Paul Revere's Ride (27 page)

For six generations since the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, every town had maintained its “training band,” All able-bodied males of military age were required to serve except conscientious objectors, clergymen, college students, professors, and the mentally incompetent. The training bands were a response to hard necessity. Many times since its founding, Massachusetts had found itself at war. From 1689 to 1763, four major conflicts had broken out between the great European powers. All of them spread to New England.

The military institutions of Massachusetts became very active in time of danger. After every peace they lapsed into a state of suspended animation, until awakened by the next crisis. This
rhythm repeated itself in the Fall of 1774, when the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts created a Committee of Safety, collected stocks of arms, and revived the old New England training bands in a new form. All men between the ages of sixteen and fifty were asked to “enlist” themselves in the militia. Older men from fifty to seventy were organized into another group called the alarm list, and ordered to be ready for service in dire emergency.
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The Provincial Congress recommended that one quarter of the militia should be organized in “minute companies,” ready to march “at the shortest notice.” Special groups of that sort had existed in New England since the mid 17th-century. In 1645, militia commanders throughout Massachusetts were ordered “to make choice of thirty soldiers of their companies in ye hundred, who shall be ready at half an hour’s warning.” On the eve of King Philip’s War in 1675, the Suffolk and Middlesex regiments were required to “be ready to march on a moment’s warning, to prevent such danger as may seem to threaten us,” When the French wars began after 1689, and New England settlements were attacked by winter raiding parties, the Massachusetts legislature created special units of “snowshoe men,” each to “provide himself with a good pair of snowshoes, one pair of moggisons and one hatchet,” and to “hold themselves ready to march on the shortest warning.” These were roving patrols of frontier guards. To support them other militia units were ordered in 1711 and 1743 to be “in readiness at a minute’s warning,” During the French and Indian War, militia companies that mustered for the Crown Point campaign of 1756, called themselves “minutemen.” When the Provincial Congress advised the founding of minute companies, it was building on a long tradition.
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Late in 1774, the towns began to act, each in its own way. One of the first was Roxbury, which on December 26, 1774, created a company of “militia minutemen, so called,” who were ordered to “hold themselves in readiness at a minute’s warning, compleat in arms and ammunition; that is to say a good and sufficient firelock, bayonet, thirty rounds of powder and ball, pouch and knapsack,” Roxbury’s “militia minutemen” were required to exercise twice a week. They were paid one shilling “lawful money” for every day of service, and could also be fined a shilling for not appearing “at time and place as prefixt by the commanding officer.”
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The arrangements varied from town to town, which responded to the Provincial Congress more as sovereign bodies than subordinate agencies. Some were very slow, but most moved
quickly, with astonishing clarity of purpose. A case in point was the town of Lexington. In November 1774 the selectmen issued special warrants for a town meeting, “to see what method the Town will take to encourage Military Discipline, and to put themselves in a position of defence against their enemies.” The town voted to tax itself forty pounds (no small sum for these poor farmers in 1775), “for the purpose of mounting the cannon, ammunition, for a pair of drums for the use of the Training Band in the town, and for carriage and harness for burying the dead.” As early as November 1774 the people of Lexington knew what lay ahead for them. Withastonishing prescience they prepared for the worst, even for burying the dead.
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Lexington’s town meeting did not follow one suggestion of the Congress. It never raised a company of minutemen. It preferred to keep all of its militia in one exceptionally large company, which it continued to call by the 17th-century Puritan name of “the training band.” Strictly speaking, there were no Lexington minutemen in 1775. It is inaccurate to call them so. The force that gathered on the Green was a traditional New England “training band.”
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Other Massachusetts towns acted in the same spirit, building carefully on the folkways of their region. New companies of minutemen began by drawing up an old-fashioned “covenant” among themselves, in the same manner as a 17th century Puritan church or town. In the town of Methuen, for example, a muster roll in 1775 began with a formal “covenant,” written in an uncertainhand, but with a firm grasp of regional traditions. “Whare Milartary Exercise hath ben much Nelciked,” it stated, “We the Subscribers being the first Comptney in Methuen Do Covenant and Engage to form our Sevels into a Bodey in order to larn th manual Exercise to be suegat to such officers as Comptney shall Chuse by Voat in all Constutenel manner accorden to our Chattaers.”
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These militia covenants differed in detail, but most were similar in fundamentals. All were voluntary associations, explicitly founded to defend a way of life. Most agreed to elect their own officers by majority vote, and to be bound by “equal laws” of their own making. In Dunstable, on March 1, 1775, twenty-eight men solemnly promised that they “do hereby voluntarily engage with each other in defence of our country, Priveledges and Libertys for the space of six months from this date; that we will submit ourselves to the Laws equally.”
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These rules were carefully observed. A Boston newspaper described a militia meeting in Roxbury, in
which the “Reverend Mr. Adams opened the meeting with prayer, after which he was chosen moderator.” Thereafter, the militia of Roxbury elected their captain, lieutenants, ensigns and sergeants.
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Many New England towns maintained a special “training field” where the militia assembled four times a year for military exercises. This also was an ancient custom. The author’s town of Wayland (formerly East Sudbury) still has a “Training Field Road,” which has existed since the mid 17th century. Professional soldiers smiled indulgently at the sight of the New England militia on its training days. They laughed contemptuously at the awkward drill, hooted at the clumsy marching, and howled with laughter at the bizarre Yankee custom of saluting an officer by discharging a blank-loaded musket at his feet. One British observer wrote, “It is a curious masquerade scene to see grave sober citizens, barbers and tailors who never looked fierce before, strutting about in their Sunday wigs with muskets on their shoulders … if ever you saw a goose assume an air of consequence, you may catch some faint idea,” Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines bragged, “If I draw my sword but half out of my scabbard, the whole banditti of Massachusetts will run away.”

But the Massachusetts training bands were far from being the military Yahoos they appeared to be. The citizen-soldiers of New England dressed in the country clothing of artisans and farmers, but they kept their weapons clean and knew how to use them. They neglected the manual of arms, but took pains to perfect their marksmanship and improve their rate of fire. They looked ridiculous in close-order drill, but Robert Rogers had taught them his methods of open-order skirmishing and trained them to use cover and to take advantage of the ground. The New England militia made a miserable appearance on parade, but they practiced mobilization with astonishing results. For all their ragtag appearance, many officers and sergeants were combat veterans who had seen hard service in the French and Indian War.

To European officers who had served with them in the last war, the behavior of the New England militia in combat had seemed erratic at best. Sometimes these citizen soldiers fought poorly; sometimes well. As a rule, they performed badly on foreign soil, and worse when under Regular officers who tried to bully them. They tended to be at their best when they fought on their own ground, under their own elected officers, in defense of their homes and their way of life.

The Regulars of the British army and the citizen soldiers of Massachusetts looked upon military affairs in very different ways. New England farmers did not think of war as a game, or a feudal ritual, or an instrument of state power, or a bloodsport for bored country gentlemen. They did not regard the pursuit of arms as a noble profession. In 1775, many men of Massachusetts had been to war. They knew its horrors from personal experience. With a few exceptions, they thought of fighting as a dirty business that had to be done from time to time if good men were to survive in a world of evil. The New England colonies were among the first states in the world to recognize the right of conscientous objection to military service, and among the few to respect that right even in moments of mortal peril. But most New Englanders were not pacifists themselves. Once committed to what they regarded as a just and necessary war, these sons of Puritans hardened their hearts and became the most implacable of foes. Their many enemies who lived by a warrior-ethic always underestimated them, as a long parade of Indian braves, French aristocrats, British Regulars, Southern planters, German fascists, Japanese militarists, Marxist ideologues, and Arab adventurers have invariably discovered to their heavy cost.

Before the citizen-soldiers of New England marched to war, they reflected at length on what they had to do, and how they meant to do it. When they believed that their homes and their way of life were at stake, they fought with courage and resolve—not for the sake of fighting, but for the sake of winning.

All of these things happened in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. In the months before, the people of New England had come sadly to the conclusion that war was inevitable, and they had prepared for it with high seriousness. The town of Sudbury alone organized five militia companies, and required them to meet every week to practice mobilization and marksmanship. Others in the town busily collected supplies, and loaded them in wagons to follow the militia when they marched. When the alarm came to Sudbury, the town was ready to muster virtually all its men of military age, and to support them in the field.

Similar scenes were repeated throughout the towns of Middlesex County, with the same typically American combination of public organization and private effort. Acton’s Captain Isaac Davis, a farmer and a gunsmith, built a firing range behind his house and shop. His company of minutemen practiced there twice a week from November to April, perfecting their marksmanship
by shooting at targets. Captain Davis was a man of energy. He managed to make bayonets and cartridge boxes for his entire company—one of the few to be fully equipped.
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When the alarm came, the militia in these towns were ready to move quickly. In Concord, after the bell was rung and the alarm guns began to be fired, the town’s soldiers mustered with astonishing speed. Private Thaddeus Blood remembered that he was called out of bed at two o’clock in the morning by his sergeant, within minutes of Dr. Prescott’s arrival in the town. Blood joined his company, and went with them to the courthouse to draw ammunition. Amos Barrett, a private soldier in a Concord minute company remembered that “the bell rung at 3 o’clock for alarum as I was then a minute man I was soon in town.”

Every town and household had its own story to tell. Some of these tales brought a laugh to later generations, and to the participants themselves in later years. In Lexington, sixteen-year-old Jonathan Harrington was a fifer in the town’s militia company. Soon after Paul Revere reached town, he was awakened by his mother, who said to her teen-aged son, “Jonathan, get up! The Regulars are coming, and something must be done!”
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No two town stories were quite the same, but common threads appeared. It was common for New England towns to identify a common meeting place for their militia, and to mark it with something called an “alarm post.” This was often a stout wooden pillar, with various public notices tacked to its sides. As the British troops marched through the Massachusetts countryside, one of them later wrote, “We vex the Americans very much, by cutting down their liberty poles and alarm posts.”
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Sometimes the alarm post was a natural landmark. In Chelmsford, George Spaulding recalled that “we rallied at the alarm post, a boulder agreed upon by previous arrangement.”
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In other towns, the militia mustered at the meetinghouse. That was what happened in Andover, where one soldier recalled, “About seven o’clock we had alarum that the Reegelers was gon to Conkord we gathered at the meting hous & then started for Concord.”
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Many towns tried to muster their full strength, and send its men together. Billerica’s men arrived
en masse,
with those in neighboring hamlets, three or four hundred men together. Other towns sent their companies separately. In the sprawling town of Dedham, four companies “marched to the action by a different route.”
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A few towns never held a general muster; the men went
running off in small groups, or even as individuals. This happened in Lynn, where many men “immediately set out, without waiting to be organized,” much to their cost later in the day. In Chelmsford, one man remembered that “there was but little military order observed by us. We went off in squads as soon as convenient.”
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Some towns mustered more quickly than others. A regimental commander had ordered the companies from Hollis and Prescott to assemble at Groton. Their historian writes, “So well prepared were they for such an emergency and so expeditious their rally, that they arrived at the Groton rendezvous, five miles distant, before the companies there were ready to march.” Many did not follow the roads. The Brookline militia “marched towards Lexington across the fields, as a crow flies.”
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The towns further west did not hear the alarm until after sunrise. In Pepperell, Abel Parker was plowing his fields three miles from Pepperell center. “He left the plow in the furrow, and without stopping to unyoke his oxen, ran to the house, and seizing his coat in one hand and his gun in the other, started on a run and did not stop until he overtook his comrades near the ‘Ridges,’ three miles below Groton.” This was the ploughing season in Massachusetts. The folk image of the minuteman leaving his plough was literally the case in many towns that first heard the alarm after the sun was up.
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