[p. 11]
Sept. 18 1774.
Last week the Revd Mr. David Osgood was ordained a Pastor of ye Church in Medford.
Wednesday April 19. 1775. ‘The Troops of his Brittanick Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay a Detachment from the Regular Army at Boston went out on ye Evening of ye 18th and marchd for Concord and in their way thro Lexington which they reachd before sunrise on ye 19th they met with a Company of Militia of about 100 men mustered near the Meeting House; upon their coming up to our men they ordered them to disperse & throw down their Armes, calling them Rebels; upon which the troops huzzad and immediately one or two Officers discharged their Pistols which was instantaneously followed by the Firing of 4 or 5 of the Soldiers and then there seemed to be a general Discharge from the whole Body.
Eight of our men were killed and nine wounded In a few minutes after this action the Enemy renewed their march for Concord at which place they distroyd some of the Province Stores.
here they killed two of our Men. but our People obligd them to retreat back to Lexington where they met with Lord Percy with a large Reinforcement, however after halting awhile they retreated again and kept firing upon our men. Pillaging almost every House they Passed by breaking and distroying Doors, Windows, Glases &c. and carrying off Clothing and other valuable Effects: Burnt some houses.
It appeared to be their design to burn & destroy all before them and nothing but our vigorous Pursuit (under Providence) prevented their infernal Purposes from being put in Execution.
But the savage Barbaraties exercised upon the Bodies of our unfortunate Bretheren who fell.
is almost incredible.
Not content with shooting down the unarmed aged and infirm they disregarded the Cries of the wounded, killing them without mercy and mangling their Bodies in the most shocking manner as they retreated back to Charlestown.
We had 7 men belonging to Danvers killed & a number belong, to other Towns.
but ye Number of the Regulars was far greater.
We have the Pleasure to ’
This text is part of:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.