Bunker Hill

been the one who, according to William Munroe, proclaimed just minutes before the skirmish, “If I had my musket, I would never turn my back upon these troops.” Parker may very well have had Hancock’s words in mind when he initially told his men to stand their ground.
    Thanks to Reverend William Gordon’s account of the events of that day, we know that as Adams and Hancock beat a hasty retreat from Lexington, Adams proclaimed, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!” Hancock missed his meaning entirely and thought his companion was talking about the weather. “I mean,” Adams insisted, “this is a glorious day for America.”
    Hancock was not as thickheaded as Samuel Adams, who apparently recounted the exchange to Gordon, seemed to imply. Being a businessman, Hancock possessed a practical sense of the human resources required to get a job properly done. Adams was more of a theorist, a man who always had his eye on the bigger picture and who never seems to have allowed the paltry concerns of individuals to interfere with his pursuit of American liberty. For him, any event that furthered the cause—even a confused and heartrending event such as the Boston Massacre—was “glorious.” Hancock, on the other hand, had seen for himself the men who were about to face the British at Lexington, and he appears to have been less taken with the patriotic possibilities of what was about to unfold. According to his fiancée, he described the militiamen as “but partially provided with arms and those they had were in most miserable order.” He may have quite rightly suspected that he and Adams were leaving a slaughter in their wake.
    Hancock, in the end, had the wisdom not to take the field at Lexington Green. In just a few hours’ time, Joseph Warren was about to make a very different decision.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    The Bridge
    T he morning of April 19, 1775, marked the beginning of a beautiful spring day in New England. The unusually warm winter meant that the trees and flowers were ahead of themselves that April, and the foliage dotting the surrounding fields was hazed with blossoms and the bright green buds of emerging leaves. Now that the column’s presence was no longer a secret, Colonel Francis Smith ordered the fifers and drummers to strike up a tune during the six-mile march to Concord.
    Mary Hartwell lived in the town of Lincoln, just to the west of Lexington. Her husband Samuel was a sergeant in the local militia, but that did not prevent her from appreciating what she saw that morning when she looked out her window. “The army of the king was coming up in fine order,” she later told her grandchildren, “their red coats were brilliant, and their bayonets glistening in the sunlight made a fine appearance; but I knew what all that meant, and I feared that I should never see your grandfather again.”
    Colonel Smith seems to have made a special effort to instill a renewed sense of discipline among his troops that morning. The British army had a long and distinguished tradition to uphold, and Smith later claimed that despite being shot at twice from the surrounding woods, his men marched from Lexington to Concord “with as much good order as ever troops observed in Britain or any other friendly country.”
    The fact remained, however, that they were not in a friendly country. But was this truly enemy territory? Twenty years before, the regulars had been looked to as the allies, if not the saviors, of the New Englanders as they marched together over these same country roads on their way to battle the French and Indians. Now that the enemy in that war had been defeated, the New Englanders were acting as if the New World of their Puritan ancestors was theirs and theirs alone. It was left to Colonel Smith and his regulars to remind these people that this was still British soil.

    —
    Concord is a town surrounded by hills. In 1775, it was also a town where open fields, crisscrossed by stone walls, predominated. This meant that the small group of militiamen gathered on Meriam’s Hill at the intersection of the road to Concord and the road to Bedford, about a mile from the center of Concord, had plenty of time to watch the long line of British troops approaching from the east. And like Mary Hartwell before them, they were transfixed by the spectacle of seven hundred British regulars marching through the clear morning air. “The sun was rising and shined on their arms,” the magnificently named Thaddeus Blood