“Commitments to equality and democracy and an aversion to aristocratic rule”

Earlier this spring the History News Network published Eran Zelnik’s essay “The Dangerous Afterlives of Lexington and Concord.”

The article states:

According to legend, the Revolutionary War started suddenly, when an aggressive and conceited British regime based in Boston sent soldiers to seize arms stored in Concord. In response, roughhewn American farmers heeded the call to defend their homes and hearths from British tyranny. Miraculously, the underdogs succeeded. The tenacity and will of virile American farmers, it turned out, could vanquish a well-trained army of British Regulars, foreshadowing the ultimate success of the American Revolution as a monumental event in world history.

This mythology, however, is inaccurate. In reality, the Americans were initially overwhelmed by extensive British forces at Lexington.

The redcoats’ overwhelming attack on the Lexington militia companies has been a vital part of the story from the beginning, never denied by “mythology.” Patriot propagandists even played up that violence, insisting the British attack was unprovoked.

In the 1800s local chroniclers added some face-saving details of counterattacks, like some of the Lexington company firing back and Capt. John Parker leading his men to ambush the British as they came back into town in the afternoon. But no one ever claimed that Lexington was where American farmers “succeeded” in stopping the regulars.

Zelnik’s command of detail goes down from there:

But the larger force of fighters that engaged the Redcoats further along the road in the Battle of Concord led the British to retreat to Boston, so as not to be stranded so far from reinforcements.

The British plan was always to search Concord and then return as quickly as possible, meeting reinforcements on the way. The exchange of fire at Concord’s North Bridge alarmed the British commanders, but it didn’t really hurry them.

It was on the road back to Boston — not in Lexington and Concord — where most of the fighting took place, and that counterassault was largely led not by militia members, but rather by minutemen. These highly trained units, composed of thousands of the region’s hardiest gun-owning fighters, were accustomed to irregular guerilla warfare. During the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) many New Englanders had served in provincial regiments that proved crucial for turning the tide of war in favor of the British.

The minute companies were part of the militia system. Generally those men had more equipment and training than average, but how much more varied from town to town. Zelnik implies the minutemen were drawn from veterans of the war that had ended twelve years before. In fact, they were usually the younger militia members, less likely to have seen combat. (And few British officers in the Seven Years’ War would have agreed that the provincial troops were their crucial edge.)

Moreover, since the British had sent several expeditions into rural Massachusetts over previous months that turned out to be dry runs for April 19, the minutemen were already drilled and ready when the actual fighting began.

The minute companies started to form in the fall of 1774. There was only one British expedition after that season—to Marblehead and Salem, large coastal towns, in February 1775. The regulars also made a handful of practice marches that provoked militia alarms, but those went no farther than two towns outside of Boston. Few of the militiamen who marched on 19 April had seen redcoats in any numbers.

These misconceptions are a shame because Zelnik’s hypothesis is sound: “more than any other moment in the nation’s collective memory of the war, the myth of Lexington and Concord has for generations represented commitments to equality and democracy and an aversion to aristocratic rule.”

Furthermore, he’s right in warning that that national myth’s “commitments to equality and democracy” have at many times been hijacked by people who want “equality and democracy” only for part of American society—which isn’t equality and democracy at all.

Wilkes on the “Parker’s Revenge” Study in Marlborough, 25 Apr.

On Wednesday, 25 April, archeologist Meg Watters Wilkes will speak about “Parker’s Revenge Revealed: Archaeology on a Revolutionary War Battlefield” at the Skinner Marlborough Gallery in Marlborough.

Here’s the event description:

On the morning April 19th, 1775, British troops marched from Boston to Concord, Massachusetts, to destroy supplies stockpiled in the town to form a provincial army. As the British soldiers reached the town of Lexington, militia had formed on the common. A shot was fired, and the British regulars fired into the militia killing eight and wounding ten. The regulars then proceeded to Concord. After taking care of their dead and wounded, the Lexington men formed and marched towards Concord to lay in wait for their return back to Boston. A brief engagement ensued.

Primary accounts of this event placed it on the Lexington/Lincoln town lines, but where was it? Join Dr. Watters as she explains the methodology and results of finding a battlefield from the first day of the American Revolution.

Meg Watters Wilkes has over twenty years of experience as a remote sensing specialist in archaeology. She holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from Trinity College in Hartford, an M.A. in Remote Sensing and G.I.S. in Archaeology from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Archaeological Landscape Remote Sensing and 3D Visualization from the University of Birmingham.

This event will take place at the Skinner auction house’s Marlborough facility, 274 Cedar Hill Street. Refreshments will be served starting at 5:00 P.M. The lecture will begin at 6:00. The event is free and open to the public.

Events on Archeology in Minute Man Park

October is Massachusetts’s Archaeology Month, and Minute Man National Historical Park is offering two programs on the field.

Saturday, 7 October, 1:00 P.M.
Parker’s Revenge: The New Evidence
Minute Man Visitor Center on the Lincoln/Lexington line

Archaeologist Dr. Meg Watters will share details about the Parker’s Revenge Archaeology Project that was successful in locating a key Lexington battle site from April 19, 1775. Following the presentation, Park Ranger Jim Hollister, joined by His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot, will lead a walk out to the scene of action. The reenactors will demonstrate how, based on the project’s findings, we believe the battle was fought. This program will feature musket firing.

Saturday, 21 October, 1:00 P.M.
Archaeology Finds of Minute Man National Historical Park
Maj. John Buttrick House, 174 Liberty Street (across from the North Bridge Visitor Center parking lot), Concord

Join Nikki Walsh, Museum Services Northeast Region of the National Park Service, for a presentation of various artifacts found throughout the park, from Concord to Lincoln to Lexington. See the artifacts and learn the stories behind where the items were found and the use of them in their historical context.

Both events are free and open to the public.

The Final “Parker’s Revenge” Archeology Report

Last month the Friends of Minute Man National Park published the final report on the Parker’s Revenge Archeological Project. I first posted about this project back in 2012 when it was just getting started, then shared periodic updates based on lead archeologist Meg Watters’s public presentations.

Now Watters has finished her formal report, and anyone can download it from this page. The Friends announced:

Technologies utilized in the research informed formal excavations and 1775 battlefield reconstructions. These methods included: 3D laser scanning, GPS feature mapping, and geophysical surveys including metallic surveys, ground penetrating radar, magnetic gradient and conductivity/magnetic susceptibility.

Taken together, the technologies enabled researchers to locate a farmhouse that figured prominently in the battle terrain, to recreate the actual 1775 battlefield landscape and battlefield features and even to model exactly what combatants could and could not see at various positions along the battle road.

Artifacts discovered included 29 British and colonial musket balls from the battle. The location and spatial patterning of the musket balls recovered enabled archaeologists to interpret the exact positions where individuals were standing during the battle—and then outline battle tactics most likely deployed.

The findings appear to validate the local tradition—stated early but without detail—that Lexington militiamen took some shots at the British column as it returned to their town from Concord. Since many of those same militiamen had been on the town common under Capt. John Parker that morning, when the regulars fired the first fatal shots of the war, a twentieth-century historian dubbed the skirmish “Parker’s Revenge.”

For folks who want to read the report, be aware that in P.D.F. form it comprises 35 megabytes of data. My download from the Friends of Minute Man site stopped several times, so I had to keep an eye on it to poke the restart button.

The report contains over 300 pages with more than 100 illustrations, most in color. Those illustrations include photographs of artifacts and researchers, maps of the field, and charts. Unfortunately—and this is the biggest shortcoming of the report in P.D.F. form—many of those maps have blurry text and lines, making them hard to interpret.

This is a scientific report and a government report (not produced by the government, but for a government agency). As such, it includes a lot of information that’s necessary for future study but may not interest more casual readers. There are a lot of blank pages, a list of every artifact found in the study, and transcripts of discussions among experts assembled a year ago.

The portions I found most interesting are:

• pages 51-65, on the original verbal sources about the event and how historians have described and interpreted it.
• the detailed recreation of the skirmish based on the new evidence, pages 153-197.
• for technical details, descriptions of the field work (pages 81-99 and 140-150) and the recreation of land use in 1775 (pages 103-121).

This project was a big undertaking. We should be grateful to Watters, the Friends and their donors, Minute Man National Historical Park, and all the enthusiastic volunteers who made it happen.

(The image above, by Kyle Zick, appears in the report. It shows the British column moving east into Lexington. See that rock outcrop at the rear center? That’s going to be trouble.)

Returning to the “Parker’s Revenge” Site, 29 Apr.

On Friday, 29 April, the Lexington Historical Society’s Cronin Lecture Series will present archeologist Margaret Watters and her final report on the “Parker’s Revenge” site in Minute Man National Historical Park.

That site, close to the park’s visitor center near the Lexington-Lincoln border, is a rocky outcrop where tradition held that the Lexington militia company under Capt. John Parker fired at Lt.-Col. Francis Smith’s British column as it was making its way back from Concord.

The big question of this investigation was whether it would find concrete evidence to back up that narrative. The next big question was how the evidence would revise that narrative.

I’ve been following this project for over a year, periodically mentioning updates about it. Last fall, for example, I featured an odd button found on the site. Earlier this month I got to enjoy a preview of Watters’s conclusions courtesy of Joel Bohy and Brown’s Company. I don’t want to reveal other people’s secrets, so all I’ll say about this lecture is: Don’t miss it.

The talk is scheduled to start at 8:00 P.M. at the Lexington Depot. It is free and open to the public. Parking is available nearby. Coffee and cookies will be served by the historical society.

The Latest Update on Parker’s Revenge, 3 Oct.

On Saturday, 3 October, archeologist Meg Watters will speak at the Concord public library on “Parker’s Revenge Revealed: Notes from the Field.”

This is the latest public update about the re-exploration of part of Battle Road in west Lexington where Capt. John Parker reportedly led his militia company in a counterattack on the British column making its way back from Concord.

The Parker’s Revenge Project is in the last months of its archeological stage, and the Friends of Minute Man Park just issued a press release that says:

Today, the 44-acre site of Parker’s Revenge is on a heavily wooded hillside within the confines of Minute Man National Historical Park. Utilizing a suite of technologies, the Parker’s Revenge project is reconstructing the historic 1775 landscape.

“What we have found to date is very significant. Due to the location and spatial patterning of the musket balls recovered, we now know the exact place where individuals were standing during the battle, allowing us to begin to paint a much clearer picture about what happened that day,” said Dr. Meg Watters, project archaeologist.

A dropped musket ball indicates the geographical position of a combatant. In addition, since the effective range of a 1775 musket was only approximately 100 yards, a fired musket ball also provides clues to combatant positioning. Archaeological investigations have discovered British and colonial musket balls, and a 1775-era copper button from a waistcoat. These findings are significant because they are located within 80 yards of each other. The small cluster is the only occurrence of battle related artifacts over the 44-acre site, clearly identifying the position of individuals fighting that day. Continued archaeological excavations and metallic surveys will complete the historic landscape investigation.

Dr. Watters’s talk, sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man, will start at 7:00 P.M.

Serving Parker’s Revenge Warm

Yesterday I attended an event at Minute Man National Historical Park announcing major support for the Parker’s Revenge project from Campaign 1776.

The term “Parker’s Revenge,” which Brandeis professor David Hackett Fischer pointed out was probably coined by John Galvin in his 1967 book The Minute Men, refers to one point in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, when Capt. John Parker and his Lexington militiamen attacked the British army column as it withdrew east from Concord. By tradition, those provincials were on or behind a particular granite outcrop—probably a good choice, as that’s said to be the highest point between Boston and Concord.

Parker’s Revenge is thus an event, and an area, and an idea—the idea of the Lexington company that had been hurt that dawn picking themselves up and fighting back.

A couple of years ago, the park and the non-profit Friends of Minute Man Park convened a group to study Parker’s Revenge in more depth. As Bob Morris of the Friends explained, the project has four phases:

• research into maps, tax and real estate records, and historic accounts to determine what land to focus on and what to look for there.
• archeology. Project Archeologist Meg Watters didn’t dig; rather, she oversaw a careful survey of the land with lasers, ground-probing radar, metal detectors, and other technology. In addition, military experts will walk through the area to give their opinions about how the opposing armies would have reacted to the site. Watters’s report is due this summer.
• interpretation and education with the findings and artifacts discovered during the investigation. Plans include traditional displays and signage, and also the possibility of an app depicting the 1775 terrain (as we understand it) that people could use while walking the area today.
• land rehabilitation under the guidance of the National Park Service’s Olmsted Center. It’s unclear whether there will be a recommendation or resources to return the whole tract to a semblance of its 1775 appearance, but right now it’s wooded and unwelcomingly overgrown.

The Parker’s Revenge project caught the attention of folks at the Civil War Trust. That foundation has been around for over fifteen years, having grown out of smaller groups. Its leaders now have lots of experience in preserving battlefield land, and they’re expanding their scope to the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 with an initiative called Campaign 1776. That push uses the minute man as part of its symbol, and of course its organizers are interested in the iconic Lexington and Concord battle.

Campaign 1776 has now contributed to the Parker’s Revenge project in two ways. It agreed to buy an acre of adjacent land with the plan of eventually donating that to the park. People think that British flankers moved across that area as they circled north to drive Parker’s men off their high ground. The property was owned by the town of Lincoln but not necessarily set aside for preservation.

In addition, Campaign 1776 and the Society of the Cincinnati’s American Revolution Institute helped to fund the archeology with a $25,000 grant, the Civil War Trust’s first archeology project. That donation was represented at the event by one of those symbolic oversized checks proudly held up by several people in suits.

Meanwhile, no fewer than four school groups passed by on field trips, peering with more or less curiosity at what the grownups were doing. That shows how big an attraction Minute Man Park already is. With more depth and detail in its Parker’s Revenge interpretation, just a short distance from the visitor center in Lexington, the park may soon have more solid stories to tell.

What’s Up with Minute Man Park This Month

Today the North Bridge Visitor Center of Minute Man National Historical Park is scheduled to reopen for the season.

It will be open through the end of the month on Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. In April, with the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord coming up, the park’s facilities will surely open for longer hours.

Meanwhile, the Friends of Minute Man Park is sponsoring two lectures this month.

Sunday, 15 March
“Parker’s Revenge Project: Notes from the Field”
Principal investigator Margaret Watters, Ph.D., will give an update on the Friends initiative to study and interpret the site traditionally associated with the afternoon assault on the withdrawing British army column by Capt. John Parker and his Lexington militiamen.

Sunday, 29 March
“War and Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1775-1783”
John Hannigan, Rose and Irving Crown Fellow in the History Department at Brandeis, will share his research on how men of color participated in the opening of the American Revolution, and the effects of their activity on the institution of slavery in Massachusetts.

Both talks will take place in Bemis Hall, 15 Bedford Road in Lincoln. They will start at 3:00 P.M., and are free and open to the public.

Battlefield Archeology Lecture in Lexington, 11 Nov.

Minute Man National Historical Park and the Friends of Minute Man are proceeding with a big project to clear and interpret the portion of the park that became known as “Parker’s Revenge.”

Based on testimony from veterans of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and local traditions, that area is thought to be where the Lexington militia under Capt. John Parker rejoined the fighting in the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775.

As part of that project, battlefield archeologist Douglas D. Scott is coming to town to advise. On Tuesday, 11 November, he’ll speak on “Shot and Shell Tell the Tale: What Archaeology Can Contribute to the Study of Conflict.”

I found a description of this talk that says:

The archaeology of conflict has captured the imagination of the public and media. Site specific studies of forts and battlefields and detailed artifact analyses are the epitome of military archaeology, but we are now beginning to see broader patterns in data. I will discuss how archeological evidence can be used with historical documentation to identify command and control organization on a battlefield as well as see the loss of tactical cohesion. Examples will be presented to support how the physical evidence of battles can refine battlefield interpretation, build a more complete understanding of past events, and demonstrate the evolution of military tactics and strategy.

This event is scheduled to start at 7:30 P.M. in the Lexington Depot.

Sgt. Monroe on Capt. Parker

Yesterday I quoted the Rev. Theodore Parker telling the story of his grandfather John Parker’s words to his Lexington militia company on 19 Apr 1775: “If they want [or mean] to have a war, let it begin here.”

In 1858 Parker told the historian George Bancroft his sources for that quotation:

They were kept as the family tradition of the day, and when the battle was re-enacted in 1820 (or thereabout), his orderly sergeant took the Captain’s place, and repeated the words, adding, “For them is the very words Captain Parker said.”

We know from other sources that the reenactment occurred in April 1822. Theodore Parker was then eleven years old.

The men Parker identified only as his grandfather’s orderly sergeant was William Munroe, who by 1822 had obtained the rank of colonel in the Massachusetts militia. He was a major figure in town whose house and tavern is now operated as a museum by the Lexington Historical Society.

In 1825, three years after that reenactment, Munroe provided a detailed deposition about the fight. He stated:

Between day-light and sunrise, Capt. Thaddeus Bowman rode up and informed, that the regulars were near. The drum was then ordered to be beat, and I was commanded by Capt. Parker to parade the company, which I accordingly did, in two ranks, a few rods northerly of the meeting-house.

When the British troops had arrived within about a hundred rods of the meeting-house, as I was afterwards told by a prisoner, which we took, “they heard our drum, and supposing it to be a challenge, they were ordered to load their muskets, and to move at double quick time.” They came up almost upon a run. Col. Smith and Maj. Pitcairn rode up some rods in advance of their troops, and within a few rods of our company, and exclaimed, “Lay down your arms, you rebels, and disperse!” and immediately fired his pistol. Pitcairn then advanced, and, after a moment’s conversation with Col. Smith, he advanced with his troops, and, finding we did not disperse, they being within four rods of us, he brought his sword down with great force, and said to his men, “Fire, damn you, fire!” The front platoon, consisting of eight or nine, then fired, without killing or wounding any of our men.

In fact, Lt. Col. Francis Smith was not on the common to converse with Pitcairn (not that Munroe would have recognized either officer at that time), and most historians now agree that no British officer gave an order to fire. But for the purpose of this inquiry, what matters most is that in 1825 Munroe did not quote Capt. Parker as saying anything stirring at all.

That 1825 volume by the Rev. Elias Phinney quoted several other Lexington veterans as well. Ebenezer Munroe said, “Capt. Parker ordered his men to stand their ground, and not to molest the regulars, unless they meddled with us.” Joseph Underwood stated:

Capt. Parker gave orders for every man to stand his ground, and said he would order the first man shot, that offered to leave his post. I stood very near Capt. Parker, when the regulars came up, and am confident he did not order his men to disperse, till the British troops had fired upon us the second time.

But no one remembered Capt. Parker saying something like, “If they mean [or want] to have a war, let it begin here.”

In 1835 the famed orator Edward Everett spoke in Lexington, giving a detailed account of the battle, and he didn’t quote Parker saying that, either. If Munroe had indeed repeated those words at the ceremony in 1822, they hadn’t become part of the town lore. They didn’t see print until Theodore Parker told the story in 1855.

In the 1880s the Rev. Carlton A. Staples prepared a “Report of the Committee on Historical Monuments and Tablets” for Lexington and a paper for the Lexington Historical Society. Both appear to quote Parker quoting Munroe quoting Parker. And Staples’s research was the authority for carving “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here” onto the boulder on Lexington green.

Capt. John Parker’s Words on Lexington Green

A few weeks back, tour guide and author Ben Edwards asked me about the words ascribed to John Parker on Lexington common as the British regulars approached.

Did Parker say, “if they want to have a war, let it begin here,” or, “if they mean to have a war…”? Some authors quote the first version, others (and a carved boulder on the green) quote the second.

It appears that our first printed source for either quote dates from 1855, or a full eighty years after the event. The Rev. Theodore Parker was then on trial in Boston for resisting the Fugitive Slave Act. In his defense, he told an anecdote about the confrontation in Lexington that included the quotation:

One raw morning in spring—it will be eighty years the 19th of this month—Hancock and Adams, the Moses and Aaron of that Great Deliverance, were both at Lexington; they also had “obstructed an officer” with brave words. British soldiers, a thousand strong, came to seize them and carry them over sea for trial, and so nip the bud of Freedom auspiciously opening in that early spring.

The town militia came together before daylight “for training.” A great, tall man, with a large head and a high, wide brow, their Captain,—one who “had seen service,”—marshalled them into line, numbering but seventy, and bad “every man load his piece with powder and ball.”

“I will order the first man shot that runs away,” said he, when some faltered; “Do n’t fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war,—let it begin here.” Gentlemen, you know what followed: those farmers and mechanics “fired the shot heard round the world.”

Parker didn’t state outright that the militia captain he described so intently, John Parker, was his own grandfather.

Some details of Parker’s story were off. He was mistaken about the aim of the British march—Gen. Thomas Gage had given no orders to seek out and arrest Hancock and Adams. There were probably about 700 regulars, not “a thousand.” Parker promulgated a fiction in saying that the Lexington militia was out at night “for training” rather than in response to news of the British march. And Ralph Waldo Emerson coined the phrase “shot heard round the world” about the fight at his home town of Concord, not in Parker’s home town of Lexington.

Three years later, Parker wrote down the story again in a letter to the historian George Bancroft, eventually published in 1863:

One fact or two let me give. At the battle of Lexington, when Capt. P. drew up his men as the British were nearing, he ordered “every man to load” his piece with powder and ball. “Don’t fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here!” I think these significant words ought to be preserved. They were kept as the family tradition of the day, and when the battle was re-enacted in 1820 (or thereabout), his orderly sergeant took the Captain’s place, and repeated the words, adding, “For them is the very words Captain Parker said.” Besides, some of the soldiers, when they saw the flash of the British guns, turned to run: he drew his sword, and said, “I will order the first man shot that offers to run!” Nobody ran till he told them, “Disperse, and take care of yourselves.”

As you can see, Theodore Parker wrote “want to have a war” in 1855 and “mean to have a war” in 1858. Both versions of the quotation thus rest on the same man’s memory.

Theodore Parker was born in 1810, thirty-five years after his grandfather had died. He based on his quotation on “family tradition” and an affirmation by the captain’s former orderly sergeant, speaking in a folksy manner: “For them is the very words Captain Parker said.”

TOMORROW: What did that orderly sergeant himself tell us?

The Aftermath

From William Diamond’s Drum, by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot:

Later on the morning of April nineteenth. Captain [John] Parker reassembled his Lexington minutemen, to march toward Concord. Some of the wounded, now bandaged, formed in awkward but determined lines. Among them was Jedediah Munroe, the old man who had fallen on the Common before he could shoot and who had brought along the old Scotch claymore as an extra weapon. William Diamond beat his drum again. The little company marched off toward Concord, the beat of the drum and the thin music of the fife echoing briefly after them. And this was perhaps Lexington’s saddest and most triumphant moment of the whole day—the sun now high in the sky, the smell of British gunpowder still in the air, their dead brothers lying on the Common behind, and the company of minutemen, knowing now what they faced, marching off to meet the enemy again.

(Photograph from Joanne Rath’s coverage of the reenactment at Lexington yesterday for the Boston Globe. Pictured are Quinn, Peter, and Joleen Ricci of Bedford.)

Playing Assassin’s Creed III as an Early American Historian

Last week at The Junto blog, Michael D. Hattem reviewed the Assassin’s Creed III videogame as a scholar of early America:

What drew me to the game, as an early Americanist, was the historically accurate renderings of the colonial and revolutionary settings. Also, throughout the game you interact with actual historical figures and play important roles in the most important events of the period. What early Americanist wouldn’t want the chance to walk around Boston in 1754, a Mohawk village, Valley Forge, and, especially for me, New York in 1776? Or participate in the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Battle of Monmouth? . . .

I am not ashamed to admit that I found it quite exciting to walk into the Green Dragon Tavern to interact with Samuel Adams and to subsequently board the Dartmouth to take part in the Tea Party. At one point, your character has to ride his horse from Boston all the way out to Lexington on a snowy evening, the rendering of which was stunning. During the Battles of Lexington and Concord, you ride along with Paul Revere and end up commanding the Minutemen charged with holding the North Bridge. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, you are tasked with swimming out into the harbor and destroying the cannon on one of the ships bombarding Breed’s Hill. To do so, you have to run down through Charlestown while buildings, including the church steeple, collapse in front of you due to cannon fire. . . .

In the end, barring a time machine, this game is as close as one can get to a dynamic visual experience of colonial and revolutionary settings. For the non-historian, the game will also bring home the violent nature of the Revolution, something often downplayed in popular history and oft-ignored even in the scholarship. Being an early Americanist, the game has led me to consider more the nature of the settings in which the historical subjects about whom I write lived. But, most of all, it proved to be just a whole lot of fun.

Hattem reported that there’s a setting to turn down the gore, making the many attacks more bloodless, and that his six-year-old son enjoyed the game. The younger Hattem had been somewhat prepared for the storyline by episodes of Liberty’s Kids, one of those television cartoons that will never die.

This Junto review included a helpful video with clips of the action, and those made me pause. And rewind and look again to be sure of what I was seeing:

• Lots of non-eighteenth-century facial hair, on such figures as Capt. John Parker.
• British soldiers attacking the Tea Party. There weren’t any redcoats in central Boston in 1773. Royal officials didn’t dare interfere with that action.
• Provincial militiamen defending the North Bridge at Concord from advancing British soldiers rather than the other way around.

So for all the care the game makers took with the settings, for all the details they included (William Molineux memorialized in a videogame? Amazing!), Assassin’s Creed III promotes some fundamentally mistaken notions about important Revolutionary events. Those might grow from misconceptions or compromises to make the play more exciting. But through lifelike images and sheer ubiquity this game will probably help to shape how a generation pictures the Revolution.

The Return of “Parker’s Revenge”

The Boston Globe ran a regional story on Thursday about archeological finds from a part of Hanscom Air Force Base that probably saw fighting on 19 Apr 1775:

In recent years, archeologists have uncovered several musket balls, a shoe buckle, a knife, and other Colonial-era artifacts on land that is part of the Hanscom Air Force Base property. And at a ceremony last month, Hanscom officials officially loaned eight of the items to the neighboring Minute Man National Historical Park, which plans to create a display for its visitors. . . .

Part of the Hanscom property extends near the site of a battle known as “Parker’s Revenge,” which took place hours after the dawn clash on Lexington Green where British regulars killed eight Colonial militiamen. Around 1:30 p.m. that day, Captain John Parker and his Lexington militia unit ambushed the British as they returned to Boston from Concord.

Although the article repeatedly refers to “the Battle of Parker’s Revenge,” that event is usually classified as a skirmish, a small part of the larger Battle of Lexington and Concord.

The term “Parker’s Revenge” appears to be a twentieth-century coinage that provides an inspiring narrative shape for the experiences of Capt. Parker’s Lexington militia company that day: after the devastating shooting on their common at dawn, they picked themselves up and participated in the attack on the British column as it withdrew back through town in the afternoon.

Here’s a report on these artifacts last year. The archeologists seem careful not to tie them directly to the battle since it’s possible they were dropped deposited at some other time. But they certainly reflect eighteenth-century weaponry.

The Friends of Minute Man National Park supports these archeological and preservation efforts.

Ebenezer Stiles’s Story of “Revear’s ride”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wasn’t the first American poet to write about Paul Revere’s ride. He was simply the best and most famous. On 15 Mar 1795, more than sixty years before Longfellow had his inspiration, a man named Ebenezer Stiles signed a poem he headlined “Story of the Battle of Concord and Lexinton and Revear’s ride Twenty years ago.”

Stiles’s manuscript entered the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which published the opening in its Proceedings in 1878. Esther Forbes printed the first two stanzas in Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, and David Hackett Fischer included four lines in Paul Revere’s Ride, which I quoted back here.

The entire poem has been published only once, so far as I can tell: by Prof. Tristram Peter Coffin in Uncertain Glory: Folklore and the American Revolution, published by Folklore Associates in 1971. I’m going to quote and analyze it to observe the anniversary of the events it relates.

When he started, Stiles either hadn’t figured out his verse form or chose to use the daring rhyme of “spur” and “Liberty.” And the lines don’t get much better than that:

He speard neither horse nor whip nor spur
As he galloped through mud and mire
He thought of nought but “Liberty”
And the lanterns that hung from the spire
He raced his steed through field and wood
Nor turned to ford the river
But faced his horse to the foaming flood
They swam across togather

2
He madly dashed o’er mountain and moor
Never slacked spur nor rein
Untill with shout he stood by the door
Of the church by Concord green
“They come They come” he loudly cried
“They are marching their Legions this way
Prepar to meet them ye true and tried
They’l be hear by Break of day”

3
The bells were run the drums were beat
The Melitia attended the roll
Every face we meet in the street
Wears a determined Scoul
For this is the day all men expected
Yet none of us wanted to see
But now it had come no one rejected
Our Country’s call of Liberty

4
Youngmen and old ansured the call
To defend the land of their sire
The[y] brought with them some powder and ball
To return the British fire
For well they knew the Blood thirsty troops
Would do their best endevour
To ruin their homes destroy their crops
And bind them slaves for ever.

5
The morning dawned the Sun arose
The birds sang loud with glee
All nature seemed to strife opposed
And the river Rolled on Merrylie
But Hush! the tramp the gleam of steel
See, See, their waving plums
As slowly they came o’er the fields
Marching to beat of drums

6
Fall in, attention the captain cried
Look well to your guns my men
But do not fire till I give the word
Leave the opening shot to them
E’en as he spoke a shot was heard
And a patriot fell on the green
And again they fired without speaking a word
The assassins what do they mean

7
Unable to stand their withering fire
We’re reluctantly foreced to obay
The word from our Captain to gently retire
And meet e’er the close of the day
The foe passed on to his work of blood
And to search for hidden stors
With a laugh and a jest that boaded no good
To the women we left within doors.

I chose to follow the M.H.S. Proceedings and Forbes quotations and use the plural “lanterns” in the first verse instead of the singular “lantern,” as Coffin transcribed the line. I haven’t seen the original manuscript, and it’s possible the people who saw “lanterns” were influenced by what they already knew about Revere’s ride. In fact, this poem is the earliest link between Revere and the signal from a Boston spire—the steeple of Old North Church, later sources specify.

Notably, Stiles changed the historical event in the same ways that Longfellow did: he had Revere spot the lantern signal instead of arrange to send it, and had him ride alone all the way to Concord. He also raised the drama by adding a “river” for Revere and his horse to swim.

Most of Stiles’s stanzas were about the skirmish at Lexington. Like all American writers for many decades after 1775, he identified (even using “we”) with the provincials and put all the blame for the shooting on “the Blood thirsty troops.” However, Stiles didn’t claim that Maj. John Pitcairn had ordered the firing or told the “damned rebels” to disperse, as many provincial witnesses claimed. Of course, he might have written “without speaking a word” simply because that was easier.

And these fine stanzas were only the first part of Stiles’s poem.

TOMORROW: New heroes appear in part two.

Archeological Findings along Battle Road

Tim Greenman at Walking the Berkshires alerted me to a report from the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center:

Archaeologists in Massachusetts recently excavated several military artifacts from a Revolutionary war era site probably dating back to a well-documented skirmish of April 19, 1775 known as “Parker’s Revenge.” The previously undisturbed site, located on an unused area of Hanscom Air Force Base in Concord, is being prepared for transfer from the United States Air Force to the National Park Service.

Among the artifacts found are musket balls (fired and un-fired), a brass shoe buckle, a fascine knife or “bill hook,” and a musket ball bullet mold that produces a size caliber ball for pistols. All of these artifacts were fragile and corroded when excavated and required immediate treatment for preservation.

The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, one of the leading institutions in the northeast for archaeological conservation, was contracted by the United States Air Force to document and treat these important historical objects. Over the last year and a half the Conservation Department has photographed, x-rayed, removed corrosion, and stabilized all the artifacts from the “Parker’s Revenge” site to preserve them.

The bullet mold (at top) presumably belonged to locals; wouldn’t the British troops who marched to Concord have left their molds behind? I suppose the curved knife, used for cutting brush or as a weapon, might have been carried by a man on either side.

Incidentally, the phrase “Parker’s revenge” seems to be a twentieth-century coinage. It doesn’t show up in early histories of the battle, so far as I can tell. It’s now applied to a part of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, where and when Capt. John Parker’s Lexington men fired at the British soldiers withdrawing toward Boston—including soldiers who had shot at their militia company on the Lexington common.

Who Really Wanted to Fight at Lexington?

Yesterday I wrote about how unlikely it seems that Samuel Adams secretly manipulated Capt. John Parker and the Lexington militia into standing their ground as the British army marched onto their Green at dawn on 19 Apr 1775.

But I still think it’s possible that another Patriot leader urged the militiamen to do exactly that. Indeed, we have evidence that one politician argued for confronting the army column—not because he expected the redcoats’ reaction to trigger a war, but because he believed it would be dishonorable not to stand up to them.

Arthur Bernon Tourtellot was so intent on building a case against Adams that he didn’t recognize how the evidence he’d amassed pointed to another man. Citing William Sumner’s notes on a dinner conversation with the widow of John Hancock in 1822, he wrote:

Hancock insisted on fighting the British himself. “It was with very great difficulty that he was dissuaded from it by Mr. [Jonas] Clarke and Mr. Adams.” He nevertheless went down to the Common to see the minutemen and came back to the Clarke house to repeat his desire to fight. Adams finally stopped the protests by pointing out the importance of Hancock…to the leadership of the cause.

Hancock’s widow, by then named Dorothy Scott, actually told Sumner:

Mr. H. was all the night cleaning his gun and sword, and putting his accoutrements in order, and was determined to go out to the plain by the meeting house, where the battle was, to fight with the men who had collected, but who, she says, were but partially provided with arms, and those they had were in most miserable order...

She was probably dramatizing her story; other parts of her recollection, such as Hancock’s aunt nearly being struck by a musket ball, are unlikely, given what other witnesses said about that night. Tourtellot read the widow’s recollections to mean that Hancock actually went down to the Green himself. I don’t think she said that—she said he wanted to.

But as for the wealthy young merchant’s wish to fight, we don’t have to rely on his widow. Tourtellot also quoted William Munroe’s 1825 deposition about this night. As a militia sergeant, Munroe was guarding the Hancock-Clarke parsonage when Paul Revere and William Dawes arrived. He recalled:

it was thought advisable, that Hancock and Adams should withdraw to some distant part of the town. To this Hancock assented with great reluctance, and said, as he went off, “If I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops.”

That sure seems like a hint about what Munroe and other men with muskets should do.

Tourtellot tried to to argue that Adams and Clarke, the Lexington minister, must have gone to the Green with Hancock:

Samuel Adams...would never have let him out of sight in the midst of such promising events; and Clarke would have guided them down the road from the parsonage, around the corner of the Common to Buckman’s. . . .

Expert as he was in town mobs and their behavior, Adams, who had lived all his life in the heart of Boston, was weak in his knowledge of country people. Hancock knew nothing of them.

Hence the need for Clarke’s involvement in the plot.

In fact, Hancock had grown up for several years in rural Braintree and in Lexington itself. Hancock had lived in Clarke’s house for a while as a boy; it’s called the “Hancock-Clarke House” because it was built for the merchant’s grandfather, the town’s minister for half a century. Hancock had also been staying there for weeks before 19 April while his secretary and a trunk of papers were in Buckman’s tavern. Thus, he had probably gone back and forth between the parsonage and the Green many times.

Why didn’t Tourtellot think that Hancock could have inspired the Lexington militiamen? He wrote:

Hancock’s behavior, brave or simply foolhardy as it may have been, during those last four hours, ruled him out as a serious advisor on the military situation (he apparently saw nothing unwise and useless in the President of the Provincial Congress standing with sword drawn and pistol cocked in the line of march of British soldiers supposedly intent on arresting him)...

In other words, Hancock couldn’t possibly have told Capt. Parker, Sgt. Munroe, or the others that they should stand up to the redcoats because he was too busy yelling about how someone had to stand up to the redcoats. Hmmm.

Hancock, unlike Adams, had some military authority in colonial Massachusetts. He had been captain of the Company of Cadets, an upper-class militia unit in Boston, until late 1774, when Gov. Thomas Gage removed him from the post and the company dissolved in protest. People continued to refer to Hancock with the honorary title of “colonel.” (Because the Cadets were so upper-class, their captain got this honorary rank.)

Hancock also had more official civil authority than Adams. In April 1775, he was both the President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the chairman of its Committee of Safety. Adams didn’t have those titles. There was no one in Lexington better positioned to give orders to Capt. Parker than John Hancock.

I’m not arguing that Hancock actually influenced the men on Lexington Green. None of those men described being inspired by him or his words, and in the early 1800s he remained popular enough that they would have had every reason to point to his leadership. But if authors want to find evidence of a Patriot leader prompting the fight in Lexington, they needn’t try to thread tenuous arguments about Samuel Adams. They should look at all the evidence about John Hancock.

(This posting is the culmination of a week of articles that began here.)

The Real Samuel Adams and Real Life

I’ve been tracing the idea that Samuel Adams somehow instigated the shooting at Lexington on 19 Apr 1775, from the first suggestion by Harold Murdock through the development by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot to a recent elaboration by William H. Hallahan. I see three major holes in this thesis, even beyond the lack of any positive evidence for it whatsoever.

First, this theory writes off the fact that the Revolution was a mass movement. It involved hundreds of thousands of people. It was organized through committees, conventions, congresses, and other means of collective decision-making. Since the Powder Alarm of early September 1774, the Boston Whigs had realized that the Massachusetts countryside was more eager to fight than their own town.

Even among the political leaders of Massachusetts, Adams was only the foremost of a large group. Some twentieth-century writers gave him credit or blame for everything that happened in Boston and then in eastern Massachusetts. But Adams didn’t come to prominence until after 1765. He had a lot of colleagues in Boston, some of them (William Molineux, Dr. Thomas Young) much closer to the crowds than he was. He was pulled along by many significant events, and far away from some others. It’s foolish to believe that Adams was guiding every political development of the day.

Second, Adams’s contemporaries considered him to be a cautious politician, especially when it came to violence. There’s no strong evidence that he led mobs. James Otis, Jr., reportedly trusted Adams—and only him—to keep him from speaking too rashly. Adams’s writings show a consistent belief that there was no need for dramatic actions. Rather, he usually stated that steady unity and resolve would cause royal officials to back down or reveal their true tyrannical aims.

Thus, on 21 May 1774, Adams wrote from Philadelphia to James Warren:

I beseech you to implore every Friend in Boston by every thing dear and sacred to Men of Sense and Virtue to avoid Blood and Tumult. They will have time enough to dye. Let them give the other Provinces opportunity to think and resolve.

Rash Spirits that would by their Impetuosity involve us in unsurmountable Difficulties will be left to perish by themselves despisd by their Enemies, and almost detested by their Friends. Nothing can ruin us but our Violence. Reason teaches this. I have indubitable Intelligence, dreadful, as to the Designs against us; consolatory, if we are but prudent.

Even as he itched for independence, Adams wrote to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper on 30 Apr 1776:

Indeed I have the Happiness of believing that what I most earnestly wish for will in due time be effected. We cannot make Events. Our Business is wisely to improve them.

To believe that Adams had indeed “made Events” in Lexington is to believe that he was completely duplicitous about his philosophy throughout life, even with his closest colleagues.

Furthermore, all the eyewitness testimony we have about Adams’s actions in the early hours of 19 Apr 1775 says that he spoke against confronting the troops. He urged leaving the Lexington parsonage as quickly and quietly as possible. Dolly Quincy reportedly heard him tell her future husband as the royal army approached, “that is not our business. We belong to the Cabinet.” In other words, elected officials had the responsibility to stay away from possible violence and keep the government running.

The third weakness of the Murdock/Tourtellot hypothesis is that it’s a conspiracy theory: a secret agreement among Adams, local minister Jonas Clarke, and militia captain John Parker to carry out a complex plot. That scheme depended on a precise understanding of how the Lexington militiamen would behave if ordered to stand on the Green, how the British troops would respond, and how the people of Massachusetts would respond in turn. The hypothesis requires nearly every action that men took in the early hours of 19 Apr 1775 to be the result of planning, and not just habit or circumstance. It posits a plot that men considered noble yet kept completely secret for decades.

(Hallahan’s wild tangent off the Murdock/Tourtellot hypothesis is even more clearly a conspiracy theory: in addition to those actions and reactions, it also posits a secret agreement between Adams and an unidentified gunman.)

One of the wisest rules for making sense of life, either in the present or in the past, is never to come up with a conspiracy theory for what can be explained by incompetence. (For variations on this dictum, see “Hanlon’s razor” and the words of Sir Bernard Ingham.) The British reports on the Concord march and the depositions from American veterans in the 1820s and 1830s offer little evidence of a conspiracy. But they show lots of evidence of incompetence, or rather of the limits on human competence: incomplete knowledge, inaccurate assumptions, misunderstandings, hesitations, poor memory, fatigue, compromises, circumstances beyond people’s control. In other words, real life.

TOMORROW: Which Patriot leader really called for standing up to the regulars.

“Adams and Clarke unquestionably made up a policy”

As I quoted yesterday, the writer Arthur Bernon Tourtellot was a big fan of banker-historian Harold Murdock. In his 1959 book William Diamond’s Drum, now published as Lexington and Concord, Tourtellot had special praise for Murdock’s The Nineteenth of April 1775: “Informed, critical, witty, the essays are of immense value for the lines of inquiry that they suggest...”

In particular, Tourtellot picked up on Murdock’s forty-three-year-old suggestion that Samuel Adams had maneuvered the Lexington militia into provoking the British troops at dawn on that fateful day. Tourtellot also pointed his finger at on the Rev. Jonas Clarke, minister of the town of Lexington. He concluded:

Adams and Clarke unquestionably made up a policy between themselves. Adams knew the broad strategy of the resistance, because he was at this point its sole architect. Clarke knew the men of Lexington and, what is more, could control them as no outsider could. The policy determined upon between the time of [Paul] Revere’s first alarm and of the minuteman’s first muster and the time of the actual arrival of the British troops, was for the minutemen, however outnumbered, to make a conspicuous stand but not to fire.

When Murdock had first proposed that theory, he had conceded there was no evidence for it. But in American Heritage magazine, Tourtellot noted how many documents about the skirmish at Lexington had come to light since Murdock had written. So what new evidence had convinced Tourtellot that Murdock was right, that Adams and Clarke had “unquestionably” decided the Lexington men should “make a conspicuous stand”?

Actually, none. The intervening decades had brought out lots about the British side of the march to Concord, but the documentation about the Massachusetts politicians and officers was nearly the same as it was when Murdock spoke in 1916. So to make his case, Tourtellot had to fall back on arguments like this:

Dorothy Quincy remembered that [John] Hancock went down to the Common. It can be taken as certain that, if he went, so did Samuel Adams, who would never have let him out of sight in the midst of such promising events; and Clarke would have guided them down the road from the parsonage, around the corner of the Common to Buckman’s.

Somehow Tourtellot seems more certain that Adams and Clarke visited Lexington Green than that Hancock did, even though Hancock was the only one of the three men that anyone described as going there. And just as no Lexington militiaman recalled being urged by Adams to stand in front of the regulars, no witness described Clarke as advocating that policy, either. This was still a conspiracy theory in search of supporting evidence.

But a lot of people read William Diamond’s Drum/Lexington and Concord. Overall, it’s a very good book: researched in detail, focused on individual stories as most of us readers like, and well written. Until it was superseded by David H. Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, it was the best twentieth-century book on the first day of the Revolutionary War in Massachusetts. And just as Murdock’s “informed, critical, witty” writing and his prescience about the British officers’ motivations probably convinced Tourtellot that his theory about Samuel Adams had substance, so Tourtellot’s book has probably made lots of readers and some other authors overlook the holes in his variation on that theory.

TOMORROW: An example of Tourtellot’s legacy.

Harold Murdock and the Birth of a Meme

Yesterday I introduced Harold Murdock, a Boston banker and historian who voiced some provocative new ideas about the Revolutionary War’s beginning in his 1916 essay “Historic Doubts on the Battle of Lexington.” The U.S. of A. was then having a national debate about whether to enter the World War on the side of Great Britain. It was an interesting time to argue that perhaps the British troops weren’t the villains of the skirmish at Lexington, as most previous American historians had agreed.

Here’s what Murdock asked his audience at the Massachusetts Historical Society:

And now, as we shift the scene to Lexington, let me ask if it has ever occurred to you to question the wisdom of sixty or seventy men going out and forming on the level ground of the Common, in plain sight of an advancing force of eight hundred of their enemies? . . .

How could he [Capt. John Parker] expect that sixty or seventy armed men, grouped between the meeting house and the Buckman Tavern, should fail of discovery by troops passing along the road but a few steps away, and how could he imagine that these troops would ignore them, standing as they did with shotted arms and in a posture of war? . . .

Captain Parker was a soldier of experience, and he chose a post for observation and consultation where his men would be almost brushed by the scarlet trappings of the passing enemy. . . . high land and thick woods, admirable spots for observation and consultation were close at hand, and yet Parker and his men stood quietly by the wayside inviting insult or molestation.

Has it ever occurred to you that Parker acted under orders, that the post he took was not of his choosing? Samuel Adams, the great agitator, had been a guest at Parson [Jonas] Clark’s for days, and he was the dynamo that kept the revolutionary machinery in motion. The blood shed by [Capt. Thomas] Preston’s men in King Street had been ably used by Adams to solidify the popular cause, and now did he feel that the time had come to draw once more the British fire? It is perhaps a foolish query, but it is engendered by an historic doubt. I cannot satisfy my mind that Parker was the responsible agent in the affair.

Murdock, in a nutshell, suggested a conspiracy to explain the shots at Lexington: Adams had somehow convinced or ordered Capt. Parker to put himself and his men in harm’s way so as to provoke an angry reaction from the British soldiers, and then an angrier, larger response from the provincial militia.

In 1923, Murdock included this “Lexington” essay and others in a book titled The Nineteenth of April 1775, published by Houghton Mifflin. He added a footnote to the passage quoted above:

There is no evidence to support this theory. On the other hand, there are precedents that justify suspicion.

Murdock’s precedents consisted of hints about the fights that led up to the Boston Massacre in the Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America and John Adams’s autobiography.

But those are vague hints indeed, hardly firm “precedents.” Gordon wrote of “certain persons among the leaders of the opposition,” and Adams of “designing men” spurring confrontations between citizens and soldiers. Neither writer pointed at Samuel Adams, whom they both admired and were close to. Some contemporary supporters described Adams as a voice for moderate measures—firm, unyielding, but not provocative. Other Whig leaders, such as William Molineux, were known for being close to the working-class crowds and being hot-headed, but by the twentieth century their names were largely forgotten.

Murdock wrote shortly before American historians and popular writers started to describe Adams in a new way: as an unreasonable radical, the sort of restless troublemaker who would indeed lure men to their deaths in order to bring about a war. And his theory about Lexington fit that picture, even though there was no evidence behind it.

TOMORROW: Murdock’s theory rediscovered.