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With wild cheers these hunters listened to the story of the minutemen, and, in honor of the event, named their log fort "Lexington." At the close of this eventful year, three hundred resolute men had gained a foothold in Kentucky. In the trackless wilderness, hemmed in by savage foes, these pioneers with their wives and their children began their struggle for a home.
I don't want you to come and breathe fire and sword against the Bostonians, like that second Duke of Alva, the inflexible Lord George Germaine.... An account is come of the Bostonians having voted an army of sixteen thousand men, who are to be called minutemen, as they are to be ready at a minute's warning. Two directors or commissioners, I don't know what they are called, are appointed.
"A Continental Congress assembled at Philadelphia," said Grandfather, "and proposed such measures as they thought most conducive to the public good. A Provincial Congress was likewise chosen in Massachusetts. They exhorted the people to arm and discipline themselves. A great number of minutemen were enrolled.
The writer of these lines had an ancestor who was foremost among those minutemen hurrying to the defense of liberty, and who, it is a tradition in his family, ran nearly all the way from Beverly, twenty miles distant, with his flint-lock on his shoulder. Hence, as all were equally prompt in leaping at the enemy's throat, Putnam's remarkable feat was not at the time considered extraordinary.
Furthermore, though twenty thousand minutemen and volunteers were gathered before Boston, though the thirteen colonies were aflame with war preparations, and though the Continental Congress was voting a declaration on taking up arms and appointing a general, nothing but vague report of all this reached Greenwood.
"The idea of a descendant of one of the Minutemen being afraid of rats!" she would say with a scornful rolling of her words which seemed to wither her listener with ridicule. "Or of an empty garret! Tut!"
The minutemen of the Old North State rallied from far and near, as they had done in Massachusetts after the battle of Lexington. Within ten days, there were ten thousand men ready to fight the redcoats. And so when Sir Henry arrived off the coast, he decided, like a prudent man, not to land; but cruised along the shore, waiting for the coming of war vessels from England.
Just as the sun was rising, Major Pitcairn marched into Lexington, where he found forty or fifty minutemen ready to dispute his advance. "Disperse, ye rebels; disperse!" he cried, riding up. But they did not disperse. Pitcairn ordered his men to fire, and eighteen minutemen fell to the ground.
Then the American learned for the first time how to stand and fight for their own liberties." The rallying minutemen flocked to the scene of the encounter, springing to arms without a thought of consequences, rising to the defense of their homes as one man, and within a week there were sixteen thousand men investing the demoralized enemy at Boston.
Captain Robbins' son, a boy of ten years, heard the summons in the garret where he lay, and in a few minutes was on his father's old mare, a young Paul Revere, galloping along the road to rouse Captain Isaac Davis, who commanded the minutemen of Acton. The company assembled at his shop, formed, and marched a little way, when he halted them and returned for a moment to his house.
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