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.

Washington on Franklin on Gage on Lexington

In 1789, President George Washington went on a tour (I might even say a progress) through the northern United States.

This is how he recorded his travel through Massachusetts in his diary on Thursday, 5 November:

About sunrise I set out, crossing the Merrimack River at the town, over to the township of Bradford, and in nine miles came to Abbot’s tavern, in Andover, where we breakfasted, and met with much attention from Mr. [Samuel] Phillips, President of the Senate of Massachusetts, who accompanied us through Bellariki to Lexington, where I dined, and viewed the spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with Great Britain, on the 19th of April, 1775. Here I parted with Mr. Phillips, and proceeded on to Watertown, intending (as I was disappointed by the weather and bad roads from travelling through the Interior Country to Charlestown, on Connecticut River,) to take what is called the middle road from Boston.

Washington didn’t mention where he dined in Lexington, but other sources confirm that it was at the tavern of William Munroe, who had been a militia sergeant back in April 1775. That building is now one of the museums of the Lexington Historical Society.

The President’s travelogue sounds rather dry, but this item in the 7 Jan 1790 Berkshire Chronicle suggests he was actually in a cheerful mood:

ANECDOTE.
When the President of the United States, in his late tour, was at Lexington, viewing the field where the first blood was shed in the late war; he with a degree of good humor, told his informant, that the Britons complained to Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, of the ill usage their troops met with at Lexington battle, by the Yankies getting behind the stone walls, and firing at them. The Doctor replied, by asking them whether there were not two sides to the wall?

Well, it’s not exactly Abraham Lincoln’s joke about Ethan Allen, but we rarely get to hear Washington tell funny stories at all.

Washington’s comment echoes a poem published in the 27 Nov 1775 Boston Gazette called “The King’s Own Regulars.” Written in the voice of the redcoats, it includes this couplet about Gen. Thomas Gage:

Of their firing from behind fences, he makes a great pother,
Ev’ry fence has two sides; they made use of one, and we only forgot to use the other.

The following spring, Charles Carroll described this poem to his wife as “a song made by Dr. Franklin.” It looks like Franklin might have written those lines while visiting Gen. Washington in Cambridge in October 1775, then left them behind for the local press. And President Washington remembered the doctor’s pithy point years later.

“Paul Revere never made the midnight ride”?

A lot of legend grew up around the American Revolution in the late 1800s, and Henry W. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” made the events of 18-19 Apr 1775 especially famed and susceptible to mythologizing.

In the early 1900s the pendulum swung the other way, toward debunking and skepticism. This is when the story of Boston’s stolen militia cannon dropped out the standard telling—that story seemed too dramatic to be true. Sometimes debunking went too far.

Here’s another example from the 29 Nov 1908 New York Times—a story headlined “Paul Revere’s Ride Is Fiction, He Says”:

Walter Benjamin, publisher of The Collector, has in his possession a letter which he believes proves conclusively that Paul Revere never made the midnight ride attributed to him by Longfellow and tradition.

The document is a letter from John Hancock to Elbridge Gerry, dated Lexington, April 18, 1775, at 9 o’clock. . . . The message reads:

Dear Sir: I am much obliged for your notice. It is said the officers are gone along the Concord Road, and I will send word thither. I am full with you that we ought to be serious, and I hope your decision will be effectual. I intend doing myself the pleasure of being with you tomorrow. My respects to the committee. I am your real friend, JOHN HANCOCK.

Mr. Benjamin says that it Hancock of the Committee of Safety, knew at 9 o’clock that the troops had gone along the Concord road and hoped they would be “serious,” that Lexington and Concord were fully aroused to the danger of the coming of British troops, and that there would be no need for Paul Revere. . . .

The article noted that a version of this letter had been published in the 1828 biography of Gerry, but without the time included. Benjamin argued that the omission of “at 9 o’clock“ meant people hadn’t realized its significance.

On the other hand, the Times continued, “the learned professors…did manage to find a plain prose version of Paul Revere among the old manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society papers.” The article summarized Revere’s own account, which the M.H.S. had published in 1798 and certainly wasn’t hiding from view.

The Times story concludes:

However, the historians are not altogether satisfied with the Revere letter, for he wrote it in 1798, twenty-four years after the ride, and, conceding his honesty, his memory might easily have been bad. Considering the many doubts which the learned have come to have of Paul Revere’s ride, Mr. Benjamin believes that the evidence contained in the Hancock-Gerry letter shows that it never happened at all, outside Longfellow’s poems.

Benjamin made a couple of errors in interpreting the document he’d bought. First, Gerry and Hancock exchanged notes about a squad of “officers,” not the full “coming of British troops.” Those officers were mounted scouts with a mission of stopping messengers from getting out of Boston and into Concord. The hundreds of grenadiers and light infantrymen who followed the scouts presented a much bigger threat. About three hours after Hancock wrote his note, Revere reached Lexington with news of that column.

Benjamin’s second error was concluding that the letter showed “Lexington and Concord were fully aroused to the danger of the coming of British troops” before Revere arrived. They were only partially aroused. James Barrett’s household was busy moving the most valuable weaponry off his Concord farm. The sight of the mounted officers caused Sgt. William Munroe to summon a guard at the Lexington parsonage. But again, news of the much larger column of soldiers increased the alert level in both towns, producing the full militia alarms.

It looked like this debunking was itself quickly debunked and didn’t affect early-20th-century recountings of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The letter itself appears to have stayed in private collections because authors continued to quote the published version only.

Then in 2014, Hancock’s letter to Gerry was displayed in an excellent exhibit at the Concord Museum. I saw it there and grabbed a brief quotation for The Road to Concord. (My transcription varies a bit from both the Gerry bio and this Times article, but not meaningfully.)

“Come in, Revere; we are not afraid of you.”

Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle at Lexington (1825) is one of the most important sources of information about events in Lexington on 18-19 Apr 1775.

Phinney published a recollection from William Munroe about how, as a sergeant in the town militia, he had assembled a small squad of guards at the parsonage.

That led to this scene in Phinney’s book as Paul Revere arrived from Boston about midnight:

On the arrival of Revere, he was hailed by the guard, and stopped. He desired to be admitted to the house. Munroe, not knowing him, nor the object of his errand, refused to let him pass, stating, that the family had just retired to rest, and had desired, that they might not be disturbed by any noise about the house. “Noise!” said Revere, “you’ll soon have a noise, that will disturb you all. The British troops are on their march, and will soon be among you.” He passed without further ceremony, and knocked at the door.

Mr. [Jonas] Clark immediately opened a window, and inquired who was there. Revere, without replying to the question, said he wished to see Mr. [John] Hancock. Mr. Clark, with his usual deliberation, was going on to observe, that it was a critical time, and he did not like to admit people into his house, at that time of night, without first knowing their business, when Hancock, who had retired to rest, but not to sleep, knew Revere’s voice, and cried out, “Come in, Revere; we are not afraid of you.”

Recent authors have presented that last line in different ways. Some describe Hancock as jovial, others as condescending. I think this shows his skill at being “condescending” in the old, positive sense of the word. But the question that occurred to me this year is: What evidence exists for Hancock saying that line at all?

Here’s how Phinney took down William Munroe’s description of the encounter:

On learning this, I supposed they had some design upon Hancock and [Samuel] Adams, who were then at the house of the Rev. Mr. 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. Tho regulars are coming out.” We then permitted him to pass.

No remark from Hancock there. The Rev. Jonas Clarke published an account of that night in 1776, and it doesn’t include such a detail. Revere wrote nothing about Hancock’s banter in his account from about 1798. And there’s no such detail in the recollections taken down from Hancock’s widow, then Dorothy Scott, in 1822.

It’s possible that Phinney came up with the line on his own. We can see he embellished what Revere told Munroe. But embellishment requires some core material to work on, and it’s possible that Phinney heard about Hancock’s remark from someone else in the parsonage who didn’t want to go on the public record as Munroe did.

A book called The Memorial of Joseph and Lucy Clark Allen, published by the Allen family in 1891, includes a mention of “Eliza Clark,” one of the Lexington minister’s daughters. She appears in Charles Hudson’s town history as Elizabeth Clarke, born in June 1763 and died unmarried in 1844. She was thus eleven years old in April 1775.

After naming Eliza Clarke, that Allen family history says, “The stories of these times were often recounted by the daughter who had helped her father, and who remained at the old parsonage many years after the rest of the family had scattered; and till her death in 1843 she was an important personage in our mother’s early experiences.” That’s in a passage about how the Clarkes served militiamen food throughout the day which includes a direct quotation: “For want of sufficient accommodations the guests seated themselves on the floor and helped themselves with their fingers.” There’s no source for that line, but by implication it was part of the oral tradition in the family going back to Eliza.

On the preceding page of that book is a footnote:

When Paul Revere came to the house on this errand, the guard at first refused to let him in; but Hancock, hearing his voice, said, “That is Revere: you need not be afraid of him.”

Again, there’s no source provided for this anecdote or the direct quote it contains. It’s possible that by 1891 the Allen family tradition had been cross-pollinated with the story from Phinney, which became a standard part of American history. But it’s also possible that Eliza Clarke’s story of hearing Hancock say something like “That is Revere: you need not be afraid of him” was Phinney’s original source for the line, “Come in, Revere; we are not afraid of you.”

The Real Story of the Fake Sarah Munroe Letter

Last week I noted a letter describing George Washington’s Presidential visit to Lexington in 1789. And I said it looked like a fake.

Polly Kienle of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum helpfully commented on that post confirming that young Sarah Munroe didn’t write that letter. Rather, it came from the pen of James Phinney Munroe (1862-1929), president of the Lexington Historical Society. And he spent years trying to live it down.

On 5 Nov 1889, J. P. Munroe wrote, he was invited to speak about the hundredth anniversary of Washington’s visit at a public dinner. He recalled, “Wishing only to be informal, to avoid the conventions of after-dinner speaking, to relieve the solemnity of history with a touch of human nature, in an evil hour I forged the name of a great-aunt (dead these many years) to a letter that she did not write, that (kindly soul) she would not have written, that so circumstantial is it she could not have written, had she tried…”

And then he placed the letter in the inaugural issue of the Proceedings of the Lexington Historical Society. That magazine also printed his prefatory remarks:

When I was asked to assume the honorable task of representing my great-grandfather here to-night, I, naturally, searched the old Munroe tavern for memorials of him, but without success. A hunt through the garret of the old Mason house, was, however, more fortunate, as it resulted in this letter. The original, of which this is a copy, bears the date Nov. 7, 1789, and is indorsed, in a fine Italian hand, “Miss Sarah Munroe, Lexington, to Miss Mary Mason, New York.” Sarah was the second daughter of Colonel William Munroe, the other children being William, Anna, Jonas, Lucinda, and Edmund. Mary was the only daughter of Mr. Joseph Mason, a famous pedagogue, and for many years, including 1789, town clerk. Of the reason of Miss Mason’s sojourn in New York, we are not informed.

Later J. P. Munroe wrote, “the Mason house having no garret worth mentioning, the non-existence of that attic suggested a manufactured letter.”

But clearly not enough people picked up that clue. Over the next few years, Munroe saw the letter cited as an authentic source in publications like the Boston Evening Transcript. It was reprinted in the program for an 1898 banquet of the California Sons of the American Revolution (who obviously hadn’t explored deeply enough in the Mason house). Munroe insisted that “Real historians” weren’t fooled, but, as Kienle commented, he was “caught up in a ‘viral’ whirlwind before the days of instantaneous online dissemination.”

Munroe wrote at least two letters to the Transcript proclaiming that the letter was a fake. In 1900 he published a pamphlet titled A Sketch of the Munroe Clan with an appendix all about the letter. In that he wrote, “The fraud seemed to me so patent, the possibility of belief by any one that a half-educated young girl would prepare a narrative so straightforward and circumstantial appeared to me so remote, that I had no thought of the skit being taken seriously.”

Two years later, the Dedham Historical Register published the letter again as a genuine document. In 1917, the Journal of American History did the same. In 1924, it even appeared in St. Nicholas magazine for young readers. And now, will the internet bring it back?

(Hear genuine stories of President Washington’s visit to New England in 1789, and his interactions with Gov. John Hancock, when you come to the Cambridge Forum tonight.)

President Washington in Sickness and in Lexington

Having spent many autumn days outdoors meeting lots of American citizens, on 26 Oct 1789 President George Washington…got sick.

He wrote in his diary:

The day being Rainy & Stormy—myself much disordered by a Cold and inflamation in the left eye, I was prevented from visiting Lexington (where the first blood in the dispute with G. Britn.) was drawn. . . . in the Evening I drank Tea with Govr. [John] Hancock & called upon Mr. [James] Bowdoin on my return to my lodgings.

(The President’s encounters with Gov. Hancock will be the focus of T. H. Breen’s talk at the Cambridge Forum next Wednesday evening.)

According to the editors of the Washington Papers, the President might have been suffering from the “widespread epidemic of respiratory ailments” spreading in the central and southern states. In fact, Washington and his retinue may have carried the virus north. Certainly a lot of the people who had crowded onto the Boston streets to see him came down with a big, and local newspapers began to refer to the “Washington influenza.”

Washington eventually made it to Lexington, visiting the town on his swing south after seeing New Hampshire.

Thursday 5th. About Sun rise I set out, crossing the Merimack River at the Town over to the Township of Bradford and in nine Miles came to Abbots Tavern in Andover where we breakfasted, and met with much attention from Mr. [William] Philips President of the Senate of Massachusetts, who accompanied us thro’ Bellarika to Lexington, where I dined, and viewed the Spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with great Britain on the 19th. of April 1775.

The President dined at William Munroe’s tavern, now a museum of the Lexington Historical Society (shown above).

In 1917, the Journal of American History published “A Young Woman’s Sprightly Account of Washington’s Visit to Lexington in 1789,” said to be written by Munroe’s daughter Sarah. It looks like a total fake. But sprightly.

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.

“John Raymond, an aged man,…was brutally fired upon”?

As I discussed yesterday, in the first half-century after John Raymond’s death outside the Munroe Tavern on 19 Apr 1775, people in Lexington agreed that British soldiers had killed him, but didn’t make a big deal of his death compared to others the same day.

That changed around the time of the Centennial. The Rev. Artemas B. Muzzey (1802-1892) of Cambridge, grandson of a man in Capt. John Parker’s militia company in 1775, published a reminiscence of Revolutionary veterans in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1877 which stated:

William Munroe…kept the public house known as “Munroe Tavern.” Here the British stopped on their retreat, and murdered John Raymond, an inoffensive man, as he was leaving the house.

Thus Raymond’s death during a battle became a murder.

Three years later, in a History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Lexington historian Charles Hudson wrote:

The officers with Percy resorted to Munroe’s tavern just below. The occupants of the house left the place in affright, leaving only John Raymond, an aged man, who was at the time one of the family. The intruders ordered him to supply them with all the good things the house afforded, which he readily did. But after they had imbibed too freely, they became noisy and so alarmed Raymond that he sought to escape from the house; but was brutally fired upon and killed in his attempt to flee from danger.

Hudson also used Raymond’s death to complain about the British soldiers’ “system of personal insult, treachery, and murder” in his history of Lexington, published in 1913.

In The Battle of April 19, 1775 (1912), Frank W. Coburn went into further detail in describing the activity of Col. Percy (shown above) and his troops:

This energetic destroyer of American homes had selected Munroe Tavern as his temporary headquarters, and ordered his wounded conveyed there also. While their wounds were being dressed his men demanded such refreshments as the place could provide, and unlike [Lt. Col. Francis] Smith’s subordinates in Concord, were not considerate enough to pay for them. So landlord William Munroe’s loss was £203, 11s. 9d., of which £90 was in the “retail shop,” presumably of a liquid nature.

As he was orderly sergeant in Captain Parker’s Company, he was naturally absent on duty, and left a lame man, John Raymond, in charge, who waited upon the unbidden guests because he was compelled to. His last service was to mix a glass of punch for one of the red-coats, after which he essayed to escape through the garden. He was not alert enough, for two soldiers fired, and one of their bullets readily overtook him as he hobbled away. Thus one more was added to the list of American dead, one of the easiest victims, of course, for he was simply an unarmed cripple. This probably happened at the rear of the Tavern.

For this paragraph Coburn cited “A carefully written newspaper clipping evidently from a Boston periodical, dated April 19, 1858, preserved in a scrap book once belonging to the Thomas Waterman collection of American History.” I couldn’t locate such an article in the Archive of Americana newspaper database, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one turns up. I would be surprised if an 1858 article offers more reliable information than was available to William Munroe in 1825.

In fact, as authors added to the drama of John Raymond’s death, they inserted contradictions into the story. Hudson referred to Raymond as “aged,” but also reported his birth date, which showed that he was forty-three years old.

Coburn called Raymond a “cripple,” but other authors listed him among the members of Capt. Parker’s militia company, which suggests that Raymond’s lameness was temporary or didn’t interfere with his military activity, like Nathanael Greene’s. (Alternatively, those authors might have assumed that Raymond’s name on the list of dead meant he died as a militiaman.)

Harold Murdock noted those contradictions in his Nineteenth of April, 1775, published in 1925. He theorized that the British troops might have viewed Raymond as their prisoner, and shot him as he was trying to escape. He also argued that Percy himself spent little time at the tavern. In any event, Murdock felt sure that the Lexington minister Jonas Clarke would have made more of Raymond’s death if his neighbors in 1775 had seen it as an atrocity.

To the credit of the historians who wrote the words now engraved on the memorial to John Raymond at the Munroe Tavern, that text sticks to the facts stated by Munroe and his family. There are a lot of details about Raymond’s killing that we’ll probably never know, so it’s wise to avoid the incendiary language of some authors writing well after the event.

TOMORROW: John Raymond’s children.

The Death of John Raymond

Part of the Munroe Tavern’s formal reopening on Sunday was the dedication of a memorial marker for John Raymond, killed on the grounds on 19 Apr 1775. That’s the stone to the left of the thick white archway in Ray Boas’s photograph above.

Immediately after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts provincial authorities listed Raymond among the men from Lexington who had died that day. Their broadsides and newspaper dispatches put no asterisk beside his name to indicate that he was killed on the common in the morning—so he must have died in the afternoon battle.

But otherwise, I found nothing published in 1775 about the circumstances of John Raymond’s death. The Provincial Congress made as big a deal as possible of certain British army “atrocities”—the deaths of two men in a Menotomy tavern, the invasion of Hannah Adams’s house in that same village. The Rev. Jonas Clarke of Lexington highlighted those same events in his sermon on the first anniversary of the battle. But he didn’t mention Raymond.

The earliest description of how Raymond died that I’ve come across appeared in William Munroe’s deposition about the battle from 1825:

On the return of the British troops from Concord, they stopped at my tavern house in Lexington, and dressed their wounded. I had left my house in the care of a lame man, by the name of Raymond, who supplied them with whatever the house afforded, and afterward, when he was leaving the house, he was shot by the regulars, and found dead within a few rods of the house.

Two years later, Munroe’s death notice (quoted here in full, and referring to him by his later militia rank) stated:

Col. M. participated with his company in the events of the day, leaving the care of his public house in the superintendance of a neighbor, whom the British killed on their retreat.

Those sources established several details about Raymond: he was one of Munroe’s neighbors, and he was “lame”—whether permanently or temporarily is unclear. Munroe left him in charge of the tavern, he served the British troops, and they shot him a short distance from the house “when he was leaving.”

TOMORROW: The story grows new details.

Munroe Tavern Redux

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Munroe Tavern in Lexington, which has just formally reopened after an extensive refurbishment and reconception. It will continue to welcome visitors in the afternoons through October.

As described in this Boston Globe article, Col. Percy used this tavern as a hospital and headquarters when he took command of the British troops in the field on 19 Apr 1775.

The Lexington Historical Society has long owned that building, along with Buckman Tavern beside the town common and the Hancock-Clarke House a couple of blocks away. Those sites interpret the day largely from the American point of view.

The Munroe Tavern is now set up to show the British soldiers’ perspective on the battle. Its main display is a map and timeline of their march to Concord and back, rather than the Massachusetts militia alarm. Its video about the firing on Lexington common quotes British officers’ reports. Its first-floor artifacts are remnants of the royal troops’ activity in Lexington, as well as William Munroe’s tavern sign and furnishings typical of such an establishment.

Among those artifacts are the society’s “Pitcairn pistols,” on display once more. Their label reads in part:

The coat of arms and monogram engraved on the oval escutcheons in the pistol grips have recently been attributed to the Crosbie family of Wikloe County, Ireland.

That process began back here. We’re all still wondering about how those pistols went out on the march.

Another improvement in the Munroe Tavern experience: The first floor of the building, which includes the main display about the march, is wheelchair-accessible.

The ceremony opening the tavern was hampered for those of us back in the crowd by a remarkable sound system which actually made people sound quieter when they talked into the microphone than when they simply addressed the crowd, as reenactor Paul O’Shaughnessy showed. But there was no way to miss the community spirit on display.

TOMORROW: John Raymond, killed outside Munroe’s Tavern.

“Like tearing from us our ‘household gods’”

Jari Backman’s comment on this post led me to look up the death notice of William Munroe, an important figure in the events in Lexington on 18-19 Apr 1775. This is how his obituary appeared in the 15 Nov 1827 Pittsfield Sun, undoubtedly reprinted from a newspaper closer to Lexington and also reprinted elsewhere.

Death of another Revolutionary Hero

Died, at Lexington, on Monday the 29th ult [i.e., of last month], Col. WILLIAM MUNROE, aged 86 — Col. M. was orderly sergeant in the battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775, the commencement of the revolutionary war.—

On the night of the 18th previous, when several British officers were seen proceeding on horseback towards the town, with the supposed intention of arresting John Hancock and Samuel Adams, Col. M. commanded the sergeant’s guard, stationed for their protection at the house where those proscribed patriots were resident in Lexington. On the receipt of intelligence that 800 British troops were secretly marching the same route, Messrs. Hancock and Adams were persuaded to retire to Woburn, and Col. M. with his party joined the Lexington company, who were immediately after attacked, before sunrise of the 19th, by the whole British force, and about 20 of the Lexington militia killed or wounded.—

The company were ordered by their commander to disperse; and the British troops proceeded to Concord, where they destroyed the provincial stores. Their triumph, however, was of short continuance; the British guard of 100 men, stationed about a mile beyond Concord village, at the North Bridge, were attacked by the militia of Concord and the neighboring towns, and forced to retire upon their main body, leaving two killed, and the same number wounded. About two hours afterward, when the British commenced their return march to Boston, they were again assaulted by the militia until they arrived at Lexington, where they were waylaid and harassed by the Lexington company, and would probably soon have been forced to surrender, had they not been reinforced by Lord Percy’s brigade of 1500 men.—

They were, however, beaten back to Boston. Col. M. participated with his company in the events of the day, leaving the care of his public house [shown above] in the superintendance of a neighbor, whom the British killed on their retreat.

Till within a year or two past, like Cincinnatus, Col. M. labored on his farm.—On the occasion of the visit of Lafayette to Lexington, three years since, arm in arm these aged veterans reconnoitered the field of battle, previous to the delivery of the address to Lafayette from the Lexington committee; and he assisted at the laying the foundation stone of the Bunker Hill Monument on the 17th June 1825.

Col. M. has been ever esteemed by his fellow townsmen as well as by strangers, for his urbanity of manners and hospitality. As a member of the Legislature and in municipal stations, he was respected for information, judgement and rectitude; and as a military officer, from a subaltern to a colonel, to which grade he rose, he was distinguished as an able tactician.

It is productive of a melancholy and heartfelt sensation, to follow to the grave “the house appointed for all the living,” one after another, those vast vestiges of “the times that tried men’s souls.” It seems like tearing from us our “household gods;” like removing the “ancient landmarks” of our nation’s birth; the objects of all that is venerable and sacred, till scarcely one is left to tell the tale of revolutionary prowess. But the consolation is, that they are gathered “like a shock of corn fully ripe,” blessed with the grateful recollections of their enfranchised countrymen, full of honors and good works, to a better and happier state of existence.

His funeral was attended by a large concourse of relations and friends.

This notice was imperfectly copied on Munroe’s Wikipedia page. That page also said it appeared in an 1820 issue of the American Mercury newspaper, where some of the errors might have first appeared, but that date is seven years too early. (If I remember how, I’ll correct the Wikipedia page soon.)

Sarah Palin Meets Paul Revere

Yesterday former half-term governor Sarah Palin’s made-for-television bus tour of historic sites ran into a pothole when she spoke on camera about Paul Revere. As transcribed by The Selling of the President 1968 author Joe McGinniss, Palin said Revere was:

He who warned, uh, the…the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that uh we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free…and we were gonna be armed.

Needless to say, Revere didn’t ride to warn the British. He rode to warn provincial militia officers and the Continental Congress delegates Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were on the march.

One could make the argument that Revere’s actions led to a massive popular response that served as a warning to British officials about the people’s determination to protect their traditional liberties—I’m just not convinced that Palin could make that argument, at least without coaching.

Furthermore, her comment about “takin’ away our arms” connotes that the royal forces were after personal weapons like muskets and pistols. The goal of the British march was artillery which the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had collected using diverted taxes for a military force independent of the royal government. That’s an important distinction, I think.

It sounds like Palin got an accurate description of Revere, the Lexington alarm, and his adolescent bell-ringing at Old North Church during her travels, but that history got garbled in her attempt to spin it into modern right-wing talking points (“Put the government on warning!” “We need our arms!”). The result was her typical stew of folksy phrases without logical or grammatical connections.

However, some of the websites critiquing Palin’s remark made historical errors of their own. Mediaite said of Revere:

He had to be quiet to not let the British know that he knew (sorry, but no bells either) they were coming– to seize weapons stores, actually…

And McGinniss elaborated on that:

the whole point of Revere’s ride from Boston to Lexington (his destination was Concord, but he didn’t make it) was that it was secret. Because the Middlesex County countryside was rife with British supporters, Revere virtually whispered his warnings that the King’s forces were crossing the Charles River on the night of April 18-19, 1775 to launch an attack upon the American rebels.

There weren’t many “British supporters,” or Crown supporters to be scrupulous, in Middlesex County by April 1775. The most prominent had been chased into Boston, or cowed into silence. Revere had to leave Boston secretly, but once he was outside town his only worry was being stopped by British army officers sent to patrol the roads ahead of the march. They nearly caught him in Charlestown, and did catch him in Lincoln.

One person even had to ask Revere to keep it down: Sgt. William Munroe, guarding the parsonage in Lexington. According to his recall in 1825:

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.”

“Warnin’ shots and bells” were definitely part of the Massachusetts militia alarm, though not from Revere himself. People in rural towns used church bells and alarm guns to summon their neighbors; many British officers described hearing those signals during the march west. Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould even testified that he heard cannon.

(Caricature above courtesy of The New Yorker.)

“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.

Meeting the Lexington Militia, 26 March

On Friday, 26 March, the Lexington Historical Society’s Cornelius Cronin Lecture Series will feature Bill Poole (who reenacts the role of Ebenezer Locke) speaking on “The Lexington Militia of April 19, 1775: Up Close and Personal.”

Who were the men present on Lexington common when the British column arrived? What happened to them during and after the Revolutionary War? Where did the young drummer William Diamond end up, and what’s the connection between Benedict Arnold and Sgt. William Munroe?

This talk begins at 8:00 P.M. at the Lexington Depot. It is free and open to the public, and there will even be coffee and dessert.

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 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.