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Among the wounded were many officers; Smith was hurt severely. Many more were disabled by fatigue.

All the following night the men of Massachusetts streamed in from scores of miles around, old men as well as young. They had scarce a semblance of artillery or warlike stores, no powder, nor organization, 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, late 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 XI.

EFFECTS OF THE DAY OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD.
THE GENERAL RISING.

APRIL-JUNE 1775.

DARKNESS closed upon the country and upon the town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds by swift relays transmitted the war message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; 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 received the Saco and the Penobscot and the St. John's. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and, ringing like buglenotes 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 one to 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 the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onward and still onward through boundless forests of pines 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 moss-clad live oaks

and palmettoes still farther 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 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, was a circular to the several towns in Massachusetts. "We conjure you," they wrote, "by all that is dear, by all that is sacred; we beg and entreat, as you 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 country people of Massachusetts had not waited for the call. As soon as they heard the cry of blood they 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 opened their hospitable doors, and all things were in common. For the first night of the siege, Prescott of Pep

perell, 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 talked of 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 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." And 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, upward 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 twentyseven miles, having run rather than marched; they halted in Andover only for refreshments, and, traversing fifty-five 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 bear-skin with a bank 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 Medford. So many followed that, on the morning of the twenty-second, he was detached. with three hundred to take post at Chelsea, where his battalion,

which was one of the fullest in the besieging army, became a model for its discipline.

By the twenty-third there were already about two thousand men from the interior parts of New Hampshire, desirous "not to return before the work was done." Many who remained near the upper Connecticut threw up the civil and military commissions held from the king; for, said they, "the king has forfeited his crown, and all commissions from him are therefore vacated."

In Connecticut, Trumbull, the governor, sent out writs to convene the legislature of the colony at Hartford on the Wednesday following the battle. On the morning of the twentieth, Israel Putnam of Pomfret, in leather frock and apron, was assisting hired men to build a stone wall on his farm, when he heard the cry from Lexington. He set off instantly to rouse the militia officers of the nearest towns. On his return, he found hundreds who had mustered and chosen. him their leader. Issuing orders for them to follow, he pushed forward without changing the check shirt he had worn in the field, and reached Cambridge at sunrise the next morning, having ridden the same horse a hundred miles within eighteen hours. He brought to the service of his country courage, and a heart than which none throbbed more honestly or warmly for American freedom.

From Wethersfield a hundred young volunteers marched for Boston on the twenty-second, well armed and in high spirits. From the neighboring towns men of the largest estates, and the most esteemed for character, seized their firelocks and followed. By the second night, several thousands from the colony were on their way. Some had fixed on their standards and drums the colony arms, and round it, in letters of gold, the motto, that God who brought over their fathers would uphold the sons.

In New Haven, Benedict Arnold, captain of a volunteer company, agreed with his men to march the next morning for Boston. "Wait for proper orders," was the advice of Wooster; but their self-willed commander, brooking no delay, extorted supplies from the committee of the town, and on the twentyninth reached the American head-quarters with his company.

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