Bunker Hill

Harringtons, Smiths, Reeds, and Tidds on the Lexington militia rolls is in
BAR
, 2:380.
    As explained in Mary Babson Fuhrer’s “The Revolutionary Worlds of Lexington and Concord Compared,” Lexington had not experienced the divisions that had plagued Concord primarily because it was a younger town and had a history of strong and open-minded ministers. Fuhrer writes of how liberty in the eighteenth century had an entirely different meaning than it would have in the nineteenth century, citing the example of John Parker’s abolitionist grandson Theodore Parker, who believed “that liberty is an inalienable right of personhood, not as his forefathers had believed, of property” (p. 118). Levi Preston was the militiaman who said, “We always had been free, and we meant to be free always”; Mellen Chamberlain, “Why Captain Preston Fought,” pp. 68–70, and cited in
BAR
, 3:56, and David Hackett Fischer,
Paul Revere’s Ride
, p. 164. For information on Prince Estabrook, see George Quintal’s
Patriots of Color
, pp. 97–98; also present on the Lexington Common that morning were two more “men of color,” Eli Burdoo and Silas Burdoo (pp. 69–71). The reference to the coercive tactics of the patriots (“everyone bends”) was made by General Frederick Haldimand, second in command to Gage in Boston; in Allen French’s “General Haldimand in Boston,” pp. 90–91. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie writes in his
Diary
of how the militiamen frequently called out “King Hancock forever” during the British retreat to Boston that day (p. 57). On November 21, 1822, William Sumner recorded Dorothy Quincy’s memories of the morning of April 19 in the Clarke parsonage, which included Adams’s insistence that “we belong to the cabinet” (“Reminiscences by Gen. William H. Sumner,” p. 187).
    David Hackett Fischer provides an excellent description of the uniforms and equipment of the British grenadiers and light infantrymen in
Paul Revere’s Ride
, pp. 118–23. According to Samuel Abbot Smith,
West Cambridge 1775
, a townsman from Menotomy was awakened that night “by the rattle of the pewter plates on his dresser, jarred, as they were, by the measured tramp of the soldiers” (p. 17); Smith also relates Deacon Ephraim Cutter’s account of how he heard later in the day “the measured tread of the soldiers as of one man” (pp. 26–27). According to Frank Coburn in
The Battle of April 19, 1775
, “the moon was shining sufficiently bright” for the soldiers to read signs along the road; Coburn also recounts how Mrs. Timothy Tufts looked out her window in Cambridge’s Beech Street and “saw from her bed the gun-barrels shining in the moonlight” (pp. 48–50), and how the widow Rand and her bullet-casting neighbor saw the soldiers’ footprints in the dirt of the road through Cambridge (p. 49). Lieutenant Jeremy Lister writes of how “the country people began to fire their alarm guns, light their beacons” as the regulars marched out of Menotomy in Vincent Kehoe,
We Were There!
(subsequently referred to as Kehoe),
p. 115. Lieutenant Sutherland writes of hearing “several shots being fired . . . between 3 and 4 in the morning (a very unusual time for firing)” in Kehoe, p. 140. Colonel Smith’s account of how they “found the country had intelligence or strong suspicion of our coming, and fired many signal guns, and rung the alarm bells repeatedly” is also in Kehoe, p. 73. Samuel Abbot Smith relates how the Committee of Safety members fled the Black Horse Tavern in
West Cambridge 1775
, pp. 16–17.
    My description of the approach of the British advance guard to Lexington Common is based, in large part, on the accounts of Sutherland, Smith, Pope, Pitcairn, and Marr, all of which are in Kehoe (pp. 73, 76, 110, 138–89, and 155).
BAR
, vol. 2, contains descriptions of the capture of Porter, Richardson, and Wellington (pp. 360–61). Paul Revere writes in detail of his conversation with Major Mitchell and his officers in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 109. For a description of the dress and training of the provincial militiamen, see David Hackett Fischer’s
Paul Revere’s Ride
, pp. 149–62; Doolittle’s engravings clearly indicate the differences in dress between the militiamen and the regulars. William Munroe testified to seeing two hundred cartridge papers lying on the ground in Phinney, p. 34. According to Reverend Jonas Clarke,
A Brief Narrative
, “After