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.

“About erecting a monument on the battle-ground”

In his 1835 History of the Town of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that the spot by the former North Bridge where two British soldiers lay buried “deserves to be marked by an ever-enduring monument,” not just two rough stones that only locals could recognize.

On 7 Dec 1835, the Boston Evening Transcript apparently reported that the town was running with that idea:

We learn from a friend who recently visited Old Concord, that the inhabitants of that town are about erecting a monument on the battle-ground, on the spot were the two first British soldiers fell and where they were buried, and where their grave-stones still are.

The land belonged to the reverend and venerable Dr. Thayer, now in his 83d year, and still continues in the ministry, who has given it to the town for that purpose.

I wrote “apparently” because the newspaper database I use includes only two of the four pages of that issue of the Evening Transcript, but other newspapers quoted that article the next day.

The 8 December Boston Courier also had the pleasure of pointing out, “For ‘Dr. Thayer,’ we presume the Transcript intended to say Dr. RIPLEY.” And indeed that evening’s Transcript acknowledged the error.

It was a curious mistake since at that point the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley (shown above) had been Concord’s preeminent clergymen longer than most people had been alive. He had succeeded the Rev. William Emerson in 1778 and was still watching over the town almost sixty years later.

The Evening Transcript’s brief report also left out how Concord had started to build a monument to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1825. But back then voters had chosen to locate that landmark in the town center rather than where any fighting had taken place. Some objected to the location, or to spending the money, and then a bonfire damaged the cornerstone.

Robert Gross lays out that drama in The Transcendentalists and Their World, so I don’t have to go over it here.

The upshot is that Concord finished building a monument out by the remains of the North Bridge in 1836. Its inscription was composed by a committee of local worthies including Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rep. Samuel Hoar. It was dedicated in 1837; at that ceremony the public first heard Emerson’s phrase “the shot heard ’round the world.”

The three points I want to emphasize about the building of that monument are:

• The obelisk wasn’t just coincidentally where the two British soldiers were buried. It was located at that spot because those soldiers’ remains lay nearby.
• The creation of the monument attracted attention from Boston and neighboring towns. Concord’s leading citizens were involved. The Rev. Dr. Ripley, who lived till 1841, was especially interested.
• There were also people in Concord who had reasons to look askance at the new erection, and would have been happy to share embarrassing stories about it.

I’ll come back to those points in a few days.

TOMORROW: A day on the Concord River.

“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.

Dr. Abel Prescott and the Details

As recounted yesterday, the Concord official Abiel Heywood told the Rev. Ezra Ripley that British soldiers fired at Dr. Abel Prescott, Jr., and “wounded him in one arm.”

Ripley published that story in A History of the Fight at Concord in 1827, when Heywood was still alive, along with other survivors of the British raid who could correct the account.

Since Heywood described how as a fourteen-year-old he witnessed Prescott seeking refuge in his family home, and helping his stepmother bandage the doctor’s wound, we should rely on Heywood describing where the wound was, right?

But eight years later, Lemuel Shattuck published his History of the Town of Concord, and he summarized the same incident this way:

…they [British soldiers] fired at Mr. Abel Prescott, whom they saw returning from an excursion to alarm the neighbouring towns; but, though slightly wounded in his side, he secreted himself in Mrs. Heywood’s house and escaped.

Abiel Heywood was still alive and prominent then, too.

These days almost every description of Dr. Abel Prescott’s wound says it was in his side rather than his arm. And maybe it was, but an earlier source contradicts that.

Shattuck also wrote in a footnote: “Abel died of the dysentery in Concord, September 3, 1775, aged 25.” I think that was the first time the doctor’s death was described in print.

It’s notable how different authors have treated Prescott as a war casualty. In 1775 there was disagreement about whether to list him as wounded in battle. He wasn’t actually bearing arms against the enemy at the time, though as an alarm rider he was fulfilling a military purpose. Explaining the circumstance of his wounding, however, might say more than the Patriots wanted to about how they were prepared with an alarm system.

Disagreements over how to count Dr. Prescott may be why his name didn’t appear on Ezekiel Russell’s “Bloody Butchery” broadside, but did show up in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s official list of casualties to complain about.

The way authors described Dr. Prescott’s death continued to evolve. Shattuck stated baldly that the cause was “the dysentery.” There was an epidemic of that diarrheal disease in Massachusetts in late 1775, called “camp fever” because it was undoubtedly spread in the Continetal Army camps and brought home to rural towns by sick soldiers and others who had been in those camps.

Shattuck didn’t state that Dr. Abel Prescott contracted dysentery while treating soldiers, however, or say anything more about his military activity.

In contrast, at least since Ruth R. Wheeler in Concord: Climate for Freedom (1967), authors have connected Prescott’s injury in April with his death in the summer. Wheeler wrote: “in his weakened condition he fell a prey to dysentery and died in August.”

By stating that Dr. Abel Prescott, Jr., never recovered from his wound, recent authors have thus made him into another casualty of the battle on 19 Apr 1775. And given what we know about health, that might be accurate. But it’s also possible that Prescott recovered from his wound and contracted dysentery independently, like many other people in Massachusetts.

Finally, there’s a question about when Dr. Abel Prescott, Jr., died. As I’ve said, that household doesn’t show up in Concord’s published vital records. Shattuck stated a death date of 3 September. The Prescott Memorial (1870) echoed that date and reported his age as “26 years, 5 mos., 9 days,” but that was actually nine days short of five months. More recently somebody apparently took that count of days as exact and calculated Prescott’s death as happening on 21 September, and that date now appears on Find-a-grave, Wikipedia, and other websites. Finally, as quoted above, Wheeler wrote that young doctor “died in August.” In the absence of a contemporaneous source, I’m sticking with 3 September.

COMING UP: Back to Dr. Samuel Prescott.

“Mrs. Heywood, an aged lady, and her son-in-law”

Yesterday we left Dr. Abel Prescott, Jr., trying to return home to Concord after alerting militia officers in Framingham and Sudbury that British regulars were on the march.

As Prescott rode closer, he spotted some of those soldiers, reportedly near the South Bridge. According to town minister and chronicler Ezra Ripley in 1827, this happened “A few minutes after the fight at the [North] bridge,” meaning those soldiers might have been on edge after hearing shots.

Ripley wrote:

Perceiving that he was watched, and that by pressing forward he should be likely to fall into their hands, he [Prescott] turned his horse about, on which they fired upon him, and wounded him in one arm.

He rode directly to the house of Mrs. Heywood, who with her son-in-law, now the Hon. Abiel Heywood, and living witness of this affair, quickly attended to his wound.

But observing the British advancing to the house, Mrs. Heywood, an aged lady, and her son-in-law left it, and sought a place of greater safety.—

Mr. Prescott ran up stairs and concealed himself in a dark place, behind the chimney and a dry cask. He heard them searching for him and uttering bitter threats, but they did not find him.

When I read this passage, I had questions about who “Mrs. Heywood” was and why her “son-in-law” had the same surname. Here’s what I figured out.

On 28 Aug 1744, the Rev. Daniel Bliss married Sarah Stone and Jonathan Heywood of Concord. He had been born in 1717, she around 1727. They had six children. The fifth was Abiel, born on 9 Dec 1759.

On 8 Jan 1768, Sarah Heywood died, aged forty-one. Some of her children were still young; Abiel had recently turned eight.

On 23 August of the same year, Jonathan remarried. His new wife was listed as “Rebeckah Rise, of Sudbury,” in the Concord records and as “Mrs. Rebecca Rice” in the Concord records.

Calculating from Rebecca Heywood’s reported age when she died in 1801, she had been born in 1714. So Jonathan Heywood had married an older woman as his second wife, not a younger one. Rebecca Rice might also have been a widow, but I can’t find an earlier marriage in Sudbury.

Jonathan Heywood died on 18 July 1774, short of his second sixth anniversary. According to the custom of the time, his property was to be held for the benefit of his children, but his widow could continue to live in the family house. His minor children, including fourteen-year-old Abiel, would have a guardian appointed to protect their interests.

Thus, Ripley used the term “son-in-law” in an old-fashioned sense to mean stepson. And “aged lady” to mean a widow of about sixty-one.

The “house of Mrs. Heywood” was the house where Rebecca Heywood lived for more than a quarter-century after her husband Jonathan died. Abiel Heywood, and quite possibly some of his siblings, were there with his stepmother on 19 Apr 1775 when Dr. Abel Prescott arrived, wounded in the arm and hunted by regulars.

Abiel Heywood grew up, went to Harvard, also trained as a doctor, but spent most of his time on Concord civic affairs. On the occasion of his first marriage, at age sixty-two, he bought his first pair of pantaloons, abandoning Revolutionary-style knee breeches. He lived long enough to tell stories at the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war.

TOMORROW: Assessing Dr. Prescott’s wound.