“Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

When we left the nonagenarian Amos Baker of Lincoln yesterday, he had just described how the commanders of the Middlesex County militiamen massed above the North Bridge in Concord agreed to march toward the British regulars holding that position.

Baker then recounted:

And the order was given to march, and we all marched down without any further order or arrangement.

The British had got up two of the planks of the bridge. It is a mercy they fired on us at the bridge, for we were going to march into the town, and the British could load and fire three times to our once, because we had only powder horns and no cartridge boxes, and it would have been presumptuous. I understood that Colonel Abijah Pierce got the gun of one of the British soldiers who was killed at the bridge, and armed himself with it.

Pierce had come out with nothing but a walking-stick as a weapon. Baker probably exaggerated when he said the provincials had “only powder horns and no cartridge boxes,” emphasizing how much the locals were underdogs. At the bridge they had a clear numerical superiority, which is why the regulars soon retreated.

There were two British soldiers killed at the bridge. I saw them when I went over the bridge, lying close together, side by side, dead.

Joshua Brooks, of Lincoln, was at the bridge and was struck with a ball that cut through his hat, and drew blood on his forehead, and it looked as if it was cut with a knife; and we concluded they were firing jackknives.

When we had fired at the bridge and killed the British, Noah Parkhurst, who was my right hand man, said, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

Baker then told the story of James Nichols, an Englishman in the Lincoln company. Richard C. Wiggin wrote about that story and the records behind it here.

I believe I was the only man from Lincoln that had a bayonet. My father got it in the time of the French war.

I went into the house where [Isaac] Davis and [Joseph] Hosmer were carried after they fell, and saw their bodies. I supposed the house to be Major [John] Buttrick’s.

When we marched down to the bridge, Major Buttrick marched first, and Captain Davis next to him. I did not see Colonel [John] Robinson [of Westford] to know him.

I verily believe that I felt better that day, take it all the day through, than if I had stayed at home.

After justice of the peace Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar finished writing this down, the text was read back to Baker and he signed it in front of three witnesses. Baker died later that year, thought to be the last veteran of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

(The picture above is Don Troiani’s painting of the fight at the North Bridge. True to form, he has given the provincial militiamen up front bayonets.)

Amos Baker at the Bridge

On 22 Apr 1850, three days after the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, justice of the peace Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar took down the memories of a nonagenarian veteran named Amos Baker.

Baker was thought to be “the sole survivor of the men who were present at the North Bridge at Concord,…and the only man living who bore arms on that day.”

Hoar wrote out an affidavit that said:

I, Amos Baker, of Lincoln, in the County of Middlesex, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on oath depose and say that I was ninety-four years old on the eighth day of April, 1850; I was at Concord Fight on the nineteenth of April, 1775; I was then nineteen years and eleven days old.

My brother Nathaniel, who was then paying his addresses to the girl whom he afterwards married, was at the house where she was staying, near the line between Lexington and Lincoln, and received the alarm there from Dr. Samuel Prescott, and came over and gave it to me. My father and my four brothers, Jacob, Nathaniel, James, and Samuel, and my brother in law, Daniel Hosmer, were in arms at the North Bridge. After the fight at the bridge, I saw nothing more of them, and did not know whether they were alive or dead, until I found two of my brothers engaged in the pursuit near Lexington meeting house. Nathaniel followed the enemy to Charlestown.

When I went to Concord in the morning, I joined the Lincoln company at the brook by Flint’s pond, near the house then of Zachary Smith, and now of Jonas Smith. I loaded my gun with two balls,—ounce balls, and powder accordingly. I saw the British troops coming up the road that leads on to the Common at Concord. The sun shone very bright on their bayonets and guns.

Abijah Pierce of Lincoln, the Colonel of the minute men, went up armed with nothing but a cane.

When we were going to march down to the bridge, it was mentioned between Major [John] Buttrick, and Capt. Isaac Davis, that the minute men had better be put in front, because they were the only men that had bayonets, and it was not certain whether the British would fire, or whether they would charge bayonets without firing. I do not remember which of them said it, but they both agreed to it; and Captain Davis’s company of minute men [from Acton] was then brought up on the right. Then they saw the smoke of the town house, and, I think, Major Buttrick said “Will you stand here and let them burn the town down?”

Local historian Josiah Adams noted that other witnesses were more certain in ascribing these words to adjutant Joseph Hosmer.

That smoke having roused the officers, Baker said, “the order was given to march, and we all marched down without any further order or arrangement.”

TOMORROW: “Firing jackknives”?

Luther Blanchard, Fifer

Yesterday I wrote about the Acton Minutemen marching toward Concord’s North Bridge, reportedly to the tune later codified as “The White Cockade.” The fifer in that unit was Luther Blanchard, son of Simon and Sarah Blanchard, born 4 June 1756 and therefore eighteen years old.

Luther was also one of the first people wounded during the North Bridge skirmish. In A History of the Fight at Concord (1827), Ezra Ripley wrote:

In a minute or two, the Americans being in quick motion, and within ten or fifteen rods of the bridge, a single gun was fired by a British soldier, which marked its way, passing under Col. [John] Robinson’s arm, slightly wounding the side of Luther Blanchard, a fifer in the Acton company. This gun was instantly followed by a volley, which killed Capt. [Isaac] Davis and Mr. [Abner] Hosmer, both of the same company.

Eight years later, Lemuel Shattuck added in a footnote in A History of the Town of Concord:

Luther Blanchard went to Mrs. [Rebeckah] Barrett’s, who, after examining his wound, mournfully remarked, “A little more and you’d been killed.”

“Yes,” said Blanchard, “and a little more and ’t wouldn’t have touched me;”—and immediately joined the pursuers.

Though Luther Blanchard marched with the Acton company (fifers got paid for musters), he lived in the neighboring town of Littleton, in an area that’s now part of Boxborough. Luther appears on Boxborough’s town seal, and every June it observes Fifer’s Day in his honor; this year’s celebration comes on 15 June.

COMING UP: What happened to Luther Blanchard?

The Questions of “The White Cockade”

In 1835, septuagenarian Charles Handley sat down with local historian Josiah Adams to relate his memory of the start of the Revolutionary War. Handley testified that on 19 Apr 1775 he was twelve years old and “lived at the tavern kept by Mrs. Brown, nearly a mile northwest of the North Bridge” in Concord. Usually when a child was “living with” someone outside the family, that meant he or she had been put out to work.

Handley recalled:

I saw Captain [Isaac] Davis’s company, as they came from Acton. I first saw them coming through the fields north of Barrett’s mill, and they kept the fields till they came to the road at Mrs. Brown’s tavern. They there took the back road leading to the bridge. They marched quite fast to the music of a fife and drum. I remember the tune, but am not sure of its name; think it was called the “White Cockade.”

Handley then whistled the tune he remembered, which Adams confirmed was “The White Cockade.”

That tune was definitely established by 1775. It was printed the next year in David Herd’s Scottish Songs and again in Campbell’s Reels (1778) and Aird’s Airs (1782). The first used the title “My Love Was Born in Aberdeen,” but the latter two included the music only. A Boston 1775 commenter reported that the melody appears in many handwritten American collections of fife tunes from the Revolution.

In 1790 Robert Burns (1759-1796, shown above) published the lyrics that gave the tune the name “The White Cockade.” For the first time in print the song was explicitly in favor of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. And that raises some questions.

D. Michael Ryan addressed some of those questions in an essay on “The White Cockade” and another article on martial music at the North Bridge. As he notes, authors around the time of the Centennial picked up Handley’s small detail and ran with it. They wrote that the Acton Minutemen had played “The White Cockade” while actually marching down on the British regulars at the North Bridge, though young Charles didn’t see that. Further writing said that “The White Cockade” was a favorite of Acton, or of Capt. Davis—again with no additional evidence besides Handley testimony. One local man later told a newspaper that his father, a veteran of the battle, described the same tune, but by then the historical accounts might have affected memories.

Even after peeling away the latter-day exaggerations, Ryan asks:

Still, we have to wonder why this Scottish tune would have been a “signature tune” of the Acton Minute Men, a “familiar air to the dwellers of the vicinity,” or a “favorite” of Captain Isaac Davis, particularly as there appears to be no local connection to the 1745 Jacobite uprising. It is true that the tune was one of rebellion, it was popular with military and civilian musicians and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it was found in music books of the period, and it was a lively tune for marching. Yet with some 500 witnesses at the North Bridge, why would not one deem it appropriate at the time (especially among the King’s men) to comment about “The White Cockade,” unless its notes simply were not played?

Another question occurs to me. In 1775, the Massachusetts Patriots were eager to show that they were standing up for British liberties and traditions. They viewed their political opponents as breaking those traditions with new taxes, appointees, &c. They linked that opposition whenever they could to Jacobite and Scottish usurpation, which let them present themselves as defenders of true British liberty. Why would those same provincials choose a tune that was clearly associated with the Jacobite threat?

I suspect that the tune we now know as “The White Cockade” didn’t have such a clear political meaning until Burns published in 1790. It probably had several sets of lyrics and several names, including a Jacobite version or two. But in New England, musicians might well have known the tune without political connotations.

After the Stuart line petered out, Burns’s “The White Cockade” was no longer a political threat but a quaint relic, suitable for publication. Burns’s popularity soon made his words the best-known lyrics to that tune. Therefore, by the time Handley and Adams spoke in 1835, they knew the tune first and foremost as “The White Cockade.” Back in 1775, it may not have had such a specific meaning.