Bunker Hill

evidence of where the regulars were headed. With the exception of the soldiers themselves, just about everybody in Boston seemed to know where the troops were headed that night.
    Much more significant than the identity of Warren’s informant is the reason Warren decided to alert the countryside. In early April the Provincial Congress had determined that a column leaving Boston must be equipped with baggage and artillery before it constituted a threat to the province. Congress had also determined that a vote of five members of the Committee of Safety (only one of them being from Boston) was required before the alarm could be sounded. Earlier that day, the committee had met at the Black Horse Tavern in the town of Menotomy (now known as Arlington) on the way to Concord from Cambridge. At that moment three committee members were staying at the Black Horse, and two others were at their homes in nearby Charlestown. Warren could have crossed the harbor, just as Paul Revere was soon to do, and after consulting his fellow committee members helped make what would have been, even with the committee’s unanimous consent, a controversial decision given the expedition’s absence of artillery and baggage. Warren opted instead to send out the tanner William Dawes (of the cannon-compressed shirt button) by Boston Neck and then called for Revere and directed him to row across the harbor for Charlestown. Even before the regulars had arrived in the marshes of Cambridge and set out for Concord, the alarm was being sounded in towns to the west and north of Boston.
    This was exactly the scenario that Joseph Hawley and the other moderates in the Provincial Congress had hoped to avoid: one influential committee member had ignored proper protocol and set into motion the process that made a confrontation between British regulars and the militia almost inevitable. Knowing that Samuel Adams had employed essentially the same strategy back in June when he attempted to circumvent the opposition to the Solemn League and Covenant, one can only wonder whether he had sent an earlier message to Warren via Paul Revere, urging him to issue the alarm even if the criterion demanded by the Provincial Congress was not met. It’s even more probable that Warren’s decision to send out the alarm was like most decisions made during a crisis—a spontaneous reaction to a seemingly confused rush of unexpected events. Even if the troops crossing the Charles River were without baggage or artillery, they exceeded the five-hundred-man threshold imposed by Congress. The possibility that Smith’s troops were after not just the military stores in Concord but also Samuel Adams and John Hancock was another concern.
    What Warren did was technically wrong, but at least he had made a decision—something the hypersensitive Gage had been struggling to do now for weeks. Whether premeditated or spur of the moment, or a mixture of both, Warren’s decision to send out Dawes and Revere rendered the debates at the Provincial Congress moot. After more than four months of preparing for the eventuality, Warren was about to have his war.
    —
    Paul Revere reached Lexington around midnight. As a precaution, a guard headed by the militia sergeant William Munroe had been posted around the house in which Samuel Adams and John Hancock were staying. Munroe and his men had been given orders to be as quiet as possible so that those inside could sleep, and when the sergeant admonished the newly arrived messenger for making too much noise, Revere erupted, “Noise! You’ll have noise enough before long! The regulars are coming out!” By this point both Adams and Hancock were awake. “Come in, Revere,” Hancock ordered. “We are not afraid of you.”
    Revere explained that he’d managed to elude two of the officers Gage had sent out to guard the road to Concord, and when Dawes arrived soon after, the patriot leaders could rest assured that the alarm these two messengers had helped to start was now—according to the system that had been previously organized by the Committee of Safety—being carried from town to town throughout Massachusetts and beyond. Warren had been concerned that in addition to the stores in Concord, the regulars were out to arrest Hancock and Adams, but as the Reverend William Gordon later related, the leaders had convinced themselves that Concord was the real aim of the British expedition.
    It was a short walk from the Clarke parsonage to the Lexington Common,