In his 1775 deposition, Captain John Parker said:
. . .about one of the clock, being informed that there were a number of regular officers riding up and down the road, stopping and insulting people as they passed the road, and also was informed that a number of regular troops were on their march from Boston in order to take the province stores at Concord, ordered our militia to meet on the Common in said Lexington to consult what to do.
On the surface, this statement makes little logistical sense. Revere alarmed Hancock and Adams at the Lexington parsonage between twelve and one o’clock in the morning. Parker lived three miles away and was said to have slept at home that night. Did Hancock, who knew almost everyone in town, wait for the captain to order out the militia? It would be one thing if Revere’s arrival was the first sign of trouble, but a suspicious party of mounted officers had already passed through town. With everyone already on alert, such poor planning would have cost valuable time.
Evidently, there was an agreed plan. An 1860 letter from the militia captain’s grandson, Theodore Parker, clarified that Parker, who was ill, made arrangements the night before for Hancock and the “proper persons” to call out the militia in his absence:
In the night, intelligence was brought to Messrs. Hancock and Adams that a British expedition was on foot. . . They gave the alarm to the proper persons, whom Capt. Parker had selected for that work, and he [the proper person] sent men through the town to give notice for assembling the militia.
Theodore Parker goes on to state that his grandfather was not roused until two o’clock, after the militia. This implies the “about one o’clock” timeframe in Captain Parker’s deposition refers to when his orders kicked in, not when he issued them.
So, which “proper persons” directed the alarm? The one man explicitly mentioned is Parker’s lieutenant, William Tidd, who Ebenezer Munroe Jr. said “requested myself and others to meet on the common as soon as possible.” [Phinney p36] Tidd was an obvious candidate for the job; he lived close to the parsonage, had known Hancock since they were boys and, as Parker’s second-in-command, had the authority to call the militia into action.
Only “about forty of the company had collected” when Ebenezer Munroe arrived on the common, which supports the idea that Tidd was involved in directing the alarm from its earliest moments. In his 1825 affidavit, William Munro said:
On the arrival of Colonel Revere, the alarm had been given.
Since Tidd lived a half mile up Bedford Road from the parsonage, he could have been at the parsonage in as little as ten minutes after the Boston express. Such timing conflicts with William Tidd’s own 1824 affidavit, which says he was not notified until two o’clock. [Phinney, p37] If taken literally, two o’clock would have made Tidd the last man alarmed. Like Parker’s statement, this makes little sense.
On further inspection, the “two o’clock” in Tidd’s affidavit appears to be a simple drafting error. Tidd made his oath to the truth of his statement to Nathan Chandler, one of the men on the town committee collecting statements from veterans of Parker’s company in the 1820s, who was also Tidd’s son-in-law. Chandler plausibly drafted the affidavit for his wife’s 88-year-old father, who was said to have retained his faculties but perhaps not his writing ability, using language from Parker’s remarkably similar 1775 deposition. In preparing the statement, Chandler may have taken the “two o’clock” timing from a second affidavit he witnessed that week: his wife’s uncle, John Munroe Jr. Since the focus of the affidavits was on the shots they fired, not the time they were alarmed, the discrepancy could easily have gone unnoticed. [Phinney, p35-38]
In addition to William Tidd, Parker’s other assigned “persons” may have included his second officer, Ensign Simonds, as well as the men already at the parsonage: Orderly Sergeant William Munro and his guard detail. One man said to have guarded the parsonage that night, Sergeant Francis Brown, served as the alarm rider who notified John Munroe Jr.
By the time someone woke up Captain Parker around two o’clock, most of the militia company and alarm men had already gathered on the common.
Sources
Hudson, Charles: History of the Town of Lexington, 1868, Two parts, Town History and Genealogical Register (G.R.), with pages numbered separately.
Phinney, Elias: History of the Battle at Lexington, 1825
Parker, Theodore: Letter to Mr. Loring, Historical Magazine, July 1860, p202-3.
The Lexington Fight 