Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 12

Some have claimed that, based on Heath's own account of his activities, he provided important tactical leaders.h.i.+p during this portion of the fighting. However, given the chaotic realities of that afternoon, the effectiveness of the provincial fire had more to do with there being close to four thousand militiamen on the field that day than anything else. If an organizational element was responsible for the success of the provincials, it had been provided that winter by the Committee of Safety. What was happening that afternoon on what came to be known as the Battle Road was, for the most part, highly fluid and spontaneous. It also didn't hurt that many of the militia companies contained veterans of the French and Indian War who, unlike Heath, had experience in just this kind of guerilla-style fighting.

"Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob," Percy later begrudgingly admitted, "will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having [been] employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians and this country being much covered with wood and hills is very advantageous for their method of fighting." But what most impressed Percy was the personal courage these militiamen demonstrated as they methodically hunted the British officers in the column. Unlike the enlisted men, whose cheaply dyed red coats quickly faded to a pinkish orange, the officers' coats were made with a more expensive and long-lasting crimson dye and were easily distinguished from the washed-out uniforms of the rank and file. For the militiamen, the vivid red of the officers' coats presented a target that was too tempting to resist. "Many of [the provincials] ... advanced within ten yards to fire at me and the other officers," Percy marveled, "though they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant."

Lieutenant Mackenzie of the Welch Fusiliers made special note of those provincials who used horses to increase their effectiveness against the British column. "Numbers of them were mounted," he wrote, "and when they had fastened their horses at some little distance from the road, they crept down near enough to have a shot. As soon as the column had pa.s.sed, they mounted again, and rode round until they got ahead of the column and found some convenient place from whence they might fire again." Just as the colonial veterans of the French and Indian War were relying on their own considerable experience and judgment as they joined in on the fighting, so were these lone riders acting on their own initiative.

What Heath provided that afternoon and evening was not tactical and strategic brilliance but legitimacy. Simply by being there, he, as a general in the provincial army, made what happened along the road to Boston something more than a backyard skirmish between some irate farmers and the regulars of the British Empire. With Heath and his companion Dr. Joseph Warren standing there on the hip of the column's rear guard, the provincials were beginning to have, in a very crude and inchoate form, the trappings of a command structure.

They were a most unlikely pair. Heath was fat and bald. Warren was tallish and handsome, his hair pinned up on the sides of his head in stylish horizontal rolls. There is no mention of Heath taking any extraordinary risks that day, but Warren was, according to one contemporary, "perhaps the most active man in the field." At a section of Menotomy known as Foot of the Rocks, Warren put himself so squarely in harm's way that a British musket ball struck out one of the pins that was holding up his curled hair. "The people were delighted with his cool, collected bravery and already considered him as a leader," one commentator wrote.

As a military novice, Warren clearly didn't have much expertise to offer. What he did have was a charismatic talent for inspiring people. And he was learning.

Warren wasn't the only one who tried to look his best that day. Before leaving Acton, many of the town's militiamen carefully powdered their hair with flour. Jotham Webb was a brickmaker from Lynn. He'd recently gotten married, and before leaving that morning, he put on the wedding suit he'd worn just a few days before. "If I die," he told his new wife, "I will die in my best clothes."

That afternoon Jotham and the rest of his company from Lynn decided to position themselves ahead of the British column near the house of Jason Russell in Menotomy. Russell, fifty-eight, had been about to res.h.i.+ngle his house, and using the bales of cedar s.h.i.+ngles to create a kind of breastworks in his front yard, he, with the help of the militiamen, resolved to defend his property against the approaching British. Some of the militiamen were posted behind the s.h.i.+ngles; others a.s.sembled on the hillside behind the house, where an orchard provided some cover. On the other side of the road, Gideon Foster and some militiamen from Danvers put together the makings of what they hoped would be an ambush. As the vanguard of the British column became visible coming down the road from Lexington, Russell's neighbor Ammi Cutter warned him that he was much too close to the road for his own safety. Russell, who was lame and apparently quite stubborn, waved him off with the words, "An Englishman's home is his castle."

The British hit them like a thunderbolt-not from the road, but from behind. As the militiamen looked eagerly for the column, flankers came at them from seemingly nowhere, flus.h.i.+ng the provincials out of the orchard and toward the house. Since the column was coming at them from the road, they were trapped between the hammer and anvil of the flankers and the advance guard. The would-be ambushers had been outflanked, and one of the first killed was Jotham Webb in his new bridal suit, soon followed by his twenty-five-year-old friend Abednego Ramsdell.

The desperate survivors of the initial British onslaught fled for the safety of Jason Russell's house. Russell was killed on his own doorstep, shot twice and stabbed an estimated eleven times by British bayonets. The Russell house was a typical, very humble colonial structure-two rooms on the ground floor and two rooms upstairs, with a cellar down below. Anything but a castle, the home of Jason Russell was about to become a slaughterhouse.

Eight men from Danvers, Beverly, and Lynn hurried into the darkness of the cellar. They proved to be the lucky ones. By blasting away at any regular who dared to approach the cellar entrance, they were able to hold off the soldiers even as they filled the beams of the house with bullet holes that can still be seen today. The militiamen who remained up above found themselves in the greatest trouble as the regulars poured into the house. Soon the rooms were filled with the ear-splitting boom of muskets and choking clouds of powdersmoke. In desperation, Daniel Townsend and Timothy Munroe jumped through the windows. Townsend took out the entire window sash and was dead when he hit the ground. Somehow Munroe was still alive when he tumbled from the window; he staggered to his feet and began to run. Regulars fired at him repeatedly but to no effect. "d.a.m.n him!" one was heard to cry. "He is bullet proof, let him go." Munroe, who received just a wound in the leg, later found thirty-two bullet holes in his clothes and hat; even his b.u.t.tons had been shot off. Outside the house Dennison Wallis was taken captive. He quickly realized that the British were executing their prisoners. So he decided to run for it. He ultimately received twelve wounds and was left for dead, but somehow he survived.

A total of twelve provincials and two regulars were killed at the Jason Russell house. Later that day the dozen bodies were laid out in the south room. According to Jason Russell's wife, the blood was "almost ankle deep" when she returned to find her husband dead and her house "riddled with bullets." Two days later, the bodies were piled on a sled and dragged by oxen to the cemetery. The townspeople dug a trench and laid the bodies "head to point" in a single grave.

Several more harrowing incidents occurred along the road through Menotomy, all of them within hearing, if not seeing, distance of each other. Seventy-eight-year-old Samuel Whittemore decided to make a stand not far from his house. After killing several regulars, he took a musket ball to the jaw and was bayoneted repeatedly before being left for dead. He lived for another eleven years. Prior to Whittemore's encounter, Deacon Joseph Adams had run for the safety of the hay barn, leaving his wife and children (among them a newborn baby) hiding in his house's bedroom. Fortunately, Adams's nine-year-old son showed a bit more pluck than his father, and after admonis.h.i.+ng the regulars for stealing the family silver, the boy used some newly brewed beer to put out a fire that might have otherwise destroyed the house.

At Cooper's Tavern, two townspeople insisted on enjoying a rum drink known as a flip even as the regulars approached. The tavern keeper and his wife fled for the cellar, leaving their customers to have their brains literally bashed out by the soldiers. Just outside Menotomy in the outskirts of Cambridge, at a house on Watson's Corner, yet another group of novice militiamen, many of them from the town of Brookline, were "scooped up" by the British flank guard and killed. It's estimated that approximately half the total deaths that occurred that day (forty-nine for the provincials, sixty-eight for the British) happened in and around Menotomy.

Soon after the incident at Watson's Corner, with sunset approaching, General Percy made the decision that saved his command. Rather than push on through Cambridge and return to Boston via the bridge, he veered left and headed for Charlestown, just a few miles away on the other side of a narrow, defensible neck and under the protective guns of the navy. This seems to have caught General Heath completely by surprise. In his memoirs Heath was quite proud of the fact that prior to heading for Lexington, he instructed the Watertown militia to dismantle, once again, the bridge. He appears to have also sent instructions to prepare an ambush for the British. What he had not antic.i.p.ated was this last-minute decision on the part of Percy to make what was, in retrospect, a quite predictable move given what Percy had earlier encountered when crossing the bridge into Cambridge.

But as it turned out, the provincials had, unknown to Heath, a trick up their sleeve. Marching south from Salem were militia captain Timothy Pickering Jr. and several hundred men. Instead of taking the road through Menotomy, the Salem men were well to the east in Medford. If they pushed on, they just might cut off the British before they reached Charlestown.

As Pickering marched south and the British continued to fight their way, house by house, toward Charlestown, John Andrews looked out from the hills of Boston. He could see, he wrote, "the engagement very plain. It was very b.l.o.o.d.y for seven hours." Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane Mecom later wrote to her brother of "the horror the town was in when the battle approached within hearing," especially since it was expected that the fighting "would proceed quite in to town." Similar fears were felt in communities throughout the region. Like Andrews in Boston, the Reverend Samuel West watched the fighting from Needham. "We could easily trace the march of the troops from the smoke which arose over them," he wrote, "and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the platoons [i.e., volleys] fired by the British." Even worse for the residents of Needham, who lost five that day, were "the infinitely more distressing scenes which we expected would follow. We even antic.i.p.ated the enemy enraged as they were at our doors and in our houses acting over all the horrors which usually attend the progress of a victorious exasperated army especially in civil wars like this."

In Menotomy, where the women and children had gathered in houses safely removed from the firing, the rumor began to circulate that the town's slaves were about to launch a revolt of their own and "finish what the British had begun by murdering the defenseless women and children." When Ishmael, an enslaved man belonging to the Cutler family, approached the house of George Prentiss, one of the many terrified women gathered inside asked, "Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?" No, Ishmael replied; he wasn't there to kill them; he was there to see whether his owner's wife, Mrs. Cutler, was safe.

A similar fear overtook the women of Framingham, who armed themselves with "axes and pitchforks and clubs" and a.s.sembled in the Edgell house, convinced that "the Negroes were coming to ma.s.sacre them all." One resident later attributed this "strange panic" to "a lingering memory of the earlier Indian alarms ... , aided by the feeling of terror awakened by their defenseless condition and the uncertainty of the issue of the pending fight."

Whatever the source of this terrible fright might have been, it marked a disturbing transformation among the citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts. Reverend West of Needham claimed that prior to Lexington and Concord, his paris.h.i.+oners had been "mild and gentle." Once their loved ones began to die, however, these same paris.h.i.+oners became "ferocious and cruel-at least towards all those they suspected as unfriendly to their cause." In town after town, the battle lines were being drawn.

Around seven in the evening, Percy and his column reached the safety of Charlestown, where a height of land known as Bunker Hill provided the defensive ground they needed to convince the provincials to discontinue the pursuit. It was dusk, dark enough, William Heath remembered, "as to render the flashes of the muskets very visible."

Heath later came to the conclusion that there could have been a very different result that evening. If only Captain Timothy Pickering and his men from Salem had "arrived a few minutes sooner," Heath wrote, "the left flank of the British must have been greatly exposed and suffered considerably; perhaps their retreat would have been cut off." In other words, if Pickering had only shown the proper spirit, April 19, 1775, might have ended with a decisive American victory.

In his defense, Pickering claimed that he had marched his men from Salem as quickly as was reasonably possible. But like James Nichols, the Englishman from Lincoln who decided that he could not fire a musket in anger at the North Bridge in Concord, Pickering had his reasons to avoid a confrontation. Even though he had been instrumental in organizing the militia not only in Salem but throughout New England, he was not part of the patriot inner circle. For one thing, his father, Timothy Pickering Sr., was an outspoken loyalist. But Timothy Pickering Jr. was too "a.s.suming ... and headstrong" to let even his own father influence what he decided to do. In the future, Pickering would become one of George Was.h.i.+ngton's most trusted officers, and he eventually served as secretary of state under both Was.h.i.+ngton and John Adams. But on the evening of April 19 he still believed, he wrote a friend, that "a pacification upon honorable terms is practicable."

Rather than charging into Cambridge and cutting Percy off, Pickering lingered on Winter Hill, more than a mile away, where he stood at the head of his men and looked toward Charlestown in the deepening twilight. Pickering was so nearsighted that if he didn't wear his gla.s.ses, "the smallest object he could discern ... was a regiment." One of his officers later remembered seeing him "riding along at night with the light of the campfires flas.h.i.+ng on his spectacles." Playing across the lenses of his gla.s.ses that evening on Winter Hill were the muzzle flashes of British and provincial muskets. Pickering looked through those pieces of glittering gla.s.s and saw not a war to be won but a reason to talk.

He was, it turned out, in the minority.

CHAPTER EIGHT

No Business but That of War

By the morning of Thursday, April 20, hundreds if not thousands of militiamen had flooded into Cambridge and Roxbury, with thousands more on the way from towns across Ma.s.sachusetts. With the exception of the harbor, which was dominated by Admiral Graves's wars.h.i.+ps, British-occupied Boston had been effectively surrounded by militiamen from the country. All the while, terrified noncombatants began to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the British regulars stationed inside Boston.

That morning, after a day and a night listening to the distant firing of guns, the Bostonian Sarah Winslow Deming was shaking so uncontrollably that she had trouble standing, as did her two female houseguests, one of whom she expected to "fall into hysteric fits every minute," while the other clung desperately to "anything she could grasp." They must, Deming wrote in a diary account of her ordeal, flee this "city of destruction" and take their chances in the country. Deming's husband insisted on remaining, at least temporarily, in Boston, but he was willing to drive his wife and her companions out of the city in a chaise before he returned to make sure their home and personal effects were safe. Soon the Demings had joined a long line of carriages and carts waiting to exit the city. After making it past four different British sentries, they were finally on the road to Roxbury. Deming's husband asked where she wanted to go next; Sarah told him to let the horse decide. The horse followed the road up to Meetinghouse Hill, which was crowded, Deming wrote, with militiamen "old, young, and middle-aged." She was struck by the "pleasant sedateness on all their countenances." Instead of being encouraged by the provincials' presence, Deming was reminded of "sheep going to the slaughter."

Harvard professor John Winthrop and his wife Hannah had spent the night in a house in Fresh Pond, about a mile from their home in Cambridge, with between seventy and eighty anguished wives and their children. As Cambridge filled up with militiamen from as far away as Worcester, they and three others decided to head to Andover. They took turns riding and then walking beside "one poor tired horse chaise" as they made their way through what Hannah described as "the b.l.o.o.d.y field at Menotomy ... strewn with mangled bodies." "We met one affectionate father with a cart," she wrote, "looking for his murdered son and picking up his neighbors who had fallen in battle." Another New Englander traveling in the opposite direction noted that the houses "were all perforated with b.a.l.l.s and the windows broken. Horses, cattle and swine lay dead around. Such were the dreadful trophies of war for twenty miles." It was no wonder "all [was] confusion," Deacon William Tudor of Brighton reported. "The rumor was that if the soldiers came out again they would burn, kill, and destroy all as they marched." Like Sarah Deming, who spent the night with the Reverend William Gordon in Roxbury before traveling to Rhode Island and then to Connecticut, they must turn their backs on the city that had once been the center of their lives.

Panic and confusion had also gripped the British soldiers in Boston. It was close to midnight by the time Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, his right arm swollen and caked in blood, crossed the harbor and staggered up the crooked street to the house where he lived with several officers. As he sat on a chair, stunned and famished, waiting for a pot of tea to brew, he was besieged by people wanting to know about the events of that terrible day. By his own estimation, he had marched "about sixty miles in [the] course of twenty-four hours," almost half of those miles "after I was wounded and without a morsel of victuals." It was no wonder, then, that when someone asked about Lieutenant Sutherland, who had received a musket ball in the chest at the North Bridge, Lister dispensed with all tact and said exactly what he a.s.sumed to be the case. "I replied [that] I supposed by that time he was dead." Unknown to Lister, Sutherland's wife was standing behind him, and she "immediately dropped down in [a] swoon."

That night Admiral Graves urged General Gage to allow his wars.h.i.+ps to blast Charlestown and Roxbury to pieces so that the British army could seize the high ground to the north and south. Gage insisted that his army was not strong enough to undertake such a bold move. The best that they could do was to dig in and prepare for the attack that they all a.s.sumed was about to come from the provincials.

On the morning of Thursday, April 20, Captain Timothy Pickering was asked to attend a meeting in Cambridge. In addition to key militia officers, the group included members of the Committee of Safety, most notably Dr. Joseph Warren. The topic for discussion that morning was nothing less than what to do next.

After watching Percy's retreat into Charlestown the night before, Pickering had a.s.sumed that the fighting at Lexington and Concord was the equivalent of the Stamp Act Riots of 1765 and the Boston Ma.s.sacre of 1770: an eruption of violence that was soon to be followed by a gesture of British forbearance. There was no need to a.s.semble an army until after they had first seen whether General Gage wanted to negotiate. Some of those present agreed with Pickering, but only some. "Others thought that now was the time to strike," he wrote, "and cut off the troops before they were reinforced; and then, said they, the day will be our own." Pickering believed such talk was recklessly unrealistic. "I do not see," he wrote, "what mighty advantage can accrue to us by getting possession of Boston; none, I am sure, which can countervail the loss of thousands in storming the town, which will immediately be beat to pieces by the men-of-war."

But what troubled Pickering the most about the meeting was not the wildness of the rhetoric; it was the motives of the more radical patriot leaders. Up until that moment, Pickering had a.s.sumed they were driven by an honest love of country; but now he had the unsettling suspicion that "ambition ... was as powerful a stimulus as the former." And with John Hanc.o.c.k and Samuel Adams soon to depart for Philadelphia, Joseph Warren had emerged as the de facto leader of what Pickering described as "the intended revolution."

That day Warren issued a circular letter for distribution throughout the colony under the auspices of the Committee of Safety, urging men to enlist in the provincial army. It was not a moderate doc.u.ment. "Our all is at stake," he wrote. "Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who may survive the carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer to your country, to your own consciences, and, above all, as you will answer to G.o.d himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means the enlistment of men to form the army, and send them forward to headquarters at Cambridge."

Warren took a different tone when he turned his attention to what he referred to as "my ever-adored town." Since the first tumultuous hours after Lexington and Concord-during which Sarah Deming and her friends had been lucky enough to escape-Boston had been almost completely sealed off from the surrounding countryside. Across from the fortifications at Boston Neck, Roxbury had quickly become a town populated chiefly by militiamen, making it impossible for Gage and his army to receive any provisions or supplies from the city's only access point to the mainland. Before the many patriots trapped inside Boston could get out and the loyalists outside the city could get in, some kind of agreement had to be reached with Gage. That day, Warren wrote the general a letter about the need to settle on a policy regarding Boston. Instead of the hysteria and bl.u.s.ter of the earlier call for recruits, Warren addressed his counterpart as a leader he both respected and was willing to trust. "Your Excellency, I believe, knows very well the part I have taken in public affairs," he wrote. "I ever scorned disguise. I think I have done my duty. Some may think otherwise; but be a.s.sured, sir, as far as my influence goes, everything which can reasonably be required of us to do shall be done, and everything promised shall be religiously performed." Warren was just thirty-three years old and hardly a career politician. A doctor who had been raised on a farm in Roxbury, he had first a.s.sumed elective office less than a year before, yet he apparently had no qualms about writing the man at the apex of political and military power in British North America as an equal. Perhaps Timothy Pickering was right; perhaps there was more than a modic.u.m of ambition behind Warren's commitment to the patriot cause. But exactly this kind of ambition was to become the driving force-both for good and for bad-behind the United States.

The next day, Friday, April 21, the Committee of Safety determined to raise an army of eight thousand Ma.s.sachusetts soldiers to serve until the end of the year, even though no one was yet sure how the soldiers were going to be paid. By that time the provincial army had a new leader, General Artemas Ward, forty-seven, from Shrewsbury. A veteran of the French and Indian War and a former member of the upper chamber of the General Court, Ward had been languis.h.i.+ng in bed with an attack of kidney stones when he received word of Lexington and Concord. That had not prevented him from riding almost forty miles to Cambridge, where he presided over his first council of war on the night of April 20. Over the course of the next few days, Ward began to organize his rudimentary army.

General John Thomas, fifty-one, a doctor from Kingston who had served with distinction in the French and Indian War, was put in charge of the provincials stationed in Roxbury. Israel Putnam was the already mythologized warrior from Connecticut who had visited Boston the year before. He had been plowing his fields on April 20 when, at a little before noon, he received word of Lexington and Concord. He handed the plow over to his son and was in Cambridge by the following day. He was soon ranging restlessly up and down the lines stretching from the ridge of hills overlooking the Mystic River to the inner reaches of the Charles River.

In the days to come, militiamen arrived from towns in not only Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut but Rhode Island, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Maine. The Provincial Congress eventually decided to raise a New Englandwide army of as many as 30,000 men, with Ma.s.sachusetts's quota increased to 13,600. Having raised armies in the past for the many wars against the French and Indians, the region's leaders had considerable experience in recruiting soldiers. Traditionally, the officers did the actual recruiting, with the officer's rank based on how many soldiers he could convince to enlist (a captain, for example, had to raise fifty men; a lieutenant, twenty-five). Since officers typically recruited in their hometowns, each company tended to be made up of neighbors, friends, and relatives, all of whom looked with considerable suspicion on anyone whom they didn't already know. And yet with companies of militiamen already beginning to arrive from towns throughout the colony and beyond, Cambridge and Roxbury were rapidly becoming the chaotic centers of what was, for New England, a remarkably diverse gathering of humanity. Included in this new army would be farmers, sailors, artisans, merchants, doctors, lawyers, some free African Americans (the Provincial Congress quickly determined that the recruitment of slaves was "inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported and reflect dishonor on this colony"), and Native Americans from western Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut.

It was an exciting time-the kind of time when no one knew what was going to happen next. Benjamin Russell was the thirteen-year-old student at Boston's Queen Street School who had followed Percy's brigade out of Boston. Once in Cambridge he and his cla.s.smates had decided to spend the afternoon playing games on the town's common, only to discover on the evening of April 19 that they were now trapped outside Boston with no way to communicate with their parents. Instead of despairing, they volunteered to serve as errand boys for the officers of the emerging army. Russell would not hear from his parents for another three months.

Around sunset on Friday, April 21, as a meeting of the Committee of Safety drew to a close in Cambridge, Benjamin Church announced, "I am determined to go into Boston tomorrow." The other committee members were dumbfounded. "Are you serious, Dr. Church?" Joseph Warren asked. "They will hang you if they catch you in Boston." Church was insistent. "I am serious," he said, "and am determined to go at all adventures."

The discussion continued, and when Church, who like many of them had family in the city, insisted that he was willing to risk possible capture, Warren said, "If you are determined, let us make some business for you." The provincial army was in desperate need of medical equipment to tend to the wounded, which included several British prisoners, and Church was given the mission to secure whatever Gage and his medical staff might be willing to give.

Church appears to have prepared the way for this announcement by providing what he hoped was incontrovertible proof that he was a man to be trusted. Paul Revere was serving as the committee's messenger, and the morning after Lexington and Concord, Church had shown him "some blood on his stocking," claiming that it had "spurted on him from a man who was killed near him as he was urging the militia on." "I argued with myself," Revere later remembered, "if a man will risk his life in a cause, he must be a friend to that cause."

Still, the decision to cross the British lines was a bold one, even by the standards of Benjamin Church, who would have the audacity to meet with Gage the next day at the governor's residence in Province House. But as Church knew better than anyone, Warren and the other patriot leaders were too preoccupied with trying to stay ahead of each new and potentially catastrophic development to question his motivations. For now at least, they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Gage had been reluctant to do anything more than hunker down for a siege-with one notable exception. On Thursday, April 20, he launched a rescue mission. Back in January, he had sent a force of about a hundred regulars under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour to Marshfield, where they had based themselves at the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas (a distant relative of provincial general John Thomas). Balfour and his men had enjoyed a quiet winter and spring (even finding the time to construct an elaborate wine cabinet in the cellar of Thomas's house) until the fighting at Lexington and Concord inspired more than a thousand militiamen from the towns surrounding Marshfield to descend on the loyalist stronghold.

On the morning of April 20, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to provide the vessels needed to extract Balfour and his men from Marshfield. Soon the schooner Hope and two recently confiscated wood sloops were on their way to the rugged piece of coastline at the mouth of the Cut River known as Brant Rock. Despite having an overwhelming numerical advantage, the militiamen surrounding the Thomas estate were reluctant to engage the British regulars. A message was sent to General Thomas in Roxbury requesting that he lead them in what might prove to be a battle that put the previous day's fighting to shame. Although General Ward needed him in Roxbury, Thomas was able to provide the militia forces in Marshfield with "eleven hundred brave men and cannon." By the time the provincial reinforcements arrived, Balfour's detachment, along with a hundred or so loyalists, had bluffed their way onto the three rescue vessels and were headed for Boston. The lesson was clear: even the most enthusiastic and well-meaning militiamen were military amateurs who needed competent officers to lead them.

Back on the morning of April 19, Committee of Safety member Joseph Palmer had given a professional post rider named Isaac Bissell a letter with a brief description of the engagement at Lexington Green. Paul Revere may have helped spread the word that the regulars were coming on the night of April 18, but Bissell helped to spread the news of the fighting at Lexington across the Atlantic seaboard. According to tradition, he was in Worcester by early that afternoon, his exhausted horse falling down dead in front of the town's meetinghouse. From there, Bissell went to Hartford, Connecticut, and by the evening of the next day, Thursday, April 20, another rider had carried the message to New London. By the evening of April 21 the message had reached New York City; by 5:00 p.m. of April 24, it had reached Philadelphia.