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REVOLUTION on Our Doorstep
I
BY VICTOR CURRAN
Imagine regiments of heavily armed men marching past your front door with grim determination—almost 800 of them, half the population of Concord in 1775. That was the scene that greeted the residents of the town on the morning of April 19th of that year. If you weren’t one of the well-trained Minutemen loading your musket at the North Bridge, what was it like to be in Concord on the morning of that historic day? If you were Concord’s patriot preacher, Rev. William Emerson,* you would have been up since the wee hours, when Samuel Prescott woke the town to warn of the approaching Redcoats. Emerson hurried to the ridge overlooking the Bay Road (now Lexington Road) and urged the outnumbered Minutemen to launch a pre-emptive strike, which they prudently didn’t do. When he
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Discover CONCORD
| Spring 2020
returned to the parsonage (now preserved as the Old Manse), a crowd of the town’s women and children turned up at his door seeking refuge. Rev. Emerson welcomed the terrified townspeople with open arms, and even offered them an alfresco breakfast. Later that morning, his wife Phebe Bliss Emerson would witness the importance of that day, as the Redcoats exchanged deadly fire with the colonists in her back yard. Many historians believe that her husband stood shoulder to shoulder with the Minutemen at the North Bridge as Phebe watched from a window of the Old Manse, surrounded by her children, including 8-month-old Mary Moody Emerson and 5-year-old William (whose son, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would later immortalize that moment as “the shot heard ’round the world”).
If you were in the militia, you might have been sent somewhere other than the North Bridge. The town’s leaders dispatched saddle maker Reuben Brown to ride to Lexington and verify the report of an approaching British force. Brown arrived there at daybreak, just as two companies of Redcoats advanced toward the Lexington militia guarding the town common. He rode back to Concord in haste, too soon to witness the volley that killed eight Lexington men and wounded ten more. When Major Buttrick asked him if the British soldiers were firing live ammunition, he could only reply “I do not know, but think it probable.” Reuben Brown’s work wasn’t done, though. He reportedly rode 100 miles that day, spreading the alarm to towns as far away as Hopkinton. He came home to find his
