XXVIII 1775. April 19. CHAP. tion, nor provisions; but there they were, thousands with brave hearts, determined to rescue the liberties of their country. "The night preceding the outrages at Lexington, there were not fifty people in the whole colony that ever expected any blood would be shed in the contest; " the night after, the king's governor and the king's army found themselves closely beleaguered in Boston. "The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends," said Warren. "This month," so William Emerson of Concord, who had been chaplain to the provincial congress, chronicled in a blank leaf of his almanac, "is remarkable for the greatest events of the present age." "From the nineteenth of April, 1775," said Clark, of Lexington, on its first anniversary, "will be dated the liberty of the American world." CHAPTER XXIX. EFFECTS OF THE DAY OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD : THE ALARM. APRIL, 1775. XXIX. DARKNESS closed upon the country and upon. the CHAP. town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds on swift relays of horses transmitted the war-message 1775. April from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; 19. the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop, till it had been borne north, and south, and east, and west, throughout the land. It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penobscot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and ringing like bugle-notes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale. As the summons hurried to the south, it was one day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing April. CHAP. the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward XXIX. without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the 1775. Dismal Swamp to Nansemond along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onwards and still onwards through boundless groves of evergreen to Newbern and to Wilmington. "For God's sake, forward it by night and by day," wrote Cornelius Harnett by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border, and despatched it to Charleston, and through pines and palmettoes and moss-clad live oaks, still further to the south, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond the Savannah. Hillsborough and the Mecklenburg district of North Carolina rose in triumph, now that their wearisome uncertainty had its end. The Blue Ridge took up the voice and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers that the "loud call" might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga, and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough even to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn, commemorated the nineteenth day of April by naming their encampment LEXINGTON. With one impulse the colonies sprung to arms: with one spirit they pledged themselves to each other "to be ready for the extreme event." With one heart, the continent cried "Liberty or Death." The first measure of the Massachusetts committee of safety after the dawn of the twentieth of April, XXIX. 1775. was a circular to the several towns in Massachusetts. CHAP "We conjure you," they wrote, "by all that is dear, by all that is sacred; we beg and entreat, as you April. will answer it to your country, to your consciences, and above all, to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means the enlistment of men to form the army; and send them forward to head-quarters at Cambridge with that expedition which the vast importance and instant urgency of the affair demands." The people of Massachusetts had not waited for the call. The country people, as soon as they heard the cry of innocent blood from the ground, snatched their firelocks from the walls; and wives, and mothers, and sisters took part in preparing the men of their households to go forth to the war. The farmers rushed to "the camp of liberty," often with nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day's provisions, and many without a farthing in their pockets. Their country was in danger; their brethren were slaughtered; their arms alone employed their attention. On their way, the inhabitants gladly opened their hospitable doors and all things were in common. For the first night of the siege, Prescott of Pepperell with his Middlesex minute men kept the watch over the entrance to Boston, and while Gage was driven for safety to fortify the town at all points, the Americans already talked of nothing but driving him and his regiments into the sea. At the same time the committee by letter gave the story of the preceding day to New Hampshire and Connecticut, whose assistance they entreated. "We shall be glad," they wrote, "that our brethren XXIX. 1775. April. And CHAP. who come to our aid, may be supplied with military stores and provisions, as we have none of either, more than is absolutely necessary for ourselves." without stores, or cannon, or supplies even of powder, or of money, Massachusetts by its congress, on the twenty-second of April, resolved unanimously that a New England army of thirty thousand men should be raised, and established its own proportion at thirteen thousand six hundred. The term of enlistment was fixed for the last day of December. Long before this summons the ferries over the Merrimack were crowded by men from New Hampshire. "We go," said they, "to the assistance of our brethren." By one o'clock of the twentieth upwards of sixty men of Nottingham assembled at the meeting-house with arms and equipments, under Cilley and Dearborn; before two they were joined by bands from Deerfield, and Epsom; and they set out together for Cambridge. At dusk they reached Haverhill ferry, a distance of twenty-seven miles, having run rather than marched; they halted in Andover only for refreshments, and traversing fiftyfive miles in less than twenty hours, by sunrise of the twenty-first, paraded on Cambridge common. The veteran John Stark, skilled in the ways of the Indian, the English, and his countrymen, able to take his rest on a bearskin with a roll of snow for a pillow, frank and humane, eccentric but true, famed for coolness, and courage, and integrity, had no rival in the confidence of his neighbors, and was chosen colonel of their regiment by their unanimous vote. He rode in haste to the scene of action, on the way encouraging the volunteers to rendezvous at Med |