Where Did Jonathan Harrington, Jr., Die?

In 1775 this house facing Lexington common, shown courtesy of the Along the King’s Highway blog, was the home of Jonathan Harrington. There were three Jonathan Harringtons among the Lexington militiamen who turned out on 19 Apr 1775, and this is the one who was shot dead.

The plaque on the right side of the house façade explains the standard story of Harrington’s death: “Wounded on the common April 19 1775 [he] dragged himself to the door and died at his wife’s feet.” That story played a role in the discussion over preserving the house, as James M. Lindgren’s Preserving Historic New England describes.

That story took a while to get into print, however. Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington (1825) quotes from a deposition of John Munroe dated 28 Dec 1824:

Isaac Muzzy, Jonathan Harrington, and my father, Robert Munroe, were found dead near the place where our line was formed. Samuel Hadley and John Brown were killed after they had gotten off the common.

Munroe’s recollection suggest Harrington died on the common close to where he had been standing in the ranks. The separate sentence about those “killed after they had gotten off the common” reinforces that impression. None of the eyewitnesses quoted in that book described Harrington dragging himself home.

In 1835, the famed orator Edward Everett came to Lexington to speak on the battle’s anniversary. Using Phinney and other, unspecified sources, Everett recounted the events of the day, including:

Robert Munroe was killed with Parker, Muzzy, and Jonathan Harrington, on or near the line, where the company was formed. . . .

Harrington’s was a cruel fate. He fell in front of his own house, on the north of the common. His wife, at the window, saw him fall, and then start up, the blood gushing from his breast. He stretched out his hands towards her, as if for assistance, and fell again. Rising once more on his hands and knees, he crawled across the road towards his dwelling. She ran to meet him at the door, but it was to see him expire at her feet.

So far as I can tell, this is the earliest description of Harrington crawling toward his wife and home. In February 1777, Ruth (Fiske) Harrington remarried a Boston man unhelpfully named John Smith, and I can’t trace her further. It’s possible that Everett heard this story somehow from her, or people who knew her. Note that he didn’t say Harrington actually got to his house: the wounded man “crawled across the road towards his dwelling.”

Frank Coburn’s The Battle of April 19, 1775 (1912) states that Harrington “fell near the barn, then standing in what is now Bedford Street.” For that statement, Coburn cited a manuscript setting down what Levi Harrington, an eyewitness to the battle, told his son in March 1846.

But nine years later, in The Battle on Lexington Common, April 19, 1775, Coburn spoke about Harrington thusly in the historical present:

He is mortally wounded on the northerly end of the Common. Across the road is his home. He struggles to reach it, falls, but with renewed effort rises and staggers to his own door-stone. His wife meets him there, and he dies in her arms.

So for that audience Ruth Harrington doesn’t just see her husband dying, but she holds him “in her arms” on their “own door-stone.” No citations this time.

In Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), David Hackett Fischer reported that the Levi Harrington manuscript is at the Lexington Historical Society. That book repeats the details of Coburn’s second telling, however, and adds another figure, saying Harrington’s death was witnessed not just by his wife but by his young son. It’s a very affecting story, one that stuck with me since I first read that book, but it seems to be one of those stories that keeps getting better with each retelling.

Joshua Simonds: potential suicide bomber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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