Bunker Hill

been keeping careful watch on the regulars’ movements since the fall and quickly realized that something was afoot. The next suspicious development was the midnight launching of boats from the decks of the transports anchored in the harbor. These were the type of small rowing vessels that had been used to take the troops up the Mystic River back in September, and the next morning they could be seen clustered at the sterns of the men-of-war. From his house on Hanover Street, Warren directed Paul Revere to ride to Lexington, where Samuel Adams and John Hancock were still living in the town’s parsonage, and inform them of these ominous developments. On the way back to Boston, Revere stopped in Charlestown, where he made arrangements with the local patriots that if the troops did indeed march out of the city, he would make sure that signal lanterns were placed in the belfry of Christ Church, whose steeple was, at 191 feet, the tallest in Boston, taller, in fact, than even Beacon Hill. One lantern would mean the regulars were taking the land route out across the Neck into Roxbury; two lanterns would mean the boats had been used to row the soldiers across the Charles River to either Charlestown or Cambridge.
    In an espionage report written on Tuesday, April 18, Gage received detailed information about where the stores were located in Concord. Many of the provisions were hidden in houses in the center of town; most of the military supplies were at a farmhouse on the other side of the Concord River. By the end of the day, Gage had completed the second draft of his orders for Colonel Francis Smith, who was to take a force of about seven hundred grenadiers and light infantry to Concord, destroy or capture the stores (what both sides wanted most were the cannons), and return to Boston. The soldiers were to leave that night in boats brought to the shore along the western edge of the common, and they were to be without both baggage (usually transported in wagons) and artillery. If all went well, they would be back in their barracks before nightfall of the following day.
    —
    Joseph Warren was one of the last patriot leaders still in Boston on the night of April 18. Around nine o’clock, just as the regulars began to assemble in the remote reaches of the common, he is said to have received word of the impending expedition and decided to alert the countryside that British troops were headed for Concord. The question is who told Warren where the soldiers were headed.
    Gage did not inform General Percy of the expedition until that night. After his meeting with Gage, Percy was passing a group of Bostonians gathered on the common when he overheard one of them say, “They will miss their aim.”
    “What aim?” Percy asked.
    “The cannon at Concord.”
    Percy turned abruptly around, rushed back to Province House, and told Gage that his supposedly clandestine mission was no longer a secret. The general was thunderstruck, claiming that besides Percy he had told only one other person.
    Many have speculated as to who that person may have been. Margaret Kemble Gage is often looked to as the most likely candidate, even though there is no tangible evidence to support the supposition. The story goes that she and her husband grew apart after the events of April 1775, and Gage quickly sent her packing on a ship back to London. In fact, Margaret Gage did not leave Boston until the late summer and was soon followed by her husband. Hardly estranged from one another, the Gages would have two more children together.
    In all likelihood there was no shadowy informant. Boston was too compact and crowded a town for much of anything to happen without a good portion of its residents knowing about it. Traditions have come down to us of someone who overheard a conversation between two officers on Long Wharf, of someone else who saw a battle-ready light infantryman in a Boston shop, and of yet another who spoke with a groomer in the stables of Province House who told him of the expedition. All of these things—or some versions thereof—might have happened. Earlier that afternoon about a dozen mounted officers wearing long blue coats to conceal their scarlet uniforms had left via the Neck and enjoyed a dinner at a tavern in Cambridge. Later that night, when the British officers began to take up positions on the various roads leading to Concord (so as to prevent any messengers from alerting the countryside), the ever-vigilant patriots had added