Pitcairn’s volley; he was sixty-four years old, and had been
color-bearer in the capture of Louisburg by assault in 1745. Two of his
sons and two sons-in-law were in his company on Lexington Green, and
eleven of the Munroe clan were in arms that day. Captain Parker did not
long survive the battle, dying the next September; but when the Civil
War came on, his grandson Theodore had bequeathed to Massachusetts, and
Governor Andrew had placed in her Senate Chamber, beside the trophies
sent by Stark from Bennington,
“two fire-arms, formerly the property of my honored
grandfather,--to wit, the large musket or King’s arm, which was by
him captured from the British in the battle of Lexington, and which
is the first fire-arm taken from the enemy in the war for
Independence; and also the smaller musket used by him in that
battle.”
Theodore Parker had died in May, 1860.
Pitcairn and his redcoats, delayed only half an hour by this bloody
overture to Washington’s grand career, marched on towards
[Illustration: MUSKETS OF CAPTAIN JOHN PARKER.]
Concord, little knowing what would meet them there. As they climbed the
hills in Lexington and Lincoln, they could surmise, however, that the
country was rising, for the church-bells were ringing an alarm of fire.
Pierpont, at Acton, overlooking the neighboring towns named by him, gave
the geography of this rising in spirited couplets:
“Now Concord’s bell, resounding many a mile,
Is heard by Lincoln, Lincoln’s by Carlisle,
Carlisle’s by Chelmsford,--and from Chelmsford’s swell
Peals the loud clangor of th’ alarum bell,
Till it o’er Bedford, Acton, Westford spreads,
Startling the morning dreamers from their beds.”
These are the small towns lying along the Concord and Merrimac rivers,
and their tributaries, which sent forth the minute-men to fight at
Concord Bridge.
Prescott had done his warning work well; and as Emerson said in 1835:
“In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years
(King Philip’s War), the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the
farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls,
to make good the resolute words of their town debates. These poor
farmers acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was
a deed of fame they were doing.”
It was Emerson’s grandfather, the town minister, who met them on Concord
Green, before his church, and who entered that night in his almanac the
events he had witnessed, as soon to be quoted.
By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord
farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the
spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and
defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military
achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in
martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still
delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital
of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander
and Cæsar--even Hannibal and Bonaparte--continue to receive admiration
for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the
accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on
the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of
literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.”
“Behold our river bank,
Whither the angry farmers came
In sloven dress and broken rank,--
Nor thought of fame:
Their deed of blood
All mankind praise;
Even the serene Reason says
‘It was well done.’”
War had been the normal state of Europe; and from the hour when Bulkeley
and Willard made here their honest bargain with the red landlords of
these game preserves, cornfields, and fishing-places, down to the
Franco-German campaigns of 1870,--235 years,--there had been scarcely a
period of twenty peaceful
[Illustration: THE MINUTE-MAN.
FRENCH’S FIRST STATUE.]
years in that hemisphere. With us it was different; but for the strife
between France and England, in which the colonies were more or less
entangled, Massachusetts had seen no warfare in her borders for nearly a
century, when the insolence of the mother-country forced independence
upon us against our will. Yet the fight at the North Bridge was no
impromptu affair, as the utterances of our Concord yeomen show. They had
declared they would fight for King George or against him, as His Majesty
might elect; and when he had made his foolish choice they did not
hesitate,--much as they had reason to dread the ordeal by combat. And
here again came in the spirit of Calvinism, rallying to the Old
Testament, rather than to the New with its gospel of peace and
love,--its _amnistie générale_, as poor Trilby says. The grandfather of
Emerson (who was also the great-great-great-grandson of Peter Bulkeley)
was parish minister of Concord; he had been chaplain to the Provincial
Congress, and he died in Vermont, as chaplain in the Revolutionary army
of General Gates. Five weeks before the invasion of his parish by the
redcoats, he had preached to the militia companies gathered in this
town for review, a famous sermon from the text, “And behold, God Himself
is with us for our Captain, and His priests with sounding trumpets to
cry alarm against you.” He was as good as his word, for he was one of
the first to take his musket and join the minute-men in the early
morning of the 19th of April; and returning to the Old Manse (then the
new manse, for it was built for him and his bride a few years earlier)
to protect his family, he saw the brief fight at the bridge from his
study window, and wrote of the day’s doings this brief chronicle of an
eye-witness. His grandson found it in a page or two of his family
almanac, where, at the end of April, he wrote, “This month remarkable
for the greatest events of the present age.”
“This morning, between 1 and 2 o’clock, we were alarmed by the
ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to
the number of 800, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and
barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge,
near to Inman’s Farm, and were at Lexington Meeting-house, half an
hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and
(as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was
brought us first by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the
guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all
posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the
help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walls and fences,
arrived at Concord at the time above mentioned; when several posts
were immediately despatched, that returning confirmed the account
of the regulars’ arrival at Lexington, and that they were on their
way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to
this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in
readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company were
preparing to receive them in the town. Capt. Minot, who commanded
them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the
Meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had
our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent
out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon
us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble
ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and
took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed
into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.
“Scarcely had we formed, before we saw the British troops at the
distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing
towards us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a
stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their number; but others,
more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be
equal to the enemy’s, by recruits from the neighboring towns that
were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we
retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set
fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed 60 bbls.
flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the Town-house,
destroyed 500 lb. of balls, set a guard of 100 men at the North
Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Col. Barrett, where they
were in expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But
these were happily secured just before their arrival, by
transportation into the woods and other by-places.
“In the meantime the guard set by the enemy to secure the pass at
the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who
had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with
special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These
orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the
enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces,
before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then
became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were
killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here
be observed by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent
beginning a rupture with the King’s troops, as we were then
uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they
had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and
killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops
soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the
greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon
upon their march to meet them.
“For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches,
discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,--sometimes
advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at
length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In
the meantime, a party of our men (150), took the back way through
the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves
to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences and buildings,
ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat.”
[Illustration: HAWTHORNE’S OLD MANSE.]
This account differs slightly from others, and omits many particulars;
it is the most valuable single version of the memorable skirmish at the
Bridge,--in itself trifling, but momentous in its results. Parson
Emerson was himself one of those who wished to meet the troops near his
own meeting-house, but was wisely overruled. He says that two British
soldiers were killed at the Bridge--Shattuck, the town historian, says
three; the difference is accounted for by a dismal tale which Hawthorne
was perhaps the first to print. He derived it, he says, from Lowell, the
poet, who had picked it up, no doubt, in his short residence at Concord
in the spring of 1838, when “rusticated” here from Harvard College. It
may be read in the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, wherein is found one of
the best pictures of our peaceful scenery,--so far removed from thought
of bloodshed.
“A youth,” says Hawthorne, “in the service of the clergyman [Parson
Emerson], happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side
to side of the Bridge, he left his task and hurried to the
battle-field, with the axe still in his hand. The British had by
this time retreated, the Americans were in pursuit; and the late
scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay
on the ground--one was a corpse--but, as the young New Englander
drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands
and knees, and gave a ghastly stare in his face. The boy--it must
have been a nervous impulse, without purpose--uplifted his axe, and
dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.”
To a certain extent, Bancroft, in his account of the fight, confirms
this tale, saying:
“The Americans acted from impulse, and stood astonished at what
they had done. They made no (immediate) pursuit, and did no further
harm,--except that one wounded soldier, rising as if to escape, was
struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Col.
Barrett’s might have been cut off, but was not molested.”
It is traditional that when this party, which had been sent to destroy
the military stores at Colonel James Barrett’s, two miles to the
westward, came back to the Bridge, alarmed by the firing, and saw their
countrymen lying dead there, one of them with his head laid open, they
were struck with fear and ran on to the main body in the village,
telling of what they had seen. And it was this single incident, very
likely, which led the English officers, and Lord Percy himself, to
report “that the rebels scalped and cut off the ears of some of the
wounded who fell into their hands.” Bancroft indignantly denies this,
saying, “The falsehood brings dishonor on its voucher; the people whom
Percy reviled were among the mildest and most compassionate of their
race,”--which is true.
It is no wonder that the British troops on
[Illustration: REVOLUTIONARY INN.]
their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds
and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties,
should themselves have committed some barbarities,--for their defeat and
humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and
officers,--more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years
before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of
the yeomanry was only ninety-one--a third of the British loss,--while
all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side.
From that day, the Revolution was begun,--to end only with the creation
of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the
history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from
the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new
character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which
the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town.
Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed
her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part
accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two _foci_ of the American
revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It
was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later,
with Emerson for its Washington,--and with results that seem as
permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington
secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may
be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political
independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was
powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound
philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art
were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our
political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to
be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe
cared to read,--a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two
or three sermons and as many essays by Channing.
Into the stagnation of this shallow pool of American letters, Emerson,
in 1836, cast the smooth stone of his philosophical first
book,--_Nature_. It made little immediate stir; the denizens of the pool
paid small heed to it, and few of them guessed what it meant. It was
written in Concord, and chiefly at the Old Manse, where Emerson dwelt
with his mother and kindred before his second marriage in 1835, and
where Hawthorne afterward made the house and himself widely known. The
fixing of his own residence in this town by Emerson was due in part to
ancestry, and still more to a perception of the fitness of the region
for the abode of a poet and sage. The same perception, by Hawthorne,
Alcott, Ellery Channing and others,--together with the important fact
that it
[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU. (1857.)]
was Emerson’s chosen retreat,--brought those literary men here. Thoreau,
the most original and peculiar genius of the whole group, was born here,
and never had much inclination to leave Concord, although in youth he
talked of adventuring to the wild West,--Kentucky and Illinois at that
time,--whither his friend, Ellery Channing, afterward did in fact go.
Around Emerson, this circle, with many who only lived here temporarily
(like Margaret Fuller and George William Curtis), or not at all,
gathered as friends and brothers, or else as disciples,--and thus the
name of Concord became associated, and justly, with a special and
remarkable school of thought and literature. Thousands now visit the
graves of these worthies, to which, and to their haunts in life--their
walks and seats and sylvan places of resort,--an increasing host of
pilgrims come year by year.
The Arabs have a proverb,--“Though a hundred deserts separate the heart
of the Faithful from the Kaaba of Mecca, yet there opens a window from
its sanctuary into thy soul.” For those who have the true inward
illumination, therefore, pilgrimage is not needful; yet to all it is
agreeable, and it has been the practice of mankind for ages, and will
be, so long as we remain ourselves but pilgrims and wayfarers on this
earth. Nasar, the son of Khosrou, who wrote in the time of Haroun
Al-Rashid, and called his book _The Traveller’s Wallet_, was not the
first, nor Bunyan, with his _Pilgrims Progress_, the last, to look on
life as a journey; but let us hear what that Persian says of it:
“Man, endowed with intellect, must search into the origin of his
existence,--whence he came, and whither he shall go,--reflecting
that in this world he is making a toilsome journey, without stop or
stay,--not even for the twinkling of an eye,--until he has
traversed the measure of that line which marks the time allotted
for his existence. For that we are but pilgrims here on earth, God
has mysteriously declared.”
The attraction of Emerson and the rest of the Concord authors, whose
homes or tombs so many pilgrims visit, comes chiefly from the
recognition by them of this search by mankind after the
Infinite,--their insight into the nature and worth of this pilgrimage of
life which all are making. Man loves and seeks amusement to beguile his
toilsome or monotonous journey,--and hence the pleasure so many take in
the lighter and more graceful or laughable forms of literature. But
sooner or later, and in many persons at all times, what Tennyson calls
“the riddle of the painful earth” is before us all for consideration, if
not for solution. We see that the universe is moral,--even if we cannot
read the moral aright,--and we seek those who can give us “the word of
the enigma,” as the French say. Emerson gave it in his manner, Hawthorne
in his, Thoreau in still another way; and these three Concord authors
not only had much vogue in their lifetime, but are yet more widely read
since their death. Others, like Ellery Channing, found little audience
in youth, and time has not yet essentially enlarged the circle of their
readers. With the same moral view of life which his more successful
friends took, Channing, the poet (who must always be distinguished from
Dr. Channing, the divine, his uncle), had in his style something of that
distraction which Montaigne declares is needful to poets.
[Illustration: GRAVES OF THE EMERSON FAMILY.]
“The precepts of the masters,” says this eccentric Gascon, “and
still more their example, tell us that we must have a little
insanity, if we would avoid even more stupidity. A thousand poets
drawl and languish in prose; but the best ancient prose (and ’tis
the same with verse) glows throughout with the vigor and daring of
poesy, and takes on an air of inspiration. The poet, says Plato”
(and here Montaigne gives his own quaint form to the familiar
passage in Plato’s Laws), “sitting on the Muses’ tripod, pours out
like mad all that comes into his mouth, as if it were the spout of
a fountain; without digesting or weighing it. So things escape him
of various colors, of opposite natures, and with intermittent flow.
Plato himself is wholly poetic; the old theology, say the scholars,
is all poetry; and the First Philosophy is the original language of
the gods.”
To this wild rule more than one of the Concord philosophers conforms;
there is a perceptible lack of method, even when their meaning is fairly
clear. Hawthorne incurs less of this censure than the rest; but he
confessed that he did not always comprehend his own allegories, nor know
exactly the moral he would insinuate. Emerson goes more directly to his
mark; a Frenchman (Chantavoine) has said of him, “In his Essays he is
first of all a philosophic moralist, never quite forgetting that he was
once a preacher.” But, in contrasting him with French writers,
Chantavoine admits that Emerson has something which the light and
brilliant Parisian essayists lack:
“We are afraid, I suppose, of losing touch with things, if we rise
much above them; we do not soar high, content to skim the surface;
we distrust those generalities, however eloquent or edifying, which
might lead us too far aside. Yet, should we borrow something of
Emerson’s manner, French criticism, both historical and literary,
would gain by it; there might possibly be less ease, less lightness
of touch, less glancing wit in our essays; but in return there
would be more earnestness and depth in our judgments on men and
affairs.”
Emerson was a reader and admirer of French prose; he did not find much
poetry in French verse. The glancing of his wit was as quick and
searching as that of Paris; but he belongs more to the literature of the
world than most of the French prose authors since Montaigne and Pascal.
In American literature he is unique; so, in his very different way, is
Thoreau; so is Hawthorne; and no American, not even one of these three,
can be compared with any of them on terms of similarity. There is that
in their best writing which puts us upon our best thinking, and leads us
along the upper levels of life. Particularly is this true of Emerson;
Virtue, radiant, serene and sovereign, sways the realm where Emerson
abides, and to which he welcomes his readers, who become his friends. It
was said of Socrates, in a dubious compliment, that he “brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth”; it might as truly be said of
Emerson that he raises earth to the level of divine philosophy. His
method in this is purely poetic; therefore, while in verse he lacks what
is usually called creative power, he brings with him the atmosphere of
poesy more constantly than any modern poet; nor, since Milton, Spenser,
and Shakespeare, has any English poet excelled him in this. To this
quality, as well as to his courage of opinion and his penetrating
insight, do we owe it that he first proclaimed our intellectual
independence of the mother-country, as Franklin, Washington and
Jefferson declared our political independence. There is, indeed, a
certain resemblance between Washington and Emerson which might escape
the notice of those who look chiefly at the totally different work each
had to do, and the diversity of life and opinion which contrasted
Virginia and New England so sharply.
It must be confessed that, in 1732, Concord was hardly so constituted as
naturally
[Illustration: HOME OF EMERSON.]