Revisiting the Lexington Alarm for the 250th

By Rich Gillespie, Lovettsville Historical Society

Doing a presentation on “The Lexington Alarm Revisited” back on Sunday, April 13^th was a thrill for me. Fifty-two attendees came that day to the Lovettsville Historical Society’s Second Sunday Lecture at St. James to learn of the opening moments of the Revolutionary War.  

It was a topic I knew well from my first employment over fifty years ago as a Guide for the Town of Lexington on the Battle Green, and later as a docent at the Lexington Historical Society’s Buckman Tavern where the Minutemen waited, and the Hancock-Clarke House where Paul Revere warned key Massachusetts leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock of the imminent danger.  “The regulars are out!”  It’s been a long time since those years of my first work in history, but my personal deep dive into the Lexington Alarm for our local program was indeed rewarding.

Part of my personal excitement was knowing I was about to return to Massachusetts for the 250^th Anniversary of the shots that began the Revolution there on Lexington’s historic Town Common.  I’d done so fifty years ago for the Bicentennial with leave from Loudoun Valley High School, and again for the 225.  It was what a Lexingtonian born in the “Birthplace of American Liberty” does, a sort of homing instinct.

My first goal upon arrival April 18th was to visit the site of “Parker’s Revenge,” a low bluff along the road between Lexington and Concord.  Here, Lexington’s militia company regrouped under their Captain, French & Indian War veteran John Parker, to exact revenge upon the British Light Infantry and Grenadiers who had killed eight and wounded nine of their townsmen on the Lexington Common.  In high school a girlfriend and I used to sit on this 40-foot-high outcropping to talk and dream. Now I realize its prime location, where the road doglegs and an unsuspected musketry broadside was possible, made it the perfect location to avenge the Lexington militia’s earlier fate at the hands of the accursed Redcoats.  It looks little different and is still improperly marked, given the arc of what happened here.  The British would remember the attack that came from this bluff.

Friday night, April 18^th was the 250^th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride.  My wife Tracy and I and old Lexington friends had to follow tradition to be where Revere (and later Samuel Dawes) stopped in town—at the home of Parson Jonas Clarke, a Son of Liberty.  He was housing the two most famous Massachusetts Patriot leaders—Sam Adams and John Hancock–recently attending the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.  When Revere arrived, clattering up the street now named for Hancock, the thousand or so attendees waiting in the darkness went wild with a roar of approval!  The Ride of Paul Revere’s current relevance to our modern times was certainly not lost on them any more than it was lost on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow back in 1861:

Four hours of sleep later, we walked the darkened streets with hundreds of others (who had found coveted back street parking spots) towards Lexington Green, to be there for the dawn arrival of British troops.  Of course, to get anywhere where you could see, required an early arrival and a long wait, but the palpable electric buzz in the crowd made the wait worth it.  Dispatch riders from Buckman Tavern—sent by the Lexington Minuteman commander Captain Parker—were hailed by the crowd.  When they come screaming back with news that the “Regulars” were but a scant half mile down the road, Parker ordered a modern-day William Diamond to give the long roll of the drum and the small bell tower on a nearby hill sounded.  The excitement built even more among the thousands in attendance.

And then they appeared—scowling, erect by exhausted, in the famed brilliant (and occasionally faded) red coats.  Them.  The scourge of American Liberty, the troops sent by King George III to corral and suppress us, hundreds and hundreds of marching British troops!  In their midst—played by modern-day re-enactors—were two of our local public historians, Travis Shaw of Hamilton and Ian MacDougall of Taylorstown, who work for the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area and have given lectures recently to the Lovettsville Historical Society.  As Ian later told me, “The feeling marching onto Lexington Green left a tingle I’ll never forget and a tear in the eye.”  

The crowd did not make so much as a peep.  Soon you could hear the screaming British commander—it was British Marine Major John Pitcairn that day with several other mounted junior officers—“Disperse ye damned rebels, ye scoundrels, and LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS!!”  As that day, the Lexington militia company appeared quite perplexed as to what they should do.  They were an “army of observation,” essentially, there to let the British know of their inherent dislike of what the British were up to in marching to Concord to steal Massachusetts military stores, and then after, they’d spiritedly pass on the intelligence gained by back roads, ahead of the British.  They largely owned their own weapons, and weren’t about to let the British take them.  Capt. Parker, now as then, ordered his men to disperse to avoid bloodshed, and some of them began to uneasily do so.  But a shot rang out—a mounted British officer’s pistol shot?  An arriving militiaman’s warning shot?—and it was followed by a number of shots by British soldiers and then a series of thundering volleys aimed at the small, dispersing company of Lexington militia.  The roar of voices, the mystery of gun smoke from massed weaponry, cloaking what had just occurred.

And then the Lexington men were falling all over, running for cover to return a few later-coveted scattered shots. The crowd was now, as the dozens of spectators that April 1775 morning, in shock.   The British went after anyone they could find, shooting and bayoneting.  Truly the “Bloody Butchery of the British Troops!”  Their officers were now clearly trying to regain control, but the minutes ticked by until the arrival of the expedition leader, a modern-day re-enactor portraying Lt. Col. Francis Smith.  The Regulars regained formation, volleyed in victory followed by boisterous victory huzzahs, and then as the still-silent crowd watched, “marched haughtily on to Concord.”

Loudspeakers around the common then shared—with large screens so that all could see—the roster of the dead, the cameras zeroing in on the crumpled form of each slain man lying on the common.  It was incredibly moving.  And then Rev. Jonas Clarke preached over the dead, as he did in the no-longer-standing meetinghouse that then stood on the Green.  He, chaplain of Captain Parker’s company, with sobbing widows and children looking on.  He who had housed Hancock and Adams.  He who would pen “They nobly dar’d to be FREE!!” on the first monument to be erected to the American Revolution, twenty-four years later in 1799.  My wife and I then realized that as Rev. Clarke had moved that congregation, he strove now to move us—that the “250” needed to be more than just a re-enactment.  It was a time to remember AMERICA and just what it was about.

As the crowd broke up, I walked to the monument with Clarke’s still-moving words and felt the catch in my throat as his parishioners must have.  On the way, a chance encounter:  two familiar looking British soldiers:  Travis and Ian from the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area, today of the 40^th Regiment of Foot, glad in their red coasts to see a friendly face.  We posed for pictures, jubilant in what we all had just experienced.  Travis and Ian had more re-enacting to do on the Battle Road; my wife, friends, and I hiked over to ‘Ye Olde Burying Ground.’ There, a simple slate marker still shows where the eight fallen Minutemen were hastily buried before Capt. Parker’s Company marched on for its revenge.  The grave was covered with brush lest the British discover it and bring the bodies back to Boston for exhibition.

We’d been up for hours, worked up a fierce appetite, and so adjourned for an old Lexington tradition—a pancake breakfast and gallons of hot coffee.  We’d learned the crucial skinny that morning—”the Baptists here have the best pancakes—and they have sausages!”  So there we went, conversing with new friends over breakfast.

What of Concord, you may ask?  Evidently, they did some commemorating, too, especially at Old North Bridge. Passage there at this hour was impossible.  But then, Concord?!  Did it matter? Lexingtonians and Concordians have been fighting over who had what Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” since 1824.  You go to one or the other on Patriot’s Day.  I do know this:  on old gravestones miles and miles from Lexington Green even if in different states, you will see colonials who had responded to the news of what had happened that day, and it was important to them that years later their gravestone would tell their true legacy—“RESPONDED TO THE LEXINGTON ALARM, 1775.”

I was excited to learn upon my return to Virginia that back home in Lovettsville, many had participated on the night of April 18-19, hanging “two lights” in steeples, public buildings, and homes.  We have not forgotten, not Paul Revere and his lanterns, not his warning, not the Lexington Alarm.