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"What a glorious morning is this!" the exclamation of Samuel Adams on yonder hill. Seven minute-men have been killed, nine wounded. Captain Parker sees that it is useless for his little handful of men to contend with a force ten times larger, and orders them to disperse. The redcoats look down exultantly upon the dying and the dead, give a hurrah, and shoot at the fleeing rebels.
Throwing out columns in various directions, Morgan pushed for Mitchell, where no doubt he expected to cut the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, got as far as Salem in that direction, captured or dispersed a few squads of badly armed minute-men who were guarding depots and bridges, which he burned, and doubtless hearing from his scouts, sent out in citizens' clothes, of Hughes's force collected at Mitchell, he discreetly turned off northeastward, apparently aiming next for Seymour.
The Americans called them minute-men, because they engaged to be ready to fight at a minute's warning. The English officers laughed, and said that the name was a very proper one, because the minute-men would run away the minute they saw the enemy. Whether they would fight or run was soon to be proved."
It was also proposed to enroll an army of eighty thousand minute-men, to man forts and be ready for action; also an additional standing army of twenty thousand men. War with Great Britain now seemed inevitable.
No messengers had arrived to inform the minute-men of Concord what had happened at Lexington; for Doctor Prescott did not know that British muskets had fired a fatal volley. From the burial ground Roger could look far down the road and see the sunlight glinting from the bayonets of the grenadiers, as the red-coated platoons emerged from the woodland into the open highway.
Old men, middle-aged men, young men, and often mere boys, like the "minute-men" of the old Revolution, they left the plough in the furrow, the flail on the half-threshed sheaves, the unfinished iron upon the anvil, in short, dropped all their peculiar avocations, and with their leathern pouches full of bullets and their ox-horns full of powder, poured into the city by every highway and by-way in such numbers that it seemed as if the whole State of Ohio were peopled only with hunters, and that the spirit of Daniel Boone stood upon the hills opposite the town beckoning them into Kentucky.
The provincial parties, however, were so alert in every part of the country, that he found himself under the necessity of engaging Colonels Caswell and Lillington, who, with about one thousand minute-men and militia, had entrenched themselves directly in his front, at a place called Moore's Creek Bridge.
During the siege of Boston, the house was given up to soldiers for barracks. Captain Lemuel May was one of the minute-men who responded to the reveille at the break of day on the 19th of April, 1775, and fought valiantly for his country at Lexington and concord.
This committee, which had greater powers than any other executive body in the history of Virginia, could set its own meeting times, appoint all military officers, distribute arms and munitions, call up the militia and independent minute-men companies, direct military strategy, commit men to the defense of other colonies and to assure the colony of its general safety. Pendleton was the chairman.
A party of British crossed the south bridge, made their way to Colonel Barrett's house, and burned the cannon carriages stored in his barn. Roger was glad to see Captain Isaac Davis and the minute-men of Acton march up the hill to join them. Captain Davis was thirty years old. He had kissed his young wife and four children good-by.
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