The Shot Heard Round the World

This is the anniversary week of the battles of Lexington and Concord – the famous “shot heard round the world” did not occur in a vacuum. Over a decade of political strife and miscalculation led to Englishmen firing upon Englishmen, a concept that would have been considered absurd just months before the event. So I am going to provide a short overview of those events that took a political crisis to insurgency and finally open rebellion.

Colonial Crisis

Almost after the last whiff of gunpowder dispersed into the blue skies over North America at the end of the French & Indian war in 1763, a crack began to develop in Britain’s newly won empire. The problems involved the management of the new empire and the governance of the English settled colonies, native Indians, and the French-speaking Quebec and the economics of the empire.  These cracks were subtle at first but over time, they seemed to split of their own weight. The war had plunged the British government deep into debt, and the British Parliament sought to exploit the colonies for quick funds. They enacted a series of coercive measures to pull revenue from the colonies.

The French and Indian War sowed the seeds of later conflict
between Britain and her colonies

The Stamp Act

The Stamp Act of 1765 was one of the first initial measures forced upon the American colonists, instated to help pay for troops stationed in North America after the British victory. A tax on paper – it was not well received and more and more American colonists became politically active.

The Townshend Acts

Charles Townshend

Then in 1767, Parliament passed a series of acts called the Townshend Acts, named after Charles
Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who devised the program. These included: the Revenue Act of 1767, the Indemnity Act, the Commissioners of Customs Act, the Vice-Admiralty Court Act, and the New York Restraining Act. This stirred up more agitation across the colonies but especially in New England where the acts met immediate resistance.

The King Street Incident

The political unrest caused by the Townshend Acts would lead to the event known to the British as the King Street incident. But you know it as The Boston Massacre. Colonial agitators accosted British soldiers and threatened them with violence. Their reaction led to the shooting of that name. By now the colonists in opposition to the Crown began organizing. The British met the colonial reaction with one more action. The Tea Act was one of the final coercive measures passed by Parliament and became the last straw, making it the final unifying factor that brought the colonies from political agitation to an insurgent-like movement that would lead to open rebellion. The Parliament's insistence on the right to tax the colonies, in the end, became too much. The Tea Act was a lame attempt to convince the Americans to buy British tea and recognize Britain's right of taxation.

Boston Massacre provided rebels propaganda 

The Party

The colonies refused to accept this policy, and instead, the Sons of Liberty, one of many local insurgent groups, staged what became known as the Boston Tea Party. The Loyalist governor, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let ships leave without the colonists paying the duty. The radicals were stirred to action. The Sons of Liberty and their supporters disguised themselves as Mohawk warriors and clambered aboard the remaining British vessels in port tied at Griffin’s Wharf. They sent 342 chests of British tea to the bottom of the harbor.

Boston Tea Party

The Reaction

The British responded to the party by instating the Intolerable Acts, which the colonies refused to submit to. The British government now tightened its grip on Massachusetts. The new royally appointed governor, General Thomas Gage, was given expanded powers, and several thousand more troops to garrison Boston and cow the colonists with a show of force. Along with these acts, Parliament closed the Boston harbor, and sent 4,000 British troops to Boston, to patrol the "rebellious areas." Parliament believed that these acts were perfectly legitimate, that the colonies needed to pay for the maintenance of the British Empire. The colonies thought differently. And a drumbeat of actions began a small but growing political rift that would lead to an insurgency of sorts.

Boston Port Bill closed the harbor
impacting New England's economy

Birth of Rebellion

Lieut Col Francis Smith
led the ill-fated column

But the colonists reacted with more action, and by 1775 political crisis morphed to open insurgency careening towards rebellion. The Massachusetts colonial assembly directed the townships to ready their militias, which had already been preparing for what many foresaw as the coming conflict. The British had many sympathetic Loyalists who kept them apprised of the growing resistance. In April 1775, Gage received orders to disarm the rebels. Gage ordered Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to gather 700 British Army soldiers and march to Concord, where the rebels were reportedly storing mass quantities of arms and ammunition. Their orders were to find the stash and destroy it. He also had orders to arrest certain rebel leaders such as Sam Adams and John Hancock. Smith’s column was drawn from 11 of Gage's 13 occupying infantry regiments. Major John Pitcairn commanded ten elite light infantry companies, and Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Bernard commanded 11 grenadier companies. Quite a shock force by any measure.

General Thomas Gage faced a difficult situation

An Intelligence War

But the patriots, as the rebels deemed themselves, had an intelligence network. Some believe Gage’s American wife, Margaret Kemble Gage, was a rebel spy. See my blog post, “The Lady was a Spy?” Regardless of the source, the rebels had received word of the British orders. On 8 April, Paul Revere rode to Concord and notified local militias in the area to be on the alert for the British army forces. On 18 April, Revere received word of British “regulars” making their way to Lexington and Concord. Having already warned the militia in Concord, which had secured the weapons supply, Revere and William Dawes rode quickly to Lexington to warn the townspeople of the expected British onslaught.

Margaret Kemble Gage: Spy?

Shot Heard Round the World

This began a frantic race to Lexington during the night: The British pressing to maintain surprise, the patriots to gather enough forces to challenge them.  The celebrated first clash took place at Lexington Green, the town square, dawn on the morning of 19 April. Militia Captain John Parker, a veteran of the Seven Years' War, led some 80 Lexington militiamen, known as minutemen. The British had 700. Years later, one of the participants recalled Parker’s alleged words before the skirmish: “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

Race to Concord

A British officer demanded that the militia disarm and disperse, and in the ensuing confusion, muskets were fired. To this day, there exists considerable uncertainty over whether the militiamen or the British soldiers fired first. Regardless, the British soldiers rushed forward with their bayonets. A skirmish ensued, during which eight militiamen were killed and only one British soldier wounded. Resistance melted away at Lexington, and the British moved on to Concord, where militia from Concord and nearby Lincoln awaited anxiously. The British found and destroyed some rebel weapons caches, but most of the colonists’ military supplies were hidden or destroyed.

The shot heard round the world on Lexington Green

At the approach of the huge British column, the Concord militia retreated to a ridge overlooking the town and militia colonel James Barrett withdrew from the town of Concord and led the men across the North Bridge to a hill about a mile north of town, where they could continue to watch the troop movements of the British and the activities in the center of town. The militia faced off against the regulars at the North Bridge.

Minutemen take on British at North Bridge

When a British covering party of around 100 regulars moved to secure the North Bridge, they were attacked by some 400 American patriots.  The regulars were both outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Confused orders from their commander and the superior numbers of the rebels broke their morale. In a confused retreat, they abandoned their wounded in search of the safety of the approaching grenadier companies coming from Concord. Despite the setback at the North Bridge, the regulars continued to search for and destroy colonial military supplies in the town while the rebels watched anxiously. They paused for lunch, assembled for a march, and left Concord in the afternoon.

Militias swarmed the returning British column inflicting maximum casualties

But the deliberate actions of the British, aimed at displaying British superiority, had an unintended consequence. It gave the colonial militiamen from outlying towns and villages additional time to reach the road back to Boston. The call went out and more and more companies of militias swarmed along the British column as they marched back to Boston. It was all the officers could do to avoid panic with revenge-minded rebels continually firing on them from behind roadside houses, barns, trees, and stone walls. Some estimates give the rebel strength at 2,000 by the time the British column returned to Boston. The bill for the day’s actions: British 273, Americans 95.

Aftermath

When the British returned to garrison, the militiamen began to lay siege to Boston.  The call went out to the other colonies and soon they were joined by militias from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. These colonial forces would be constituted as the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. The Battles of Lexington and Concord turned the decade-long crack between the colonists and the mother country into a chasm Britain could never breach. It also widened the split between the patriots and Loyalist colonists, who soon would wage their own savage war within a war. But the immediate result was impressive: it roused 16,000 New Englanders to the join forces around Boston.  Less than a year later, the British army of occupation would withdraw to Canada to prepare for a long war.

The British occupation of Boston

The American Revolutionary War had begun. But it would take another year for that to morph into a war for independence.

First Commander

When choosing what to cover about People, I try to focus on the "second-tier" first patriots—those men and women whose actions helped shape the course of the American Revolution but are often overlooked in the brief history taught these days. I put "second-tier" in quotes because, in reality, the sum of their activities, and sometimes their only actions, were crucial to the success of the Glorious Cause. With that in mind, this blog post highlights one of our lesser-known great first patriots, Artemas Ward of Massachusetts. A dependable, serious leader of the patriot cause in New England, the little-known Ward was the first commander in chief of the American army during the early days of the War for Independence.

Early Life

This first patriot was born in Shrewsbury on November 26, 1727. His father, Nahum Ward, was a skilled sea captain, merchant, land developer, farmer, lawyer, and jurist. Young Artemas went to common schools, was prepared for college by a private tutor, and graduated from Harvard College (B.A. 1748, M.A. 1751). Like his father, he held many public offices at the town, county, and state levels. In 1750, he married Sarah Trowbridge, daughter of Rev. Caleb Trowbridge and Hannah Walter of Groton, Massachusetts. They had eight children. To support his wife and growing family, he opened a general store and became a tax assessor.

Silent Servant

Ward held numerous offices at the town, county, and state levels. However, his military service was the highlight of his career. He was appointed Justice of the Peace in 1752 and served multiple terms as a representative in the Colonial General Assembly and on the executive council. When the war with France broke out in 1755, Ward became a major in the 3rd Massachusetts Regiment, the militia of Middlesex and Worcester counties. The regiment served as garrison forces along the frontier in western Massachusetts. This duty called him at intervals from 1755 to 1757 and alternated with his attendance at the General Court.

Massachusetts militia protected the western frontier

In 1757, he was appointed colonel of the 3rd Regiment, which marched with British General James Abercrombie's forces to attack Fort Ticonderoga in 1758. The French army, led by General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, consisted of 3,600 men and decisively defeated the numerically superior force of Abercrombie. However, Ward was sidelined during the critical (losing) battle at Fort Carillon due to an "attack of the (kidney) stone." This was clearly a recurring condition for Ward, as we will see.

Abercrombie's Campaign vs Ticonderoga would end in failure

When he returned from the war, Ward was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas. He also became involved in the heated politics of the Bay Colony as a member of the governor's council, while maintaining many of his militia connections. As tensions with Britain grew in the next decade, he associated with figures like John and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren. In the General Court, he was appointed to the taxation committee alongside Samuel Adams and John Hancock. On the floor, he was second only to James Otis in speaking out against the acts of Parliament.

It's safe to say he was a Whig. In fact, his often outspoken support for the increasing demands of the colonists put him at odds with the Massachusetts governor, Francis Bernard, who revoked his militia colonelcy. But Ward's growing popularity helped him get re-elected to the governor's council until 1774, when the new governor, the infamous Thomas Hutchinson, removed him from the council for his political activism. Tensions were reaching a boiling point in New England, and by October of that year, Ward sat with the first Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. He was also appointed Brigadier General by the Congress on October 24, 1774.

Struggle for Freedom Begins

As political crises led to an American Revolution, the people in and around Boston, as well as New England overall, were close to insurrection by the spring of 1775. Local militias, minutemen, and other groups gathered around the British-occupied city in a wave of patriotism. If New England was the most rebellious region and Massachusetts the most aggressive rebel colony, Artemas Ward was one of its most aggressive, if little-known, leaders.

The insurgency didn't need much to turn into an open rebellion. It reached that point when "the shot heard round the world" was fired on April 19, 1775. Ward missed Lexington and Concord because of illness. However, upon hearing about the action, he got out of bed, mounted his horse, and rode through pain (he was suffering from kidney stones again) to Boston to help organize the siege of the city.

Ward missed Lexington & Concord but rallied from
his sickbed to take charge

Ward was popular with the troops, and because of his military experience, he was soon proclaimed commander of all Massachusetts state militia. In June, the Continental Congress appointed him Major General and commander of all forces besieging Boston—some 15,000 strong. Boston-strong, I suppose. By now, other New England colonies as well as New York were sending men to Boston—America's first national army was forming. Ward was soon to be tested in both his military and political skills.

First Commander

Ward had his hands full with the army, whether it was New England's or the United States' forces; the men were ill-trained, ill-led, ill-equipped, and had little regard for military discipline. But Ward, like Washington later, also faced a complex array of political issues: Committees of Safety from several states, locals, his commanders, and the Continental Congress. Never flashy but always steady, Ward worked through these as best he could.

General Artemas Ward was the
first American commander

Ward faced formidable challenges. Not only was he confronting the world's most powerful army, but he was doing so with a force of volunteers who had agreed only to fight in a single battle. Once the British had been pushed back to Boston, many militiamen wanted to return to their farms. In their minds, they had volunteered to fight but had not enlisted in an army. The independent-minded Yankees had little enthusiasm for camp life, especially given the harsh and unsanitary conditions at the sprawling camp in Cambridge. Ward faced the daunting task of building an army from chaos.

Job one was to keep the army together. He called for volunteers to become the first enlistees. Men from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island began filling the ranks. Some claimed Ward was a poor disciplinarian and that his "Grand American Army" was anything but grand. But the solid Yankee puritan understood his volunteer Yankee soldiers. He knew from experience they would resist strict discipline, a discipline the jurist in him felt he had no legal authority to impose. Ward believed he had to lead by consensus and mutual respect. These were, after all, the men of whom Samuel Adams wrote, "our soldiers will not be brought to obey any person of whom they do not themselves entertain a high opinion." Ward's calculated soft management helped his raw recruits hold the siege.

Ward began his RevWar service commanding the ragtag force
besieging Boston

Job two was to keep the British in Boston. The Battle of Bunker Hill took place under Ward’s overall command. On June 13, 1775, after learning from a "line crosser" that the British planned to send troops from Boston to occupy the hills around the city, Ward ordered General Israel Putnam to establish defenses on the Charlestown Peninsula, specifically on Bunker Hill. On June 16, approximately 1,000 colonial militiamen under Colonel William Prescott constructed earthen fortifications on top of Breed’s Hill, as it was smaller but closer to Boston. The battle that followed became iconic: a draw that resulted in the slaughter of British regulars by militia rebels.

Lack of munitions caused rebels to abandon
Breed & Bunker Hills

From Number One to Number Two

On June 17, Congress debated who should be appointed as the supreme commander of the American forces. Fellow (and completely biased) New Englander John Adams suggested that "the greatest number" wanted the job to go to Ward. But Congress needed to persuade delegates from the South that this was not just New England's war and instead chose George Washington of Virginia, making Ward his second in command.

Adams suggested Ward was the initial first choice
for the commander in chief

While General Ward gained national recognition for the heroic stand at Bunker Hill, the failure to supply enough ammunition to hold the position prevented the Americans from winning. When Washington took command of the army in Cambridge on July 2, 1775, Ward became his second in command. The New England militiamen who made up most of the first American army trusted and admired Ward, but Washington quickly became a critic. Accustomed to serving with professional officers, Washington dismissed Ward as "a fat old churchwarden." Washington was also shocked by the lax discipline among Ward's New England soldiers.

Ward was instrumental in the successful siege of Boston in 1775

The New England versus Virginia clash became an early challenge to the army's unity. Washington's open criticism deeply offended Ward, but over the next nine months, he helped Washington transform the assembled militia units into the Continental Army. He was stationed with the right wing on Roxbury Heights. Because of impaired health and the British now gone from Boston, he resigned his commission in April 1776. However, at the request of General Washington, who now saw the importance of winning over the New Englanders, he continued to serve as his second until the end of May.

Ward was part of the leadership team that forced the
mighty British Army from Boston 

Post-Military Public Service

When Ward returned to civilian life, he held important and demanding positions in Massachusetts. He was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Worcester County in 1776 and 1777. He served as President of the Massachusetts Senate's Executive Council for about three years. In this role, Ward acted as Massachusetts’ chief executive during the crucial years of the war (1777-1779), essentially filling the position that replaced the Royal Governor. Ward also served as a member of the Continental Congress from January 1780 to May 1782.

Post War Public Service

Shay's rebellion led to
the Constitutional Convention

Ward was elected Speaker of the Massachusetts House in 1786, which made his actions as a Justice of the Peace of the Worcester Court during the 1786 Shays’ Rebellion all the more significant. He faced down the rebels on the courthouse steps, demonstrating his popular influence and respect for the rule of law. Shays' rebellion led to demands for a new form of government and the Constitutional Convention was convened. With the ratification of the new constitution, Artemas Ward was elected as a Federalist to the 2nd and 3rd Congresses (1791-1795).

Ward House in Shrewsbury

In December 1797, Ward ended his long career as a judge and spent his final years peacefully at home with his family. He died on October 28, 1800, and is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Shrewsbury Center.

Ward is buried in Mountain View Cemetery

Legacy

Ward's accomplishments as a jurist and politician place him among the top founders who helped lead the colonies to statehood, transition, and the formation of a nation. As a military commander, he was overshadowed by Washington and held back by health issues and his personality. Still, he served as a popular figure for the New England colonists to rally behind during a time of near chaos, when a single mistake by the British could have easily ended the American cause. He faced criticism from his commanding officer but showed the strength and patriotism to persist long enough for the culture of a new American army—the Continental Army—to develop from the early chaos around Boston. For that alone, we give a hearty cheer to the rebellion's first leader.

Artemas Ward Memorial

On November 3, 1938, a bronze statue of General Ward was unveiled at Ward Circle in Washington, D.C., positioned at the intersection of Nebraska Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue. The stone base bears the inscription, “Artemas Ward, 1727-1800, Son of Massachusetts, Graduate of Harvard College, Judge and Legislator, Delegate 1780-1781 Continental Congress, Soldier in Three Wars, First Commander of the Patriotic Forces.”