Rev. West was worried, and he was right to be. He knew that his parishioners had only sporadic training. They were not ready to fight the British – the strongest and best-trained army in the world.
Part 1
We all learn about the Battles of Lexington and Concord when we are in school, and the alarm sent by Paul Revere and his riders on the night of April 19, 1775, and of course Longfellow’s stirring poem. Seeing the two lanterns that signaled a British departure “by sea” – that is, across the Charles River to Cambridge, he was there on the opposite shore,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.
The country folk – that was us. And although Longfellow gives Paul Revere all the credit, there was in fact a network of riders who went out that night, to the villages and farms in Middlesex, but also to the villages and farms in Suffolk (as we then were) and others.
This wasn’t Paul’s first ride. As early as 1774, he worked for the Boston Committee of Correspondence as an express rider to carry messages and documents, occasionally as far as New York or Philadelphia. It wasn’t even Paul’s idea. The MA colony had established a system of alarm riders by statute in 1645, to raise the alarm in the event of an Indian attack. This system was maintained until the early 1700s, when it was allowed to lapse. But it was a good means of rapid and stealthy communication, so the Sons of Liberty revived it again.
A definition, because this term will come up again, and it’s important. Committee of Correspondence sounds like the people who take minutes at municipal meetings or send thank you notes on behalf of a nonprofit organization. Behind that boring name was in fact active and dangerous activity. These people were agitators, propagandists, and spies. The Committees of Correspondence were organized in each town to work with the Sons of Liberty and coordinate the colonists’ response to Britain’s increasingly frequent Intolerable Acts – the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, the Quartering Act, and so forth. These Acts were imposed on the colonies to limit their commerce and governance, in the hope that these sanctions would dampen their increasingly rebellious behavior. Boston had the first Committee in 1764, followed by New York.
When things started to really heat up in 1772, Boston reorganized its Committee, and actively began recruiting the towns in MA to form committees of their own to facilitate patriot communication throughout the Commonwealth. Most of the towns – 206 out of about 220 of them – responded to Boston’s appeal.
Needham was not one of them.
So, on the night of April 18th, Paul Revere borrowed a horse from Deacon John Larkin, a Charlestown merchant who was a patriot sympathizer. Revere had been told by Dr Joseph Warren that the Regulars were marching to Lexington to capture John Hancock and Sam Adams, and then would go on to Concord to impound the powder and arms. There were others out that night – Revere did make it to Lexington, as did William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. The warning was delivered to John Hancock, but as they tried to go on to Concord, the three men were intercepted by the British. Dawes and Prescott escaped, but Revere was held and questioned, and his horse was confiscated. Deacon John Larkin never did get his horse back.
Needham was well aware of what was going on in Boston and the towns around it – patriot firebrand Eleazer Kingsbury made sure of that. The town people for the most part were conservative, and the minister who led them, the Rev. Samuel West, like many Harvard-educated ministers, was a Tory at heart. So on December 4, 1773 (two weeks before the Boston Tea Party), Needham Town Meeting took up the Boston Committee’s request to elect its own Committee of Correspondence to “join with the Committee of Correspondence of the Town of Boston relating to the importation of Tea.”
The December 1773 warrant article “pass’d in the negative” – that is, it was voted down. With the exception of partisans like Eleazer Kingsbury, Needham wanted no part in the doings of their troublesome Boston neighbors.
By mid-1774, however, this attitude had begun to change. As the Intolerable Acts became more restrictive, Needhamites became increasingly restive. As Rev. West noted, “Nothing but ye most impolitic conduct in Britain could have produced that reverse in ye general spirit which now discovered itself… Every week and almost every day produced something new either to manifest or increase ye irritation of ye people… The measures pursued by ye government in great Britain were precisely such as to keep up ye ferment without having any tendency to accomplish their purpose.” By 1775 – a short two years – Needham was all-in. Town Meeting voted to not only create a Committee of Correspondence, with Capt. Robert Smith as its representative; but it had also elected Eleazer Kingsbury as its representative to the new and illegal Provincial Congress.
The Alarm came to Needham in the morning of April 19 from several sources. A rider (“a man on horseback without any hat on”) rode through West Needham and gave the alarm at Bullard’s Tavern, which was on the main route toward Natick [now Route 135; the tavern was near where the main gate to Wellesley College is now located]. Ephraim Bullard or his son went up to Bullard’s Hill to fire a gun to warn the militia to assemble. A British deserter, headed for Sherborn, rode into Needham over Kendrick’s Bridge on what is now Kendrick Street, and passed on the information to William Eaton in East Needham that the British were on the move. And Nero Benson, a young boy and son of a freed slave, sounded his trumpet and gave the alarm as he rode into the far western part of Needham and into Natick.
Near the end of his long life, the Rev. Samuel West wrote a memoir about his life, his schooling, and his career in the ministry. Rev. West was minister during the years that led up to the Revolutionary War. As I mentioned, he was a Tory and preferred that the colonies did not rise up in rebellion. But he also cared for the town and its people, and followed their lead as he thought best for them in this matter. Between his memoir and the town records, we have a first-hand view of Needham’s path to revolution.
Rev. West was worried, and he was right to be. Every Massachusetts town had militia companies for defense, and they were required to train weekly to be in readiness. In reality, however, their training consisted of scant copies of old British training manuals supplemented by whatever practical knowledge they could gain from men who had served in the French and Indian War about 20 years before. Their weapons were miscellaneous, and because of the cost and scarcity of powder, their practice did not often include the necessary skills of loading and shooting their temperamental muskets.
West knew that his parishioners were not ready to fight the British, the strongest and best-trained army in the world. He also feared that a failed battle would lead to harsh reprisals, and the British would escalate to stronger measures to repress rebellion.
Nevertheless, on April 19th, 185 Needham men, nearly every able-bodied male over the age of sixteen, assembled to march. The Minute Company, whose job was to be first to respond, was already armed and ready. The East and West Companies needed to assemble to receive their powder and shot, and in some cases, to make their musket balls. As I mentioned, there was not a lot of ammunition, so it was distributed at need. The powder was supposed to be kept at the powder-house on Great Plain Avenue – the remote location being important, since it was volatile. However, in 1774 the British banned the export of ammunitions and guns to the colonies; they also began to confiscate local supplies. Supplies were getting tight. For this reason, East Needham’s powder supplies had been moved in 1775 to Rev. West’s house for safekeeping so the British could not impound it. West Needham’s ammunition had been moved, we think, to Bullard’s Tavern.
Rev. West’s memoir records that day: “The news reached us about nine o’clock AM. The east [militia] company in Needham met at my house, as part of the military stores were deposited with me, they there supplied themselves, and by ten O’clock all marched for the place of action with as much spirit and resolution as the most zealous friends of the cause could have wished for. We could easily trace the march of troops from the smoke that rose over them, and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the Platoons fired by the British.”
The East Needham men received Rev. West’s blessing and marched off by around 10 o’clock. They marched down Central Avenue, to Hunnewell Street, and met up with some members of the West Company at Lower Falls on what is now Washington Street.
What they left behind in Needham that day were the minister, the women and children, and the “Exempts” – the men too young or too old and infirm to march with the militia, and who were therefore “exempted” from service. The Exempts were a sort of home guard, but given the shortage of weapons and shot, they were mostly armed with pikes, clubs, scythes, and other homemade weapons. Add to this their ages and lack of training, and they were really just one more thing for Rev. West to worry about.