A Minuteman's Last Post

Having just gone to Boston and once again being enamored of and fired up about the true stories of our revolutionary war, for this year’s Remembrance Day I am posting this story. It is mostly transcribed from another source and is about a real Minuteman.  (see credit at the end)

Did you know that the Minutemen were militia members, but that not all colonial militia members were Minutemen?  The Minutemen were the elite, hand-picked for their dedication, enthusiasm, and their ability to muster at a moment’s notice.  They were our “first responders” of that day, or our original Rapid Deployment Force.  They turned out quickly and held the field (in theory) until the rest of the militia units could form and march.  Gosh, and you thought that idea was something new. 

Anyway, I’ve read the names of some Minuteman leaders, but you rarely read the personal stories of the rank and file, unless they were killed on the day of the battle.  Gordon Lightfoot said a soldier "must be dead to be admired" [Don Quixote]; apparently, this has more than a grain of truth in it. 

So, for Remembrance Day, 2014, I present you:  Mr. Thomas Hill, Esq, of West Cambridge, Massachusetts, a Minuteman, and with thanks to Mr. Thomas Kemp for the original story.

The following is an almost verbatim transcription of an encomium printed in the Massachusetts Spy, Worcester, MA in 1851. I have slightly re-arranged the order of the text for clarity.

A Revolutionary War hero, gone.  Died at his residence in West Cambridge, on Thursday morning (15 July 1851). Thomas Hill, esq, aged 90 years. Mr. Hill was a pensioner. He was in the battle of Concord, and was on Bunker Hill, but not in the engagement.

Thomas Hill…, …the only survivor of a family of seven, then in his fourteenth year, was [also] not under arms on the day of the Concord fight, but…with his father and eldest brother Abraham was of the volunteer minute men who fought at Bunker Hill on the seventeenth of the following June and later in the Eight Years War served two campaigns in the Jerseys and New York. He [was] now 89 years of age.

Thomas Hill was honored, along with four other survivors who were active in the scenes of 1775 [these were all that could be found still alive in 1851*] .  On this occasion, the citizens of the beautiful town of West Cambridge did high honor to one of the least of its quiet native-born townsmen. Thomas Hill, the old soldier, was escorted by a cavalcade of about seventy horsemen, out and home, from West Cambridge to Concord over nearly the precise route of the first instalment of British troops that marched from Boston and fired upon the collected American troops at Lexington, killing eight men, being ordered as ‘damned rebels’ to disperse by the British commander.

First printed, along with explanatory notes, by:
Thomas Jay Kemp | Posted on August 21, 2012 by Thomas Jay Kemp: Thomas Hill—American Revolutionary War Minuteman Hero Gone

Thomas Hill, age 14, didn’t stay at home with the women, the children, and the old folks.  He went out to the battle with the men and braved the fire of the angry and determined Regulars. He not only went, he went with the first of the “shock troops,” the Minutemen. 

So to honor the old soldier, they took his body on parade, accompanied by seventy mounted horsemen, along the same route Paul Revere rode in 1775 and followed that same morning by the British soldiers who initiated the fighting in what we now call our Revolutionary War -- at Lexington Green, and at the Old North Bridge in Concord.  How cool is that?

* In 1851, a soldier who was of fighting age in 1775 would have been about 95 years of age, so there were not many left.  Average life expectancy was much lower 175 years ago than it is today.