here is an old photograph of that house from the collection of the Boston Public Library. Brown’s account books from a couple of decades later are at the Concord library.

“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.

Ammi Cutter and the Old Men of Menotomy

Yesterday I quoted the part of “The White Horseman,” the earliest known story about Hezekiah Wyman on 19 Apr 1775, which makes it also the earliest known story about Ammi Cutter on that same day.

We know that there really was a man named Ammi Cutter in the western part of Cambridge, now called Arlington. The Independent Chronicle newspaper for 1-8 Feb 1776 has an advertisement from “Ammi Cutter of Menotomy” about a two-year-old red steer he’d found.

Ammi Cutter (1733-1795) was a miller and farmer on his third wife, the former Hannah Holden. Like Asahel and Abigail Porter, the Cutters got married in Samuel Perley’s church in Seabrook, New Hampshire; Massachusetts couples went to that neighboring colony if they wanted to marry quickly with no questions asked. In Ammi’s case, the questions would have been:

• Isn’t Hannah the younger sister of your second wife, who died sixteen months ago?
• Are you sure you’ll be able to get home before the baby comes?

The marriage took place on 27 Oct 1774. Hannah gave birth to Joshua Cutter on 1 December.

There was, in fact, another Ammi Cutter in Menotomy at the time: the first one’s son (1755-1830). He was “a large man, broad in chest,” who at nineteen almost certainly marched with the town’s regular militia company on 19 Apr 1775. According to the family history, he “is said to have disabled three British foemen on the retreat from Concord.”

And that leads us from the written vital records into unverifiable oral traditions. In his early forties (and with an infant at home), the older Ammi Cutter was reportedly exempted, along with other older men, from marching off to confront the redcoats. Instead, he and a bunch of “exempts,” some of them war veterans, stayed in Menotomy and ambushed a British supply convoy.

How did that story come down to us? The first hint comes in “The White Horseman,” which credits “Ammi Cutter” with masterminding the attack. That 1835 story says, “Ammi had planted about fifty old rusty muskets under a stone wall, with their muzzles directed toward the road.”

A more detailed story appears in the Rev. Samuel Abbot Smith’s history of west Cambridge on 19 Apr 1775, published in 1864. Based on interviews with local residents about what they’d heard growing up, Smith said that the “old men…in all about twelve” chose David Lamson to lead that attack, but he credited Cutter with being part of it. For different parts of that story Smith cited Dr. Benjamin Cutter (1803-1864), the older Ammi’s grandson; Mrs. Lydia Peirce, actually alive in 1775; a Miss Bradshaw, granddaughter of the parish minister in 1775; and Col. Thomas Russell, grandson of Jason Russell.

Smith told two other stories involving Ammi Cutter, citing Dr. Cutter. The same stories appear in two books the doctor drafted and his son William R. Cutter finished: A History of the Cutter Family in New England (1871) and History of the Town of Arlington (1880). According to those books:

• After Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould was captured while riding to Boston for medical care, men took him to Cutter’s house. (Incidentally, Gould would have his own quickie wedding when he returned to Britain.)
• Cutter told Jason Russell that it was dangerous to try to shoot regulars from his house near the road. Russell persisted, and was killed.

That makes Ammi Cutter appear crucial to much of what happened in Menotomy on 19 Apr 1775. It may be safer to say that his family was crucial in preserving and publishing the town’s stories.

Because of the contemporaneous reports and the number of people in Arlington who recalled hearing about the event, it’s clear that a group of Menotomy men did ambush British supply wagon. (The “Old Men of Menotomy” historical marker appears above, courtesy of the Historical Marker Database.) Ammi Cutter was most likely in that group, and his family definitely passed down the tale.

One descendant, also named Ammi Cutter and born in 1777, became a prominent merchant in Boston and a captain in the town militia. If he told the story about his grandfather on lots of occasions in Boston, it could have become a well-known anecdote of 19 Apr 1775, attached to the name Ammi Cutter, even before it was printed. And that’s just as “The White Horseman” presents it.

COMING UP: What about “Mother Barberick”?

Lt. Gould Gets Married

After the Battle of Bunker Hill, Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould sailed for England. He had been wounded in the fighting at Concord and held prisoner by the provincials for a month. Some of his fellow British officers probably resented how during that time he’d signed a deposition generally supporting the provincials’ view of how the war began. But Gould was rich, and didn’t need to remain in the army.

Another officer in the 4th Regiment, the third Viscount Falmouth, asked Gould to take letters to his mother, Frances Boscawen (1719-1805). The lieutenant also apparently visited his sister, who had married a brother of the Earl of Sussex. Lord Sussex had a daughter, the Hon. Barbara Yelverton. And this is where the gossip starts.

In October 1775, Edward and Barbara eloped across the Scottish border and married in Gretna Green. Scottish law allowed girls to marry without their parents’ consent earlier than in England, so that town became eighteenth-century Britain’s equivalent of Las Vegas when it came to no-questions-asked weddings.

Boscawen wrote to a friend on 1 November:

Have you not pitied poor Lady Sussex, my dear Madam? . . . My lord has made a will, which cuts off this ungrateful child with a shilling, but it is to be hoped he will live to cancel it and forgive her; but it must be a very bad child, I should fear, that can plant a dagger in her parents’ breasts, in return for all their care and tenderness: such a child too! The boldness amazes me. She was sixteen last June.

Actually the new Mrs. Barbara Gould was only fifteen, having been born in 1760.

Gould sold his lieutenant’s commission, effectively retiring from the army, in January 1776. He testified about the start of the American war in London the next year. The Goulds had three children before Barbara died on 8 Apr 1781 at the age of twenty. Eleven years later Edward remarried, to the Hon. Anne Dormer, eldest daughter of the eighth Baron Dormer.

Gould served as a justice of the peace and one term as high sheriff of Nottingham. Starting in 1781, he helped to command the Nottinghamshire militia, and thus attained the title of colonel. He volunteered for service in Spain in 1808 and retired only in 1819. A widower once more, Gould moved to Paris, where he died on 15 Feb 1830.

Gould’s son, Henry, became the 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn, inheriting the title through his mother. He was a tenant and, for a while, pal of the young Lord Byron. Most scholars suggest their falling-out was over sex—did Grey try to seduce Byron? Or did Byron resent Grey flirting with Byron’s mother? Or both? Byron wouldn’t tell even his sister what had happened. Baron Grey died in 1810, his father outliving him by twenty years. According to the family of one of Gould’s fellow lieutenants, both the colonel and the baron proved to be “wild and dissipated” men.

(Photo of Gretna Green today by Ian Britton, via FreeFoto.)

Lt. Gould Testifies in London

John Horne (1736-1812; he added the surname Tooke in 1782; color portrait here) was a British political activist. He believed in a Bill of Rights, full publication of government proceedings, the rule of law, and curbs on governmental power, and he wasn’t afraid to say it. Which, in the late 1700s, made him a dangerous radical.

Horne was inspired by John Wilkes but later feuded with him, just as he worked and feuded with a number of other British politicians on the left. Since the 1820s authors have suggested that he wrote the famous Junius letters. However, some of those letters were addressed to Horne, and indicate he and Junius were at odds—though he seems quite capable of having picked a fight with himself.

During the Revolutionary War, Horne spoke up for the American cause. In June 1775 he announced in the Public Advertiser that his Society for Constitutional Information had raised over £100 for:

the relief of the widows, orphans, and aged parents of our beloved American fellow subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.

The government disliked that, fined the printers of Horne’s announcement £100 each, and took Horne to court for libel.

The state trial began under Lord Chief Justice Mansfield on 4 July 1777. Horne undertook to defend himself, which had its good points and its bad points. He gave an impassioned account of his case, but then had to admit it had “made me forget to examine my witnesses.” So he interrupted Attorney-General Edward Thurlow and asked to be allowed to return to his case.

Mansfield agreed. Horne called Thurlow himself. Mansfield squashed that. Horne then called Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for America and chief prosecutor of the war. Germain didn’t appear. Horne made a remark about Gen. Thomas Gage also being unavailable—he’d heard Gage was in Germany—and finally called his third witness: Edward Thoroton Gould, former lieutenant in the 4th Regiment and former prisoner of war, who had returned to England in mid-1775.

After a bit of squabbling over procedures, Horne read out the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s deposition from Gould (quoted yesterday), in which the lieutenant had said he couldn’t tell who had fired first at Lexington, and that British soldiers had fired first at Concord. Then Horne got down to questioning. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t had the chance to examine Gould in advance, and some of the former officer’s replies surprised him.

Horne: “Was you, at the time when the orders were given to you to go to Lexington and Concord, apprehensive of any attack by those Americans against whom you went?”

Gould: “We were as soon as we saw them; we found them armed.”

Horne: “Before you went from Boston?”

Gould: “That day we did.”

Horne: “How many miles is Lexington or Concord from Boston?”

Gould: “The farther is about 25 miles, the nearer is about 12.”

Horne: “Did you know, had you any intelligence that the Americans of Lexington and Concord were, at that time, marching, or intending to march to attack you at Boston?”

Gould: “We supposed that they were marching to attack us, from a continued firing of alarm guns, cannon, or they appeared to be such from the report.”

And that caught the Lord Chief Justice’s attention.

Mansfield: “Did you say cannon?”

Gould: “Cannon.”

Mansfield: “When was that?”

Gould: “As soon as we began the march, very early in the morning.”

Horne tried to pull it out by arguing that the alarm guns were simply a logical response to the army’s actions, not a provocation or escalation or sign that the army might have been justified in using deadly force.

Horne: “But did you hear those alarm guns before your orders for the march were given, or before your march began?”

Gould: “No.”

Horne: “But after you had begun your march?”

Gould: “Yes; after we began our march the alarm guns began firing.”

Horne: “Did you suppose those alarm guns to be in consequence of your having begun the march?”

Gould: “I cannot say.”

Horne: “I will not desire you to suppose (though the gentleman has supposed that they were coming to attack him) but do you know if any intelligence whether the persons who fired the alarm guns, whether those were the persons who were killed at Lexington and Concord?”

Gould: “No; I do not.”

And the jury also wanted to be certain about the militia alarm.

Juryman: “Pray who did the alarm guns belong to; to the Americans or our corps?”

Gould: “From the provincials.”

Horne: “What do you mean by an alarm gun?—Alarm may be misunderstood.”

Gould: “That is, what they term in the country an alarm gun; it is a notice given to assemble the country.”

Gould’s testimony about the Massachusetts militia’s alarm system proved decisive. Lord Mansfield summed up his conclusions like this:

Now what evidence has Mr. Gould given? Why, he says, that he was sent with a part of the king’s troops, by the orders of general Gage, the governor of the province, the commander of the king’s troops; that when they began their march (which was about two or three in the morning) he heard (I think he says he heard) a continual firing of alarm cannon, which is a signal, at certain distances, used in America to raise the country; and that they heard as soon as they began their march; and from thence they concluded that the provincials were marching to attack them.

When they came within sight of them, they found them armed, in bodies of troops armed. This was not a stated time of peace when the king’s troops, under the authority of the governor, go from one part to another; to have bodies of men, in military array, armed, and signals fired!

After about ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty against Horne. According to a relative of another officer in the 4th Regiment, “Before Mr. Gould gave his testimony, many present believed that our troops had murdered the natives sleeping in their houses, and that it would be proved by Mr. Gould’s evidence.”

Instead, Horne was imprisoned for a year, and then retired to the country for a while. He resumed his political career after the American war. In 1794 the British government arrested Horne Tooke again, this time on the charge of high treason, for criticizing the kingdom’s war against Revolutionary France. That jury acquitted him after only eight minutes. Though barred from sitting in Parliament because he’d taken clerical orders early in his career, Horne Tooke made his house in Wimbledon a center of British reform politics for the next two decades. He also published a popular book on language called The Diversions of Purley.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Edward Thoroton Gould? (It gets juicy.)

Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould: wounded and captured

Among the accounts of the action at Lexington and Concord on 19 Apr 1775 collected by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, one of the most interesting came from Edward Thoroton Gould—lieutenant in His Majesty’s 4th Regiment of Foot.

Gould had been born at Huntington, England, and baptized on 29 Oct 1747. He bought an ensign’s commission in the 4th Regiment in February 1767, and a lieutenant’s in November 1771. In 1775 he was an officer in the 4th’s light-infantry company, and thus part of the detachment ordered to march to Concord. Gould was one of the British officers involved in the exchange of fire at the North Bridge (shown here, in a photograph by Richard Hollister, courtesy of the National Park Service).

The lieutenant gave the following deposition on 25 Apr 1775:

I, Edward Thoroton Gould, of his majesty’s own regiment of foot, being of lawful age, do testify and declare, that, on the evening of the 18th instant, under the orders of General [Thomas] Gage, I embarked with the light infantry and grenadiers of the line, commanded by Colonel [Francis] Smith, and landed on the marshes of Cambridge, from whence we proceeded to Lexington.

On our arrival at that place, we saw a body of provincial troops, armed, to the number of about sixty or seventy men. On our approach, they dispersed, and soon after firing began, but which party fired first I can not exactly say, as our troops rushed on shouting and huzzaing previous to the firing, which was continued by our troops so long as any of the provincials were to be seen.

From thence we marched to Concord. On a hill, near the entrance of the town, we saw another body of provincials assembled: the light-infantry companies were ordered up the hill to disperse them; on our approach, they retreated toward Concord.

The grenadiers continued the road under the hill toward the town. Six companies of light infantry were ordered down to take possession of the bridge which the provincials retreated over; the company I commanded was one. Three companies of the above detachment went forward about two miles [to Barrett’s farm].

In the meantime, the provincial troops returned, to the number of about three or four hundred. We drew up on the Concord side of the bridge; the provincials came down upon us, upon which we engaged and gave the first fire. This was the first engagement after the one at Lexington. A continued firing from both parties lasted through the whole day.

Gould didn’t echo other British officers in insisting that provincials had fired the first shots on Lexington common, or even before. But being a prisoner of war probably had something to do with that. As his deposition concludes: “I myself was wounded at the attack of the bridge [in Concord], and am now treated with the greatest humanity, and taken all possible care of by the provincials at Medford.”

Another lieutenant in the 4th Regiment, Lt. W. Glanville Evelyn, wrote home to his father: “Poor little Gould received a wound a little above his heel, and going home before the division, was intercepted, and is detained among them; but we hear that they do not use him ill, and that he is attended by a surgeon.”

After being wounded in the shooting at Concord’s North Bridge, Gould had apparently commandeered a chaise and rode back to Boston on his own (or at least with only one soldier as a driver). East of Lexington, he met Col. Percy and his reinforcement column. Percy wrote the next day that the lieutenant “informed me that the Grens & L I had been attacked by the rebels about daybreak, & were retiring, having expended most of their ammunition.” Percy continued west, and Gould continued east—but was captured in “the place called Monottama”—Menotomy, or Arlington.

Gould was probably a demanding but rewarding prisoner. Historian Richard P. Frothingham later wrote (without citing a source): “He had a fortune of £1900 a year, and is said to have offered £2000 for his ransom.” In the end the lieutenant’s price was Josiah Breed of Lynn (1731-1790); the two captives were exchanged on 22 May, according to another lieutenant in the 4th, John Barker.

At the end of that month, the Public Advertiser of London printed Lt. Gould’s deposition, along with the other material sent over by the Provincial Congress. It surely didn’t help his army career.

TOMORROW: Edward Thoroton Gould testifies about Lexington and Concord again—but this time in London.