Beck’s Blow-by-Blow Analysis

A century after Frank Warren Coburn shared his conclusions about which town militia companies fought the British troops at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Derek W. Beck produced a new analysis.

Coburn sorted out the action by the towns where fighting occurred. In Igniting the American Revolution, 1773–1775, Beck focused more closely on individual skirmishes. Here’s his analysis about which towns’ companies joined the fighting and where.

• North Bridge (Concord): Concord, Acton, Bedford, Lincoln
• Meriam’s Corner (Concord): Billerica, Chelmsford, Reading
• Brook’s Tavern/Hill (still Concord): Framingham, Sudbury
• “Bloody Angle” (Lincoln): Woburn
• “Parker’s Revenge” (Lincoln/Lexington line): Lexington
• Fiske Hill (Lexington): Cambridge
• Menotomy (then Cambridge, now Arlington): Menotomy, Medford, Malden, Lynn, Beverly, Danvers
• Watson’s Corner (Cambridge): Brookline, Roxbury, Dedham, Needham

Coburn listed the Watertown company as entering the fray in Arlington. Beck described those men following an order from Gen. William Heath and sticking near the bridge over the Charles River in Cambridge. In his memoir, Heath wrote (speaking of himself in the third person):

From the committee, he took a cross road to Watertown, the British being in possession of the Lexington road. At Watertown, finding some militia who had not marched, but applied for orders, he sent them down to Cambridge, with directions to take up the planks, barricade the south end of the bridge, and there to take post; that, in case the British should, on their return, take that road to Boston, their retreat might be impeded.

Watertown had an unusually large number of men under Capt. Samuel Barnard, so it’s possible some of them went into the fight on the north side of the Charles while others held the bridge. But Col. Percy avoided any confrontation at the river by turning east from Cambridge toward Charlestown. (Beck suggests the Watertown men might have then come up from the bridge to fight.)

Another town Coburn listed as taking part in the battle but Beck found no place for is Newton. Coburn wrote that three Newton companies joined the fight at Lexington, citing mainly Samuel F. Smith’s town history.

Smith gave a lot of space to a narrative passed down in the Jackson family, which actually says the Newton men started fighting in Concord and carried on all the way to when the redcoats got into their boats at Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge—which never happened.

However, Smith and another local historian, Francis Jackson, also printed a story about Capt. Jeremiah Wiswall’s company, how his seventy-five-year-old father insisted on marching along, and how the old man was shot in the hand. I quoted those passages back here.

It strikes me as potentially significant that two of the Newton companies said they “Marched from Newton to head quarters at Cambridge” while the third, Capt. Wiswall’s, went “upon the Alarm in Newton to Lexington.” That third muster roll includes “Mr. Noah Wiswall,” the captain’s father. Contemporaneous accounts do list Noah Wiswall among the wounded provincials.

All told, I therefore lean toward including Capt. Wiswall’s Newton company among the units that actually engaged the British troops in either east Lexington or west Cambridge. I’m not sure about the other two seeing combat, and the muster rolls contradict the Jackson family tradition.

[Full disclosure: I’m from Newton.]

Ceremony for Noah Wiswall of Newton, 7 Sept.

Noah Wiswall of Newton was born in 1699, but age didn’t stop him from turning out during the militia alarm on 19 Apr 1775. In his Life of the Rev. Joseph Grafton, Late Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Newton, MS. (1849), S. F. Smith recorded this tradition from a descendant:

After the companies of men, including his own sons, had gone towards Cambridge, he started on foot and alone to follow them, on the day of the battle of Lexington, saying, “I wish to see what the boys are doing.”

Standing with some Americans not far from the field, three British soldiers came in sight. He immediately pointed them out to his companions, saying, “if you aim at the middle one, you will hit one of the three.” The American did so and was successful; the other two fled.

But that which was remarkable is that as he held out his hand to point towards the Britons, a ball fired from some quarter passed directly through it. He coolly bound up the hand with his handkerchief, picked up the gun of the fallen regular, and returned home with it as a trophy.

Francis Jackson’s History of the Early Settlement of Newton, published five years later, quotes that anecdote and adds of Wiswall:

He was Selectman three years; one of the early Baptists in Newton, having been bap. 1754, and one of the founders of the Baptist Ch. in Newton, 1780. The first meetings of the Ch. were held at his dwelling house [near Crystal Lake]. He gave the land on which their first M. H. was erected. . . .

He was then [in 1775] 76 years old: It may seem incredible that a man of his years could have performed the march and endured the fatigues of that day, but the roll of the East Newton company, in the battle of Lexington, now in the office of the Sec. of State, of Mass., and sworn to by the Capt. of that company, before Judge Fuller, shows that he was with the company, and not only he, but Ebenezer Parker, then 78 years old, and Dea. Jonas Stone, Dea. David Stone, Dea. William Bowles, and several other aged men, were volunteers in the ranks of the company on that day.

Wiswall was the only Newton man whom the Massachusetts Provincial Congress listed as wounded on the first day of the war. He survived the whole war and died in 1786.

On 7 September, there will be a ceremony at the Wiswall Tomb in Newton’s South Burying Ground on Winchester Street. This is meant to honor Wiswall and disabled American veterans (though I don’t see anything in the traditions to suggest that Wiswall considered himself disabled by his wound). The event is open to the public, and Gardner’s Regiment of reenactors will be among the honor guards.