Bunker Hill

descendant of Thomas and Margaret Gage) insisted that there was no family tradition concerning an estrangement between the Gages—an assertion that seems borne out by the portraits of Thomas and Margaret, painted after their return to England from Boston in 1775, that still bracket a fireplace mantel at the Gage estate. J. L. Bell in his blog “Boston 1775” does a masterful job of demonstrating why it’s highly unlikely that Margaret Gage revealed any secrets about her husband’s planned expedition to Concord; see postings for April 12 and 13, 2011, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2011/04/marriage-of-thomas-and-margaret-gage.html. Another possibility is that Warren’s informant was none other than Benjamin Church. In the weeks ahead, Warren would turn a blind eye to some highly suspicious behavior on the part of Church, perhaps because the doctor had earned Warren’s trust by acting as a double agent on the night of April 18.
    In an October 25, 1775, entry in his journal, Jeremy Belknap records various accounts he’d heard of events in Boston on the evening of April 18, including the appearance of a light infantryman in a shop and the conversation between two officers on Long Wharf (pp. 84–86). Ellen Chase includes this evidence as well as Samuel Drake’s account of the man who spoke with the groomer in the stables of Province House, along with an account of the officers dispatched to guard the roads to Concord, in
BAR
, 2:320–31. The essential illegality of Warren’s decision to send out the alarm on the night of April 18, 1775, is discussed by John Scheide in “The Lexington Alarm,” pp. 59–61; by John Cary in
Joseph Warren
, p. 183; and by Clifford Shipton in his biography of Warren in
SHG
, 14:520–21. Seemingly in his own defense, Warren writes Joseph Reed on May 15, 1775: “I verily believe that the night preceding the barbarous outrages committed by the soldiery in Lexington, Concord, etc. there were not 50 people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be shed in the contest between us and Great Britain” (
LJW
, p. 486). This statement appears to be at complete odds with what Warren knew to be the truth, especially since as recently as April 3, 1775, he had written to Arthur Lee that if Percy’s March 30 foray into the countryside had resulted in the destruction of any military stores “not a man of them [Percy’s brigade] would have returned to Boston” (
LJW
, p. 448). “Was he,” as Clifford Shipton so rightly asks concerning Warren’s decision to send out the alarm, “deliberately creating an incident which would assure war?” (p. 521). We’ll never know for sure, especially since, according to some accounts, many of Warren’s papers were destroyed after his death. Did these papers include incriminating documents that might have indicated just how deliberate Warren’s decision to send out the alarm really was? Once again, we’ll probably never know for sure.
    William Munroe describes Paul Revere’s arrival at the Jonas Clarke house on the night of April 18 in an affidavit recorded on March 7, 1825, in Elias Phinney’s
History of the Battle of Lexington
(subsequently referred to as Phinney), p. 33; Phinney provides the detail about Hancock responding, “Come in, Revere. We are not afraid of you” (p. 17). William Gordon appears to have spoken in great detail with Samuel Adams about the night of April 18 and morning of April 19; in his
History of the American Revolution
, vol. 1, he records, “Mr. Adams inferred from the number [of British regulars] to be employed that [the stores in Concord] were the objects, and not himself and Mr. Hancock, who might be more easily seized in a private way by a few armed individuals, than by a large body of troops that must march, for miles together, under the eye of the public” (pp. 476–77). Probably the best way to visualize Lexington Common or Green (both terms were used in eighteenth-century accounts) in 1775 is by looking at the relevant engraving in the series by Amos Doolittle, all of which are based on sketches made at the sites within weeks of the events in 1775. My description of John Parker is based on Elizabeth Parker’s “John Parker,” pp. 47, 60–61, and
BAR
, 2:345–46. Lexington militia company clerk Daniel Harrington reported that 130 militiamen answered the first call that night in William Gordon’s “Account of the Commencement of Hostilities” in
AA4
, 2:627. The number of Munroes,