Bunker Hill

African American casualty of the Revolution since the death of the black sailor Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre.
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    From the standpoint of the British, the skirmish at Lexington had been a disaster. For a frighteningly extended period of time, Colonel Smith and his officers had lost control of their men. Even after the infantrymen had been induced to stop firing their muskets, it took a while to calm them down. “We then formed on the Common,” Lieutenant John Barker wrote in his diary, “but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders.”
    Part of the problem had to do with Gage’s decision to put together an expedition made up of grenadiers and light infantrymen rather than go with one of the three brigades that made up the force he had in Boston. Although these seven hundred men represented the elite in his army, they had never trained together and were unfamiliar, for the most part, with the officers who were now commanding them. The trust and cohesion that went with a group of men who had been training and living together for several years did not exist among Smith’s expedition. Throughout the long day ahead, orders given by the British officers were either misinterpreted or ignored, an inevitable result of unfamiliarity in a time of crisis.
    Compounding the difficulty was the fact that they were already fourteen miles into what they now knew was enemy territory. The prospect of the march back to Boston through a countryside that was rapidly filling up with militiamen was daunting, to say the least. In fact, when shortly after the incident at Lexington, Colonel Smith revealed for the first time the purpose of their mission, several of his officers advised him to turn back. “From what they had seen . . . ,” Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie wrote, “they imagined it would be impracticable to advance to Concord and execute their orders.” Colonel Smith simply told them that he was “determined to obey the orders he had received,” and they continued on to Concord.
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    The encounter at Lexington was just as disastrous for the town’s militiamen, who suffered what might be termed the country equivalent of the Boston Massacre. It apparently made no difference that, unlike the Bostonians, who had been armed with only clubs, rocks, and snowballs, the militiamen were equipped with muskets. Once the king’s troops had been goaded into firing their weapons, the Lexington militia suffered casualties that were as lopsided as those suffered by the crowd in Boston in 1770. Just as determining who was at fault became a hotly contested political issue in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, so was what happened at Lexington about to spark a controversy that persists to this day as to who was the first to discharge his musket or pistol.
    The real question was not who fired the first shot, but why were Parker and his men on the Lexington Green in the first place? Seventy or so militiamen had no chance of stopping an advance guard of more than two hundred British regulars. Instead of spending much of the early-morning hours drinking at Buckman’s Tavern and then stubbornly lingering on the green, the Lexington militia should have already been in Concord, where they could have helped hide and ultimately defend the military stores. As it was, they had almost called attention to what few kegs of powder they had hidden in the town’s meetinghouse. What purpose was to be served by standing out there on the grass as the soldiers marched by?
    Years later, General William Heath, who was about to join with Joseph Warren and play an important role in subsequent events that day, commented that by standing so near the road, Parker and his men had been guilty of “too much braving for danger [since] they were sure to meet with insult, or injury, which they could not repel.” If they were intent on engaging the British, they should have been where many of them ended up: behind a stone wall.
    Some have speculated that Samuel Adams may have been responsible for the militia being on the Lexington Green. Since Adams had a reputation for stage-managing events, whether it was the selection of the province’s delegates to the Continental Congress in June or Warren’s Massacre Day Oration in March, perhaps he accompanied John Hancock to the Lexington Green and convinced Captain Parker to make a stand against the British. However, Hancock, not Adams, was Lexington’s local hero, and he had