Two hundred and fifty years ago today, the battles of Lexington and Concord were fought. As battles go, they didn’t amount to much. The Americans suffered 49 killed and 39 wounded, the British 73 killed and 174 wounded. But their historical consequences could hardly have been greater. 

For they constituted the first military action of the American Revolution and thus the creation of the most consequential nation of modern times, the United States. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so famously said, it was, in retrospect, “the shot heard round the world.”

The story of the battles has been so well told in both prose and poetry — like Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” — as to hardly need retelling here. But sometimes a single incident or individual can add much color to the story as a whole.

Consider Captain Samuel Whittemore, a prosperous farmer from Menotomy (now Arlington), Massachusetts. He had been born on July 27, 1696, and at 78 was the oldest soldier to fight on either side in the Revolutionary War. 

His family had begged him to flee with them to safety, but he refused. He was going to get a shot at the British as they returned from Lexington. His daughter warned him that, “Father, they will take you.”

“They’ll find it hard work to do it,” he replied. He was right about that.

Whittemore had served in the Massachusetts militia at the taking of the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in 1745. He may have fought there again when, in 1758, it was taken for the second time, a turning point in the French and Indian War.

On April 19, 1775, as the British army was retreating to Boston after the battles, they were sniped at continually by American militia hiding in the woods and behind stone walls alongside the road. A relief brigade under Earl Percy (later Duke of Northumberland) was marching out from Boston to assist the retreat.

Whittemore was armed with a musket, two pistols (apparently dueling pistols he had somehow acquired in his earlier military career), and a sword. When British grenadiers under Lord Percy reached his position behind a stone wall, he fired his musket, killing a British soldier. With his pistols he killed one soldier outright and mortally wounded another.

By that time, some British soldiers, enraged by the irregular warfare of the Americans, had broken ranks and charged. One British bullet shot away part of Whittemore’s cheekbone. The British soldiers then, in the words of one of Whittemore’s obituaries, “gorged their malice on his wounded head.” He was bayoneted several times (one report has the number at thirteen, but that seems unlikely) and left for dead.

But about four hours later, long after the British had reached Boston, he was found by American troops not dead but actually struggling to reload his musket.

Using a door taken off the hinges of a nearby dwelling, he was carried to the house of Dr. Cotton Tufts (a first cousin of Abigail Adams) who told the family that the case was hopeless. But the family insisted that he suture the wounds regardless, and the doctor was proved wrong.

When Whittemore had recovered sufficiently from his wounds, his daughter asked him if he was sorry he had not fled with the family to safety. 

“No,” he said, “I should do just so again.”

Samuel Whittemore lived until he was 96, dying on February 2, 1793, shortly before George Washington was inaugurated for his second term as president. At his death he had a progeny of 196, including a great great grandson. His living descendancy today must run into the tens of thousands. 

In a family Bible, one of his great granddaughters, Adeline Whittemore Torrey, wrote words that ring down through the ages: “Where shall we find such devoted patriotism now?”