The Minutemen and Their World

By Robert A. Gross and Alan Taylor

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The “shot heard round the world” catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town―future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne―soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life.

In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780374706395

Robert A. Gross

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. He is author of The Minutemen and Their World.

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To my children, Matt, Steve, and Nell

Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition

BY ALAN TAYLOR

During the 1970s the most exciting and expansive mode of historical scholarship was the new social history. Full of intellectual promise and proselytizing zeal, the new social historians promised to reach a deeper, more precise, and more comprehensive understanding of history by using social science methods. In colonial American history, John Demos, Philip J. Greven, Jr., and Kenneth Lockridge gave us three innovative and influential books on three Massachusetts towns: Plymouth, Andover, and Dedham. These authors challenged the impressionistic and narrative mode of history writing that depended on a few illustrative examples almost always derived from the well-documented lives of the most powerful. Indeed, they suggested a stark disconnect between the common many and the elite few. John Demos explained:

Owing to the work of Perry Miller and a whole corps of his distinguished students, the religious faith and belief of the Puritan leaders is very well known indeed. But I am thinking rather of the followers, and ordinary citizens of these early New England towns. What they heard and read did not necessarily coincide with what their ministers and magistrates said and wrote. Thus I contend that we have an excellent picture of Puritan worship for the highest level of the culture (the educated, the powerful), but nothing comparable for the average man. The problem in studying the latter group, of course, is that most of them were from the standpoint of history quite inarticulate.

To recover the history of common people required new methods to exploit sources beyond the letters, journals, memoirs, essays, and sermons produced almost exclusively by the most affluent and educated class of people. Haunting local historical societies and the offices of county clerks, the new social historians investigated the births, deaths, and marriages in parish records; the wills and inventories in probate; the lawsuits in court records; the property valuations in tax lists; and material artifacts, including houses, furniture, tools, utensils, and clothing. Although certainly useful for tracking individuals, the local records of New England towns especially appealed as opportunities to study the average experiences of communities.¹

Subscribing to the notion that social history was history with the politics left out, the practitioners initially dismissed the famous and the dramatic as largely irrelevant to the conditions and lives of the great majority of colonial society. The three books bestow no more than passing reference to any great translocal event, including even the massive Indian uprising known as King Philip’s War, which imperiled Plymouth, Dedham, and Andover in 1675–76. Conveying their general sense that the rhythms of social life were immune to the passing storms of politics, Greven quickly concludes that when the war was over a year later, life in the village resumed its old course.²

Instead of the conspicuous but fleeting event, the new social historians sought the subtle but fundamental structures of life. These were demographic—the life-cycle patterns of births, marriages, deaths, and movements revealed by the statistical means among local populations over the generations. Or they were economic and social: the organization of production within households and the transmission of property across the generations through inheritance. And they were cultural, usually the persistence of a traditional mentalité appropriate to small and intimate communities of peasants. Upon discovering such patterns in particular communities, the authors generalized for all of New England.

The new methods of research and analysis were dazzling, and recovering the history of common people was alluring, but the new community studies soon seemed doubly limited. They neglected both the wider world and the more intimate experiences and thoughts of individuals among the common people. By treating their towns as self-contained systems, the authors virtually isolated them from the wider webs of commerce, politics, war, and religion—obscuring the fit of the local into the regional and the imperial. In addition, the community study as social science ironically tended to obscure the particular lives of common people. Conceived of as a social being, as a composite type that emerged from analysis of local records, the common colonist lost individual variation and initiative, becoming confined within the anonymizing and slowly evolving deep structures of social patterns. Moreover, by assuming that common people could not be found in literary sources, the new social historians denied themselves materials necessary to describe the appearance and personality of actual people. And by neglecting both grand events and particular lives, the new social historians lost opportunities to tell revealing and dramatic stories that would convey their more technical and abstract findings to a broader audience.

The Minutemen and Their World, published in 1976, combined the new social history with an attention to grand events, biographical detail, and literary craft. Although deeply indebted to previous community studies, Robert A. Gross transcends their limitations by discarding their sharp distinction between the social and the political, which awarded the first to common people and the second to an elite. Gross demonstrates both that the American Revolution profoundly mattered to common people and that they helped propel that mass movement by their behavior in local settings. Because the political was social and the social was political, the best history would leave neither out. Minutemen explores the outbreak of armed revolution in the context of the [Concord] townspeople’s ordinary lives, before and after April 19, 1775. Gross applies statistical methods to an array of local records to reveal the life of a whole community in surprisingly intimate detail and to tell the story of ordinary men and women who have left behind few of the diaries and letters on which historians have long relied.

Social science guided Gross’s research, but narrative technique frames his presentation. Social history, Gross observes, like any other branch of history, should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, for it deals with everyday, fundamental experiences of human life—with work and play, with growing up and raising families, with growing old and facing death. For most Americans today, the Revolution seems distant, arcane, and dull because for so long it has been treated as a forensic debate over abstract principles by impossibly pure men in funny clothes. Gross renders that revolution more real, compelling, and important by connecting its philosophical principles to the experiences of ordinary people struggling with the human universals of birth, adolescence, labor, poverty, pride, sickness, and death. And he produces a vivid picture of small-town life in an eighteenth-century world more directly vulnerable to the shifting seasons and a scarcity of resources.³

Gross recovers and retells the personal experiences of particular residents. Let’s examine, for example, the story of Lucy Barnes and Joseph Hosmer. She was the teenage daughter of a wealthy farmer; he a struggling young cabinetmaker. Her father refused to countenance their plans for marriage, but the couple forced the issue: Lucy became pregnant and father Barnes grudgingly consented to the match. Gross then observes: Lucy’s case was not unique … [I]n the twenty years before the Revolution, more than one out of every three firstborn children had been conceived out of wedlock. In the process, the young people subverted their parents’ authority. Here we find the pivot in Gross’s telling of the couple’s story: the shift from the particular to the general, from the biographical to the social.

This turn reverses the actual course of Gross’s work as a historian. First, his research in Concord’s vital records found a pattern of increased premarital pregnancy closely associated in timing with the press of a growing population on the town’s supply of farmland. During the eighteenth century, as fathers divided their lands among several heirs, each generation inherited shrinking farms, which meant less to pass on to their sons and daughters. With diminished property to give, fathers lost leverage to control the marriage choices of their children, who acted with increasing independence. Those trends rendered the story of Lucy and Joseph more than anecdotal and idiosyncratic. Instead, it revealed a general pattern at the very heart of Gross’s argument that the people of Concord vigorously embraced revolution in 1775 as a crusade to recover a sense of control over their lives and their community in a time of diminishing resources and increasing internal frictions over land, marriage, status, and church membership.

The sequence of narration from particular to general matters. Throughout Minutemen, Gross presents capsule biographies that build toward his argument—instead of simply tacking them on as examples to support assertions already made. As a result, the stories lead readers to the general points in the most evocative and effective manner. In his notes, Gross explains his methods and musters statistics to support his interpretation. Those notes demonstrate research as thorough as that in any preceding community study. But the lucid and concise text, rich in human detail, shows that Gross regards the social science as only the first half of his dual challenge. He takes a second, difficult step by translating his findings into a compelling set of stories. By connecting a great event to the enduring dilemmas of the human experience, Gross produces historical literature of the highest order. And he demonstrates that scholarly rigor can be combined with finely crafted writing to reach a broad readership.

In this new century, some twenty-five years after the appearance of Minutemen, I often hear historians declare moribund the community study of the New England town. The historical profession has moved on, with a new cultural history now enjoying the compelling influence and exercising the proselytizing zeal that once belonged to the new social history. The obituary, however, is premature and rests on a limited and static reading of what has, in fact, been a dynamic and enduring genre, with the power to renew in hybrid forms—including those associated with the new cultural history. Yes, the self-contained form of community study practiced in 1970 had a short shelf life. By the 1980s, its three leading practitioners—Demos, Greven, and Lockridge—had shifted their work to tell eloquent stories about the inner lives of particular people in the colonial past, contributing to the emergence of the new cultural history. But the variety of community history developed by Robert Gross remains of enduring importance because it is both expansive outward into the wider world and inwardly probing of individual experience. Historians continue to employ his methods to define the local context of a biographical subject or a sweeping event and to narrate their findings. I think especially of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s brilliant, evocative, and influential book, A Midwife’s Tale, which combines social and cultural history to explore the intertwined life and diary of Martha Moore Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine, during the late eighteenth century. By applying quantitative methods to vital, property, church, and town records for that locality, Ulrich constructs compelling dialogue between an individual life and its social context: a domain of neighbors. I also cannot imagine writing either of my first two books without the model provided by Minutemen, the single most influential work in shaping my sensibility as a historian.⁴ The new mode of history will continue to shift with the years, but a few books will endure because of their insightful and sympathetic engagement with the tragedy and comedy of human life. One such book is The Minutemen and Their World.

Davis, California

November 15, 2000

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

When this book was first published in the bicentennial year of 1976, the new social history was young, and so was I. The movement to write history from the bottom up was in full swing, and I eagerly enlisted in a generational effort to go beyond the great white men who had dominated scholarly accounts of the American past—the educated and the elite—and expand the cast of characters to encompass all levels of the social order, particularly those at the bottom—the laborers, the servants, the enslaved, the paupers, and the outcasts, plus women of all classes—who were typically omitted from the story or passed over as anonymous. I was also skeptical of the notion that history is past politics. In the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, political alienation was widespread, and in that mood, I sought a connection to early America that ran deeper than the squabbles of gentlemen in powdered wigs and tricorn hats over land and office. I was thus drawn to study the men and women of a little community, whose everyday activities—farming the land, raising families, educating the young, caring for the needy, engaging in public worship, and, yes, running local government—might reveal a distinct way of life and a culture at once distant from our own, yet resonant in human meaning across the centuries. Such a history would be democratic and inclusive, and it promised to ground the great events of our history—the American Revolution and the War of Independence—in the intimate realms of the family and the local community.

Choosing Concord as that community was easy. It was the site of the opening battle of the Revolution, when on the morning of April 19, 1775, the Minutemen of patriotic legend—actually, militia units and Minute companies from Concord and its neighbors Acton and Lincoln—confronted British Regulars at the old North Bridge and fired the shot heard ’round the world. What brought the townspeople to that turning point in history? I wondered. How did the debate over British taxes and tyranny enter into the ongoing life of the town, and how, in turn, did Concord’s internal concerns and conflicts shape its involvement in the protests that culminated in that clash of arms on April 19? And why was Concord chosen as the main depot of military supplies for the gathering resistance to the king’s troops? Did its leading role in the fight against British repression and the ensuing revolution alter the community, not only through the sacrifice of blood and treasure in the long struggle for independence, but also in the ideas the townspeople held dear and in their relations to the wider world? The Revolution, in this view, could not be taken for granted. It was an event—arguably a transformative one—in the character and conduct of the community.

It has been nearly fifty years since I first conceived this study, and as the United States, even more deeply divided now than it was in the mid-1970s, approaches another landmark in our national existence—the 250th anniversary of the Revolution—I feel a kinship with the grizzled veterans who survived to commemorate the semicentennial of the Concord Fight on April 19, 1825. Much has changed in our life as a people and in the stories we write about our country. The tribe of historians is more diverse and democratic than ever, and so, as a result, are our narratives of the past. The new social history has long since been assimilated into the historian’s tool kit. Yet we continue to argue about the same questions, albeit in more complex ways. How much support did the break with Britain command? How democratic was the American Revolution—in the ideals it proclaimed, in the laws and practices of government it fostered, in the social order and economic system it sustained? Did it empower ordinary people, expand participation in government, or advance liberty and equality for Blacks, for women, for common whites? Or did it substitute old elites for new, entrenching white men of property in power and enabling their continuing dominion over women, seizure of Native lands, and expansion of African slavery under the protection of the new federal government?¹

The Minutemen and Their World provides an equivocal answer to these questions. Attentive readers can readily find evidence both for and against the argument that Concord’s revolution was democratic. After independence, the townspeople faced the same social forces as before: population pressures on land, rising emigration of the young, weakening of patriarchy, deepening integration into a capitalist economy, and continued leadership by an economic and social elite. On these matters, the social history set forth in the original version of Minutemen remains unchanged.

But the course of the Revolution in Concord was more disruptive than I had originally realized. Over the years, in looking into the records of other Massachusetts towns, such as nearby Lexington, I have concluded that Concord’s cosmopolitan elite was strongly attached to the royal regime in Boston and resisted involvement in the mounting protest movement until the summer of 1774. If the town was silent at key moments before then, that was not because the residents were too preoccupied with internal feuds to notice British assaults on their rights. Far from it: the townspeople were well aware of the disorders and riots taking place in Boston. Rather, the governing class succeeded in using its power to silence voices of opposition or to keep them on a moderate path. Moreover, Concord harbored more Loyalists than I was aware of; the Revolution proved to be a civil war in several leading families. As a result, when the political explosion came in the summer of 1774, following the British assault on local self-rule, it was a radical break from Concord’s previous stance. The townspeople were no longer reluctant revolutionaries. Indeed, they embraced their prominent role as the meeting place of the Provincial Congress, principal magazine of the emerging American army, and jailhouse for Loyalists and British prisoners of war. The fight for independence penetrated deeply into local life.

For this revised and expanded edition of The Minutemen and Their World, I have updated the text with new findings about Concord’s politics before and during the war, in order to highlight how conflicted and disruptive was the process of revolution, even in a community that ultimately contained the forces of change. I would never have been able to do so without the assistance of several devoted students of Revolutionary-era Massachusetts. Joel Bohy, the director of historic arms and militaria for Bruneau & Co. Auctioneers and a periodic appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, shared with me the results of his investigations into the trove of documents at the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Archives, which detail how Colonel James Barrett and other local officials, under the direction of the extralegal Provincial Congress and later the General Court, mobilized arms and men in Concord. John Hannigan, curator of the Massachusetts Archives in Boston, guided me to pertinent military records; clarified my understanding of the colonial militia laws, particularly with regard to the enlistment of Blacks and Native Americans; and took me through the paper trail regarding an alleged conspiracy by Blacks in Middlesex County to rise up against white rule in the event of a clash between British and provincial forces. In Concord, the curator of special collections at the Concord Free Public Library, Anke Voss, and the new municipal archivist, Nathanial Smith, were invariably prompt and gracious in making available electronic records in their care. I have benefited immensely from the commitment of local librarians and institutions to tell the story of the Revolution in Concord and Massachusetts as fully and richly as possible. Tom Putnam, director of the Concord Museum, and David Wood, curator of the museum, deserve a special note of thanks for involving me in planning the new April 19 galleries and in sharing information with me. Finally, I want to thank the American Antiquarian Society for inviting me to deliver its Robert C. Baron lecture in 2017, which provided the basis for this edition’s new afterword, and to express my appreciation to Richard D. Brown, Tom Chambers, John Hannigan, Woody Holton, Mary Kelley, and Joanne Pope Melish for their comments on my effort to set The Minutemen and Their World in the context of recent historiography.

Ann Gross, as ever, has been indispensable as editor and critic in the creation of this new edition.

R.A.G.

Concord, Massachusetts

March 12, 2022

Preface to the First Edition

A history of the town of Concord, were it tolerably, nay, badly executed, could not well be an obscure one. It must be either famous or infamous … The annals of all our ancient towns and cities are of inestimable value, and will be faithfully preserved; but those of Concord,—old Concord, in connexion with very few others, are the pound of flesh nearest the heart of the Republic. He that should do justice to them, had reason to expect, and he had a right, as a man deserving well of his country, to enjoy, the gratitude of those he should serve.

—B. B. Thacher, History of Concord, North American Review (1836)

The town of Concord has always occupied a special place in the minds of Americans, and naturally so. It was the starting point of the Revolution: the site of the battle of April 19, 1775, at the old North Bridge. And in the nineteenth century, as the home of Emerson and Thoreau, it became the intellectual capital of the new republic. Concord thus played a leading part in the achievement of our political and cultural independence as a people. In turn, the town has come to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life.

Many writers have told Concord’s story. For the most part, theirs have been tales of great events and great men—of the embattled farmers and the distinguished writers who have brought fame to the town. This book takes a different approach. It sets the Concord Fight, as it used to be known, in the context of the townspeople’s ordinary lives, before and after April 19, 1775. It examines how the citizens farmed the land, raised their families, and carried on their politics at the end of the colonial period. Within this setting, it then asks what brought them to the bridge, and it shows how the peculiar tensions and social patterns of the town shaped both its response to revolution and what men did on April 19. Finally, it traces the townspeople through the Revolution and the war into the new republic and links the world of the Minutemen to that of Emerson and Thoreau. In this way, the Minutemen emerge as real people, with hopes and fears, ambitions and doubts, ideals and interests. Without such a connection between the soldiers at the bridge and the people of the town, it is difficult to comprehend the human meaning of the Revolution—to see it as a social force in men’s lives, affecting what they would plant, where they would live, and what they could hope to achieve. Freedom, they knew, and we need to recall, is an intensely practical matter.

This study is part of the new social history. It is based on a reconstruction of eighteenth-century Concord from such sources as vital records, genealogies, tax and assessment lists, wills, deeds, petitions, and the minutes of town meetings. Through the use of statistical methods and with the aid of a computer, such records can reveal the life of a whole community in surprisingly intimate detail. They allow one to write history from the bottom up—to tell the story of ordinary men and women who have left behind few of the diaries and letters on which historians have long relied. Unfortunately, quantitative social history can be dull and tedious work, and at times it requires technical knowledge and skills. In this book, I have chosen to relate Concord’s response to revolution directly and simply, without flogging the evidence. The detailed support for my conclusions and the sometimes dry methodological issues of this research have been left to the notes. Social history, like any other branch of history, should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, for it deals with everyday, fundamental experiences of human life—with work and play, with growing up and raising families, with growing old and facing death. It thereby provides us with our closest points of contact with men and women of the past. By seeing how earlier Americans have lived and struggled in their daily lives, we can come to recognize them as people like ourselves and gain a new understanding of our society and our heritage.

In the course of this project, I have acquired many debts. The bulk of my research was done at the Concord Free Public Library, which possesses an extraordinarily rich collection of manuscripts on all aspects of town life. Under the direction of Rose Marie Mitten, the library maintains a strong commitment to serious scholarship and to the preservation and use of the town’s archives. I could not have written this work without the assistance of reference librarians Mrs. George Barker and Mrs. Norman Harris and most especially that of Mrs. William Henry Moss, head of the Reference Department. Mrs. Moss and her staff readily accepted my newcomer’s interest in Concord history, graciously enduring my unending questions and requests. I am immensely grateful for all their kindness and help.

Other people and institutions in Concord have also facilitated my research. Robert F. Needham, chairman of the Town Records and Archives Committee, granted permission to use the official papers of the town. In the Town Hall, former Town Clerk Aljean Doty and former Town Treasurer Mary Sheehan guided me to the assessment lists in their care. The Minute Man National Historic Park and the Concord Antiquarian Museum assisted in gathering materials for the maps. And Mrs. Raymond Emerson kindly allowed me to use her transcripts of the diaries of William Emerson and Daniel Bliss.

Outside of Concord, I have drawn on the resources of many other institutions. This would have been a very different book if I had not consulted the Lemuel Shattuck Collection at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. For her cheerful assistance in my use of the Shattuck Collection as well as the Society’s incomparable genealogical materials, I am grateful to Mary Leen. I also want to acknowledge the assistance of Leo and Helen Flaherty at the Massachusetts Archives, Alan Fox and James Parla at the Massachusetts State Library, and Paul Sostek, Clerk of Courts for Middlesex County. Through the Genealogical Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I was able to obtain microfilm copies of the Revolutionary War Pension Records at the National Archives; thanks are due to Robert Tarte for enabling me to use the microfilms at the Society’s Boston Branch Library. Finally, over the last three years, I have been aided by the staffs of the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Athenæum, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Large-scale projects in social history cannot be carried out alone. They are costly, and they involve the efforts of many people. This project was begun under a John and Louise K. Jay Fellowship from Columbia University; other early expenses were supported through the National Institute of Mental Health Training Program in Social History at Columbia. Through the auspices of Professor Donald E. Johnson, chairman of the Humanities Department, computer time was generously made available by Worcester Polytechnic Institute; programming services were provided by Edward Perkins and John Gabranski, former staff members of the Worcester Area College Computation Center. Connie Dionne did the keypunching.

Several people have assisted me in gathering data for the study. Debby London and Michael Baumrin, while undergraduates at Brandeis University, coded several assessment lists. Another Brandeis graduate, Alisa Belinkoff, contributed her friendship, her enthusiasm, and her impressive talents as a researcher throughout this project, coding assessment lists, inventorying sources, and compiling the file of Concord officeholders used in the political analysis of the town. I have gained, too, from the work of the Concord Group at Brandeis in 1972–73; the members—Marc Harris, James Kimenker, Susan Kurland, and Richard Weintraub—coordinated their research with my own while doing their senior honors theses under David Hackett Fischer. And from her research on Massachusetts officers in the French and Indian War, Nancy Voye, a graduate student at Boston University, generously supplied the service records of the Concord Minutemen.

This book has been long in coming, and I owe much to colleagues and friends for simply putting up with me during the years of research and writing. I have learned much about agriculture from Darwin Kelsey of Old Sturbridge Village and from Concordians Robert Flannery and Eleanor Snelling, who by their example have also taught me about the integrity of New England life. Douglas Lamar Jones and Linda Auwers Bissell have been hearing about and commenting on this work for so long that it seems almost redundant to thank them for their careful reading of the final manuscript. Thomas Conway’s questions about Concord helped provoke the idea for this book; Richard Bushman criticized several early chapters. Everyone who knows David Fischer is in awe of his remarkable energy, creativity, and willingness to share his work with other scholars. I have benefited greatly from his help; his comments on the manuscript have improved both style and substance considerably. To Stuart Bruchey, my sponsor at Columbia, I owe an enormous debt for his tolerance of my long delays and his confidence in the results. And I am grateful to Wendy Weil for her long encouragement and support and to Arthur Wang for being a model editor, patient and tactful as he persuades one to make valuable changes in the manuscript.

If Ann Gross successfully and wisely resisted becoming a research assistant, she has nonetheless had to listen to nearly every word of the manuscript, and most of the time she even did so cheerfully. Her sound judgment as an editor is reflected throughout this work. She also found the decoration for the title page and prepared the index. We have drawn closer together, I believe, by sharing in the creation of this book. Matthew Gross did nothing to help publish the book; indeed, he delayed completion of the manuscript. For that, I am most grateful. He took his father away from his work, gave him much pleasure and joy, and led him to realize what was truly important and what was not.

R.A.G.

September 1975

PROLOGUE

Winter Soldiers and Springtime Farmers

SPRING CAME EARLY TO New England in 1775, after one of the mildest winters in memory. Not once that year had the mercury dropped below zero, and most of the time it stood above freezing. The light snows of January and February scarcely muffled the sounds of Minutemen at drill. Extraordinary Weather for warlike Preparations, Concord’s fiery minister, William Emerson, called it. Men and women had gained a brief respite from what was usually a cheerless, idle time, when impassable roads kept them huddled close to home, repairing tools, spinning and weaving, reading Bibles, and mourning the always large number of winter dead. Now, in March, as the ground thawed and farmers drove their ox teams to the fields for the annual plowing, people in Concord were once again moving to the timeless rhythms of rural life.¹

In rapidly expanding colonial America, Concord was an old town by 1775. It had once been Massachusetts’s first frontier, the first settlement beyond the sight and smell of the sea. For six generations since 1635, its inhabitants had been getting a living from the soil and gradually increasing their numbers until they were some fifteen hundred persons (about 265 families) on the eve of the war. The Puritan founders, whose heroic achievements would inspire townsmen in the Revolutionary struggle against Britain, had been drawn to the site by its nine miles of river, rich in shad, salmon, and alewives, and by the abundant beaver and game that lived by the water and in the thick pine woods. Along the river lay an expanse of natural meadowland that promised plentiful fodder for cattle; bordering the grasslands were tracts of upland long since cleared by the Indians for corn fields. Each family received a share in these lands, which all agreed to farm in common, and built its house along the main road in the middle of town.²

Soon settlers scattered to other attractive areas. They and their descendants steadily hacked away at the woods so that by 1775 the landscape was more open than it is today and an invading army in the village center could be spotted easily from the northern heights two miles away. If a ne’er-do-well woodsman could still trap an occasional fox for its fur or shoot a rare wolf for the bounty, the ordinary farmer found little but squirrels, woodchucks, and raccoons for target practice. The salmon had long ago stopped running; as a conservation measure, the town made a monopoly of the shad fishery. Men gave their attention to domestic animals; pigs ran at large through town, horses and cattle browsed along the public ways. Solid walls of stone, painfully dragged and shoved out of the fields, secured farmers’ crops from destruction.³

A traveler in 1775 could reach the town by two main routes from Boston. He might, like the British spies who arrived that March to report on the Americans’ military preparations, follow a roundabout, twenty-mile route, passing through the narrow Neck that linked peninsular Boston to Roxbury on the mainland and then cutting a northwesterly arc through Watertown and Weston to the Lincoln-Concord line. This was the road farmers preferred when they hauled wood or drove cattle to Boston market. But if he wanted to save a few miles, the traveler would go not by land but by sea and take an expensive ferry across the Charles River to Charlestown before proceeding, as directly as the winding Bay Road allowed, through Cambridge, Menotomy (now urban Arlington), Lexington, and Lincoln into Concord center. Between Lexington and Concord traveling was rugged, with the road at times dropping steeply into close passes through surrounding heights. The Redcoats took this road on April 19.⁴

A mile from Concord center, a glacial ridge rises abruptly from the plain to command the Bay Road. The original settlers had burrowed into the ridge during the first winter in 1636 while they built their houses by its edge. Despite the dispersal of families throughout the town over the following century, the road along the ridge retained its importance as a center of population and trade. A farmer from the outlying areas could take care of virtually all his needs along the way: there were blacksmiths to shoe his oxen, tanners to cure his hides, coopers to barrel his beef, cordwainers and tailors to outfit his family, cabinetmakers to furnish his home. He could earn some welcome cash by selling produce at the shop of John Beatton, an honest Scotsman who figured accounts not only in the legal pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings, but split his farthing into so many common