Bunker Hill

militiamen’s musket balls. Sutherland got spun around by a hit to the chest, and two privates fell beside him dead or mortally wounded. Captain Laurie’s attempts to maintain a blistering rate of fire were stymied by the almost immediate loss of four of eight officers. As the militia and minutemen made their way across the bridge, those in front kneeling so that those behind could fire over their heads, British resistance crumbled, and the regulars, despite Laurie’s protestations, turned and fled. “The weight of their fire was such,” Lieutenant Jeremy Lister wrote, “that we was obliged to give way, then run with the greatest precipitance.” According to militiaman Amos Barrett, “There were eight or ten that were wounded and a running and a hobbling about, looking back to see if we were after them.”
    The provincials streamed across the bridge but seemed unwilling to continue the fighting. Part of the problem was that the regulars’ commanding officer, Colonel Smith, had arrived from the center of Concord with reinforcements. The militiamen may have also realized by this point that Concord was not in fact burning. The shocking loss of Captain Isaac Davis could have also contributed to the sudden absence of resolve. But perhaps the biggest reason the militia stopped firing on the British was the realization that something truly momentous had just occurred. They had done much more than fire on British troops; they had forced three companies of light infantry to retreat. It was a victory, of sorts, but for what purpose? The town, it turned out, was not in flames. The British had fired the first shot, but the provincials had clearly forced the issue by marching on the bridge, and people had died on both sides. The only directive the Provincial Congress had provided was the necessity of not firing the first shot. Now that the shot had been fired, should the militiamen continue to fight? Or should they return to waiting for the other side to make the next move? Instead of iron resolve, hesitation and confusion reigned in the aftermath of the confrontation at the North Bridge.
    Colonel James Barrett and roughly half his force backtracked to the other side of the river and eventually returned to Punkatasset Hill. Major Buttrick and a few hundred minutemen continued across the bridge and climbed into the ridge of hills that overlooked the road leading into Concord, where they took up a position behind a stone wall. Below them on the road, about 250 yards away, Colonel Smith and the grenadiers met up with the remnants of Captain Laurie’s three companies. “There we lay,” the militiaman Amos Barrett remembered, “behind the wall, about 200 of us, with our guns cocked expecting every minute to have the word—fire; . . . if we had fired, I believe we would have killed almost every officer there was in front. . . . They stayed there about 10 minutes and then marched back and we after them.”
    No provincial officer seemed willing to take charge after the fighting at the North Bridge. According to Thaddeus Blood, “everyone appeared to be his own commander.” In this vacuum of leadership, Private Ammi White, in his early twenties, came upon one of the infantrymen who had fallen on the British left flank. Like several others, the regular had been left behind in the chaotic retreat from the North Bridge. Exactly what happened next is difficult to determine. The soldier was injured but still very much alive, and he may have tried to defend himself with his bayonet. Whether it was out of anger or fear, Ammi took up his hatchet and struck the wounded soldier repeatedly in the head. The Reverend Emerson watched the attack and seems to have been more disturbed by the incident than Ammi, who years later confided that he simply did what he thought was expected of a soldier in the midst of battle.
    Unfortunately, Ammi did not succeed in immediately killing the infantryman. For more than an hour the soldier lay on the ground, his head chopped into a mess of splintered bone and brains, as both the British and the provincials waited for the return of Captain Parsons from Barrett Farm. Neither side knew what to do next. Smith apparently feared that any attempt on his part to cover Parsons’s retreat across the bridge might incite yet another attack from the provincials. So he returned to Concord’s village center and did nothing, which meant that Colonel Barrett on Punkatasset Hill was free to annihilate the