Bunker Hill

or Green, a crude triangle of lumpy grass formed by the intersection of the road from Boston to the east, the road to Concord to the west, and the road to Bedford to the north. In addition to some chest-high stone walls, which would later remind the regulars of the hedgerows back in England, the green was bounded by the houses of Jonathan Harrington and Daniel Harrington to the west, that of Marret Munroe to the south, and Buckman’s Tavern to the east. Within the eastern tip of the green was the Lexington Meetinghouse. Rather than a bell-equipped spire, the congregation had opted for a more economical stand-alone belfry, which stood fifty yards or so to the west of the meetinghouse. Soon the bell was ringing, and by 2:00 a.m. approximately 130 members of the 144-man Lexington militia had assembled on the green under the leadership of forty-six-year-old Captain John Parker. Parker was six feet, two inches tall and the father of four girls and three boys, all between the ages of four and fourteen. He was also a veteran of the French and Indian War and had been at the Siege of Louisbourg in 1758 and with Wolfe when he had taken Quebec. He was now a farmer who lived about two miles from the center of town, and like Josiah Quincy Jr., he was dying of tuberculosis. He had had trouble sleeping the night before, and it looked as if he was going to get even less sleep tonight.
    As was true in all the town militias throughout Massachusetts, this group of men knew each other intimately. Parker, it was said, was related to at least a quarter of the men gathered there that night. Of the militia’s 144 members, 14 of them were Munroes, 11 were Harringtons, 10 were Smiths, 7 were Reeds, and 4 were Tidds. They lived in a tightly knit, largely self-contained community that was profoundly different from what was to be found in a typical village in England. They voted in town meetings that instilled the assumption that they had a direct say in how their government worked. Their sense of self-worth was determined not by ancient notions or protocols of class but by their ability to farm, hunt, and fight. At the center of all their lives was the Lexington Meeting, whose black-robed minister Jonas Clarke assured them that just as God had approved of their forefathers’ battles with the Indians and the French, their current insistence on liberty was also divinely sanctioned. In keeping with this melding of spiritual and martial concerns, the meetinghouse—unheated and safely removed from other structures near the green—served as the town’s powderhouse.
    Years later, one of the militiamen who participated in the events of that day insisted that it wasn’t the Tea Act or the Boston Port Bill or any of the Coercive Acts that made them take up arms against the regulars; no, it was much simpler than that. “We always had been free, and we meant to be free always,” the veteran remembered. “[Those redcoats] didn’t mean we should.” It was a sense of freedom strengthened by the knowledge that to the west and north, and to the east in Maine, lay a wilderness that their children could one day go to as their forefathers had done when they first sailed for the New World. Nothing like this was available to the future generations of Europe. It was a sense of promise that made the militiamen’s resolve to oppose these troops all the more powerful.
    But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy of the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seem a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook.
    While Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Massachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they—rather than Gage and the loyalists—had the power to intimidate those around them into