Yesterday’s Posts

I’m home from Battle Road 250, at which I watched the Parker’s Revenge tactical demonstration, said hello to several excellent local reenactors, heard a fine talk by Matthew Keagle of Fort Ticonderoga, and chatted with the Emerging Revolutionary War crew.

I capped that off with dinner with Lee Wright of The Pursuit of History, discussing different possible future projects, including upcoming weekend events.

During the day I was gratified to see two big newspapers air two of my pet theories about the start of the Revolutionary War.

The Washington Post published David Kindy’s article “Who really fired the shot that started the American Revolution?” in its Retropolis section. That delves into the mysterious first shot at Lexington.

(I suspect Kindy’s editor was responsible for the subhead referring to that as “the shot heard round the world,” which was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term for the first return fire at Concord.)

Following up on a tip from me, Kindy focused on young Lexington militia man Solomon Brown.

“It’s not that I think he is definitely the man who fired first,” states historian and author J.L. Bell, who writes the daily blog Boston 1775 about the American Revolution. “But if I could go back in time, he’s the first person on my list that I would want to interrogate.”

The previous day, the same Washington Post section ran “Was a woman the informant who helped launch the American Revolution?” by Petula Dvorak. That article went over the theory advanced in the newspaper’s editorial a century ago (and circulating at least sixty years before that): that Margaret Gage leaked her husband’s plans for the Concord march to Patriot leaders.

That article prompted Dana Kennedy to write “Inside one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the American Revolution: That a woman may have kick-started the whole thing” for the New York Post.

Kennedy gave me a chance to spout off on weak points in the theory:

“I don’t think anybody actually leaked it,” Bell, who also runs the blog Boston 1775, told The Post. He believes that Joseph Warren and others had been gleaning information about British troop movements from a variety of sources and events.

“For one thing, Gage’s plan was to send troops to Concord, but Warren told them to just go to Lexington. Revere and Dawes went on to Concord on their own accord.”

If anything, Bell thinks the spy might have well been a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper. He was renting a room to a British sergeant who may have unwittingly trusted him with the army’s plans.

“Unfortunately, that story is a lot less sexy and about a person we’ve never heard of,” Bell said.

Kennedy also quotes Alexander Cain of Historical Nerdery and Emily Murphy of the Salem Maritime National Historical Site. Sensible people who, of course, are on the same side of the debate as me.

[The photo above shows a British army reenacting unit in the Lexington town parade and comes from the Pursuit of History Twitter feed.]

Counterfactual 2: If Capt. Parker Hadn’t Assembled His Company

Picking up the “what if” thread from yesterday, I turn to this question: What would have happened if neither Paul Revere nor William Dawes had arrived in Lexington in the wee hours of 19 Apr 1775?

The town would still have been at a heightened level of military alert. That afternoon a young local named Solomon Brown had ridden out from Boston—not as a messenger, but just coming home from business.

On the road Brown had spotted a bunch of other men on horseback. They looked or sounded British. When their cloaks flapped back, he saw they were carrying pistols. Brown began to suspect they were British army officers.

Everyone in Lexington knew two important politicians from Boston were staying in the Rev. Jonas Clarke’s house: John Hancock, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and Samuel Adams, delegate to the Continental Congress. Were those army officers coming out to arrest those men?

In fact, Maj. Edward Mitchell was leading about a dozen mounted officers out into the countryside to keep alarm riders from getting to Concord. That town was the only goal of Gen. Thomas Gage’s mission. Lexington was just along the way.

Not knowing that, Solomon Brown went to his militia sergeant, William Munroe (shown above). Munroe gathered “a guard of eight men, with their arms,” at the parsonage. So some Lexington militiamen were already on the alert well before hearing from Revere or Dawes.

In real life, after receiving the Bostonians’ post-midnight warning, Capt. John Parker assembled the rest of the Lexington militia company on the town common. Nothing happened, so he let the men disperse to nearby houses and taverns to catch some sleep.

But let’s imagine that Revere and Dawes never arrived. The town picked up news of the approaching column hours later from a few travelers, from hearing bells and warning shots from towns to the east.

In that case, the Lexington men might have assembled more hastily. They might have headed for where they thought they might be most needed: at the parsonage, strengthening Sgt. Munroe’s guard.

Hancock and Adams might not have had time to leave town—or Hancock might have refused to do so with more men watching. So an armed crowd would have gathered on what’s now Hancock Street, determined to prevent the troops from arresting those political leaders.

The expedition’s light infantry companies were the first to march into town. But in this scenario the men of the 10th Regiment wouldn’t have seen a body of armed men lined up on the common. They wouldn’t have felt any need to veer off to confront those men. They would have kept marching swiftly along the road to Concord, half a mile from the Hancock-Clarke house.

The two bodies of armed men might have spotted each other in the early dawn light. But they would have been too far apart for either to present any threat. The army column would probably have passed through Lexington without any incident.

Contrary to the scenario Jim Piecuch found described in Kostya Kennedy’s The Ride, Hancock and Adams would not ”have been captured or killed” because the regulars weren’t looking for them.

(Well, if Hancock had insisted on rushing to the common to confront the regulars, he might have been captured or killed. But even he wasn’t that reckless.)

TOMORROW: Alternative scenarios for Concord.

“The unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood”?

I’ve written several postings about Solomon Brown, even suggesting he might have been responsible for the first shot in Lexington on the morning of 19 Apr 1775.

There’s one source about him I haven’t been able to nail down.

In an 1880 issue of The Magazine of American History, the Rev. Horace Edwin Hayden of Pennsylvania quoted a local obituary of Solomon Brown like this:

Deacon Solomon Brown

The individual whose name heads this article, and a notice of whose death appeared in this paper, a short time since, was one of the oldest inhabitants of New Haven in this county [in Vermont], and died claiming the respect of all who knew him, for his virtues both as a man and a citizen. . . . 

Deacon Brown was a soldier of the Revolution, and bore a part in that memorable struggle, which should immortalize him in the annals of his country. He was a participator in the first battle for freedom on the plains of Lexington, and has the unrivaled honor of having shed the first British blood in defence of American liberty, at the battle of Lexington on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775.

This battle was the opening scene of the bloody drama which closed with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and in this scene the subject of this notice stands forth the most prominent actor. He wrote in blood the first word in the charter of American freedom. Let his name be registered among the noblest of his country's benefactors and heroes, and honored by posterity as the most dauntless of their heroic sires. Deacon Brown served five years in the revolution as a sergeant of artillery, and encountered all the perils and hardships of that memorable and glorious struggle. He died mourned by his friends, lamented by the church, and respected by all. 

But as to the source of that encomium, Hayden could only say: “Middlebury, Vt., Free Press, about 1830.”

Two years later, Hayden published A Biographical Sketch of Captain Oliver Brown, an Officer of the Revolutionary Army who Commanded the Party which Destroyed the Statue of George the Third. Solomon was Oliver’s younger brother, so he tagged along in that booklet. Unfortunately, Hayden’s citation only got worse with Middlebury turned into “Middleburg.”

I went looking for the newspaper article Hayden quoted. It doesn’t appear in the newspaper database I access. Furthermore, I discovered that there was no Middlebury Free Press in 1830. The printer E. D. Barber was still calling his young newspaper the Anti-Masonic Republican.

In the Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont compiled by Hiram Carleton in 1903, I found a statement that Solomon Brown died on 6 June 1837. That date does fall in the period when Barber called his newspaper the Middlebury Free Press, just before he sold out to Hamilton Drury and it became the Vermont Argus and Free Press. So we should be able to narrow the search down to the summer of 1837—if copies of the newspaper survive from then.

Another voice speaking to Solomon Brown’s primacy was Josiah Bushnell Grinnell (1821–1891, shown above). He was a U.S. Representative from Iowa and namesake of Grinnell College. In 1887 he returned to his home town of New Haven, Vermont, to deliver a historical address, later published. Grinnell stated:

Dea. Solomon Brown also lived and died here fifty years ago. To him belongs the honor of having fired the first effective shot at the red coats in the revolutionary war. I attended his funeral, at which his memorable shot was mentioned, and I just remember the story from his own lips. . . . He did not wait for orders and sighted an honest gun at a red coat spy, where was found blood, and to him belongs the honor of that first shot which “echoed round the world.”

Both Hayden and Grinnell cited the depositions collected by Elias Phinney in his 1825 History of the Battle of Lexington as supporting Brown’s claim. The evidence in that book is more equivocal.

It’s worth noting that in 1775 no British officers reported that the regulars on Lexington common suffered any wounds, and they had every reason to do so in the effort to cast blame on the provincials.

Solomon Brown might well have shot at the redcoats—he could even have been the first to do so. But that doesn’t mean his shots hit anyone.

The Later Adventures of Solomon Brown

In 2008 and 2011 I wrote about Solomon Brown of Lexington, who did as much as any individual to start the Revolutionary War in that town.

At the age of eighteen, Solomon Brown:

• spotted British army officers riding through town and alerted local militia leaders.
• volunteered to ride to Concord to warn people there, only to be stopped by those same British officers and thus to become one of the first detainees of the war.
• shot twice at the British troops from Buckman Tavern—after they fired at militia men in the common, he said, but conceivably before.

That day wasn’t Solomon Brown’s last effort in the war. In April 1777, two years after the memorable shots at Lexington, Brown enlisted in Capt. Benjamin Eustis’s company of Col. John Crane’s artillery regiment. He had the rank of sergeant. Army records described him as 5'10" tall with a light complexion.

Brown served three years in the Continental artillery, though for several months in 1777 he was reported as being sick in Boston. In November 1778, Lt. Col. Cornelius Van Dyck appointed Brown the “Conductor of Military Stores” at Fort Schuyler in New York. He remained in the army until 1 Apr 1780, when Gen. Henry Knox discharged him.

According to the short history of New Haven, Vermont, in Hamilton Child’s Gazetteer and Business Directory of Addison County, Vt., for 1881-82, “After leaving the army he remained in Nine Partners, N.Y., two years, then came to this town in 1787.” The years don’t add up, but Brown definitely settled in New Haven, bringing his first wife and child from Dutchess County to live in a log house.

Solomon Brown managed to build a brick house to replace that one before his first wife died in 1802. He remarried and had more children by his second wife. Another local chronicler said Brown “was a noted character and an honest store keeper at the foot of Beech Hill.” He held many town offices and became a church deacon. He or his namesake son, born in 1796, was active in the Anti-Masonic Party in 1831 and 1832.

Brown lived long enough to apply for a Revolutionary War pension, but his affidavit was entirely about his three years in the Continental Army, not his memorable day of militia service in 1775. He was too far away for Elias Phinney to get a first-hand statement for the History of the Battle of Lexington (1825).

Thus, the only recorded statement from Solomon Brown about the events of 18-19 April was the deposition he and his fellow detained messengers, Jonathan Loring and Elijah Sanderson, supplied to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that month. They complained about being detained by the British officers at pistol point. The three men then offered no explanation of why they had been riding to Concord in the middle of the night, nor did Brown say anything about shooting his gun at dawn.

Solomon Brown died at New Haven, Vermont, on 6 June 1837. His gravestone, shown above, states proudly that he was born at Lexington and had reached the age of “82 years & 5 months.” Among the property he left to his family “the musket from which was sent the first shot.”

Henry Knox “after about three hours perseverance”

Here’s a link to the podcast recording of my conversation with Bradley Jay of WBZ last month about Col. Henry Knox and his mission to Lake Champlain to obtain more cannon for the Continental siege lines.

And here’s a timely question about Knox: Was 12 Jan 1776 the last day that he kept his diary of his mission to bring back cannon from the Lake Champlain forts?

The diary pages are visible on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website. The last entries (pages 24-26) show Knox dealing with the Berkshire Mountains:

10th [January] reach’d [No 1,?] after have Climb’d mountains from which we might almost have seen all the Kingdoms of the Earth —

11th [January] went 12 miles thro’ the Green Woods to Blanford

It appear’d to me almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up & down such Hills as Are here with any thing of heavy loads —

11th at Blanford we overtook the first division who had tarried here untill we came up—and refus’d going any further On accott that there were no snow beyond five or six miles further in which space there was the tremendous Glasgow or Westfield mountain to go down—but after about three hours perseverance & hiring two teams of oxen—they agreed to go

On the next page are a couple of receipts, the second apparently about those “two teams of oxen” that Knox hired:

Blanford Jany. 13. 1776—
Recd of Henry Knox eighteen shillings Lawful money for Carrying a Cannon weighing 24.3 p from this Town to Westfield being 11 Miles —

Solomon Brown

It looks to me like Knox arrived in Blandford on the 11th, catching up with men and horses he’d sent ahead. That evening or the 12th, he learned that those teamsters didn’t want to proceed because the lack of snow on the ground meant the road would be rough. In addition, they faced the steep slopes now in the town of Russell.

Knox overcame that problem with “three hours” of arguing plus two ox teams from Solomon Brown (1737-1786), a war veteran and a committee member for Blandford. Brown’s gravestone appears here at Find a Grave. I’m guessing that took place on 12 January, Knox remained in Blandford awaiting another set of men, and Brown returned to sign the receipt on 13 January.

And there are no more dated entries in that notebook.

TOMORROW: Blandford in the eighteenth century.

Knox’s Oxen

Still on the broad topic of Henry Knox, Derek W. Beck has shared news of his article “No Ox for Knox?” in the July/August issue of American Revolution magazine. He writes:

My “No Ox for Knox?” article questions the famous story of Col. Henry Knox leading a team of ox-drawn sleds laden with artillery through the snowy mountains of western Massachusetts. This story is a staple of both history books and the American subconscious, and has been immortalized in at least two artworks. . . . But could it be wrong? Read the article to see my argument that Knox had no oxen after all.

I haven’t seen the magazine yet, but I assume that Derek focuses on the particular leg of Knox’s trek from Lake Champlain to Cambridge in the winter of 1775-76.

The colonel definitely used oxen to move the heavy guns south from Fort Ticonderoga, as shown by a receipt that the New England Historic and Genealogical Register published in 1876:

Recd. of Henry Knox twenty six dollars which Capt. John Johnson paid to different Carters for the use of their Cattle, in dragging Cannon from The Fort of Ticonderoga to the North Landing of Lake George

The heavy guns were then floated down the lake. Knox planned to use more oxen for the overland journey, as he wrote in his journal in mid-December (published at the same time):

I sent an Express to Squire [George] Palmer of Stillwater to prepare a number of Sleds & oxen to drag the Cannon presuming that we should get there, & on Wednesday the 13th he came up & agreed to provide the necessary number of sleds & oxen & they to be ready by the first snow.

17 December Knox wrote to Gen. George Washington about having “provided 80 yoke of oxen to drag them as far as Springfield where I shall get fresh cattle to carry them to camp.”

But then on 28 December, Knox recorded that Palmer and Gen. Philip Schuyler were still at odds on the price for those ox teams. Instead, the next day Schuyler “Sent out his Waggon Master & other people to all parts of the Country to immediately send up their slays with horses suitable.” Thereafter Knox’s journal mentions horses. John P. Becker’s memoir, The Sexagenary, briefly describes the ensuing trek from the perspective of an eleven-year-old driver, son of the man who supplied most of those horses.

But then Knox’s train came to Blandford, Massachusetts, on the eastern edge of the Berkshire Mountains. On 11 Jan 1776 he wrote:

At Blanford we overtook the first division who had tarried here untill we came up, and refus’d going any further, on accot. that there was no snow beyond five or six miles further in which space there was the tremendous Glasgow or Westfield mountain to go down. But after about three hours persuasion, I hiring two teams of oxen, they agreed to go.

Those teams are probably connected to the second receipt published with the journal:

Blanford Jany 13. 1776 Recd of Henry Knox eighteen shillings lawful money for Carrying a Cannon weighing 24C. 3 from this Town to Westfield being 11 Miles

That was signed by Solomon Brown (1737-1786). Above is his gravestone, courtesy of Find-a-Grave.

So Knox, contrary to his initial plans, didn’t need any oxen to get the cannon up the Massachusetts mountains, but he hired four to get them down. By then, the colonel was convinced of the value of horses. The Gilder-Lehrman Institute displays a 13 January letter in which Knox tells a colleague what to offer teamsters: “offer them 14/ York currency today for each Span of horses that is after they leave Springfield—After they get down the next Hill they will be able to travel much farther than Oxen.”

TOMORROW: Knox’s weather reports.

“Solomon Brown fired at them”

Yesterday I described Solomon Brown’s experience on the night of 18-19 Apr 1775: carrying news of British army officers on patrol, being captured by those officers, being released. The deposition that the teenager and two older companions signed a few days later, complaining about how those officers had detained them, leaves the impression that that’s all he did.

Indeed, the depositions that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress published in April 1775 say little about anyone resisting the British military in Lexington on the morning of the 19th. The purpose of those documents was to convince readers that the army had fired without provocation on a peaceful assembly (of armed militiamen who had been out all night).

I’ve come to approach Revolutionary depositions as usually truthful in what they say, but also prone to significant omissions. In 1775 the folks at Lexington didn’t deny firing back at the redcoats. Rather, when folks were talking with the Patriot magistrates who collected their depositions, the question just didn’t seem to come up.

In 1825 local historian Elias Phinney wanted to make the case that Lexington had been the site of the first forceful resistance against the royal troops—i.e., that the men of his town had fired back, and done at least a little damage. And young Solomon Brown turns out to have been a crucial figure in that aspect of the event as well.

Elijah Sanderson was one of the two men detained along with Solomon for several hours the previous night. Here’s part of his description of the shooting on the green for Phinney:

After our militia had dispersed, I saw them [i.e., the regulars] firing at one man, (Solomon Brown,) who was stationed behind a wall. I saw the wall smoke with the bullets hitting it. I then knew they were firing balls. After the affair was over, he told me he fired into a solid column of them, and then retreated. He was in the cow yard. The wall saved him. He legged it just about the time I went away. In a minute or two after, the British musick struck up, and their troops paraded, and marched right off for Concord.

I went home after my gun,—found it was gone. My brother had it. I returned to the meeting-house, and saw to the dead. I saw blood where the column of the British had stood when Solomon Brown fired at them. This was several rods from where any of our militia stood; and I then supposed, as well as the rest of us, that that was the blood of the British.

Abijah Harrington, one of Lexington’s representatives in the Provincial Congress, added:

A day or two after the 19th, I was telling Solomon Brown of the circumstance of my having seen blood in the road, and where it was. He then stated to me, that he fired in that direction, and the road was then full of regulars, and he thought he must have bit some of them.

A more dramatic description of the teenager’s activity in those minutes was supplied by his son G. W. Brown in 1891. This account was clearly based on decades of local writing as well as family traditions:

Solomon Brown went [from the common] to the right across the Bedford road and jumped over a stone wall. As he landed upon the ground a ball from the enemy passed through his coat, cutting his vest. Another about the same moment struck the wall. He then dropped down behind the wall until their attention was drawn from him.

He then took a circuit in their rear around to the Buckman tavern, where he supposed many of the company had taken refuge, entered the back door, and on going over the house found no one except the pedler [named Allen], who was for a short time prisoner with him on the Concord road the night previous.

He then went to the front door and opened it, when to his surprise the rear portion of the enemy stood in his front, the army having made a halt. No sooner had he stepped in the open door-way than a bullet from an enemy’s gun struck the doorpost about midway. Another following it struck the door near the top.

He then stepped back a little, placed his gun near the muzzle against the door casing, aimed at an officer standing in the ranks of the enemy and fired. Not waiting to see the result he hastened through the house and out at the back door where he entered and made a hasty retreat through the fields.

Being discovered by the enemy, a shower of bullets went whizzing by him until he had reached a distance of some forty rods, when he slipped and fell, and although his clothing bore testimony of the close proximity of some of their bullets, not one marred his person.

And as long as we’re talking about firing from Buckman’s tavern, here’s a detail that militia sergeant William Munroe gave to Phinney:

The front platoon [of the regulars], consisting of eight or nine, then fired, without killing or wounding any of our men. They immediately gave a second fire, when our company began to retreat, and, as I left the field, I saw a person firing at the British troops from Buckman’s back door, which was near our left, where I was parading the men when I retreated. I was afterward told, of the truth of which I have no doubt, that the same person, after firing from the back door, went to the front door of Buckman’s house, and fired there.

How do we reconcile the details of these accounts? G. W. Brown was probably mistaken about his father having lined up on the green; earlier accounts don’t suggest Solomon was among those men. Instead, the teenager appears to have been all around Buckman’s tavern (shown above, courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society).

Phinney concluded that Solomon had fired “from a wall” in the front of the tavern, and that a different person had fired from its back door. But the Brown family came to understand that he had been at the back door before going inside to fire from the front. And Munroe understood that one man had fired from both spots—meaning at different times.

Apparently Solomon did something to attract the redcoats’ fire early on—which brings us to the report of Lt. William Sutherland that the first shot had come “from the Corner of a house to the right of the Church”—i.e., Buckman’s tavern. Another curious detail is Solomon’s surprise at opening the front door of the tavern and finding part of the army massed in front of him. If they had been shooting at him already, even from the green, why was he surprised?

Did regulars shoot at Solomon for a while before he went into the tavern, as he shot from the front door, and then again after he ran out the back? Did the British rear guard shoot at Solomon separate from the first companies on the common? Does that fit with descriptions of how long the firing lasted?

All the accounts from Lexington state that Solomon Brown didn’t fire until after the regulars had begun the shooting. But of course that’s what they would say. What if Solomon fired the first shot, then ran through the tavern and fired another, and finally “legged it” as bullets flew around him?

If so, it’s easy to understand why. Solomon Brown was eighteen. He’d seen armed officers slipping into his town. He’d been captured at gunpoint and held by those officers for several hours in the middle of the night, deprived of his horse (or his minister’s horse), and left to race back home. For this teenager, the war might already have started.

Then again, the first shot at Lexington could have come from someone whose name has been forgotten, or could have been an accidental discharge that the regulars interpreted as an attack. I’m not convinced Solomon Brown bears any responsibility. But he’s the first guy I’d want to take a deposition from.

Solomon Brown Stays Out Late

In April 1775, Solomon Brown was an eighteen-year-old growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of a local deacon. He was also crucial in at least one way the momentous confrontation between the town’s militia company and the British military on the 19th of that month.

On the 18th, Solomon visited Boston, and early in the evening he stopped into William Munroe’s tavern (shown above) to tell Munroe, a sergeant in the Lexington militia, that on the way home:

he had seen nine British officers on the road, travelling leisurely, sometimes before and sometimes behind him; that he had discovered, by the occasional blowing aside of their top coats, that they were armed.

That quotation comes from Munroe’s testimony decades later. He said that he immediately assembled a small squad to guard the parsonage where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying because Patriots widely (but wrongly) thought the royal authorities intended to arrest those men.

Meanwhile, Solomon went on to Buckman’s tavern near the center of town and repeated what he had seen. Elijah Sanderson recalled:

After some conversation among the citizens assembled there, an old gentleman advised, that some one should follow those officers, and endeavour to ascertain their object. I then observed, that, if any one would let me have a horse, I would go in pursuit. Thaddeus Harrington told me, I might take his, which was there. I took his, and Solomon Brown proposed to accompany me on his own horse. Jonathan Loring also went with us. We started, probably, about nine o’clock…

According to an 1891 profile of Solomon Brown by his son, the teenager at first objected that he had “had his horse in use through the day, when Minister [Jonas] Clark replied to him that he would be provided for, and soon led out his own horse saddled and bridled for his use.” That profile conflicts with contemporaneous sources on some points, but this seems like an odd detail for the family to make up.

In any event, the three Lexington men set off to the west. After about an hour they saw the British officers. Unfortunately for them, those officers saw them first. According to Sanderson, “One rode up and seized my bridle, and another my arm, and one put his pistol to my breast, and told me, if I resisted, I was a dead man.”

The officers, under the command of Maj. Edward Mitchell, made the three men dismount in a wooded area of Lincoln. They held Solomon and his companions for hours, questioning them repeatedly. In 1775 the men complained that their captors “searched and greatly abused them,” but decades later Sanderson recalled the questioning as persistent but civil. It was a pleasant night, but still not a pleasant experience.

By 2:15 A.M., according to Sanderson, the officers had added two more detainees: “Allen, a one-handed pedlar,” and Paul Revere. However, the British failed to stop Dr. Samuel Prescott from getting past the patrol on the back trails to Concord.

The Lexington men heard Revere tell Mitchell that the provincial militia had already been alerted to their army’s march. This was apparently a last-ditch attempt to make the British field commanders call off the mission, and it had some effect. The officers decided to rendezvous with the column marching west.

Mitchell ordered Solomon and the other detainees back on their horses, and they all rode east “at considerable speed.” As they approached Lexington, there was a burst of gunfire up ahead—perhaps militiamen discharging their guns before going into Buckman’s tavern for a late-night refreshment or nap. The officers stopped to confer—was the column being attacked?

Maj. Mitchell decided to let all their prisoners go. The Lexington men testified in 1775 that the officers “cut the horses’ bridles, and girths, turned them loose, and then left us,” heading for Lexington. Now it was the locals’ turn to worry about an attack—what would those officers do when they got to the center of town? Sanderson recalled:

We then turned off to pass through the swamp, through the mud and water, intending to arrive at the meeting-house before they could pass, to give information to our people.

The men saw the officers arrive at the town meeting-house, but then ride on to the east. Solomon Brown and his companions went into Buckman’s tavern to describe their experiences.

TOMORROW: Shooting and being shot at.

The First Detainees of the War?

Three days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress formed a committee to collect depositions of what had happened on 18-19 Apr 1775. Political activists on both sides had likewise collected such sworn testimony after the Boston Massacre in 1770 and other disputed events.

Here’s the first of those depositions as they were eventually printed, written down and sworn to at Lexington on 25 April:

We, Solomon Brown, Jonathan Loring, and Elijah Sanderson, all of lawful Age, and of Lexington, in the County of Middlesex, and Collony of the Massachusett Bay, in New England, do testifie and declare, that on the evening of the Eighteenth of April, Instant [i.e., this year], being on the Road between Concord and Lexington, and all of us mounted on Horses, we were, about ten of the Clock, suddenly surprized by nine Persons, whom we took to be Regular [i.e., army] Officers, who Rode up to us, mounted and armed, each having a Pistol in His Hand, and after Putting Pistols to our Breasts, and seizing the Bridles of our Horses, they swore, that if we stirred another step, we should be all Dead Men, upon which we surrendered our selves.

They Detained us until Two o’Clock the next morning, in which tune they searched and greatly abused us; having first enquired about the Magazine at Concord, whether any Guards were posted there, and whether the bridges were up, and said four or five Regiments of Regulars would be in Possession of the stores soon; they then brought us back to Lexington, cut the Horses Bridles and Girts, turned them Loose, and then Left us.

SOLOMON BROWN,

JONATHAN LORING,

ELIJAH SANDERSON.

What an outrage against British and American liberty! Young men detained at pistol point on threat of death—their horses taken away—all by officers of a standing army!

Yet somehow these three deponents have managed to leave out some details:

• Just why they were riding between Lexington and Concord at 10:00 at night.
• Anyone else who was detained by the same British officers during the next four hours—in particular, a man who’d come all the way to Lexington from Boston named Paul Revere.
• What they did after they were released from army custody.

In other words, this deposition was probably the truth and nothing but the truth; it just wasn’t the whole truth.

Brown was eighteen years old in 1775, Loring twenty-six, and Sanderson probably twenty-four. They would all live into the next century, and two would eventually say more about their experiences on the first day of the Revolutionary War. I’ll be quoting more from and about them.

“The Regulars Are Coming Out.”

In 1825, Elias Phinney published his History of the Battle of Lexington. As that little book’s title implies, Phinney argued that the shooting on Lexington green at dawn on 19 Apr 1775 was not one-sided and irregular but the first fight of the Revolutionary War. (A local historian from Concord disagreed, naturally.)

Phinney had gathered several legal depositions from current and former residents of Lexington who recalled the royal troops shooting, and themselves or their neighbors shooting back. Back in 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had published similar depositions—including some from the same men—that described only the British firing. That booklet didn’t explicitly deny the possibility that some locals had fired back, but it described an unprovoked and furious redcoat attack.

Phinney’s depositions also offered some other previously unreported details of the events in Lexington on 18-19 April, including what Paul Revere actually said (to one man, at least) about the approaching British soldiers. According to the militia sergeant in command at the Lexington parsonage, Revere didn’t say, “The British are coming.” Here’s the start of that man’s deposition:

I, William Munroe, of Lexington, on oath do testify, that I acted as orderly sergeant in the company commanded by Capt. John Parker, on the 19th of April, 1775; that, early in the evening of the 18th of the same April, I was informed by Solomon Brown, who had just returned from Boston, that he had seen nine British officers on the road, travelling leisurely, sometimes before and sometimes behind him; that he had discovered, by the occasional blowing aside of their top coats, that they were armed.

On learning this, I supposed they had some design upon [John] Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, who were then at the house of the Rev. Mr. [Jonas] Clark, and immediately assembled a guard of eight men, with their arms, to guard the house.

About midnight, Col. Paul Revere rode up and requested admittance. I told him the family had just retired, and had requested, that they might not be disturbed by any noise about the house. “Noise!” said he, “you’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out.” We then permitted him to pass.

Soon after, Mr. Lincoln came. These gentlemen came different routes. Revere came over the ferry to Charlestown, and Lincoln over the neck through Roxbury; and both brought letters from Dr. [Joseph] Warren in Boston to Hancock and Adams, stating, that a large body of British troops had left Boston, and were on their march to Lexington. On this, it was thought advisable, that Hancock and Adams should withdraw to some distant part of the town.

Munroe called Revere a colonel because that was the title the silversmith received later in the Revolution. He misunderstood how Revere had crossed the Charles River, saying he’d come “over the ferry” rather than rowing himself along the ferry’s approximate route. And Revere didn’t mention Dr. Warren sending letters to Hancock and Adams; he delivered the warning orally. As for “Mr. Lincoln,” that was apparently how Munroe remembered William Dawes.

We can therefore ask whether Munroe quoted Revere accurately. “The regulars are coming out” certainly sounds right for early 1775, though.