Bunker Hill

doing what they wanted. As one of Gage’s officers observed, “The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends.” Not since the Salem witch trials had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear, depending on which side of the issues they found themselves.
    —
    It was cold that night on the Lexington Green, and after one of the scouts whom Parker had sent down the road to Boston reported that there was no sign of the British, the militia captain dismissed his men, telling them to be ready to reassemble at the beat of a drum. Those who lived close to the green went home, but most of them, including Parker, retired to the convivial warmth of Buckman’s Tavern.
    There they would remain for the next three hours. At some point, we know that John Hancock made his way to the green. At that time, Hancock was Massachusetts’s leading political celebrity. Samuel Adams might be looked to as the mastermind, but Hancock was the public face of the patriot movement and would be later referred to that day as “King Hancock.” He was both president of the Provincial Congress and chairman of the Committee of Safety. He also had strong ties to Lexington. Not only had he been living here for the last few weeks, his grandfather had built the house in which he was staying, and some of his youth had been spent in Lexington.
    Hancock was a leading merchant and political figure, but like Joseph Warren he harbored his own military ambitions. He’d been the colonel of the Independent Company of Cadets, and after talking with the militiamen on the green (and perhaps in Buckman’s Tavern), he returned to the parsonage on the road to Bedford and began sharpening his sword. According to Hancock’s fiancée, Dorothy Quincy, who was also staying at the Clarke parsonage that night along with Hancock’s aunt, he spoke as if he intended to join the militiamen when they reformed on the green. Adams, however, patted him on the shoulder and insisted, “That is not our business; we belong to the cabinet.” When Hancock reluctantly agreed that they must “withdraw to some distant part of town,” he made one final proclamation that Sergeant William Munroe still remembered fifty years later. “If I had my musket,” he claimed, “I would never turn my back upon these troops.”
    By five in the morning, Hancock and Adams—minus Dorothy and Hancock’s aunt—were in Hancock’s carriage and rumbling toward a safer location. Meanwhile, Captain Parker had gotten startling news. The regulars were just minutes away.
    —
    Not until well after midnight had Colonel Francis Smith managed to get all seven hundred or so of his men across the Charles River. They’d been forced to wade from the boats to shore, and after once again wading across a small tidal river so as to prevent the soldiers’ leather-soled shoes from alerting the countryside as they pounded across a wooden bridge, they’d started up the road through Cambridge.
    The chilly spring air glowed with the gray light of the full moon as the grenadiers in their tall bearskin caps and the light infantrymen in their close-fitting black leather helmets trudged up the road, each footfall magnified hundreds of times into a single booming step that sounded like a giant striding out of Boston in the dark. One woman looked out her window and was astonished to see the soldiers’ gun barrels glinting in the moonlight like a river of flowing silver. The widow Rand watched the soldiers pass and then went looking for her neighbor, whom she found casting bullets in a shed behind his house. When she told him of what she’d seen, he refused to believe her. Only after he’d seen the many nearly identical footprints in the road did he realize that the old woman had been telling the truth.
    In the town of Menotomy, between Cambridge and Lexington, Colonel Smith began to realize that his attempts at secrecy had gone for naught. Signal guns could be heard in the distance up ahead. He ordered his men to halt and sent back a messenger to General Gage, requesting reinforcements. In addition to the grenadiers and light infantry, Gage had included a battalion of marines in the expedition, and Smith ordered Marine Major John Pitcairn to push ahead with six companies of light infantry and secure the two bridges that provided access to the town of Concord from the north.
    The Black Horse