King George Read online

  And now, in the middle of all this chaos, someone fired. Who? According to minuteman Sylvanus Wood: “There was not a gun fired by any of Captain Parker’s company, within my knowledge. I was so situated that I must have known it.”

  But British lieutenant John Barker told a different story: “On our coming near them they fired one or two shots.”

  So no one takes credit for “the shot heard ’round the world”—the first shot of the American Revolution. It might have been a minuteman, or it might have been a British soldier. It might even have come from one of the houses in town. What we do know is that when the British soldiers heard the shot, they lost control. They started charging, screaming, and firing their guns. “Our men without any orders rushed in upon them, fired and put ’em to flight,” said Lieutenant Barker. “The men were so wild, they could hear no orders.”

  Some of the minutemen stood and fired back. Others ran for their lives, blasting away as they retreated through town.

  Three Cheers

  The shooting on Lexington Common lasted about ten minutes. It finally ended when Colonel Francis Smith (he’s in charge of this mission, remember?) rode into town. Smith found a British drummer and ordered him to beat the “cease fire” signal. This worked.

  Eight minutemen had been killed and nine more were wounded (including Prince Estabrook, who was shot in the shoulder). The wounded men crawled to nearby houses for help. Only one British soldier had been shot and slightly hurt.

  It took Smith about half an hour to get the seven hundred British boys calmed down and organized. He spent a little time yelling at the men for losing control. He warned them to follow orders next time. Then he let them give three cheers for their “victory,” and they marched on to Concord.

  Salmon Update

  Dorothy Quincy and Aunt Lydia watched the whole thing from the window of the Clarkes’ house. When the shooting started, Lydia leaned out the window to get a closer look. A bullet whistled past her head and crashed into the barn next door. She pulled her head in.

  After the British left town, the two women set off in a carriage to meet up with Hancock and Adams. Yes, they remembered to bring Hancock’s “fine salmon.” The salmon was cooked at a house in Woburn, and everyone was sitting down to lunch when a man ran in and started shouting that the British were on their way. So the fish was left behind and Adams and Hancock rode farther from the fighting. Later that day, they ate some cold pork and potatoes.

  “Grand Music”

  Now the action shifted down the road to Concord, where the Concord minutemen were ready and waiting. How did they know the British were coming?

  “This morning, between one and two o’clock, we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell,” explained Reverend William Emerson of Concord.

  Who brought you the warning, Reverend?

  “The intelligence was brought to us first by Dr. Samuel Prescott,” Emerson said.

  Prescott was the one who had escaped from the British patrol the night before. He raced into Concord and started spreading the news.

  By seven in the morning, about 250 Concord minutemen were gathered in town. They weren’t sure what to do, though. They talked it over. They decided to march out to meet the British.

  A Concord minuteman named Amos Barrett remembered parading out of town with the group, a few of the men proudly playing their drums and fifes (small flutes). Then, out on the narrow road, they saw the seven hundred British soldiers coming toward them. They stopped. They realized they hadn’t really thought this plan through very well. They turned around and marched back into Concord, with the British right behind. Both armies had their drummers and fifers going strong. “We had grand music,” said Amos Barrett.

  Barrett and the minutemen marched up into the hills above the town and waited to see what the British were going to do. The Americans had time on their side. The alarm had been spreading from town to town all morning, and more minutemen were pouring in from the towns around Concord. Soon there were 300 minutemen in the hills. Then 350, then 400.

  There were also lots of people from town, mostly kids who were up there to watch. It was getting crowded. The minutemen had to ask the spectators to go somewhere else.

  Josiah Haynes was the oldest man to fight that day. This seventy-nine-year-old minuteman had gotten up at dawn, grabbed his musket, and marched eight miles to Concord. Now he was glaring down at the North Bridge, and at the British soldiers guarding the bridge. He told the captain of his town’s militia:

  “If you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward.”

  Hold on there, Josiah. Everyone was still hoping this day would end without more bloodshed.

  Breakfast Time

  Down in town, British soldiers started looking for weapons. That was the whole idea of this mission, as Gage’s secret orders to Colonel Smith explained: “You will seize and destroy all the artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms and all military stores whatever. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants or hurt private property.”

  Josiah Haynes

  Unfortunately for Gage, the people of Concord had been expecting something like this for days. By now nearly all of the military supplies were hidden in attics or buried in fields.

  At the Wood family home, for example, a pile of guns had been hastily shoved into a bedroom. When the British came to search this house, the Wood women welcomed the soldiers. They told the men they could search anywhere they wished—except for one small bedroom where a sick woman was sleeping. The British officers considered themselves gentlemen, and they would never disturb a sick woman. So they ordered their men to leave that room alone.

  Needless to say, no weapons were found in the Wood house. Meanwhile, Colonel Smith and some of the other British officers set up chairs on people’s lawns and started ordering breakfast. These guys were used to being served. Women in Concord grumbled and gave a few lectures on the rights of Americans. But they were willing to make a little money. They sold the officers meals of meat, potatoes, and milk.

  All the while, the soldiers kept up their search for supplies. They found a few barrels of flour and some musket balls. They tossed it all into a pond. (A few days later the people fished everything out. Most of the flour was still good.) They found a few cannons, and they destroyed them. They smashed up the wooden carriages that were used to haul the cannons around. Then they set the broken wood on fire. That fire changed a lot of lives.

  Just ask Hannah Davis.

  The Bridge Fight

  Early that morning Hannah Davis had watched the Acton minutemen gather outside her house. (Acton was a town near Concord.) Her husband, Isaac, was their captain. She later said:

  Hannah Davis

  “My husband said but little that morning. As he led the company from the house, he turned himself round, and seemed to have something to communicate. He only said, ‘Take good care of the children,’ and was soon out of sight.”

  Now, up in the hills, Isaac Davis and the other minutemen saw smoke rising from the middle of Concord. They were too far away to see that the smoke was just from the burning cannon carriages.

  “Will you let them burn the town down?” shouted one minuteman.

  “No! No!” the other men roared. Captain Davis led the minutemen down toward the North Bridge. “We were all ordered to load,” said Amos Barrett, “and had strict orders not to fire till they fired first, then to fire as fast as we could.”

  At the North Bridge, a British officer named Walter Laurie looked up and saw four hundred angry Americans marching toward him. Laurie didn’t have much time to form a plan. A few British soldiers ran onto the bridge and started trying to rip up the wooden planks. The Americans called out for the British to stop messing with their bridge. Then the shooting started. As usual, no one knows who fired first.

  “We soon drove them from the bridge,” reported Amos Barrett. Several minutemen and British soldiers were killed or wounded. Is
aac Davis was one of the men who died at the North Bridge.

  This bridge fight is remembered as a major moment in American history. That’s because up to this point, neither the minutemen nor the British soldiers had really expected the day’s tense events to explode into all-out battle. Now men on both sides had been killed. Now it was going to be a long, bloody day. A long, bloody day that would lead to seven years of war.

  The Nightmare Begins

  And the British were not prepared for a long, bloody day. They hadn’t even bothered to bring an army surgeon with them.

  Colonel Smith stood in the middle of Concord, wondering what to do. Every time he lifted his telescope to the hills around town he saw more minutemen up there. He really had no choice. He had to make a run for Boston.

  It was a little after noon when the British army marched out of Concord. No drums and fifes this time—the march was quick and quiet for about ten minutes. Were the minutemen hiding in the woods along the road? The British had no idea.

  They found out when they hit a bend in the road called Meriam’s Corner (home of Abigail and Nathan Meriam). Hundreds of minutemen opened fire from behind trees and stone walls. Bullets zoomed at the British from all sides.

  The British soldiers started running, hoping to get past the minutemen. But the bullets kept coming. They kept coming for the next six hours. “We were totally surrounded with such an incessant fire as it’s impossible to conceive,” said Lieutenant Barker.

  The minutemen had no organized plan. But there were a lot of them—about 3,600 men from more than forty different towns showed up before the day ended. They were able to line the road all the way to Boston. Men would shoot, duck back into the woods, reload their muskets, run forward, and shoot again. Minuteman (and Reverend) Edmund Foster explained the strategy like this: “Each sought his own place and opportunity to attack and annoy the enemy from behind trees, rocks, fences, and buildings.”

  The British soldiers must have felt like they had wandered into a nightmare. “We at first kept our order and returned their fire as hot as we received it,” said a soldier named Henry de Berniere. But they were still fifteen miles from Boston! And soon they started running out of ammunition. The men panicked. “We began to run rather than retreat in order,” de Berniere said.

  Wounded men who could still walk held on to horses for support and hobbled along as fast as they could. Badly wounded and dead soldiers were left lying in the road.

  Battling Brothers

  It was dark when the fighting finally ended. More than 250 British soldiers had been shot, and seventy-three of them died. About one hundred Americans had been hit, half of them killed. Seventy-nine-year-old Josiah Haynes was killed while reloading his musket.

  That evening John Adams stood on a hill in Boston, watching the surviving British soldiers stumble back into town. It’s hard for us to imagine what a shocking scene this must have been. Keep in mind that even Patriots like Adams still considered themselves citizens of the British Empire. “When I reflect and consider,” wrote Adams, “that the fight was between those whose parents but a few generations ago were brothers, I shudder at the thought, and there’s no knowing where our calamities will end.”

  What Next?

  You won’t be surprised to learn that British and American soldiers told very different versions of the amazing events of April 19, 1775.

  According to General Thomas Gage, British soldiers had marched out to Concord on a simple, peaceful errand. Then, for no reason, they were viciously attacked by sneaky rebels! “A number of armed persons,” he reported, “to the amount of many thousands, assembled on the 19th of April last, and from behind walls and lurking holes, attacked a detachment of King’s Troops.”

  According to the Americans, a pack of bloodthirsty British soldiers had invaded the quiet towns of Lexington and Concord. Then, for no reason, the soldiers started shooting people. Express riders raced from town to town with letters saying: “The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren on Wednesday the 19th . . have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery.”

  Militiamen all over New England responded to the call by grabbing their guns and marching toward Boston. By the end of April, nearly 20,000 of them had gathered. They had the British army trapped in Boston. They had no idea what to do next.

  King George knew what to do next. He was outraged that colonists had dared to fight with British soldiers. And he was more convinced than ever that the British military would soon bring the Americans to their knees. He said, “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit.”

  Okay, George. We’ll test your theory next.

  George Washington, Meet Your Army

  King George was hoping to smack the rebels with a “smart blow.” But he was about to be disappointed. Before sunrise on the morning of May 10, 1775, a Vermont Patriot named Ethan Allen stepped into a boat on Lake Champlain. Allen and his men pushed out into the cold, choppy water and began silently rowing across the lake. The second blow of the American Revolution was about to be delivered.

  And not by the British.

  Here Comes Ethan Allen

  This story begins in early May 1775, when a Connecticut lawyer named Noah Phelps stopped shaving. Once he had a nice little beard going, he disguised himself as a poor peddler—a guy who sells pots and tools door-to-door. Then he walked right up to the gates of Fort Ticonderoga, a British fort in northern New York.

  The British soldiers asked the sloppy-looking peddler what he wanted. Phelps said he needed a shave. Could the fort’s barber help him out? The soldiers let Phelps into the fort.

  While Phelps sat still in the barber’s chair, his eyes spied the condition of the fort. Crumbling walls, bored soldiers … it was just as he had hoped. Fort Ti (as the locals called it) was not prepared for an attack.

  Noah Phelps passed the information on to the Green Mountain Boys, a group of Patriot farmers from the Green Mountains of Vermont. The Boys were led by Ethan Allen. Standing six foot six, with a furious temper, Allen was not the kind of guy you would want to have as an enemy. He was known to beat up two men at once by lifting them off the ground and banging them together.

  But on the morning of May 10, Ethan Allen was perfectly calm. He and about eighty of the Boys rowed across Lake Champlain, reaching the New York side of the lake just before sunrise. There, in front of them, was their target: Fort Ticonderoga. One British soldier sat guarding the fort’s gates. Or, he was supposed to be guarding the gates. Technically, he was asleep.

  Party at Fort Ti

  What woke the guard that morning? Probably it was the sound of eightyt-hree large Americans charging toward him, whooping and screaming like wild animals. The sleepy soldier stood up, lifted his gun, fired once, threw the gun on the ground, and ran into the fort, leaving the gates open behind him.

  Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys were right on his heels. Inside the fort, a British officer named Jocelyn Feltham sat up suddenly in bed. “I was awakened by a number of shrieks,” he explained. “I jumped up … I ran undressed to knock at Captain Delaplace’s door.”

  Captain Delaplace was the commander of the fort. But he was still asleep. So Lieutenant Feltham went back to his room, grabbed some clothes, and stepped out into the hall.

  And next thing he knew he was standing face to face with a very excited giant named Ethan Allen. Allen was knocking on Delaplace’s door and shouting things like “Come out of there, you old rat!”

  Lieutenant Feltham tried to appear calm and in control (which is hard to do when you have your pants in your hand). He demanded to know by what authority Ethan Allen was attacking this British fort. Allen roared back:

  “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!”

  Ethan Allen

  This was a cool-sounding answer, and it later became famous. But at the time Lieutenant Feltham just seemed conf
used. “He began to speak again,” Allen later wrote, “but I interrupted him and, with my drawn sword over his head, again demanded an immediate surrender.”

  The sword over the head did the trick—Feltham surrendered Fort Ticonderoga to the Americans. Within minutes, the Green Mountain Boys found ninety gallons of rum in the fort’s cellar. The party lasted three days.

  More important, Ethan Allen and the Boys had captured more than one hundred British cannons. If the Americans were really going to fight a war with Britain, they would need those big guns.

  Walk with Me, Sam

  But were the Americans going to fight a war with Britain? That question was still being debated down in Philadelphia.

  One early morning in June, John and Samuel Adams met to talk over current events. “I walked with Mr. Samuel Adams in the State House yard,” remembered John, “for a little exercise and fresh air, before the hour of Congress.”

  The Adams cousins knew that many members of the Continental Congress were not too thrilled about Ethan Allen’s Fort Ti attack. These members were still hoping to find a peaceful solution to their conflict with the British government. In fact, Congress actually ordered Allen to make a careful list of all the items found at Fort Ticonderoga. That way they could give everything back to the British if war was avoided.