All of us here support our troops in whatever way each of us can. Today, during this Independence Day weekend, I'd like to take a moment to remember the earlier heroes, the ones without whom we might not have this holiday. Men of character, strong will, and faith.
The events of April 19, 1775, set in motion the founding of our great nation, which served as a beacon of freedom and land of hope for the whole world for over 200 years. Recent events have grieved us deeply as we see that ideal slipping away but that's a topic for other threads.
I ask that we remember this day men like John Brown, Samuel Hadley, Caleb Harrington, Robert Munroe, Isaac Muzzey, Asahel Porter, Jonathon Harrington and Jonas Parker, all killed that fateful morning on Lexington Green.
Men like Captain Isaac Davis, who was leading his men across Concord bridge, and Private Abner Hosmer next to him, both killed instantly by a British volley.
(artist: Don Troiani)
And men like Dr. Joseph Warren and the over 100 other lives lost at Bunker Hill, when the patriots finally resolved that enough was enough and it was time for armed conflict.
(artist: Don Troiani)
It wasn't until 8 years and possibly 25,000 lives later that their dream was realized. A nation where they were free to live their lives out from under the oppressive thumb of tyranny. How times have changed...
God bless all of those brave patriots and may they never be forgotten.
"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
The devastation of the day for the British began after the fight at the bridge...where they were able to retreat unharmed...until they came to Meriam’s Corner, a crossroads and a small bridge about a mile outside of Concord.
To cross the narrow bridge, the army column had to stop, dress its line, and close its rank to a mere three soldiers apiece. As the last of the army column marched over the bridge, colonial militiamen from Billerica and Chelmsford fired, the regulars turned and fired a volley, and the colonists returned fire. Two regulars were killed and perhaps six wounded with no colonial casualties. Smith sent out his flanking troops again after crossing the small bridge.
Nearly 500 militiamen assembled in the woods on Brooks Hill about a mile past Meriam’s Corner. Smith’s leading forces charged up the hill to drive them off, but the colonials did not withdraw. Meanwhile the bulk of Smith’s force proceeded along the road to Brooks Tavern where they engaged a single militia company from Framingham, killing and wounding several of them. Smith withdrew his men from Brooks Hill and moved across another small bridge into Lincoln.
Soon they were greeted at a bend in the road (“The Bloody Curve”, now known since the 19th century as the “Bloody Angle”) by 200 men, mostly from the towns of Bedford and Lincoln, who had positioned themselves on an incline in one of the few areas in Massachusetts that had not been cleared since the mid-1600s of trees and made into an open field. They stood behind trees and walls in a rocky, tree-filled pasture for an ambush. Additional militia joined in from the other side of the road, catching the British in a crossfire in a wooded swamp, and a fresh regiment arrived and attacked from the rear.
Eight soldiers and four colonial militia were killed. The regular army soldiers escaped by breaking into a trot, a pace that the colonials could not maintain through the woods and swamps next to this spot in the road. Colonial forces on the road itself behind the British were too densely packed and disorganized to mount an attack.
Militia forces at this time numbered about 2,000, and Smith sent out flankers again. When three companies of militia ambushed the head of his main force near either Ephraim Hartwell’s or (more likely) Joseph Mason’s Farm, the flankers closed in and trapped the militia from behind.
Flankers also trapped the Bedford militia after a successful ambush near the Lincoln-Lexington border, but British casualties were mounting from these engagements and from persistent long-range fire, and the exhausted British were running out of ammunition.
On the Lexington side of the border, Captain Parker, according to only one uncorroborated source (Ebenezer Munroe’s memoir of 1824), waited on a hill with the reassembled Lexington Training Band (militia), some of them bandaged up from the first fighting of the day. These men, according to this account written only many years later, did not begin the ambush until Colonel Smith himself came into view. Smith was wounded in the thigh sometime on the way back to Lexington, and the entire British column was halted in this ambush supposedly known as “Parker’s Revenge”. Major Pitcairn sent light infantry companies up the hill to clear out any militia sniping at them.
The light infantry cleared two additional hills—”The Bluff” and “Fiske Hill”— and took casualties from ambushes. Pitcairn fell from his horse, which was injured from firing from Fiske Hill. Now the two principal leaders of the Concord expedition were both injured or unhorsed. Their men were tired, thirsty, and running low on ammunition. A few surrendered; most now broke and ran forward in a mob. Their organized, planned withdrawal had turned into a rout. “Concord Hill” remained before Lexington Center, and a few uninjured officers turned around and supposedly threatened their own men with their swords if they would not reform in good order.