"It may seem natural to us that in 1825 the children and grandchildren of minutemen would commemorate the fight at the North Bridge. It was not."

Commemorating Concord
Robert A. Gross

II

A decade later, by the mid-1830s, with over two thousand inhabitants, Concord was probably at its political and economic pinnacle. The central village hosted some nine stores, forty shops, four hotels and taverns, four doctors and four lawyers, a variety of county associations, a printing office and a post office. Manufacturing was humming, too, with a growing mill village in the west part of town, along the quick-running Assabet River, and rising producers of carriages and chaises, boots and shoes, bricks, guns, bellows, and pencils. But a good many people were left out of the prosperity. In what was still a farming town, 64 percent of adult males were landless, while the top tenth of taxpayers, some fifty men, controlled nearly half the wealth. Those who failed to obtain a stake in society, native and newcomer alike, quickly moved on. The ties that once joined neighbors together were fraying. On the farms, the old work customs–the huskings, roof-raisings, and apple bees–by which people cooperated to complete essential chores gave way to modern capitalist arrangements. When men needed help, they hired it, and paid the going rate, which no longer included the traditional ration of grog. With a new zeal for temperance, employers abandoned the custom of drinking with workers in what had been a ritual display of camaraderie. There was no point in pretending to common bonds.

With the loosening of familiar obligations came unprecedented opportunities for personal autonomy and voluntary choice. Massachusetts inaugurated a new era of religious pluralism in 1834, ending two centuries of mandatory support for local churches. Even in Concord, a slim majority approved the change, and as soon as it became law, townspeople deserted the two existing churches–the Unitarian flock of the Reverend Ripley and an orthodox Calvinist congregation started in 1826–in droves. The Sabbath no longer brought all ranks and orders together in obligatory devotion to the Word of God. Instead, townspeople gathered in an expanding array of voluntary associations–libraries, lyceums, charitable and missionary groups, Masonic lodges, antislavery and temperance societies, among others–to promote diverse projects for the common good. The privileged classes, particularly the village elite, were remarkably active in these campaigns. But even as they pulled back from customary roles and withdrew into private associations, they continued to exercise public power. Such pretensions were guaranteed to ignite political conflict.

The explosion came in the form of Anti-Masonry, which swept through Concord from 1833 to 1835 with as much intensity as it had in the "burned-over district" of New York state, where the movement got its start. It was propelled by the conviction that Freemasonry, once associated with Revolutionary heroes George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, posed an imminent threat to the republic. Bound together by secret oaths, conducting business behind closed doors, allegedly promoting one another’s interests through command over the levers of power, the Masons epitomized the contradictions of the emerging social order. In the link between private loyalties and public influence, opponents detected "an engine of conspiracy for any evil or selfish purpose." Concord’s Masons were acutely vulnerable. They had taken a special role in the jubilee celebration. Their members occupied every level of power, from state senator John Keyes to the captain of the Concord Artillery to the editor of the local newspaper, who experienced a sudden change of heart in 1833 and defected to the enemy, converting his press into an organ of Anti-Masonry. The most prominent target was the Reverend Ripley, a Mason of thirty-five years’ standing and Grand Chaplain of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Massachusetts.

In this atmosphere of conflict, the eighty-three-year-old Ripley turned to history as a means of reuniting the distracted town. In 1834, he proposed to donate the land behind the Old Manse for a monument to commemorate "the Great Events at Concord North Bridge on the 19th of April 1775." Immediately, a few critics arose to denounce the scheme: Why should a monument be located in "the backside of Dr. Ripley's house?" But the town snapped up the offer, in part because it cost the inhabitants nothing. The land was free; the costs of upkeep were paid by private donors; the fund set up in 1825 financed construction. All the town had to do was authorize a change of venue. By this reliance upon private money to facilitate public ends, Ripley and his allies cleverly removed the issue from democratic give-and-take.

At the same time, the parson’s offer was intended to forge a new basis for civic unity, as he made clear in a lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 19, 1837. Taking stock of the "agitated and unsettled state of society," Ripley reminded his listeners that "a well-regulated town or parish" is like "a swarm of bees, clinging together in one body, mutually sustaining and depending upon one another . . . If those in the centre let go their hold, the whole body fails; and if the surrounding multitude fly off, the whole swarm is broken up." In what is a familiar theme today, the patriarch who had presided over Concord for six decades bewailed the loss of community. Neighbors used to know one another, share mutual interests, respect others' views. Now, with so little in common, they exaggerated "differences in opinion, on religion and politics" and polarized the community. Ripley’s gift was designed to heal those rifts. It would pull Concord together in common reverence for the Revolution. It would highlight the blessings of Providence. It crystallized a new civic identity. It consecrated a sacred landscape.

Fig. 3. Letterhead taken from the invitation for the Grand Centennial Military and Civic Ball on April 19, 1875. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

As the aging parson was creating a lasting legacy, his step-grandson Ralph Waldo Emerson was on the threshold of the distinguished career as writer and lecturer that won him enduring fame as "the Sage of Concord." The latest in a long line of New England clergy, Emerson had abandoned the pulpit in 1832 following the death of his first wife, traveled to Europe and Britain on a journey of self-discovery, and returned to write a little manifesto of his new vision, entitled Nature, while enjoying Ezra Ripley’s hospitality in the Old Manse. Like his grandfather, the erstwhile minister was troubled by the changes unsettling New England, especially the rising conflict between social classes and the unabashed pursuit of self-interest he had witnessed in his hometown of Boston. Sadly, he lamented in 1829, that was "a community composed of a thousand different interests, a thousand societies filled with competition in the arts, in trade, in politics, in private life" and united by no "common good." Emerson’s solution for disharmony would ultimately take him far from Ripley’s social ethic. Rather than rely on elite leaders and established institutions, he discovered in nature the means to reconcile individual and society

Out of this personal illumination Emerson forged a radical doctrine of self-trust that earned him a growing following among educated young people and angry denunciations from onetime colleagues in the Unitarian clergy. In the eyes of critics, the respectable renegade from the ministry was a dangerous disturber of social order. But that opinion did not hold in Concord. There Emerson was readily admitted into village elite, following his second marriage, to Lydia Jackson in 1835, and the purchase of a handsome house near the town center. In short order, he was elected to membership in the exclusive Social Circle, an organization of the town’s leading men. Emerson was apparently untroubled by charges that the group was a self-styled "aristocracy." Compared to the great inequalities and social distances of Boston, Concord was a haven of small-town sociability. "Much of the best society I have ever known," he told a friend in Boston in 1844, "is a club in Concord called the Social Circle, consisting always of twenty-five of our citizens, doctor, lawyer, farmer, trader, miller, mechanic, etc., solidest of men, who yield the solidest of gossip."

In this benign mood, Emerson delivered the formal address for Concord’s bicentennial in 1835 and composed the hymn for the dedication of the monument at the bridge site on July 4, 1837. Nothing he said would have bothered Edward Everett in the least. The story of Concord, he declared in his ceremonial discourse, is the story of liberty. At their first settlement in the wilderness, the Puritan founders of the town established government and society upon an ideal plan. "The nature of man and his condition in the world, for the first time, . . . controlled the formation of the State." For all his vaunted nonconformity, Emerson was as attached as his neighbors to the conventional wisdom regarding Concord’s decisive part in the events of April 19: the clash at the North Bridge was "the first organized resistance . . . to British arms." Turning to the handful of veterans of that memorable day who were sitting in his audience, the thirty-two-year-old orator offered up an encomium that could have come from Webster or Everett: "If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, you had."

Emerson never swerved from this serene prospect on the local past, which he rendered for posterity in the elegiac lines of the famous "Concord Hymn." In fact, over the succeeding decades, as he developed into a leading critic of New England society and a powerful advocate of antislavery, he avoided the subject altogether. Having launched his literary career by bewailing the filiopietism of his contemporaries, he fastened his attention on "the signs of the times," in hopes of discovering the transcendent meaning of passing events. This evasion of history is striking, for in the 1840s and 1850s, at the high tide of the crusade against slavery, Concord was astonishingly attentive to its heritage. Alarmed by the disarray of its records, gathering dust in the possession of the town clerk, Concord spent a remarkable seven hundred dollars to put its archives in order and installed a fireproof safe in its new Town Hall, built in 1852, for their protection. Its leaders, notably, Samuel Hoar, played a leading part in winning passage of a state law in 1851 "for the Better Preservation of Municipal and Other Records." Doubtless, Emerson observed and approved these initiatives, but they made little impact on his prose. Even when Emerson thundered at the knavery and the cowardice of Massachusetts’s leaders in the face of an aggressive slave power, he seldom contrasted them with the legendary figures of the Revolution. Instead, he derided the patriotic speeches gotten up for "the nineteenth of April" and the Fourth of July as "a great deal of nonsense" belied by New Englanders’ support for the Fugitive Slave Law. There was once a time, he observed in an 1855 "Lecture on Slavery," when America’s leaders were its "foremost" men: "Washington, Adams, Jefferson, really embodied the ideas of Americans. But now we put obscure persons into the chairs, without character or representative force of any kind." More often, he urged listeners to take action for themselves: "You must be citadels and warriors, yourselves Declarations of Independence."

It was left to Thoreau, "the man of Concord" Emerson called him, to quarrel strenuously with his neighbors’ version of the past. Though he is famous for blithe dismissal of his elders, Thoreau was actually remarkably attentive to local history. One of the wittiest sections of Walden is his mock-heroic account of the battle of the ants, whose combatants far outstripped the minutemen in "patriotism and heroism." "For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick." But in the struggle against slavery, Concord’s Revolutionary heritage was no laughing matter. Though many inhabitants, especially women, were quick to enlist in the abolitionist movement– Thoreau’s mother and aunts and Emerson’s wife rallied early to William Lloyd Garrison’s cause–and though prominent politicians, such as Samuel Hoar and his son Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, played key roles in the founding of Free Soil and Republican Parties, the local elite contained a fair number of entrenched Old Whigs, who put "cotton" over "conscience." (Rockwood Hoar coined that very notion.) In 1850, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Concord Fight, the town staged a great "Union" celebration, at a time of national crisis over slavery. The first choice for speaker was Senator Daniel Webster, who declined, citing his immersion in the desperate effort to find a national "compromise." That was fortunate for Concord; after March 7, when the great orator endorsed the Fugitive Slave Law, Webster was execrated by many of his one-time worshipers. Emerson pronounced the judgment on Webster: "The fairest American fame ends in the filthy law." The eventual speaker was Robert Rantoul Jr., an antislavery Democrat who would briefly succeed Webster in the Senate. On April 19, 1850, Rantoul was discreet. Not until the final sentence of his address, in the course of which he celebrated "the site of the old North Bridge" as "the pivot on which the history of the world turns," did the speaker breathe a hint of the issue that was on everybody’s minds. Charging his listeners to safeguard "the beacon-fire of liberty whose flames our fathers kindled," Rantoul invoked those in dire need of its "refulgent" light, including "the wanderers in the chill darkness of slavery, [whom] it guides, and cheers, and warms . . . " In Emerson’s view, this was a paltry performance, noted only for its "wearisomeness" and "painfulness." Thoreau ignored it altogether.

What Thoreau did not overlook was his neighbors’ reluctance to put their antislavery sentiments into action. In 1854, as the Fugitive Slave Law continued to be enforced in Massachusetts, he derided popular preoccupation with the fate of Kansas and Nebraska and indifference to oppression at home. "The inhabitants of Concord are not prepared to stand by one of their own bridges, but talk only of taking up a position on the highlands beyond the Yellowstone river. Our Buttricks, and Davises, and Hosmers are retreating thither, and I fear that they will have no Lexington Common between them and the enemy." Rantoul’s "beacon-fire of liberty" was fast dimming out. Fortunately, in Thoreau’s view, it was rekindled by that revolutionary from out of the West, John Brown. In the simple grandeur of Brown, Thoreau found a way to reclaim the New England heritage. The man possessed the indomitable spirit of a Puritan soldier in Cromwell’s army. "He was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as there." Best of all, educated not at Harvard but "at the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty," Brown devoted his entire self to a noble ideal. In the highest praise he could offer, Thoreau branded his hero "a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,–that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life."

Thoreau’s forceful rhetoric had an unintended effect. By embodying the New England heritage in a living individual, he meant to inspire others to heroic action. But conflating Puritans, minutemen, and Transcendentalists together could foster complacency. New Englanders might consider themselves the nation’s conscience, even when they merely cultivated lofty thoughts in their gardens. By such literary means, the Concord philosophers were domesticated to their town and region. In 1853, the writer George William Curtis, who had resided in Concord for several years following a brief sojourn at Brook Farm, sketched the town of Emerson and Hawthorne in a volume aimed at literary tourists, entitled Homes of American Authors. Taking his inspiration from their writings, Curtis conjured up Concord from Emerson’s and Hawthorne’s texts. Emerson expressed the spirit of the place. "The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord, or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon Emerson's pages." Hawthorne evoked its legends in Mosses from an Old Manse. (Thoreau, who had not yet published Walden, received no mention.) In Curtis’s telling, Concord enjoyed a happy life as a writer’s retreat. Untainted by industry and trade, populated by plowmen and poets, associated with a fabulous past and eternal nature, the town belonged to the realm of the pastoral: a place apart from its own time, where an urban visitor might gain respite from the pressures of modern life. In Curtis's pages, Transcendentalism and tourism merged. A trip to Concord was a spiritual experience.

That new identity took hold, in part because it refracted an undeniable reality. With the coming of the railroad in 1844 and the waning of the village as a vital economic and political center, Concord underwent an alteration from town into suburb. Though it continued to support numerous dairy farms and market gardens geared to demands from Boston, and its textile mill held on till the 1890s, an increasing number of residents began commuting regularly to jobs in the city. Many fewer people came to Concord for business. The regular stages stopped running; teamsters no longer carried country produce to local stores; eventually, the county courts decamped for the industrial city of Lowell. Devoid of its former liveliness, the village struck one short-term resident, the ex-urbanite Harriet Hanson Robinson, as something of a ghost town: "It is a dull place," Harriet complained. "It is a narrow old place. It is a set old place. It is a snobbish old place . . . It is full of graveyards, and winters are endless. The women never go out, and the streets are full of stagnation."

Fig. 4. Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts, photograph taken by E.M. Perry, 1898. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

In such a placid setting, it is easy to see how Concord, with its rich heritage, attractive landscape, and literary associations, could become a retreat from the wider world. Local inhabitants were soon publishing tourist guides, which proliferated in the wake of Louisa May Alcott’s great success with Little Women and its successors and after Walden became a pilgrims’ Mecca. As early as 1862, a short-lived magazine entitled The Monitor was half-facetiously suggesting that visitors would be better off skipping the annual April 19 ceremonies and spending their time in the woods, where they might run into a local philosopher. "Leave business behind . . . Money, too, for there is nothing here that money will buy. Fashion as well, for it, alone, does not pass current here. Do not despise anyone you may meet in the woods, or up the river on account of their clothing."

But nature did not displace history, nor did tourism eliminate activism. Little more than a year before that Monitor article, on April 19, 1861, a new generation of young men joined their military companies on the town common to answer Lincoln’s call for troops; six years later on that date, Concord raised its Soldiers’ Monument on the site. The nineteenth of April would continue to accrue meanings over the years, as its message of liberty and community was reinterpreted for new generations. In the Gilded Age, as Anglo-Saxon nativism surged in the face of mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, it was often an occasion for narrow, ancestral pride. But the minutemen could also inspire a larger vision of freedom. On the very first Patriots’ Day in 1894, Rockwood Hoar, the former attorney general of the United States– who had watched the 1825 celebration as a schoolboy, served as president of the 1850 commemoration, and hosted President Grant at the centennial–spurned the parochialism and prejudice that had come to surround the anniversary. Son of the man who had touched off the feud with Lexington back in 1824, Hoar firmly declared that April 19 belonged to no single town. "It was Massachusetts up in arms that day . . . Whatever was done, Massachusetts did it." But state pride was no better than town pride, if it expressed a bigoted spirit. In a bold challenge to his own class, Hoar turned to the representatives of the Sons of the American Revolution, who were sitting in the audience, and made a "modest suggestion": shouldn’t the group end its restriction of membership to blood descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers? "The title to public consideration or leadership in public affairs by reason of descent, is not an American idea." Surely, "every citizen of the Commonwealth who prefers honor and public service to selfishness and ease, who loves liberty, and will resist tyranny without counting the personal cost, wherever he was born and of whatever lineage . . . should have a right to call himself, and is a son of the American Revolution."

That notion has enjoyed wide appeal in American culture. Daniel Chester French’s statue of the minuteman at the bridge–the patriotic farmer with a plow under one hand and a musket in the other–served as a popular emblem of the American fighting man in World War II. During the Cold War, "Minutemen" missiles stood guard against Soviet attack. But in recent years, the minuteman has become a favorite of the right wing. Participants in the militia movement of the 1990s seized upon the designation "minutemen" for their extralegal companies of weekend soldiers preparing to fend off an invasive federal government, deemed as dangerous to liberty as ever was the British Empire under George III. By coincidence, it was on April 19, 1993 that federal agents launched their catastrophic raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and confirmed the extremists’ worst fears. Alas, to avenge that attack, Timothy McVeigh chose April 19, 1995 to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In his wake, the once "memorable" nineteenth of April now stands not only for the birth of independence but also for the worst episode of domestic terrorism in American history. Attorney General Hoar, who cared passionately about the rule of law, would have been shocked by the new connotations of an event he celebrated as a signal moment in the history of freedom.

To reclaim the day from the paramilitary Right requires more than the patriotic cant of those holiday orations Emerson and Thoreau despised. It calls both for history and for memory, in a continuing interplay between the urge to recapture the past in all its complexity and the impulse to appropriate it for the political and ideological ends of later times. That is a difficult balancing act, but without its discipline, the minutemen are in danger of becoming a symbol for any and every group purporting to be fighting in liberty’s defense. But we can find inspiration in that effort by pausing to reflect on Concord’s ongoing redefinition of itself.

Further Reading:

For more on American jubilee celebrations, see Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York, 2001). For Thoreau on the battle of the ants, see Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, rev. ed. (New York, 1982), 66; Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 1971), 9, 230; John McWilliams, "Lexington, Concord, and the ‘Hinge of the Future,’" American Literary History 5 (Spring 1993): 1-29. See also Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976) and "The Celestial Village: Transcendentalism and Tourism in Concord," in Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Boston, 1999); and Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815-1836 (Boston, 1998).