Founding Myths Read online

  Also for the younger set, Molly Pitcher has her own trading card in the Topps American Heritage Heroes series. The text:

  MOLLY PITCHER

  AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  NON-COMMISSIONED SERGEANT

  The image: Molly jamming her rod into the cannon’s barrel, gazing intensely at her target, with an officer on horseback in the background (could it be General Washington?) looking on approvingly.

  THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN MOLLY

  Even if the legend is flawed, Molly Pitcher does introduce women camp followers into the core narrative of the Revolutionary War—but these women enter the story under false pretexts. In truth, they were more like the historic Captain Molly from the Hudson Highlands than the fanciful Molly Pitcher. They were poor and “vulgar,” in the parlance of the times. Like Mary Hays, Margaret Corbin, and the soldiers themselves, many drank and swore. (“Molly was a rough, common woman who swore like a trouper,” an elderly woman from Carlisle recalled of Mary Hays McCauley decades later. “She smoked and chewed tobacco, and had no education whatsoever. She was hired to do the most menial work, such as scrubbing, etc.”)55 These women were part of camp life, not above it.

  Unlike the fabled Molly Pitcher, camp followers were not honored by Washington for their deeds. Quite the reverse. Starting on July 4, 1777—on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—Washington issued orders for the women who accompanied the Continental Army not to ride on the wagons. Again and again he repeated these orders: women should walk, not ride, and they should stay in the rear with the baggage. For a general trying to put together a respectable army, camp followers were to be tolerated at best—and the fewer the better, as far as the commander in chief was concerned. “The multitude of women,” he wrote in 1777, “are a clog on every movement. . . . Officers commanding brigades and corps [should] use every reasonable method in their power to get rid of all such as are not absolutely necessary.”56

  Common soldiers, on the other hand, appreciated the women among them. Contrary to general orders, they let women ride in the wagons clear to the end of the war. The only “reward” bestowed on female camp followers was the respect of their male peers. After the war, these men kept the memory of “Captain Molly” alive. When telling old stories, they recalled their own “Captain Mollies,” those courageous camp followers who braved the heat of the action at Fort Washington, Fort Clinton, Brandywine, Monmouth, and other historic battlefields. Decades later, when these stories congealed into one and were set in print, veterans who were still alive came forth proudly: “Yes, that must have been her. I saw that woman. I knew the heroine myself.”

  While Captain Molly has a legitimate place in the story of our nation’s birth, Molly Pitcher does not. The story of Molly Pitcher belongs to the nineteenth century, and it is historically significant as folklore. This appealing heroine serves men, fights tough, and is rewarded by men in high places—but she does not represent the female presence in the Revolutionary War, as some writers now contend; she distorts it. To tell history as it truly was, our heroine would be “Molly of the Buckets, Pails, and Heavy Burdens”; she would not wait till her husband died or was wounded to help with the cannons; and she would receive little if any recompense, certainly no gold or officer’s commission from General Washington.

  DAVID AND GOLIATH

  “British professionals . . . pump[ed] shot into the backs of fleeing Minute Men.”

  The Battle of Lexington. Reduced engraving by Amos Doolittle, 1832, from his original engraving, 1775, based on a sketch by Ralph Earl.

  4

  “THE SHOT HEARD ’ROUND THE WORLD”

  Every year, over one million Americans commemorate “the shot heard ’round the world” with a patriotic pilgrimage to Minute Man National Historical Park on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts. On April 19, the anniversary of the famous event, reenactors dress up as colonial minute men and march from nearby towns to Lexington and Concord, where they exchange make-believe musket fire with friends and neighbors dressed as British Redcoats. Throughout the state, and in Maine and Wisconsin as well, “Patriots’ Day” is celebrated as an official holiday.

  The story is classic David and Goliath, starring rustic colonials who faced the world’s strongest army. At dawn in Lexington on April 19, 1775, several hundred British Regulars, in full battle formation, opened fire on local militiamen. When the smoke had cleared, eight of the sleepy-eyed farmers who had been rousted in the middle of the night lay dead on the town green.

  In the wake of the bloodbath, to mobilize popular support, patriots proclaimed far and wide that the Redcoats had fired first. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress collected depositions from participants and firsthand witnesses, then published those accounts that conformed to the official story under the title A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops. British authorities countered with their own official version: the Americans had fired first. Not surprisingly, this story received little circulation in the rebellious colonies.

  Because of the biases and agendas of the witnesses, we can never know for sure who fired the first shot at Lexington. But we do know that the patriots won the war of words. “The myth of injured innocence,” as David Hackett Fischer calls it, became an instant American classic.1 We have all learned that the British started the American Revolution when they opened fire on outnumbered and outclassed patriot militiamen on the Lexington Green. But this makes no sense. Revolutions, by nature, are proactive—they must be initiated by the revolutionaries themselves. The American Revolution had begun long before the battle at Lexington.

  In 1836 the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson coined a catchy phrase that has signified the event ever since: “the shot heard ’round the world.” Actually, Emerson’s poem “Concord Hymn” commemorated the fighting at the North Bridge in nearby Concord, and his celebrated “shot” was fired by Americans:

  By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

  Here once the embattled farmers stood,

  And fired the shot heard ’round the world.

  Over time, however, Emerson’s poem was relocated to Lexington, a site more hospitable to the story we wish to hear. At Lexington the farmers were clearly the victims, while at Concord they were not. The David and Goliath tale, highlighted by the image of bullying British troops mowing down Yankee farmers, has prevailed. Popular histories still repeat the story as it was first told by American patriots, making it very clear who fired the first shot: “British professionals . . . pump[ed] shot into the backs of fleeing Minute Men.”2 Current textbooks routinely locate “the shot heard ’round the world” to the standoff at Lexington, not the “rude bridge” at Concord, where Emerson placed it. One grade-school text, even as it quotes the “Concord Hymn” verbatim in a sidebar, says Emerson called the first shot fired at Lexington “the shot heard ’round the world.”3 A college text, after outlining the events at both Lexington and Concord, tries to have it both ways by misquoting Emerson, switching from the singular to the plural: “The first shots—‘the shots heard ’round the world,’ as Americans later called them—had been fired. But who had fired them first?” It then discusses the debate over who had fired the first shot at Lexington, showing a clear preference for that location.4

  But what if the roles were reversed? What if American Revolutionaries were actually Goliath, and the British occupying force, greatly outnumbered and far from home, more like David? In fact, the American Revolution did not begin with “the shot heard ’round the world,” wherever it was fired. It started more than half a year earlier, when tens of thousands of angry patriot militiamen ganged up on a few u
narmed officials and overthrew British authority throughout all of Massachusetts outside of Boston. This powerful revolutionary saga, which features Americans as Goliath instead of David, has been bypassed by the standard telling of history. By treating American patriots as innocent victims, we have suppressed their revolutionary might.

  BELEAGUERED BOSTON

  At Lexington, the story goes, poorly trained militiamen, aroused from their slumber by Paul Revere, were surprised and mowed down by British Regulars. Surprised? Untrained? Unprepared? Let’s take a closer look at events that culminated in “the shot heard ’round the world.”

  On December 16, 1773, patriots dressed as Indians dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. On the night of April 18, 1775, sixteen months and two days later, British troops marched from Boston toward Lexington and Concord. Blood was shed, lots of it, and a war was on. What, exactly, happened during that intervening sixteen months and two days? How did an act of political vandalism lead to outright warfare?

  Here is one response, repeated for generations in our textbooks and in almost all accounts of the American Revolution.

  To punish Boston for what we now call the Boston Tea Party,5 Parliament passed four bills it called the “Coercive Acts” and colonists dubbed the “Intolerable Acts.” The “most drastic” of these was the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston.6 (The others are generally listed but rarely discussed in any detail.) This measure was supposed to isolate Bostonians from other colonists, but it had the reverse effect: “Americans in all the colonies reacted by trying to help the people of Boston. Food and other supplies poured into Boston from throughout the colonies.”7

  Meanwhile, leaders in twelve colonies gathered in the First Continental Congress to show support for Boston and present a united opposition to Britain’s harsh move. Congress petitioned Parliament to change its course, but Parliament remained firm. Six months later, British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord.

  Most of this account is correct—as far as it goes. Colonists did help Boston and form a Continental Congress, and British soldiers did march. But why did Britain take the offensive? Was it because other colonies came to the aid of Boston or because Congress complained? Do acts of charity or written protests, in the absence of stronger forms of resistance, generally lead to war? The beleaguered Boston story does not explain why British officials used military force against British citizens living in Massachusetts in April 1775. Something critical is missing here. We need to see how political tensions resulted in actual warfare.

  The problem begins with one false statement in the Boston-based narrative—namely, that closing Boston Harbor was “the final insult to a long list of abuses.”8 In fact, it wasn’t so much the Boston Port Act that set one colony aflame and triggered the American Revolution, but the second of the offensive bills, the Massachusetts Government Act. In this measure, Parliament unilaterally gutted the 1691 Charter for Massachusetts, the people’s constitution. No longer could citizens call town meetings except with permission of the royal governor, and once they met, they could not discuss any items the governor had not approved. No longer could the people’s representatives choose the powerful Council, which functioned as the upper house of the legislature, the governor’s cabinet, and the administrative arm of provincial government. No longer could the people have any say in choosing judges, juries, or justices of the peace—local officials with the power to put citizens in jail or take away their property.

  The people of Massachusetts, accustomed to home rule in local matters through their town meetings and a representative structure of government for a century and a half, were thoroughly disenfranchised by the Massachusetts Government Act. Try to imagine, today, that our Constitution was suddenly declared obsolete—not slowly eroded, but actually yanked away. This would spark considerable protest, and it did so then. Outraged citizens rose as a body to say, “No way!”

  THE FIRST AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  When the Boston Port Act took effect, other colonists passed the hat for relief, held days of prayer and fasting, embarked on another round of boycotts like those of the 1760s, and called for conferences to talk things over.9 These were common forms of political action in British North America. But when the Massachusetts Government Act took effect shortly afterward, the people of that colony actually shut down the government and prepared for war. This was the stuff of revolution. Citizens of Massachusetts forcibly shed the old regime and began to replace it with their own.10

  In June 1774, upon hearing news of the Massachusetts Government Act, patriots sprung to action. In Worcester, on July 4, members of the radical American Political Society (APS) pledged to arm themselves with “Two Pounds of Gun Powder each 12 Flints and Led Answerable thereunto.”11 Stephen Salisbury, a local merchant, sold so much gunpowder over the next few weeks that he contemplated building his own powder house.12 They hadn’t yet figured out exactly what actions they would take to resist the Massachusetts Government Act, but they did know they would not submit to it, and they reasoned—correctly, as it turned out—that it would come to blows at some point.

  The Massachusetts Government Act was due to take effect on August 1, 1774, and the first court to sit under the new provisions was scheduled to sit in remote Berkshire County, on the western edge of the province, on August 16. That court never convened. When the Crown-appointed officials showed up for work, they found themselves locked out of the Great Barrington courthouse and face-to-face with 1,500 patriots, who told them the court was closed.13

  The next court on the schedule was to meet in Springfield on August 30, but on that day, three to four thousand patriots, marching “with staves and musick,” again shut it down. “Amidst the Crowd in a sandy, sultry place, exposed to the sun,” wrote one firsthand observer, the judges were forced to renounce “in the most express terms any commission which should be given out to them under the new arrangement.”14

  Patriots who closed the courts in Great Barrington and Springfield proceeded unopposed, but General Thomas Gage, the newly appointed military governor of Massachusetts, vowed to take a stand in Worcester, where the court was supposed to meet on September 6. “In Worcester, they keep no Terms, openly threaten Resistance by Arms, have been purchasing Arms, preparing them, casting Ball, and providing Powder, and threaten to attack any Troops who dare to oppose them,” he wrote on August 27. “I shall soon be obliged to march a Body of Troops into that Township, and perhaps into others, as occasion happens, to preserve the peace.”15 Peace? If Gage did make good on his promise, it would look more like war—and this was more than seven months before Lexington and Concord.

  But events soon took a dramatic turn. On September 1, taking the offensive in a rapidly escalating arms race, General Gage ordered British troops to seize powder stored in a magazine in nearby Somerville, not far from Boston. As news spread, the story of British troops on the march took on a life of its own, and soon, across the Massachusetts countryside and proximate points of neighboring colonies, an estimated twenty to a hundred thousand angry men (this is the range of contemporary estimates, perhaps also a bit exaggerated), believing that the British Redcoats had killed six patriots and set fire to Boston, headed toward Boston to confront them.16 In some towns, nearly every male of fighting age participated in the “Powder Alarm,” as people soon called it. One firsthand observer described the frenzy of the moment:

  [A]ll along were armed men rushing forward some on foot some on horseback, at every house women & children making cartridges, running bullets, making wallets, baking biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the same time animating their husbands & sons to fight for their liberties, tho’ not knowing whether they should ever see them again.17

  Alas, it was a false alarm. “The people seemed really disappointed,” one man told John Adams two months later,
“when the news was contradicted.”18

  After the patriots’ showing in the Powder Alarm, Gage reasoned that his troops would be vastly outnumbered if he sent them to Worcester. “The flames of sedition,” he conceded to British secretary of state Lord Dartmouth, had “spread universally throughout the country beyond conception.”19 Gage had little choice but to let the judges fend for themselves, but judges alone could not uphold the power of the Crown and Parliament against such odds. The battle was won before it raged. The day before the court was slated to meet, the APS “Voted, not to bring our Fire-arms into Town the 6 Day of Sept.” Guns would not be needed; sheer numbers would suffice.20

  At dawn on September, 6, 1774, militiamen from across the county of Worcester started marching into the town of Worcester. By ten o’clock, as the day grew hotter, 4,622 men from 37 different towns stood at the ready. (We know the numbers because Breck Parkman, one of the participants, counted the men in each militia company.21) Approximately half the adult male population of a county that ranged from the Rhode Island to the New Hampshire borders had mustered in force to topple British rule at the local level.

  When two dozen Crown-appointed court officials showed up to work in their black suits and wigs, they found the courthouse doors barricaded. Locked out, they huddled instead in Daniel Heywood’s tavern, halfway between the courthouse and the town common. There they waited, waiting for the throngs to determine their fates.