Elijah Sanderson of Lexington and Salem

Elijah Sanderson has appeared on Boston 1775 several times, but usually as a source on other people’s experiences of the April 19 battle.

Several years back, Donna Seger highlighted Sanderson’s memories of that day and his subsequent career on her Streets of Salem site.

In 1775 Sanderson signed off on a brief account of his experience for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. But he had much more to say in Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington, on the Morning of the 19th of April, 1775, published in 1825.

Seger wrote:

Phinney took oral histories from participants who were still alive, published in the form of sworn affidavits in the book’s appendix, and the very first account was that of Elijah Sanderson, who was at the end of a long career as one of Salem’s most successful cabinetmakers. Sanderson’s testimony was given just weeks before his death in early 1825, and published not only in Phinney’s account but also in the regional newspapers that year, when historical consciousness of the importance of the Battles of Lexington and Concord seems quite well-developed.

Elijah Sanderson and his younger brother Jacob were among the most prolific and consequential cabinetmakers of Salem, who spread the city’s craftsmanship and style far beyond New England through an expansive export trade in alliance with their partner Josiah Austin and several prominent merchants and shipowners.

That’s the same Josiah Austin quoted in this document describing how he moved ammunition out of Concord. Since that account seems incredible, perhaps Austin was spurred to invent his tale after hearing his partners talk about their presence at Lexington. Or perhaps someone else thought that if one Salem cabinetmaker was in the thick of the fight, another could be inserted into that action as well.

…in 1775 the Sanderson brothers were living in Lexington, in the home of their elder brother Samuel…on the main road from Boston. . . . relatively late on the evening of the 18th Elijah noted the passing of a party of British officers “all dressed in blue wrappers”. He decided to discern what was up, so made his way to John Buckman’s tavern where an older gentleman encouraged him to “ascertain the object” of these officers, so he did so, on a borrowed horse in the company of two other comrades. . . .

Elijah’s party was stopped by nine British officers a few miles down the road in Lincoln, and they were detained and examined, along with two other “prisoners”, a one-handed pedlar named Allen and Col. Paul Revere. After “as many question as a Yankee could” ask, the entire party mounted and made their way to Lexington, where [fellow detainee John] Loring observed “The bell’s a ringing, and the town’s alarmed, and you’re all dead men” but [the officers] let them go, after cutting the bridle and girth of Elijah’s horse.

We hear no more of Revere, but Elijah made his way to the tavern in Lexington and there promptly fell asleep! Yes, he fell asleep in the middle of the opening act of the American Revolution.

But then came the drums signalling that the British column was in sight. To follow Sanderson through what happened next, visit Streets of Salem.

(The picture above is a secretary bookcase from the Sanderson brothers’ shop, now the property of the U.S. Department of State.)

“Returning from Lexington before day light”

When Paul Revere described his ride with William Dawes to the Rev. Jeremy Belknap in 1798, he wrote: “We were overtaken by a young Docter Prescot, whom we found to be a high Son of Liberty.”

Revere wrote nothing about why Dr. Samuel Prescott was out on horseback in west Lexington after midnight.

In his 1824 History of the Battle of Lexington, Elias Phinney quoted Elijah Sanderson on how British army officers “attempted to stop a man on horseback, who, we immediately after understood, was Dr. Prescott’s son.”

Again, no reason given for young Prescott being out on the road at that time.

The first printed explanation for Prescott’s late night that I’ve found appeared that same year in the 24 Apr 1824 Concord Gazette and Middlesex Yeoman. In a 49th-anniversary retrospective on the opening battle of the Revolutionary War, that hometown newspaper stated:

The approach of the British army from Lexington, was known to the people of Concord at an early hour of the morning. This information was brought by Dr. SAMUEL PRESCOTT who was returning from Lexington before day light, (as was the custom on such occasions in those days) from a visit to the lady who afterwards became his wife.

He was met by the British advance guard near Mr. [Ephraim] HARTWELL’s in Lincoln, and in attempting to stop him a scuffle ensued, during which he had the reins of his horse’s bridle cut off; but being acquainted with the way, he jumped his horse over the fence, adjusted the bridle and came to Concord. Others who endeavored to get to Concord for the same purpose were stopped by the enemy.

Those unnamed ”others” included Revere, Sanderson, and their companions.

In recounting the British army search of Concord, the same article states:

One party went down the road to the house owned by the late ASA HEYWOOD, then occupied as a tavern. Suspicions were excited that young Dr. PRESCOTT was in the house; and as they considered him the principal cause of defeating the execution of their plan to take the town by surprise, they sought his life. He was aware of their intentions and secreted himself in a hole beside the chimney in the garret, and eluded their search. They broke the windows of the house and left it.

That anecdote is obviously based on the experience of Samuel Prescott’s older brother Abel, as recounted here. Both brothers had been physicians and impromptu alarm riders who died decades earlier, so it’s understandable for local lore to conflate them.

(I’m not sure if Asa Heywood, who had died earlier in 1824, ever owned the house where Jonathan Heywood’s widow Rebecca was living in 1775, or whether it was then a tavern, but I’m just not up to sorting through real estate records of Heywoods in Concord.)

There were other errors in the newspaper’s account, such as a claim that Lt. Col. Francis Smith was wounded in the fight (true) and “died in a few days” (false).

Nonetheless, this article is significant as the earliest statement that Dr. Samuel Prescott was out late visiting his fiancée on 18 April.

TOMORROW: More details emerge.

The Sight, Sound, and Taste of Battle

Minute Man National Historical Park just published Thompson Dasher’s article “Enlightened Senses: A Sensory History of April 19, 1775.”

After a discussion of how Enlightenment philosophers portrayed our sensory powers, it analyzes the reminiscences of three people involved in the Battle of Lexington and Concord by focusing tightly on their perceptions:

• Lexington militiaman Elijah Sanderson on what he saw and (because of smoke) couldn’t see during the fighting on his town common. 
• Rebecca Fiske’s memory of hearing gunfire as the British army column and the provincial pursuers moved back through Lexington in the afternoon.
• Ens. Jeremy Lister’s account of small tastes of food and drink he begged after he was wounded at Concord’s North Bridge and traveled back to safety in Boston. 

Back in 2006 I wrote about a historiographical trend of articles and books focusing on the senses, then including Richard C. Rath’s How Early America Sounded and Elaine Forman Crane’s article “‘I Have Suffer’d Much Today’: The Defining Force of Pain in Early America.”

Dasher’s article cites the more recent The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses by Carolyn Purnell, which looks like a distillation of that scholarship.

I’m still underwhelmed by the new insights produced by this approach. There doesn’t seem to be much new in realizing that the Boston Massacre was loud, or eighteenth-century battlefields smoky, or water wet. The link between philosophical discussions of senses and how people actually experienced a moment still feel attenuated. (Crane’s article is an exception.)

But this approach does encourage keen attention to the immediate experiences of individual actors. That alone brings more life to historical moments. The power of an article like Dasher’s is how it allows or presses us to reimagine the events of 19 April through the eyes, ears, and mouth of particular people.

(The photo above comes from a smoke-filled reenactment of frontier skirmishes at Wilderness Road State Park in Virginia, courtesy of the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation.)

“Solomon Brown fired at them”

Yesterday I described Solomon Brown’s experience on the night of 18-19 Apr 1775: carrying news of British army officers on patrol, being captured by those officers, being released. The deposition that the teenager and two older companions signed a few days later, complaining about how those officers had detained them, leaves the impression that that’s all he did.

Indeed, the depositions that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress published in April 1775 say little about anyone resisting the British military in Lexington on the morning of the 19th. The purpose of those documents was to convince readers that the army had fired without provocation on a peaceful assembly (of armed militiamen who had been out all night).

I’ve come to approach Revolutionary depositions as usually truthful in what they say, but also prone to significant omissions. In 1775 the folks at Lexington didn’t deny firing back at the redcoats. Rather, when folks were talking with the Patriot magistrates who collected their depositions, the question just didn’t seem to come up.

In 1825 local historian Elias Phinney wanted to make the case that Lexington had been the site of the first forceful resistance against the royal troops—i.e., that the men of his town had fired back, and done at least a little damage. And young Solomon Brown turns out to have been a crucial figure in that aspect of the event as well.

Elijah Sanderson was one of the two men detained along with Solomon for several hours the previous night. Here’s part of his description of the shooting on the green for Phinney:

After our militia had dispersed, I saw them [i.e., the regulars] firing at one man, (Solomon Brown,) who was stationed behind a wall. I saw the wall smoke with the bullets hitting it. I then knew they were firing balls. After the affair was over, he told me he fired into a solid column of them, and then retreated. He was in the cow yard. The wall saved him. He legged it just about the time I went away. In a minute or two after, the British musick struck up, and their troops paraded, and marched right off for Concord.

I went home after my gun,—found it was gone. My brother had it. I returned to the meeting-house, and saw to the dead. I saw blood where the column of the British had stood when Solomon Brown fired at them. This was several rods from where any of our militia stood; and I then supposed, as well as the rest of us, that that was the blood of the British.

Abijah Harrington, one of Lexington’s representatives in the Provincial Congress, added:

A day or two after the 19th, I was telling Solomon Brown of the circumstance of my having seen blood in the road, and where it was. He then stated to me, that he fired in that direction, and the road was then full of regulars, and he thought he must have bit some of them.

A more dramatic description of the teenager’s activity in those minutes was supplied by his son G. W. Brown in 1891. This account was clearly based on decades of local writing as well as family traditions:

Solomon Brown went [from the common] to the right across the Bedford road and jumped over a stone wall. As he landed upon the ground a ball from the enemy passed through his coat, cutting his vest. Another about the same moment struck the wall. He then dropped down behind the wall until their attention was drawn from him.

He then took a circuit in their rear around to the Buckman tavern, where he supposed many of the company had taken refuge, entered the back door, and on going over the house found no one except the pedler [named Allen], who was for a short time prisoner with him on the Concord road the night previous.

He then went to the front door and opened it, when to his surprise the rear portion of the enemy stood in his front, the army having made a halt. No sooner had he stepped in the open door-way than a bullet from an enemy’s gun struck the doorpost about midway. Another following it struck the door near the top.

He then stepped back a little, placed his gun near the muzzle against the door casing, aimed at an officer standing in the ranks of the enemy and fired. Not waiting to see the result he hastened through the house and out at the back door where he entered and made a hasty retreat through the fields.

Being discovered by the enemy, a shower of bullets went whizzing by him until he had reached a distance of some forty rods, when he slipped and fell, and although his clothing bore testimony of the close proximity of some of their bullets, not one marred his person.

And as long as we’re talking about firing from Buckman’s tavern, here’s a detail that militia sergeant William Munroe gave to Phinney:

The front platoon [of the regulars], consisting of eight or nine, then fired, without killing or wounding any of our men. They immediately gave a second fire, when our company began to retreat, and, as I left the field, I saw a person firing at the British troops from Buckman’s back door, which was near our left, where I was parading the men when I retreated. I was afterward told, of the truth of which I have no doubt, that the same person, after firing from the back door, went to the front door of Buckman’s house, and fired there.

How do we reconcile the details of these accounts? G. W. Brown was probably mistaken about his father having lined up on the green; earlier accounts don’t suggest Solomon was among those men. Instead, the teenager appears to have been all around Buckman’s tavern (shown above, courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society).

Phinney concluded that Solomon had fired “from a wall” in the front of the tavern, and that a different person had fired from its back door. But the Brown family came to understand that he had been at the back door before going inside to fire from the front. And Munroe understood that one man had fired from both spots—meaning at different times.

Apparently Solomon did something to attract the redcoats’ fire early on—which brings us to the report of Lt. William Sutherland that the first shot had come “from the Corner of a house to the right of the Church”—i.e., Buckman’s tavern. Another curious detail is Solomon’s surprise at opening the front door of the tavern and finding part of the army massed in front of him. If they had been shooting at him already, even from the green, why was he surprised?

Did regulars shoot at Solomon for a while before he went into the tavern, as he shot from the front door, and then again after he ran out the back? Did the British rear guard shoot at Solomon separate from the first companies on the common? Does that fit with descriptions of how long the firing lasted?

All the accounts from Lexington state that Solomon Brown didn’t fire until after the regulars had begun the shooting. But of course that’s what they would say. What if Solomon fired the first shot, then ran through the tavern and fired another, and finally “legged it” as bullets flew around him?

If so, it’s easy to understand why. Solomon Brown was eighteen. He’d seen armed officers slipping into his town. He’d been captured at gunpoint and held by those officers for several hours in the middle of the night, deprived of his horse (or his minister’s horse), and left to race back home. For this teenager, the war might already have started.

Then again, the first shot at Lexington could have come from someone whose name has been forgotten, or could have been an accidental discharge that the regulars interpreted as an attack. I’m not convinced Solomon Brown bears any responsibility. But he’s the first guy I’d want to take a deposition from.

Solomon Brown Stays Out Late

In April 1775, Solomon Brown was an eighteen-year-old growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of a local deacon. He was also crucial in at least one way the momentous confrontation between the town’s militia company and the British military on the 19th of that month.

On the 18th, Solomon visited Boston, and early in the evening he stopped into William Munroe’s tavern (shown above) to tell Munroe, a sergeant in the Lexington militia, that on the way home:

he had seen nine British officers on the road, travelling leisurely, sometimes before and sometimes behind him; that he had discovered, by the occasional blowing aside of their top coats, that they were armed.

That quotation comes from Munroe’s testimony decades later. He said that he immediately assembled a small squad to guard the parsonage where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying because Patriots widely (but wrongly) thought the royal authorities intended to arrest those men.

Meanwhile, Solomon went on to Buckman’s tavern near the center of town and repeated what he had seen. Elijah Sanderson recalled:

After some conversation among the citizens assembled there, an old gentleman advised, that some one should follow those officers, and endeavour to ascertain their object. I then observed, that, if any one would let me have a horse, I would go in pursuit. Thaddeus Harrington told me, I might take his, which was there. I took his, and Solomon Brown proposed to accompany me on his own horse. Jonathan Loring also went with us. We started, probably, about nine o’clock…

According to an 1891 profile of Solomon Brown by his son, the teenager at first objected that he had “had his horse in use through the day, when Minister [Jonas] Clark replied to him that he would be provided for, and soon led out his own horse saddled and bridled for his use.” That profile conflicts with contemporaneous sources on some points, but this seems like an odd detail for the family to make up.

In any event, the three Lexington men set off to the west. After about an hour they saw the British officers. Unfortunately for them, those officers saw them first. According to Sanderson, “One rode up and seized my bridle, and another my arm, and one put his pistol to my breast, and told me, if I resisted, I was a dead man.”

The officers, under the command of Maj. Edward Mitchell, made the three men dismount in a wooded area of Lincoln. They held Solomon and his companions for hours, questioning them repeatedly. In 1775 the men complained that their captors “searched and greatly abused them,” but decades later Sanderson recalled the questioning as persistent but civil. It was a pleasant night, but still not a pleasant experience.

By 2:15 A.M., according to Sanderson, the officers had added two more detainees: “Allen, a one-handed pedlar,” and Paul Revere. However, the British failed to stop Dr. Samuel Prescott from getting past the patrol on the back trails to Concord.

The Lexington men heard Revere tell Mitchell that the provincial militia had already been alerted to their army’s march. This was apparently a last-ditch attempt to make the British field commanders call off the mission, and it had some effect. The officers decided to rendezvous with the column marching west.

Mitchell ordered Solomon and the other detainees back on their horses, and they all rode east “at considerable speed.” As they approached Lexington, there was a burst of gunfire up ahead—perhaps militiamen discharging their guns before going into Buckman’s tavern for a late-night refreshment or nap. The officers stopped to confer—was the column being attacked?

Maj. Mitchell decided to let all their prisoners go. The Lexington men testified in 1775 that the officers “cut the horses’ bridles, and girths, turned them loose, and then left us,” heading for Lexington. Now it was the locals’ turn to worry about an attack—what would those officers do when they got to the center of town? Sanderson recalled:

We then turned off to pass through the swamp, through the mud and water, intending to arrive at the meeting-house before they could pass, to give information to our people.

The men saw the officers arrive at the town meeting-house, but then ride on to the east. Solomon Brown and his companions went into Buckman’s tavern to describe their experiences.

TOMORROW: Shooting and being shot at.

What Did the British Officers Inquire About?

My deliberately iconoclastic posting about the likelihood that the Battle of Lexington and Concord would have happened much the same way even without all of Paul Revere’s activity on 18-19 Apr 1775 prompted some interesting replies.

One was from Jay Fitzgerald at Hub Blog, who seemed to think that the posting was directed at Longfellow’s poem rather than nonfiction histories of the battle. While that poem created or perpetuated some popular misconceptions about Revere, no history reader takes it as accurate, and its myths are easily dismissed. Fitzgerald appears to want to celebrate the semi-fictional Revere for “capturing the public's imagination,” but celebrations are a matter of heritage, not history.

More thoughtfully, Garden Keeper wrote a long comment that began:

I know that you have written several times about the "myth" that the British troops were after John Hancock and Samuel Adams. I would respectfully differ on whether it is a "myth". I cannot find the citation right now, but I believe that General Gage received orders from London in the days before April 17th. Those orders, along other things, directed him to arrest the provincial leaders. As the British communication system was notably less secure than our own Belichick system, it is doubtless that these orders were known by Warren and others.

Further, while you have noted that Gage's written orders said nothing about the capture of Hancock and Adams, Gage also sent 20 officers on horseback into Middlesex County to thwart the Revere and the other riders. As Hackett Fischer notes, "In particular, [the patrols] inquired about the whereabouts of John Hancock and Samuel Adams."

So while the written orders suggest otherwise, there was good reason to fear that the expedition to Concord might have ancillary targets. Written orders, after all, have some limits. Gage also ordered that property not be damaged which didn't prevent the burning of some Lexington homes.

Yes, the orders that Gen. Thomas Gage received from London in early April 1775 recommended that he arrest the Massachusetts resistance leaders as the first step in restoring order. The Boston Whigs almost certainly knew about those orders. The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper got out of town. Elbridge Gerry, Azor Orne, and Jeremiah Lee were so afraid of being captured that they spent hours hiding in a field. And as soon as he knew the army was marching west, Dr. Joseph Warren sent William Dawes and Revere out to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams.

However, we have Gen. Gage’s actual orders for the march to Concord, we have his intelligence files (in the Clements Libary), and we have reports from several of the British officers on that march. None of those sources show any interest in locating Hancock and Adams. No American description of what happened in Lexington on the morning of 19 April shows the army making any move to find or chase those two men.

So what evidence is left that the British were seeking Hancock and Adams? On page 132 of Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer quotes Elijah Sanderson as saying of British officers, “They particularly inquired where Hancock and Adams were.” These words come from a long deposition Sanderson gave in 1824, published in Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington.

Sanderson was also one of the three men who signed the deposition I quoted yesterday. And in that testimony, given less than a week after the night they were describing, he and his comrades said the officers “enquired about the Magazine at Concord, whether any Guards were posted there, and whether the bridges were up.” Those details fit exactly with what Gage wrote in his orders, including the fact that the troops would have to cross bridges to get to some weapons. The 1775 deposition said nothing about Hancock and Adams, and Sanderson’s 1824 deposition said nothing about the arms at Concord. I think that nearly half a century of American writers’ emphasis on Hancock and Adams had colored Sanderson’s memory.

None of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s other 1775 depositions mentioned Hancock or Adams, either. Capt. John Parker of Lexington recalled hearing that “Regular Troops were on their March from Boston in order to take the Province Stores at Concord.” The two depositions signed by many of Parker’s men together both mentioned how “Regulars were marching from Boston towards Concord, with intent (as it was supposed) to take the Stores, belonging to the Colony, in that town.” The Provincial Congress’s report described “an apparent Design to take or destroy the military and other stores, provided for the Defence of this Colony, and deposited at Concord.” All those statements came after the actual battle, and thus were based on knowledge of what the British troops had and hadn’t done.

Did the Provincial Congress have evidence that the army had sought Hancock and Adams, but suppressed it, thinking it would play better to tell the world that it was amassing “military and other stores” to use against the king’s troops? It’s hard to see why the body would do that. Why not portray the British march as an attempt to kidnap two popular gentlemen? (Some newspapers ran with that story anyway.)

As for “the burning of some Lexington homes,” that happened, but only after the British column had returned through the town and met its reinforcements. By that point in the afternoon, the battle was on, the regulars had suffered their worst losses, and battlefield commanders were taking actions on their own authority. It’s clear that Gage’s aim for the mission was to destroy the Concord weaponry with minimal collateral damage.

TOMORROW: The big question of what mattered on 19 Apr 1775.

The First Detainees of the War?

Three days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress formed a committee to collect depositions of what had happened on 18-19 Apr 1775. Political activists on both sides had likewise collected such sworn testimony after the Boston Massacre in 1770 and other disputed events.

Here’s the first of those depositions as they were eventually printed, written down and sworn to at Lexington on 25 April:

We, Solomon Brown, Jonathan Loring, and Elijah Sanderson, all of lawful Age, and of Lexington, in the County of Middlesex, and Collony of the Massachusett Bay, in New England, do testifie and declare, that on the evening of the Eighteenth of April, Instant [i.e., this year], being on the Road between Concord and Lexington, and all of us mounted on Horses, we were, about ten of the Clock, suddenly surprized by nine Persons, whom we took to be Regular [i.e., army] Officers, who Rode up to us, mounted and armed, each having a Pistol in His Hand, and after Putting Pistols to our Breasts, and seizing the Bridles of our Horses, they swore, that if we stirred another step, we should be all Dead Men, upon which we surrendered our selves.

They Detained us until Two o’Clock the next morning, in which tune they searched and greatly abused us; having first enquired about the Magazine at Concord, whether any Guards were posted there, and whether the bridges were up, and said four or five Regiments of Regulars would be in Possession of the stores soon; they then brought us back to Lexington, cut the Horses Bridles and Girts, turned them Loose, and then Left us.

SOLOMON BROWN,

JONATHAN LORING,

ELIJAH SANDERSON.

What an outrage against British and American liberty! Young men detained at pistol point on threat of death—their horses taken away—all by officers of a standing army!

Yet somehow these three deponents have managed to leave out some details:

• Just why they were riding between Lexington and Concord at 10:00 at night.
• Anyone else who was detained by the same British officers during the next four hours—in particular, a man who’d come all the way to Lexington from Boston named Paul Revere.
• What they did after they were released from army custody.

In other words, this deposition was probably the truth and nothing but the truth; it just wasn’t the whole truth.

Brown was eighteen years old in 1775, Loring twenty-six, and Sanderson probably twenty-four. They would all live into the next century, and two would eventually say more about their experiences on the first day of the Revolutionary War. I’ll be quoting more from and about them.