The Slow Spread of Official News about Bunker Hill

In response to this week’s question about George Washington on 17 June 1775, the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a few people guessed he was in New York on the way to the siege lines. In fact, he didn’t leave Philadelphia until the morning of 23 June, a full week after he agreed to be commander-in-chief. His letters make clear that even he didn’t expect his departure to take that long.

Washington reached New York on 25 June, and there opened a dispatch from Boston with a report on the fighting in Massachusetts. (Adding to the chronological confusion, the letters Washington sent during his journey north all appear to be misdated by one day.) The dispatch that Washington read that day brings up another mystery.

News of the first shots at Lexington on the morning of 19 Apr 1775 reached New York on the afternoon of 23 April, according to the comprehensive table at the back of David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. So a little less than five days.

Yet the report on Bunker Hill arrived in New York eight days after the battle, even assuming that no dispatch rider departed until light on 18 June. Why the difference?

On 18 June, the day after the fight, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appointed a six-man committee to “prepare a letter to the Continental Congress on the late attack of the king’s troops at Bunker’s hill, &c.” That committee included Joseph Hawley, James Warren, Dr. Benjamin Church, and James Otis, Sr.—all heavy hitters. But the congress was then officially leaderless with Dr. Joseph Warren missing and feared dead. On the afternoon of 19 June, the legislature chose James Warren (shown above, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts) as its new president.

On 20 June, the Provincial Congress reviewed its committee’s report on the battle, “paragraph by paragraph,” and ordered it to be copied and sent. Their dispatch referred to an “anonymous letter from Boston” numbering the British casualties at “about one thousand,” which turned out to be more accurate than the committee thought.

That was probably the letter that Washington opened in New York five days later. So the mail riders weren’t slow. The Provincial Congress delayed its report until its committee had a good sense of what had happened and/or could put a good spin on events. It thus seems likely that Gen. Washington and his party had heard brief, early rumors about the Bunker Hill battle before they reached New York City.

What Was Washington Doing During the Battle of Bunker Hill?

On Tuesday I posed the question of what George Washington was doing during the Battle of Bunker Hill, which occurred on the afternoon of 17 June 1775.

As several people noted, around that date the Continental Congress was making Washington the commander-in-chief of its new Continental Army. But that process took some time. The Congress voted to appoint a commander and offered Washington the post on 15 June, heard his acceptance on 16 June, and started drafting its formal commission and instructions on 17 June, as shown in its record here. It seems likely that once Washington accepted the post of commander, he stayed away from the Congress’s formal sessions. So where was he?

The most consistent source for Washington’s daily activities before the war are his diaries, which are otherwise bland and unenlightening. (He stopped keeping those diaries as soon as he took up his commission as general, making him perhaps the most frustrating diarist ever.) As shown here, Washington’s entry for 17 June 1775 was:

Dined at Burns’s in the Fields—spent the Evening at my Lodgings.

Washington also recorded dining at “Burns’s” or “Burn’s” on 1, 13, and 15 June. I think that dinner locale was most likely Patrick Byrne’s tavern on Front Street between Walnut and Spruce, known as “the Sign of the Cock.” Byrne (1734-1808) was an immigrant from Ireland, and his tavern shows up in other news of the era. But I’m not certain his address counted as “in the Fields” in 1775—any Philadelphians know?

Since Americans of this period ate dinner in the first half of the afternoon, and Philadelphia time was somewhat behind Boston time, Washington was probably eating at Byrne’s as the major fighting of the Battle of Bunker Hill began.

Two days before, Washington had “spent the Eveng. on a Committee”—that was the last day before he accepted the post of general, and I suspect he used the time to make clear what he wanted in other generals (Charles Lee, Horatio Gates), aides, and other support. But on 17 June, as the British consolidated their new territory on Bunker’s Hill and the provincials threw up hasty fortifications on the west side of Charlestown neck, Washington spent the evening privately.

As of midnight, three Boston 1775 readers answered the question correctly, citing Washington’s diary. Two people are our old friends and occasional guest bloggers Charles Bahne and Don Hagist, and the third is frequent commenter Joe Bauman. Congratulations to all three gentlemen!

I flipped a coin with Washington on it a couple of times, and it came up for Don. So I’ll be sending him a free copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution. Thanks, everyone!

TOMORROW: A question of timing.

Q. & A. on Bunker Hill with Nathaniel Philbrick, part 2

Today Boston 1775 concludes a colloquy with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution.

Q. What could the American commanders have done differently to win the battle? What could the British commanders have done differently to avoid such heavy losses? And how would a different outcome on 17 June 1775 have affected the siege of Boston or the war?

A. The most obvious failing of the American commanders had to do with the artillery regiment under Colonel Richard Gridley, who had the unfortunate habit of picking officers to whom he was related. With only one or two exceptions, the officers under Gridley’s command were both cowardly and ineffectual, and several of them were seen running scared from the scene of the battle.

Since most of the American troops were already terrified of the British cannons, it was especially unnerving to see their own artillery officers proving so pathetically incompetent. This led large numbers of soldiers to linger back on Bunker Hill, where they could avoid the battle to the south. For those fighting in the redoubt and along the breastworks and rail fence, it was infuriating to realize that hundreds, if not thousands of their own men were on the Charlestown peninsula but were providing them with no help.

Both Colonels William Prescott and John Stark were highly critical of Israel Putnam, who had stationed himself on Bunker Hill. Putnam seems to have chiefly occupied himself trying to build a fortification that might serve as a fallback position for those on the front line, but this was hardly a priority at this point in the battle when Prescott and Stark needed every soldier and musket they could get. According to Stark, if Putnam had done what he should have and gotten those lollygaggers to join the fighting, “he would have decided the fate of his country in the first action.”

On the British side, it might have all gone very differently if they had followed Henry Clinton’s advice and landed some soldiers to the north at Charlestown Neck, where they would have cut off the American retreat.

If the American army had been routed at Bunker Hill and the British had then pursued them into Cambridge, the war might have been effectively over before it even got started. If the Americans had decisively won the battle, it might have convinced the British ministry to agree to a compromise. The ironic thing is that both alternative outcomes would have meant that America remained a part of the British Empire.

Q. A movie studio has bought the dramatic rights to Bunker Hill. While acknowledging that authors have zero influence on casting, let’s imagine that you’re making that movie. You’ve spent a lot of mental time with several of the characters involved in the start of the Revolution. Cast a couple of those leading roles with well-known actors or actresses, past or present, and explain why they would be good choices.

A. I’m terrible at this kind of thing, but I’ll give it a try, limiting myself to actors/actresses from the past.

Errol Flynn as Joseph Warren. He’d bring a swashbuckling, action-hero charisma to the role that would be great, particularly when it comes to Warren delivering his Massacre-Day Oration in a toga and when he fights to the death at the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

Katharine Hepburn as Mercy Scollay, Warren’s fiancée. Scollay was apparently very bright and high strung and Kate would be perfect; while we’re at it, let’s cast an older Spencer Tracy as her father John Scollay, chair of the Boston Selectmen.

Let’s go with a young Ernest Borgnine as Israel Putnam since you need a big athletic loveable guy with a wild streak.

I’d pick Laurence Olivier to be Thomas Gage and tell him to bring out his inner Hamlet.

I picture both Colonels Prescott and Stark as being thin and wiry and fairly humorless—maybe a dour Jimmy Stewart for Prescott and Max von Sydow as Stark?

See, I told you I was lousy at this kind of thing.

Hey, I don’t think that was so bad! At top: Olivier tries to channel Gen. John Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple. Below: Young Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian in In the Wake of the Bounty.

TOMORROW: The Bunker Hill giveway. Answers accepted until midnight!

Q. & A. on Bunker Hill with Nathaniel Philbrick, part 1

Here’s the first part of my blog interview with Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the new book Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution.

Q. Your new book is titled Bunker Hill, but it describes the years before that battle on 17 June 1775 and continues to the end of the siege of Boston in 1776. How did you decide on the boundaries of your story? Did you start with the battle and expand, or did you set out to tell a story of the American Revolution and narrow in on that battle?

A. All of my books seem to be about communities under incredible stress and trauma, and from the first I wanted Bunker Hill to be about what the Revolution did to the inhabitants of Boston. I knew it had to end with the evacuation of the British, and it seemed natural that it begin after the Tea Party with the Boston Port Act and the arrival of General Gage and his army. Within those time constraints the Battle of Bunker Hill was the pivotal event—when a rebellion turned into a war.

Q. What aspect of the Battle of Bunker Hill did you find most surprising, or feel isn’t as well known as it should be? What misconceptions do you think people have about the battle, then or now?

A. I don’t think it’s generally understood what a confused and confusing event it was.

The Americans’ original plan was to postpone, if not stop altogether, an impending British attack by building a fort on Bunker Hill, which is on the north end of the Charlestown peninsula and would have commanded the approaches to Cambridge without directly threatening the British in Boston. But for reasons that are still not clear, William Prescott built his redoubt about a half mile to the south on Breed’s Hill, less than a cannon shot away from Boston. Instead of delaying a British attack, Prescott ended up provoking the bloodiest battle of the Revolution.

The amazing thing is that the battle went as well as it did for the Americans, and that’s led to another misconception. The British, not the Americans, actually won the battle, but they suffered casualties of almost fifty percent. As General Howe admitted, “The success is too dearly bought.”

So there you have it, a battle named for the wrong hill that was won by the war’s ultimate losers. No wonder people are confused.

Q. My favorite anecdote about the Battle of Bunker Hill revolves around Abijah Willard recognizing his in-law William Prescott on the edge of the redoubt. In The Whites of Their Eyes, Paul Lockhart raised doubts about that story, but you find it plausible. Would you please summarize the anecdote and the issues involved in judging its authenticity?

A. Early on in the battle a cannon ball decapitated one of Prescott’s men. Prescott could see that the rest of his soldiers, most of whom had no previous war experience, were badly shaken. In order to inspire them, he jumped up onto the fort’s parapet and began to strut back and forth, waving his sword and shouting at the British. Apparently Prescott was wearing a banyan—a long loose-fitting coat that must have been swirling about him like a cape.

Meanwhile, at that moment in Boston, General Thomas Gage was examining the American stronghold through his spyglass when he saw this maniac dressed in a banyan making a spectacle of himself. Standing beside Gage was a loyalist named Abijah Willard. Gage handed his spyglass over to Willard and asked if he knew who that crazy guy was. According to tradition, Willard recognized that it was none other than his brother-in-law William Prescott.

“Will he fight?” Gage asked.

“Yes, sir,” Willard replied. “He is an old soldier and will fight as long as a drop of blood remains in his veins.”

The story may seem too good to be true, but it comes from Prescott’s son, which is a pretty trustworthy source, I think. Paul Lockhart is justifiably skeptical of the anecdote, pointing out that given the distance and the fact that eighteenth-century spyglasses were pretty primitive compared to what we have today it would have been impossible for Willard to recognize any face that far away, especially with smoke in the air.

My theory is that given Prescott’s much-commented-on coat, a facial recognition was not required. I’ve played around a bit with eighteenth-century telescopes here on Nantucket and have come to believe that Willard recognized the coat, not the face, and said, “Aha, that’s my madman brother-in-law Bill.”

TOMORROW: More of this interview. And have you entered the contest for a copy of Bunker Hill?

Nat Philbrick’s Bunker Hill: Talks, Reviews, and a Giveaway

Today is the publication date of Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution. He’s speaking about it three times this week in Massachusetts:

• Wednesday, 1 May, 6:00 P.M., Coolidge Corner Theater, Brookline. Co-sponsored by the Brookline Booksmith and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Tickets are $5 per person from the bookstore, or free to someone who buys a copy of the book there.
• Thursday, 2 May, 7:00 P.M., American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. Free to the public.
• Friday, 3 May, 6:30 P.M., the Bostonian Society’s Old State House Museum, Boston. Free to the public.

For upcoming events in other parts of the country, visit Nat’s website.

Bunker Hill has been garnering some very good reviews. David M. Shribman wrote in the Boston Globe:

Everyone in these precincts knows this story, or apocryphal strains of it: that the Battle of Bunker Hill really was fought on Breed’s Hill, that June 17 forevermore would be a red date on local calendars, that the heroic Joseph Warren died in battle as a nation was being born. Yet this is but the skeleton of the story Nathaniel Philbrick tells in Bunker Hill, a masterpiece of narrative and perspective by an author who has helped us look anew at the voyage of the Mayflower and the passage of George Armstrong Custer.

Thomas Fleming, who began his own career writing about the Revolution with a book on this battle, Now We Are Enemies, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Philbrick tells the complex story superbly, from the American and British points of view…[with an] emphasis on the flaws that afflicted both sides.” Tony Horwitz walked the battlefield with Nat Philbrick for Smithsonian magazine.

Walter Isaacson mused in the Washington Post:

The Committees of Correspondence conjured up comparisons to the role played in Tahrir Square by Facebook and other social networks. The affair of the purloined Hutchinson Letters reminded me of WikiLeaks, the rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes reminded me of Twitter, and the Tea Party reminded me of, well, the tea party. As Philbrick writes, “Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communications that threatened to preempt old hierarchical form of government.”

But the most interesting lesson was that, even though the American Revolution might have been partly kindled by social networks, it was taken over and won by militias. Those who pamphleteer and blog, talk and tweet, cannot control the course of events as handily as those who are willing to put their lives on the line. The revolution will not be tweeted.

At All Things Liberty, Hugh T. Harrington focused on scope and sources:

Despite a title that suggests a narrow focus on a single battle, Bunker Hill does a superb job setting the stage for the Siege of Boston and the climatic action that took place on Breed’s Hill. Coverage of the Committees of Correspondence is outstanding. One may grumble that some other aspects such as the Tea Party and the raid on Fort William and Mary could have been treated more thoroughly but even in a book reaching 400 pages it is clear that not everything can be detailed in a single volume. What is presented is an outstanding overview.

Maps are essential to understanding the story and following the action. Fortunately excellent, clearly readable and simple maps are provided. The book provides outstanding coverage of the big picture of what was happening, who was doing it and why.

However, the strong reliance upon 19th century secondary sources to add details and color to the narrative is disappointing. Much of what was written in the 19th century falls into the category of legend, hearsay, or simply entertaining stories that do not always stand up well to historical scrutiny.

Harrington acknowledges that the endnotes in Bunker Hill explain the sources Nat Philbrick relied on and, in some cases, acknowledge that other historians (like myself) disagree on certain stories’ reliability. Readers can then make up their own minds. That makes Bunker Hill definitely a book in which one should read the notes.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll share a question-and-answer with Nat Philbrick about this book. But first, Boston 1775 has a copy of Bunker Hill to give away. As usual, I’m tying this giveaway to a question of historical knowledge:

What was George Washington doing during the Battle of Bunker Hill?

Put your answer in a comment on this blog entry. I’m looking for the most specific, best documented answer. I’ll keep those comments invisible until the arrival of Friday, 3 May. If there are two or more best answers, I’ll pick one correct respondent at random to receive a free copy of Bunker Hill.

Two Talks on the View from France

Tomorrow the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the History Department at Boston College are presenting a lecture titled “Les Treize Colonies: Viewing Early America from France” by Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Professor of American History and Civilization at the Université de Paris VIII. This talk begins at 4:00 in Stokes Hall S376.

On 7 May at noon, Van Ruymbeke will speak at the Boston Athenaeum on “Rêves d’Amérique: The New World in Huguenot Imagination and Reality.” That lecture description says:

Promotional pamphlets published by colonial proprietors and land speculators to draw Huguenots to their domains and Huguenot letters sent from America to relatives who remained in Europe enable historians to grasp the image that the New World carried in the refugees’ imagination and to contrast it to the harsh reality of getting settled in an often inhospitable environment.

Van Ruymbeke is author of a new book titled L’Amérique avant les États-Unis: Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise (America before the United States: A History of English America). He’s previously written and edited books on the Huguenot diaspora after 1685.

Among the Huguenot families who eventually settled in Boston were the Reveres, Bowdoins, and Faneuils. For a while there was a Huguenot church, though it sat empty by the time of the Revolution. Ironically, the town’s first Catholic congregation met there in the 1780s.

The Boston Town House at 300

In 1713, Boston built its Town House as its center of government—the building for town meetings, the Massachusetts Council and General Court, and the Superior Court. It was only natural that the business community would congregate nearby as well. Many large ports in the British Empire had similar buildings. What’s remarkable about Boston’s Town House is that it’s standing, the oldest surviving public building in the United States. But now we know it as the Old State House museum.

The Bostonian Society, which maintains that museum, is celebrating the 300th anniversary of its building with a series of events in May. These include:

• Nathaniel Philbrick speaks on the Boston origins of the American Revolution and signs his new book, Bunker Hill [more on that to come soon]. Friday, 3 May, 6:30 P.M., free for all.
• Masonic Re-Dedication & Anniversary Commemoration. Saturday, 4 May, 11:00 A.M. Free to all passersby.
• Battle Road Brewing hosts a beer tasting for visitors aged 21 and over. Wednesday, 8 May, 5:30 P.M.
• Treasure or Trouble? A special exhibit on preserving historic buildings, including “the opportunity to put on a pair of gloves to get a hands-on experience with historical materials.” Thursday, 9 May, 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. Free with admission to the Old State House.
• Modern Demands, Historic Spaces. A panel of experts will examine key issues in historic preservation, including accessibility, balancing preservation with for exhibitions and events, changing technologies and energy needs. Moderator Greg Galer, the Executive Director of the Boston Preservation Alliance, will encourage audience participation and dialog with the panel. Thursday, 9 May, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. Free.
• Old State House 300th Anniversary! Saturday, 11 May, 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. A day of celebration as the Old State House turns 300! Visitors can experience three centuries of history through family-friendly activities, special tours, and conversations with Revolutionary Characters. Free with admission to the Old State House.

Slinging “King Hancock” Back and Forth

Of all the people in Revolutionary America I’ve found saying, “King Hancock,” so far only one used the phrase at all proudly. Boston 1775 reader Richard Doctorow quoted that item in a comment a while back.

The 15 Jan 1778 Independent Chronicle and other newspapers printed an anecdote about an eight-year-old American fifer taken prisoner during a raid on Long Island. To a British officer he proudly identified himself as “one of King Hancock’s men.”

Was that unnamed boy using a term common among American soldiers? Or was he, too, speaking sarcastically, spitting a term used by British officers back at them? Did this boy even exist? Even if he didn’t, it would be significant that a Patriot newspaper wanted people to believe he did.

In contrast, it’s easier to find stories of people loyal to the Crown using the phrase “King Hancock” in insults to the American cause. For example, in 1778, the American military tried Col. David Henley, at his request, for how he had attacked some of the British prisoners of war in the “Convention Army” at Cambridge. For more on that conflict, see Don Hagist’s recounting.

One witness in Henley’s court martial, Cpl. John Buchanan of the British army, testified:

After [Pvt. Samuel] Reeves was returned to the guard-room, and the other prisoners dismissed, Reeves said to me, “This is a poor pass I am come to, to be taken out of the guard-house and stabbed, and my king and country damned—damn King Hancock and the Congress.”

Buchanan acknowledged that Col. Henley might have heard this remark and become even angrier at Reeves.

Because by that time most Americans had become republicans and disdained having a king of any kind. Which meant “King Hancock” became purely an insult.

COMING UP: “King Hancock” in verse later in the war.

“King Hancock” and Samuel Dyer

A few days back, I quoted two appearances of the phrase “King Hancock” from 1770, noting that it was written down only when one side of the political divide was attacking the other, usually sarcastically.

That makes it very hard to figure out the phrase’s original meaning—was it ever a sincere compliment to John Hancock? It’s also hard to know who in pre-Revolutionary America actually used the term, as opposed to who was accused of using the term by political opponents.

Take, for example, this appearance of the phrase in the 20 Oct 1774 Norwich (Connecticut) Herald, reporting news from Newport, Rhode Island:

Last Tuesday arrived…Mr. Samuel Dyre, of Boston; who gives this account of himself;---That on the 6th of July last, early in the morning, he was kidnapped by the soldiers in Boston, in consequence of orders from Col. [George] Maddison, and carried into the [army] camp, confined in irons, and kept so till early the next morning, when he was conveyed on board the Captain, Admiral [John] Montague, still in chains.

When he was first confined in the camp, Col. M-------n asked him who gave him orders to destroy the tea, to which he replied nobody; the Col. said he was a damned liar, it was King Hancock, and the damned sons of liberty, and if he did not tell he should be sent home in the ship Captain, where he should be hung like a dog; then told him to prepare a good story, that General [Thomas] Gage would come to examine him, &c. . . .

We must leave time to unfold this dark, very dark affair, of governmental kidnapping, which is a true spawn of hell, nursed up by the church of Rome!

We thus have another American describing how another Briton described other Americans. More specifically, another American Whig, quoted in Whig newspapers, accused a British military man of using the term “King Hancock” to suggest that was how Americans thought of John Hancock. [And I bet you didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition to show up at the end there.]

Adding to the confusion, Dyer is an unreliable witness. He told wild, and wildly different, stories to people on either side of the conflict. He tried to assassinate a British officer. He persecuted American prisoners. And yet he really was held captive and transported by the British military. (Someday I’ll trace Dyer’s whole twisted story.)

So I don’t think this newspaper story is solid evidence of what Lt. Col. Maddison actually said in 1774. But it is solid evidence that Americans of that time thought it was credible for a British officer to refer to one of their leaders sarcastically as “King Hancock.”

The Soldier Who Died in Buckman Tavern

I was planning to start this entry by stating: “Because Pvt. John Bateman left a deposition on 23 Apr 1775, we know he hadn’t died from his wounds by that date. And that suggests he wasn’t the soldier buried near Buckman Tavern in Lexington, as memorialized by this stone.”

Except that last night Don Hagist kindly left a comment on yesterday’s posting to report that a British army muster roll says grenadier Bateman died on 21 April—two days before that deposition.

Now I believe the most likely explanation is that the muster roll is in error, based on information transmitted to the British command across the siege lines during an exchange of prisoners or talks leading up to it. My experience is that Patriot depositions were one-sided and incomplete, but not made up out of whole cloth and signed with a dead man’s signature. So I think it most likely that Bateman died after 23 April. Still, it’s a good reminder that our sources might be a crucial day or two off.

As for that stone in Lexington, the basis for it seems to be this passage from an article by Dr. Francis H. Brown, published by the Lexington Historical Society in 1905:

A British soldier was buried in the ground of the Munroe purchase. He was wounded on the 19th of April, and carried to the Buckman Tavern, where he died on the 22d. He was buried at a spot near the Eustis monument. Mr. Eli M. Robbins had the exact spot pointed out to him by Abijah Harrington, who died within a few years. Harrington’s father was sexton in 1775, had buried the soldier and knew the spot well. The exact spot has been pointed out to the writer. The grave should have a permanent mark.

At the same time Brown, Robbins, and the historical society published a collection of “Lexington Epitaphs” which included one non-epitaph for that soldier with an unfortunate typo:

An English soldier
wounded April 19, 1775; died
April 12, 1775; no stone marks
his grave.

The Abijah Harrington “who died within a few years” seems to be the man who lived from 1804 to 1893. His father was Nathan Harrington (1762-1837)—old enough to remember the fighting in Lexington but not old enough to have been the sexton at that time. So there seems to be some confusion along the line: Brown was referring to another Abijah Harrington, the sexton was really that man’s grandfather, or something else. In any event, we can only hope the information about the soldier’s death date was transmitted accurately in one form.

Charles Hudson’s 1913 history of Lexington reprints a bill from Dr. Joseph Fiske (1752-1837) to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for treating wounded British soldiers, which hints at how many there were. Here are the appointments Fiske billed for:

• 19 April: one soldier in Woburn, another at the Buckman Tavern in Lexington.
• 20 April: seven British soldiers at that tavern (probably including the man who died two days later), two in Lincoln (perhaps including Bateman), three more at his uncle’s house in Lexington.
• 23 April; one soldier in Cambridge.
• 26 April: back at Buckman Tavern; he dressed the wounds of that last soldier “three times.”

Fiske submitted his bill in June, suggesting that was his complete work for the congress. Meanwhile, as I quoted yesterday, Concord historians say Dr. John Cuming was treating another batch of wounded soldiers in their town.

(Photograph of the modern marker for this soldier’s grave by Caitlin G. D. Hopkins.)

The Mysterious Prisoner of Ephraim Flint

To follow up yesterday’s deposition from Pvt. John Bateman of His Majesty’s 52nd Regiment of Foot, here’s another guest-blogger essay from Richard C. Wiggin.

Ephraim Flint “shouldered his musket” on April 19, 1775, “and as one of the results, captured a British Soldier at Lexington, and took him home with him, where he worked some time on the farm of his captor peacefully.” So we are told, at least, by Flint family lore.

The origin of the lore is somewhat obscure, and whatever details might once have filled out the story have long since been lost. The story survives as a one-sentence teaser, repeated by a descendant in the 1904 printed record of the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the incorporation of Lincoln. Is it possible that there could be some truth to this story? And if so, where would one look to find corroborating evidence?

There is a record of a British soldier in Lincoln four days later, on April 23, 1775. John Bateman, of the 52nd Regiment, was deposed in Lincoln as part of the Provincial campaign to document that the British Regulars fired unprovoked upon the locals. His is the only deposition (of twenty taken over three days) that was executed in Lincoln.

In it, Bateman gives no hint as to how or why he happened to be in Lincoln, but he is presumed to be either a prisoner or a deserter. Concord’s Rev. Ezra Ripley suggests that there may have been a fine line between the two. “Willing captives,” he called them in 1827. “They designedly separated themselves from their companions, in order to be taken...prefer[ing] this method to desertion, which would be attended with danger.”

Nor is it clear from Bateman’s deposition at what point he fell into the hands of the Provincials, or whether he may have been wounded. The content of the deposition ends with the firing on the Lexington Green, suggesting that he could have separated from the column before it reached Concord, or at least that he was probably not part of the patrol at the North Bridge. But this is speculative. All we know is that he was in Lincoln four days later.

Can anything be deduced from the fact that Pvt. Bateman was deposed in Lincoln? Nine Lincoln men had traveled to Lexington to be deposed on the same day; another was deposed in Lexington two days later. Is there a reason he could not have gone (or been taken) to Lexington, as well? Why was it necessary for the deposers to travel to Lincoln? Could John Bateman be Ephraim Flint’s prisoner of war?

That essay was adapted from Rick’s new book Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783, available at local bookstores and by mail from the Lincoln Historical Society.

In his 1835 history of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that Bateman was one of eight wounded soldiers whom Dr. John Cuming cared for; according to other sources, that was at the house of Loyalist Daniel Bliss, who had gone into Boston. Among those soldiers, only Bateman “died and was buried on the hill” in Concord. If Bateman was indeed suffering from a fatal wound, that suggests this man could not have “worked some time” on Ephraim Flint’s farm. It would also explain why he didn’t travel to Lexington to meet with magistrates there.

But Shattuck’s statement raises other questions. If Bateman was wounded, he presumably experienced parts of the battle beyond the skirmish at Lexington; did he have anything to say about those events? Why was Bateman in Lincoln four days after the battle instead of at Dr. Cuming’s improvised hospital in Concord? And finally there’s still the mystery of who was Ephraim Flint’s captive, if indeed there was one.

Thanks, Rick!

Pvt. John Bateman Testifies and Declares

I’m going to break away from “King Hancock” for a while to highlight a document dated 23 Apr 1775.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress set out to collect testimony about who fired first in that fight, and about any other arguable examples of British army misbehavior. Here’s the text of one of the depositions that magistrates set down:

Lincoln, April 23d, 1775.

I, John Bateman, belonging to the fifty-second regiment, commanded by Colonel [Valentine] Jones, on Wednesday morning, on the nineteenth day of April instant, was in the party marching to Concord. Being at Lexington, in the county of Middlesex, being nigh the meeting-house in said Lexington, there was a small party of men gathered together in that place, when our said troops marched by; and I testify and declare, that I heard the word of command given to the troops to fire, and some of said troops did fire, and I saw one of said small party lie dead on the ground nigh said meeting-house; and I testify, that I never heard any of the inhabitants so much as fire one gun on said troops.

John Bateman.

The Massachusetts authorities were no doubt pleased to have testimony supporting their version of events from a British soldier. The image above shows a copy of Bateman’s deposition that the legislature sent to the Continental Congress; it is now part of the U.S. National Archives.

TOMORROW: Are there any more clues about John Bateman?

“King Hancock” in 1770

The term “King Hancock” predates the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, when Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the British army reported hearing Massachusetts farmers shout it. The challenge is interpreting what people meant and understood when they referred to John Hancock that way.

The earliest sign of “King Hancock” I’ve found is in a satirical verse that Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette published on 26 Mar 1770, three weeks after the Boston Massacre. This verse was headlined “A New SONG (Lately compos’d on Castle Island,) Said to be in vogue among the Caledonians.” The British army commanders had just moved the 14th and 29th Regiments to Castle William (mapped above). Thus, the newspaper, which was the voice of Boston’s Whigs, presented this verse as coming from the British military.

The new song’s second stanza read:

If you will not agree to Old England’s Laws,
I fear that K—g H——k will soon get the Yaws;
But he need not fear, for I swear that we will,
For want of a Doctor, give him a hard Pill.
   Derry down, down, hey, derry down.

Obviously this song wasn’t complimentary about Hancock. And the printers weren’t complimentary about the British they portrayed as enjoying the song; the term “Caledonians” suggested they were disloyal Scotsmen. (Frank Moore later wrote that the verses were also published as a broadside with a headline making it even more clear they came from the British troops.)

So did Bostonians coin the term “King Hancock” as a compliment for their leading merchant and politician? Did British army officers pick up that term and use it sarcastically, or did they invent the term sarcastically? Or did the Whig printers sarcastically invent the British officers sarcastically inventing the term in order to rile their readers?

Yesterday Boston 1775 reader David Niescior quoted another appearance of “King Hancock” from 1770. Months after the Massacre, royal officials collected depositions from British soldiers who had been in Boston about how they had been treated. In his sworn testimony Pvt. Edward Osbaldiston or Osbelddeston of the 14th Regiment stated that in May 1770 a crowd had attacked the British military hospital on the Common and shouted:

Damn the King of Great Britain, Damn the Ministry, and all the Scoundrels that order’d the Lobsters to Boston, and drinking a health to King Hancock hoping King George would not be long on the Throne.

One might question the likelihood that people in the middle of a riot would pause for “drinking a health to King Hancock.” Pvt. Osbaldiston was a few months and a few colonies removed from Boston, and unlikely to encounter any challenge to his recollection. The officials who arranged for the soldiers’ depositions wanted testimony that put Bostonians in the worst light.

For example, Pvt. George Smith of the 14th told magistrate James Murray about hearing “a number of well dress’d Men” on King Street in Boston calling out:

What King, for the King of England had no more business with them than any other Man, and if they imagin’d any person present thought so, they would, Tar and Feather him immediately and afterwards cut off his Head & stick it up on the highest post in the Town.

Is that an accurate description of how Boston gentlemen were behaving in late February 1770? Certainly they said nothing close to that in print or private letters. As I wrote yesterday, until 1776 American political leaders were careful to portray themselves and their supporters as patriotic subjects of George III, opposing only the government ministers who were corrupting his fine intentions.

But were ordinary Bostonians in May 1770 already willing to curse the king, as Pvt. Osbaldiston described, or behead his defenders? Or were those locals sarcastically echoing a phrase from the March 1770 newspaper back at the army (i.e., “You guys threaten ‘K—g H——k’? We’ll cheer for him, and you can’t do anything about it. How do you like them apples?”)? Or was Osbaldiston exaggerating, picking up a phrase he’d heard back on Castle Island?

COMING UP: The further career of “King Hancock.”

“Calling out, ‘King Hancock forever’!”

According to Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of His Majesty’s 23rd Regiment of Foot, as the British column made its way back to Boston on 19 Apr 1775:

During the whole of the march from Lexington the Rebels kept an incessant irregular fire from all points at the Column, which was the more galling as our flanking parties, which at first were placed at sufficient distances to cover the march of it, were at last, from the different obstructions they occasionally met with, obliged to keep almost close to it.

Our men had very few opportunities of getting good shots at the Rebels, as they hardly ever fired but under cover of a stone wall, from behind a tree, or out of a house; and the moment they had fired they lay down out of sight until they had loaded again, or the Column had passed.

In the road indeed in our rear, they were most numerous [or, according to the earliest transcript, “they were not numerous”] and came on pretty close, frequently calling out, “King Hancock forever”!

Mackenzie’s account was first published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1890. Though he clearly wrote from the perspective of a British officer, he was generally calm and factual, and most historians trust him on the details.

So if we believe Mackenzie about the provincials shouting, “King Hancock forever!” what did they mean by that?

Giving John Hancock the nickname “King” could have been an allusion to his wealth. Likewise, colonial Americans referred to Robert “King” Carter of Virginia (1663-1732), and Robert “King” Hooper (1709-1790) of Danvers. Men in Lexington might have had a particular fondness for Hancock because his paternal grandfather had been the minister of their town for a long time.

But Lt. Mackenzie probably heard sedition in those calls. With Hancock just concluding a stint as president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, royal officials might have suspected he wanted to set himself up as monarch of Massachusetts.

Hancock and other leading American politicians of April 1775 would have hotly denied such an ambition. At the time they were still professing their loyalty to George III and the British constitution. The source of all the troubles, they complained, was the corrupt ministry in London, not the king. So I doubt those men would have been pleased to hear the provincial soldiers shout “King Hancock forever!”

In fact, in nearly all the uses of the term that have come down to us, “King Hancock” was a pejorative thrown out by supporters of the royal government trying to discredit or ridicule Hancock and the Patriot cause.

COMING UP: The birth and rise of the “King Hancock” meme.

The Young British Fifer

Besides Luther Blanchard, there’s another story of a wounded fifer on 19 Apr 1775, this one on the British side. But I’ve been unsuccessful in nailing down the details.

Abram English Brown wrote Beneath Old Roof Trees in 1896 based on historical accounts, family traditions, and some fictionalization—but it’s hard to know how much of each. Setting the scene as a yearly reunion of Revolutionary War veterans in Lexington, Brown quoted a “Lieutenant Munroe” about a “little fifer”:

“He was a bright little fellow, and had piped away for [Maj. John] Pitcairn as well as he could, in coming down from Concord, until an old fellow had let fly at him from his musket loaded with shot for wild geese, and had broken one of his wings; at least, there he sat, with his fife stuck into the breast of his jacket, begging for help.”

“We gave it to him too,” cried a voice from the perch above; “although they abused our folks, young and old.”

Almost a century later, in 1994, David Hackett Fischer wrote in Paul Revere’s Ride:

Later, [Joshua] Simonds captured a musician, a boy fifer whose coat was closely buttoned, and fife projecting from it. This English fifer was but a child, and begged Simonds not to kill him. The militiaman discovered that the coat had been buttoned to staunch a fatal wound. The child was taken to an American farmhouse, and died a few days later.

The citation for that paragraph and the preceding is “Simonds, ‘The Affair in the Lexington Meetinghouse.’” Unfortunately, that source doesn’t appear in the book’s lists of first-person American accounts or local histories. Perhaps it sits unpublished in a local historical archive.

Joshua Simonds’s willingness to blow up the Lexington meetinghouse was first described in Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington in 1825, so it seems reliable. Brown’s book retold that story, citing Simonds’s descendants, and another anecdote about a prisoner. However, Brown didn’t go on to connect Simonds to the young fifer as Fischer’s book did.

Gen. Thomas Gage listed one musician killed in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, one wounded (I don’t know which regiments). Did those casualties include this young fifer? Did he die, as Fischer wrote, or survive, as Brown implied? Or is he entirely fictional?

The Death of Luther Blanchard

As I described yesterday, Luther Blanchard was an eighteen-year-old fifer when the Revolutionary War broke out. He was wounded in the fighting at the North Bridge in Concord—but not badly enough to keep him from continuing to march with the Acton militia company throughout the day.

Furthermore, Luther Blanchard was well enough to enlist on 24 April as a private in the company of Capt. William Smith of Lincoln, assigned to Col. John Nixon’s regiment. That regiment was in the thick of the fight at Bunker Hill in June. Luther was listed as a corporal in his company on 1 August. On 30 September, he was “reported dead.” His older brother Calvin returned from Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition against Québec months later to learn that Luther had died.

Nineteenth-century historians provided contradictory timelines for Luther Blanchard’s death. Samuel Adams Drake’s Middlesex County history of 1879 stated:

Though the wound that day appeared slight, and only briefly detained him from his company, it became the cause of his death soon after.

D. Hamilton Hurd’s Middlesex County history of 1890 stated exactly how soon, citing a Blanchard descendant as its source:

He followed on in the pursuit of the British on their retreat to Boston, fifing with all the vigor of his manly strength, which grew less as the excitement of the day began to tell upon his wasted forces. The wound, which he did not think serious at first, grew worse as he proceeded, and on reaching Cambridge he was obliged to be taken to a hospital, where he died.

Finally, according to Lucie Caroline Hager’s Boxborough: A New England Town and Its People (1891):

The wound appeared slight, but he died three days later in consequence of it. His body was brought to Littleton and laid in the old cemetery there. Today the spot is unmarked and unknown.

But clearly Luther Blanchard didn’t die in April 1775. He was not only alive in August but healthy enough to be a corporal. Unfortunately, neither Continental Army records nor the published vital records of Littleton offer any more information.

In 1895, the Blanchard family erected a memorial which said: “Luther was the first man hit by a British bullet at the old North Bridge, and died in the service of his country a few months later.” (The monument shown above courtesy of Find a Grave appears to be a later one.)

In a small book about Luther and Calvin Blanchard published in 1899 by a descendant, writer Alfred Sereno Hudson argued that the wound at the North Bridge had indeed been fatal:

Calvin Blanchard always stated in unequivocal terms that his brother Luther died from the effects of that wound; and, repeatedly, did his son Simon state what he had so often heard from his father’s lips about his uncle Luther.

The family also understood that Luther died in a building of Harvard College. Hudson says that the college buildings were used as a hospital, but in fact by the fall of 1775 they were used only as barracks. The hospitals were kept a distance from the bulk of the men. Of course, one doesn’t have to be a hospital to die, and people from rural Massachusetts might think of all Cambridge as Harvard.

Curiously, the family’s 1895 memorial inscription doesn’t say that Luther Blanchard died of his original wound. It simply said he died while in the army. There was a dysentery epidemic in 1775 which killed many soldiers and civilians. Overall more Revolutionary War soldiers died in camp than in battle. So while it’s possible Luther’s April wound was indeed the cause of his death, it may be more likely that he died of an unrelated disease and his family came to blame the old wound.

In any event, the teen-aged fifer at the North Bridge did not live to see twenty.

Luther Blanchard, Fifer

Yesterday I wrote about the Acton Minutemen marching toward Concord’s North Bridge, reportedly to the tune later codified as “The White Cockade.” The fifer in that unit was Luther Blanchard, son of Simon and Sarah Blanchard, born 4 June 1756 and therefore eighteen years old.

Luther was also one of the first people wounded during the North Bridge skirmish. In A History of the Fight at Concord (1827), Ezra Ripley wrote:

In a minute or two, the Americans being in quick motion, and within ten or fifteen rods of the bridge, a single gun was fired by a British soldier, which marked its way, passing under Col. [John] Robinson’s arm, slightly wounding the side of Luther Blanchard, a fifer in the Acton company. This gun was instantly followed by a volley, which killed Capt. [Isaac] Davis and Mr. [Abner] Hosmer, both of the same company.

Eight years later, Lemuel Shattuck added in a footnote in A History of the Town of Concord:

Luther Blanchard went to Mrs. [Rebeckah] Barrett’s, who, after examining his wound, mournfully remarked, “A little more and you’d been killed.”

“Yes,” said Blanchard, “and a little more and ’t wouldn’t have touched me;”—and immediately joined the pursuers.

Though Luther Blanchard marched with the Acton company (fifers got paid for musters), he lived in the neighboring town of Littleton, in an area that’s now part of Boxborough. Luther appears on Boxborough’s town seal, and every June it observes Fifer’s Day in his honor; this year’s celebration comes on 15 June.

COMING UP: What happened to Luther Blanchard?

The Questions of “The White Cockade”

In 1835, septuagenarian Charles Handley sat down with local historian Josiah Adams to relate his memory of the start of the Revolutionary War. Handley testified that on 19 Apr 1775 he was twelve years old and “lived at the tavern kept by Mrs. Brown, nearly a mile northwest of the North Bridge” in Concord. Usually when a child was “living with” someone outside the family, that meant he or she had been put out to work.

Handley recalled:

I saw Captain [Isaac] Davis’s company, as they came from Acton. I first saw them coming through the fields north of Barrett’s mill, and they kept the fields till they came to the road at Mrs. Brown’s tavern. They there took the back road leading to the bridge. They marched quite fast to the music of a fife and drum. I remember the tune, but am not sure of its name; think it was called the “White Cockade.”

Handley then whistled the tune he remembered, which Adams confirmed was “The White Cockade.”

That tune was definitely established by 1775. It was printed the next year in David Herd’s Scottish Songs and again in Campbell’s Reels (1778) and Aird’s Airs (1782). The first used the title “My Love Was Born in Aberdeen,” but the latter two included the music only. A Boston 1775 commenter reported that the melody appears in many handwritten American collections of fife tunes from the Revolution.

In 1790 Robert Burns (1759-1796, shown above) published the lyrics that gave the tune the name “The White Cockade.” For the first time in print the song was explicitly in favor of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. And that raises some questions.

D. Michael Ryan addressed some of those questions in an essay on “The White Cockade” and another article on martial music at the North Bridge. As he notes, authors around the time of the Centennial picked up Handley’s small detail and ran with it. They wrote that the Acton Minutemen had played “The White Cockade” while actually marching down on the British regulars at the North Bridge, though young Charles didn’t see that. Further writing said that “The White Cockade” was a favorite of Acton, or of Capt. Davis—again with no additional evidence besides Handley testimony. One local man later told a newspaper that his father, a veteran of the battle, described the same tune, but by then the historical accounts might have affected memories.

Even after peeling away the latter-day exaggerations, Ryan asks:

Still, we have to wonder why this Scottish tune would have been a “signature tune” of the Acton Minute Men, a “familiar air to the dwellers of the vicinity,” or a “favorite” of Captain Isaac Davis, particularly as there appears to be no local connection to the 1745 Jacobite uprising. It is true that the tune was one of rebellion, it was popular with military and civilian musicians and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it was found in music books of the period, and it was a lively tune for marching. Yet with some 500 witnesses at the North Bridge, why would not one deem it appropriate at the time (especially among the King’s men) to comment about “The White Cockade,” unless its notes simply were not played?

Another question occurs to me. In 1775, the Massachusetts Patriots were eager to show that they were standing up for British liberties and traditions. They viewed their political opponents as breaking those traditions with new taxes, appointees, &c. They linked that opposition whenever they could to Jacobite and Scottish usurpation, which let them present themselves as defenders of true British liberty. Why would those same provincials choose a tune that was clearly associated with the Jacobite threat?

I suspect that the tune we now know as “The White Cockade” didn’t have such a clear political meaning until Burns published in 1790. It probably had several sets of lyrics and several names, including a Jacobite version or two. But in New England, musicians might well have known the tune without political connotations.

After the Stuart line petered out, Burns’s “The White Cockade” was no longer a political threat but a quaint relic, suitable for publication. Burns’s popularity soon made his words the best-known lyrics to that tune. Therefore, by the time Handley and Adams spoke in 1835, they knew the tune first and foremost as “The White Cockade.” Back in 1775, it may not have had such a specific meaning.

The Aftermath

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

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

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

The British Plan to Burn Harvard College

On 22 Nov 1775, the Rev. Isaac Mansfield, Jr., a Continental Army chaplain, preached a Thanksgiving sermon in the camp at Roxbury. He leveled this accusation about the British military’s plans the previous April:

What, but the hand of Providence preserved the school of the prophets from their ravage, who would have deprived us of many advantages for moral or religious improvement.[?]

Okay, most of Mansfield’s listeners would probably have had little idea of what he was talking about. “School of the prophets”? But when he published this sermon the following year after becoming minister in Exeter, New Hampshire, Mansfield added a footnote:

“General Gage, as governor of this province, issued his precepts for convening a general assembly at Boston, designing to enforce a compliance with Lord North’s designing notion; they were to be kept as prisoners in garrison, till under the mouth of cannon and at the point of the bayonet they should be reduced to a mean and servile submission. To facilitate this matter, he was to send out a party to take possession of a magazine at Concord; presuming that this might be done without opposition, the said party upon their return from Concord were to lay waste till they should arrive at Cambridge common; there, after destroying the colleges [i.e., Harvard] and other buildings, they were to throw up an entrenchment upon the said common, their number was to be increased from the garrison [in Boston], and the next morning a part of the artillery to be removed and planted in the entrenchment aforesaid. This astonishing manoeuvre, it was supposed, would so effectually intimidate the constituents, that the general assembly by the compliance designed would literally represent their constituents.”

The author is not at liberty to publish the channel through which he received the foregoing; but begs leave to assure the reader, that it comes so direct that he cannot hesitate in giving credit to it. He recollects one circumstance, which renders it highly probable; Lord Percy (on April 19.) suspicious his progress to Concord might be retarded, by the plank of the bridge at Cambridge being taken away, brought out from Boston several loads of plank, with a number of carpenters; not finding occasion to use them, he carried them on his way to Concord, perhaps about a mile and an half from the bridge: About an hour after the plank were returned. If he had intended to repass that river at night, he must have reserved the plank; if he designed to stop in Cambridge, the plank must be an encumbrance. This conduct, in returning the plank, may be accounted for upon supposition of the foregoing plan of operation.

Mansfield thus accused the British commanders of planning to capture the Massachusetts legislators, destroy Harvard College, and fortify Cambridge common. He refused to identify his source for that inside information about enemy plans. And of course he was speaking in the midst of a war, when rumors and accusations fly at their fastest.

In fact, Mansfield’s claims don’t make sense. Gen. Thomas Gage did issue a call in September 1774 for the Massachusetts General Court to convene, but they were to gather in Salem, not Boston, and he quickly canceled that summons after the “Powder Alarm.” (The politicians gathered in Salem anyway, out of his reach, and formed a Provincial Congress instead.) There was no call for a legislature in April.

There was also nothing in Gen. Gage’s orders about Harvard. Indeed, the college was so little on Col. Percy’s mind on 19 April that he had to ask tutor Isaac Smith, Jr., which road led from there toward Concord. Percy didn’t have entrenching tools, and Cambridge was a poor place to stop and defend. So when Percy brought the column back through Cambridge, they didn’t pause at the college or the common, nor tried to recross the bridge over the Charles River, but pushed straight on to Charlestown, which was closer to the troops in Boston and more easily defended.

Not many authors repeated Mansfield’s accusations, but one who did say the British planned to burn Harvard was Frank Warren Coburn in The Battle of April 19, 1775, published in 1912. Coburn had found no further evidence of this plot. He merely wrote, “Mr. Mansfield fully believed such plans to have been made and states that his information came so direct that he could not hesitate to accept it…”

Coburn’s was one of the last histories of the Battle of Lexington and Concord written without access to many British sources or much interest in what the British actually planned or experienced, as opposed to what the provincials assumed and published about them. And however sincere those stories and accusations were, they aren’t solid evidence.