Bunker Hill

burned in the road along with some other wooden objects, including the town’s liberty pole. When the wind took hold of the flames and the conflagration spread to the nearby Town House, local matron Martha Moulton urged the officers to put out the fire. When they equivocated, saying, “Oh, Mother, don’t be concerned,” Moulton took up a pail of water and shamed them into helping her. Soon a bucket brigade had succeeded in extinguishing the flames, creating the cloud of smoke that the militiamen saw from the hill on the other side of the Concord River. The regulars weren’t burning the town; they were doing their best to save it.
    —
    All of this was lost, however, on the militiamen and their officers. As far as they were concerned, Concord was about to be burned to the ground by the regulars. Colonel Barrett reluctantly decided that they must challenge the soldiers at the bridge and rescue the town. If they got lucky, the regulars would let them pass unmolested. If not and the bridge became a scene of brutal fighting, the company leading the militiamen must have bayonets. Other captains volunteered, but their companies were not as well equipped as the men from Acton, and Isaac Davis was given the honor of leading them toward the regulars gathered at the North Bridge. “I have not a man that is afraid to go,” he assured the other militia officers. Concord’s schoolmaster was present that morning, and years later he remembered how Davis’s face “reddened at the word of command.” Davis’s cheeks may have been suffused with a flush of pride and resolve, but he may have also been suffering, like his children, from scarlet fever.
    Davis’s Acton company moved from the left of the line to what became the front of the column. Marching beside Davis were Concord’s Major John Buttrick and Westford’s Lieutenant Colonel John Robinson. The militia followed behind them in files of two, normally not a fighting formation. In the rear and on horseback, Colonel Barrett repeated to each passing company not to fire first.
    —
    Even though men had already been killed at Lexington, many later looked to what was about to happen at the North Bridge as the start of the American Revolution. But, in truth, this was hardly the first time that armed colonists had actively opposed the British military. Back on December 14, the citizens of New Hampshire had attacked Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth and taken the king’s gunpowder and artillery. Two and a half years before that, on June 9, 1772, a British customs schooner, HMS
Gaspée
, had been boarded and burned by a group of Rhode Islanders led by the merchant John Brown. In both incidents, American colonists had initiated an attack with the intention of taking or destroying the crown’s property.
    But the events at the North Bridge were to be different. The militiamen were not out to storm a fort or scuttle a hated customs vessel. They simply wanted to save their town. But first they must cross a river.
    —
    The three companies of British regulars at the bridge were commanded by Captain Walter Laurie, who had long since sent a message to Colonel Smith calling for reinforcements. Laurie’s hundred or so soldiers were clustered on the west side of the bridge, but when they realized that the militiamen were headed toward them, marching, one of his officers wrote, “with as much order as the best disciplined troops,” Laurie ordered his own men back across the bridge. Now most of his force was concentrated in a single group on the east side of the river, with the bridge between them and the approaching militiamen.
    Two of Laurie’s officers lingered on the bridge and began to pull up some of the planks so as to impede the progress of the militiamen. In the meantime, Laurie tried to assemble two of his companies into what was known as a street-firing formation. After firing, the soldiers kneeling in the front rows would peel off to the sides to reload as those behind moved forward to continue the firing. Maximizing firepower in a confined space, street-firing, if performed properly, might have succeeded in holding the bridge until reinforcements arrived. But as it turned out, Laurie, like Lexington militia captain John Parker before him, hadn’t given himself enough time to prepare his men.
    As Laurie struggled to get his troops organized, Lieutenant William Sutherland and a handful of men leaped over the wall on the left side of the road leading to the bridge.