Ens. DeBerniere’s Last Trip to Concord

Ens. Henry DeBerniere went back to Concord on the British army expedition of 18-19 April.

Indeed, DeBerniere probably served as a close advisor to the mission’s commander, Lt. Col. Francis Smith (shown here). The young officer had been to the town the previous month, had learned about the cannon at James Barrett’s farm, and was in Smith’s own 10th Regiment.

After the column reached central Concord, DeBerniere led Capt. Lawrence Parsons of the 10th Regiment with “six light-companies” farther across the North Bridge to Barrett’s. The ensign wrote afterward, “we did not find so much as we expected, but what there was we destroyed.”

The serious action, DeBerniere came to learn, was back at the bridge, where Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie of the 43rd, whom he called “Capt. Lowry,” and three companies “were attacked by about 1500 rebels.” (As usual, people tended to overestimate the enemy’s numbers.)

In that fight, “three officers were wounded and one killed” along with three soldiers DeBerniere didn’t name. He counted Lt. Edward Hull of the 43rd as “killed.” In fact, Hull was merely wounded at the bridge but wounded again while riding in a carriage to Boston. He finally died in provincial custody on 2 May, which suggests that DeBerniere wrote his account at least two weeks after the battle.

During that exchange of fire at the bridge, Parsons, DeBerniere, and those six companies were still up at Barrett’s farm, searching. The ensign wrote of the local militia:

they let Capt. Parsons with his three companies return, and never attacked us; they had taken up some of the planks of the bridge, but we got over; had they destroyed it we were most certainly all lost; however, we joined the main body.

Actually, Laurie’s men had taken up planks of the bridge. But it’s true that those provincial companies didn’t try to cut off the search party, waiting until all the British forces had left the center of Concord before attacking. (Parsons reported that at least one of the soldiers killed at the bridge was “scalped,” but DeBerniere said nothing about that.)

Elsewhere in Concord, Ens. DeBerniere noted, that “Capt. [Mundy] Pole of 10th regiment…knock’d the trunnions off three iron 24 pound cannon and burnt their carriages.” These guns were the only provincial artillery left in Concord, possibly because they belonged to the town and possibly because they were just too darn big to move.

DeBerniere’s report continued with a description of the British withdrawal under fire; “there could not be less than 5000…rebels,” he now guessed.

we at first kept our order and returned their fire as hot as we received it, but when we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act [as flankers], and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward, made a great confusion;

Col. Smith (our commanding-officer) had received a wound through his leg, a number of officers were also wounded so that we began to run rather than retreat in order—the whole behaved with amazing bravery, but little order; we attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened:

At last, after we got through [into] Lexington, the officers got to the front and presented their bayonets, and told the men if they advanced they should die: Upon this they began to form under a very heavy fire

Finally Col. Percy arrived with fresh troops and two field-pieces. That changed the balance of power, and the regulars resumed withdrawing east in more orderly fashion. But there was heavy fighting in Menotomy:

out of these houses they kept a very heavy fire, but our troops broke into them and killed vast numbers; the soldiers shewed great bravery in this place, forceing houses from whence came a heavy fire, and killing great numbers of the rebels.

Around seven o’clock, DeBerniere wrote, the army column reached Charlestown. There the soldiers “took possession of a hill that commanded the town,” the soon-to-be-famous Bunker’s Hill. The town’s selectmen, who were strong Whigs but didn’t want their homes consumed by fire and sword, sent a message to Col. Percy saying

if he would not attack the town, they would take care that the troops should not be molested, and also they would do all in their power for to get us across the ferry;

the Somerset man of war lay there at that time, and all her boats were employed first in getting over the wounded, and after them the rest of the troops; the piquets of 10th regiment, and some more troops, were sent over to Charlestown that night to keep every thing quiet, and returned next day.

Thus ended Ens. DeBerniere’s third and last journey into the Massachusetts countryside.

COMING UP: DeBerniere’s papers.

“They came three thousand miles and died”

So how many British soldiers died at the North Bridge in Concord? How many were buried nearby? Those questions have answers, but not definite ones.

As I quoted earlier in the week, one of the British officers there, Lt. William Sutherland, described leaving two men “dead on the Spot.” But Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie reported losing three men overall. And Capt. Lawrence Parsons reportedly saw three men dead at the bridge as he later passed that spot—or was that count influenced by Laurie’s report?

When Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis, Jr., described burying corpses of the regulars who died at the bridge, they said “neither” had been scalped, suggesting there were two. But their testimony was probably selective. Had another corpse already been moved away?

In 1827, Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote that in the firing at the North Bridge “Two of the British were killed and several wounded,” with the dead still lying “near the bridge” when their comrades returned from Col. James Barrett’s. Furthermore:

The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot were they were laid. Their names were unknown. Several others were buried in the middle of the town.

Ripley wrote nothing about Ammi White and his hatchet.

In his 1835 history of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that “Three British soldiers were killed” at the bridge, but only two were “left on the ground” there and later interred nearby. “One of the wounded died and was buried where Mr. Keyes’s house stood,” Shattuck added. Many later authors have therefore written that two British soldiers were killed immediately at the bridge and another badly wounded, making it back to the center of Concord before dying there.

And who were the “Several others” that Ripley said were interred in central Concord? Shattuck reported that one was Pvt. John Bateman, who died under the care of Dr. John Cuming “at the house then standing near Captain Stacy’s”—Daniel Bliss’s house, according to other authors. (This despite Bateman giving a deposition in Lincoln, not Concord, on 23 Apr 1775.) Bateman “was buried on the hill,” Shattuck wrote.

Don Hagist has reported that Bateman was a grenadier in the 52nd Regiment. The companies at the bridge came from the 4th, 10th, and 43rd. So Bateman must have been fatally wounded in the British withdrawal from Concord, not at the bridge. (It’s notable that some founding settlers of Concord were named Bateman; perhaps people of that town brought him back out of some feeling of kinship.)

According to Shattuck, therefore, there were four British soldiers buried at three sites in Concord soon after 19 Apr 1775. According to Ripley, there might have been “Several others,” but that’s too vague to track down.

TOMORROW: Commemorations and looking for names.

British Corpses at the North Bridge

I’m returning to the Battle of Lexington and Concord for another series of essays. Later this week I’ll post some work by another researcher that I’ve been hoping to share for years. But first I want to lay the groundwork for that.

In the middle of the morning on 19 Apr 1775, three British army companies were holding the North Bridge in Concord while three others had marched to James Barrett’s farm to search for cannon, gunpowder, and other military stores.

The soldiers around the bridge were from the light infantry companies of the 4th, 10th, and 43rd Regiments. On a rise above them was a mass of provincial militia.

Aroused by the sight of smoke from the center of town, those provincial companies began to march down to the bridge. The king’s soldiers became alarmed. Some fired at the advancing men. The provincials fired back.

Lt. William Sutherland of the 38th Regiment, who had volunteered to accompany this mission, later wrote that he was wounded and withdrew under fire, “leaving two of those that turned out with me dead on the Spot, one of which I am told they afterwards Scalped.”

That claim of scalping came from the British soldiers who were at Barrett’s farm and marched back across the bridge some time later, after both sides had withdrawn from that spot. Capt. John Gaspard Battier of the 5th’s light company recorded this testimony:

Corpl. Gordon, Thos. Lugg, Wm. Lewis, Charles Carrier & Richd. Grimshaw in the presence of Captn. Battier of the 5th. Light Company do solemnly declare, when they were returning to Join the Grenadiers they saw a Man belonging to the Light Company of the 4th. regiment with the Skin over his Eye’s Cut and also the Top part of His Ears cut off

That’s one of the very few accounts of this battle that the British army gathered from its enlisted men.

News of that atrocity spread among the redcoats. Capt. Edward Thoroton Gould, taken prisoner in the afternoon, later testified that he’d heard the report “From a captain that advanced up the country.” Lt. Sutherland included it in his report for Gen. Thomas Gage, signed on 26 April. Ens. Jeremy Lister, writing after 1782, recalled seeing four soldiers’ bodies mutilated, clearly an exaggeration.

Soon after the battle Gen. Gage published a broadside offering a “Circumstantial Account of an Attack…on his Majesty’s troops,” which stated:

When Capt. [Lawrence] Parsons returned with the three companies over the bridge, they observed three soldiers on the ground; one of them scalped, his head much mangled, and his ears cut off, though not quite dead; a sight which struck the soldiers with horror.

Sutherland remembered two soldiers “dead on the Spot” while Parsons and his men saw three. The officer in charge of the British men at the bridge, Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie, later reported three privates killed, though he didn’t write when and where they died or where he’d last seen their bodies. Laurie didn’t write about a scalping—he reported only what he’d personally seen, and that attack allegedly happened after he’d led his surviving men back to Concord center. But plenty of other soldiers saw a mutilated corpse of one of their comrades.

TOMORROW: Burying the evidence.

The Real Fight at Concord Bridge

The thumbnail image to the right is N. C. Wyeth’s “Fight at Concord Bridge.” It shows Concord’s “embattled farmers,” apparently standing athwart the town’s North Bridge, blocking the British troops.

In the same spirit is this painting, which allposters.com doesn’t credit to a particular artist. The site labels it “American Minutemen Fight to Hold Off the British Army at Concord Bridge, April 10, 1775.” That’s not only nine days early, but misrepresents how the fighting at the North Bridge in Concord went down.

Many people conceive of that skirmish as the local militiamen taking a stand on the bridge and refusing to let the British troops cross. In fact, the two forces’ movements were much more complicated.

When Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s British expedition came into view east of Concord, the militia companies assembled in town turned and marched west, away from the regular troops and across that North Bridge. They took positions on high ground that overlooked the Concord River, eventually ending up more or less where the North Bridge Visitor Center is now.

Lt. Col. Smith sent seven companies of light infantrymen to that bridge. Four of those companies crossed and went two miles beyond to search the farm of militia colonel James Barrett, where Gen. Thomas Gage had heard (correctly) that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had hidden weapons. The militia didn’t try to block that search party. Three other British companies remained near the bridge, on either side of the Concord River, in order to guard their comrades’ withdrawal route.

The regulars down by the river watched the militia up on the rise. The militiamen, numbers growing, watched the regulars. The situation was so static that one English-born farmer from Lincoln, James Nichols, walked down the hill to talk to the soldiers, then walked back up and said he was done for the day—he wasn’t interested in fighting his countrymen.

Then some men on the hill spotted smoke from the center of Concord. The grenadiers there had found some cannon carriages and extra wheels, piled them up, and set them on fire. The flames threatened the town house. Officers ordered soldiers to douse the fire, but by then it had done too much damage—not to the building, but to the stalemate back at the bridge.

Lt. Joseph Hosmer asked Col. Barrett, “Will you let them burn the town down?” After hearing from other officers, the militia colonel ordered an advance. Two militia regiments began to march down toward the bridge and the three British companies guarding it.

Clearly outnumbered, those regulars withdrew to the town side of the bridge and started to take up the planks to keep the militia regiments from crossing. To the locals, that looked like more property destruction. Men shouted down at the redcoats, and the militia companies kept marching.

As Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie and Lt. William Sutherland tried to get the British soldiers in formation to protect themselves, three soldiers fired without orders. Capt. Isaac Davis and Pvt. Abner Hosmer of Acton were killed, and four other men were wounded. The provincials fired back, hitting four British officers, killing three privates and wounding five more. The redcoats retreated at a run back to the center of Concord.

Thus, the “embattled farmers” of Middlesex County weren’t trying to keep the redcoats from crossing the Concord River—it was the other way ’round!

TOMORROW: In pulling back from the North Bridge, the British left four companies cut off behind enemy lines. What happened to them?

Finding Dr. Joseph Warren’s Head

Yesterday I quoted Abigail Adams’s 31 July 1775 letter complaining that British officers had cut the head off Dr. Joseph Warren’s corpse after they found it on the battlefield of Bunker Hill. Of course, Adams was living in Braintree, and had no firsthand knowledge of what went on in army-occupied Charlestown or Boston. She was angrily recounting what unstated sources told her that a recent British deserter had said. How strong is that letter as evidence that Warren was indeed posthumously beheaded?

Adams herself knew that a defector’s report might not be reliable. In the paragraph just before the passage about Warren’s head, she wrote:

5 deserters having come into our camp. One of them is gone I hear to Phyladelphia. I think I should be cautious of him—no one can tell the secret designs of such fellows whom no oath binds—he may be sent with assassinating designs. I can credit any viliny that a Ceasar Borgea would have been guilty of—or Satan himself would rejoice in.

Furthermore, it seems significant that I can’t find any mention of Warren’s decapitation in newspapers of the time, in other people’s letters, or in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress report on the battle. Patriots were seizing any opening to complain about British cruelty, including the treatment of prisoners of war captured in Charlestown, so they wouldn’t have kept secret about this event if the evidence were strong.

What’s more, Adams and her family stopped mentioning Dr. Warren’s severed head after this letter, though their letters and memoirs contain many remarks about their late friend and physician. None of the early American histories of the Revolution repeat the report. The Warren family published multiple memoirs in the 1800s without lamenting their honored ancestor’s decapitation. Richard Frothingham didn’t include the detail in his 1865 biography of the doctor, though he did say that Warren’s “coat was sold by a soldier in Boston.”

Furthermore, we have firsthand information about the treatment of Dr. Warren’s body from the man put in charge of burying it. In a letter dated 23 June 1775, Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie described giving the enemy leader a swift and humble burial on the battlefield:

Doctor Warren, President of the Provincial Congress, and Captain General, in the Absence of [John] Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, and next to Adams, in abilities, I found among the Slain, and stuffed the Scoundrel with another Rebel, into one hole, and there he, and his seditious principles may remain

Laurie had no reason to treat Warren’s corpse well, but also no impetus to lie to his friends about how he’d treated it. His letter contradicts what Abigail Adams later heard on two points. Not only did he say nothing about decapitation, but he also said he’d buried the doctor with one other body; Adams understood there were “many bodies over him”—or at least over his headless corpse.

Finally, the most commonly related story about Dr. Warren’s body is that, after the British evacuation, occasional dentist Paul Revere identified it by recognizing a false tooth he had made for the doctor. It would be awfully hard to identify a body by its false teeth if the whole head has been buried separately. Furthermore, in 1776 Bostonians reportedly found Warren’s body in a grave with one other corpse, agreeing with Laurie’s account instead of Adams’s rumor. It had been “stripped of its covering,” which supports the accounts that British soldiers took Warren’s clothing, but not his body parts.

Assessing this rumor offers a chance to highlight one difference between the Massachusetts Historical Society’s two online databases of Adams family letters. The Adams Electronic Archive offers a look at Abigail Adams’s handwritten letter, with a transcript. The Founding Families Adams Papers offers a transcription plus the published edition’s notes, which say: “AA is reporting only a part of the rumors that circulated then and later about British indignities to Joseph Warren after his death in Bunker Hill battle.” Those notes go on to quote the Laurie letter as more reliable.

One odd treatment of this rumor is in John Cary’s 1964 biography of Warren. It says that some British officers wanted to decapitate the doctor, but a Freemason among them stopped them. In essence, Cary decided that the deserter’s story about cutting off Warren’s head was entirely reliable—except for the actual cutting-off-the-head. That seems like an odd way to combine historical evidence. It’s as if one dubious source says George Washington was in Vermont on a particular date, and all other sources say he was in New Hampshire, so an author concludes that he was in New Hampshire but thinking about going to Vermont that whole day.

Dr. Joseph Warren's Body: the second identification

The first thing that British army officers did after identifying Dr. Joseph Warren among the corpses on Bunker Hill was to search his body. They discovered letters that had come out of Boston, and soon the men who wrote those letters were under arrest.

One officer noted that Warren had “died in his best cloaths: every body remembered his fine silk-fringed waistcoat.” (In 1780 this man’s letters were published in The Detail and Conduct of the American War, a critical analysis of the conflict by a soldier who had fought in it, of the sort that we’re seeing again now.)

Then it was time to bury the doctor’s corpse. Capt. Walter Sloane Laurie, who had been in command at the North Bridge in Concord, was in charge of the burial detail. On 23 June he wrote that he had “stuffed the scoundrell with another into one hole and there he and his seditious principles may remain.” The fact that Warren had been buried with one other provincial, a detail also recalled by some locals, became significant after the British army left Boston in March 1776 and the doctor’s survivors went looking for his corpse.

William H. Sumner (1780-1861; shown above, courtesy of the Jamaica Plain Historical Society) wrote his “Reminiscences relating to General Warren and Bunker Hill” in two stages: a letter to a newspaper in 1825 and a longer paper in 1857, published in the New England Historical & Genealogical Register for 1858. About the identification of Warren’s corpse in 1776 he wrote:

Gen. Warren’s body had mouldered in the grave for ten months, when it was disinterred. . . . After the evacuation of Boston, Warren’s friends were informed where he was buried. This was not as “Historian” [someone who had written to the Boston Patriot in July 1825, who Sumner thought was Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846)] says it was, “with the promiscuous slain, in the common trench of the dead;” though it was in the same grave with a person with a frock on. Warren’s body was found stripped of its covering, while the other was buried in its common habiliments.

Mr. [Jonathan] Clark,...as well as another soldier whose name I have forgotten, was here on the 17th, who assisted at the exhumation in the presence of the Doctor’s two brothers, who were satisfied of the identity of the body, by many circumstances which they detailed. If stronger evidence of its identity were wanting, that afforded by Col. [Paul] Revere, who set the artificial tooth, (which “Historian” says led to the “mere conjecture” that it was Warren’s body,) and who recollected the wire he used in fastening it in, would afford it.

One thing, however, is certain; that the skull was perforated by a musket ball in the upper part of the head, in such a place, as I am informed by professional gentlemen, would probably have produced sudden, though it might not instant death.

Revere’s identification of Dr. Warren’s corpse is said to be one of the first examples of forensic dentistry in American history. But Dr. John Jeffries claimed to have used the same clue of the false tooth in the same way ten months before.

TOMORROW: Dr. Warren’s corpse moves—but where are the photographs?