01:45 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 31, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

These are the orders that started the American Revolution:

"You will march with the Corps of grenadiers and Light Infantry put under your Command with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all the Artillery, Ammunition, provisions, Tents & all other military stores you can find."

Thomas Gage, the general commanding the British garrison at Boston wrote those orders; Francis Smith, a fat lieutenant colonel, received them at 8 p.m. on April 18, 1775.

Journal graphic / Tom Murphy

For secrecy, Smith was to march his soldiers in small groups to the Boston Common, where they would rendezvous at 10 p.m. From the Common the 700 men would row across the bay to Lechmere's Point on Charlestown, to begin their long march to Concord, where British spies had determined that the rebels had a large store of gunpowder, artillery and shot.

The secret of Smith's nighttime mission was poorly kept. As the troops stepped into their transport boats under cover of darkness, the city's apothecary, Dr. Joseph Warren, dispatched Patrick Dawes and the silversmith Paul Revere to carry the alarm to Concord.

A friend of Revere's bravely carried two lanterns up the narrow stairwell in the steeple of the North Church. Here he hung the lighted lanterns as a signal that the British were coming via the bay to Charlestown. The British in Boston weren't stupid; they knew that lanterns burning in the belfry were some sort of a signal. They hustled over there to catch the messenger, but he had already doused his lanterns and run.

Dawes spurred his mount along Boston Neck, through Roxbury and Brookline; two men silently rowed Revere past the British warship Somerset to the Charlestown shore.

Revere wrote: "It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising."

In Charlestown Revere borrowed Deacon John Larkin's horse, a mount the deacon would never see again. The horse thundered across a bridge spanning the Mystic River to Medford.

"The regulars are out!" Revere called into the moonlit night. "The regulars are out!"

Lieutenant Colonel Smith and his 700 regulars -- trained soldiers of the British Army -- were indeed out, but they were mired in the marsh. Smith halted his men at the Phipps Farm in Charlestown for two hours while he waited for provisions. When he ordered them to move out past midnight he marched them around a planked bridge, to avoid making noise, and through a stream feeding the Charles River.

In the chill of the April night the troops were wet to their waists. Their white pants, brightened with a white paste called pipe clay, and their calf-high boots, were wet and heavy. Each man carried a pack, bayonet, belts, a day's provisions and 36 cartridges. Each also carried a 10-pound musket. Before them was a round-trip march of 32 miles.

The distant peal of church bells and the occasional blast of a signal shot told Smith that his cover had been blown. At 3 a.m. he sent a rider back to Boston with a request for reinforcements. Then he marched on, determined to seize the rebel arsenal at Concord.

Shot heard 'round the world

On the way to Concord lay the town of Lexington, a sleepy crossroads of 750 people. Warned by Revere and Dawes before their capture by British troops, a band of 70 minutemen awaited the arrival of Smith's soldiers.

Leading the minutemen was Capt. John Parker, at 45 a veteran of the French and Indian War. Only 38 of Parker's men brought arms and ammunition with them; these he formed in a line across the Lexington Green.

At dawn the British troops came in view from the south. John Pitcairn, 53, a captain in the Royal Marines led the advance guard as the British swept on toward Lexington.

Pitcairn ordered his men to form the battle line; his troops smartly moved into formation, pointing their muskets and yelling "Huzzah! Huzzah!"

Pitcairn spurred his mount toward the small line of rebels; he drew up before them with his troops bristling at his back. "Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, and disperse!"

There was no way 38 farmers could hold off a battle line of the British Army, Parker knew that. He ordered his minutemen to leave the green. They began to break up, but they refused Pitcairn's demands to drop their muskets. As the rebels left the field, somebody's gun flared. No one will ever know for certain who fired this, "the shot heard 'round the world." What is certain is that it touched off a storm of fire from the British lines. And when the shooting stopped, eight minutemen lay dead on the blood-spattered green.

Sniper fire

The British rolled on for Concord, six miles away, stopping to fire their traditional victory volley. Their only casualties had been a wounded man and Pitcairn's bloodied horse.

On the return march from Concord to Boston, the British marched for eight hours through a gauntlet of armed and angry minutemen. Nearly 4,000 men fired at them during the march; the muskets of that time were wildly inaccurate, so the farmers and merchants of Massachusetts just kept firing and firing 1-ounce balls of lead. They shot about 80,000 rounds in all, an average of 3 blasts every second.

The British troops that made it as far as Concord had to march 16 miles back in wet boots, carrying 60 pounds of gear, with no sleep, while the trees, walls and houses around them exploded.

"We were fired at from all quarters, but particularly from the houses on the roadside, and the Adjacent Stone walls," wrote British Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. "Several of the Troops were killed and wounded in this way, and the Soldiers were so enraged at suffering from an unseen Enemey, that they forced open many of the houses from which the fire proceeded, and put to death all those found in them. . . .

"Our men had very few opportunities of getting good shots at the Rebels, as they hardly ever fired but under cover of a Stone wall, from behind a tree, or out of a house; and the moment they had fired they lay down out of sight until they had loaded again, or the Column had passed. In the road indeed in our rear, they were most numerous, and came on pretty close, frequently calling out, "King Hancock forever."

By day's end, Mackenzie tallied 168 British soldiers wounded, and 68 dead.

'There is war'

In Providence the cry rang out: "War, war boys! There is war." Along Towne Street the drum beat to arms.

Nathanael Greene, a private in the Kentish Guards, heard the news that night at his house in Coventry. He said goodbye to Caty, saddled his horse and thundered off to the alarm post of the Guards, stopping at a friend's house to borrow cash.

The Kentish Guards set out at dawn on April 20, marching by foot into Providence as the morning light touched their new, colorful uniforms. A man named John Howland later said, "I viewed the company as they marched up the street, and observed Nathanael Greene, with his musket on his shoulder, in the ranks, as a private. I distinguished Mr. Greene, whom I have frequently seen, by the motion of his shoulder on the march, as one of his legs was shorter than the other."

The Guard got as far as Pawtucket, where a messenger reached them with an order from the governor, demanding that they not cross state lines. The bulk of the Guard obeyed the order, but Greene, two of his brothers and a fourth man ignored it; they mounted horses and pressed on. En route to Boston they heard that British troops had retreated into Boston, so they turned back for Rhode Island where, in the coming days, Greene received some surprising news.

The right connections

The General Assembly called an emergency session in the Providence Colony House, a brick building on a grassy hill overlooking the cove. Here they voted to form a Rhode Island Army of 1,500 men.

This "Army of Observation" needed a general to lead it. In an act that defies explanation, the General Assembly passed over Gen. Simeon Potter, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and bypassed Greene's friend, James Varnum, captain of the Kentish Guards.

The Assembly reached way down into the ranks and chose as general a bookish, asthmatic, gimp-kneed private, Nathanael Greene.

Greene certainly had political connections, and in Rhode Island that's always been important. He was a friend of Samuel Ward Jr., whose father was a former governor and Rhode Island's representative to the Continental Congress; Greene had served in the General Assembly, and his brother, Jacob Greene, was then a deputy in the legislature.

But as Richard K. Showman, the first editor of The Papers of Nathanael Greene noted, "There were men with military experience, however, who had even better political connections. . . . , but none, it would appear in retrospect, possessed Greene's military genius. Perhaps by some miracle the leaders of the Rhode Island Assembly recognized his hidden genius; it is more likely that like the winner of a lottery they simply picked the right number."

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

A continuing series

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources for today's installment

Boatner III, Mark M. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1994.

Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, Vol. I. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1930.

French, Allen. The Day of Concord & Lexington. Eastern National; for Minuteman National Historical Park: Concord, Mass., 2004.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. I. Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1871.

Henderson, Ernest F. A Short History of Germany, Vol. II. The MacMillian Company: New York, 1902.

Langguth, A.J. Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. Touchstone: New York, 1988.

Ripley, the Rev. Ezra. "A History of the Fight at Concord, on the 19th of April, 1775." The Nova Anglia Co., Historical Reproductions, Hinesville, Ga. (Originally published in 1832.)

Scheer, George F., and Rankin, Hugh F. Rebels & Redcoats. De Capo Press Inc.: copyright 1957 by The World Publishing Company.

Showman, Richard K., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. I. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1976.