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Who Were the Minutemen and Minutewomen?

This spring a proposal to replace the Minuteman with some other symbol for our athletic teams triggered a firestorm in the national news media.
The proponents of change saw in the Minuteman issues of gender, race and guns. “There were no Minutewomen,” said some. “Minutemen were not people of color,” said others. Some did not like firearms.

Once again the Minuteman won, as it did in a similar debate in 1983. But the dialog among the participants revealed a substantial lack of knowledge about the role of armed women, and people of color, who were members of the original Minutemen. In Massachusetts alone, 840 minorities served in the Revolutionary War, 740 were recorded as black or mulatto and 100 recorded as Indians. Armed men and women, white and colored, repelled the British at Concord, Lexington and elsewhere. They fought at Bunker Hill. They were members of George Washington’s Continental Army.

One Minutewoman, two months before the Battle of Concord and Lexington, came close to making Salem the location of “the shot heard round the world.” On Sunday February 26, 1775, Sarah Tarrant called out to a British troop trying to find Colonial arms in Salem “Go home and tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand and broken the peace of our Sabbath. What, do you think we were born in the woods, to be frightened by owls?” When a British redcoat leveled his musket at her she challenged him, saying, “Fire if you have the courage, but I doubt it.” No shots were fired. The British retreated; playing the same tune that General Cornwallis’ British army band would later play at his surrender at Yorktown, “The World’s Turned Upside Down.”

On that “famous day and year,” April 19, 1775, at least 11 black Minutemen from Lexington, Framingham, Braintree, Brookline, Concord, Groton, Cambridge, and Stoneham responded to Paul Revere’s midnight alarm. On Lexington Green, in the first firefight of the Revolution, black Minuteman and slave, Prince Estabrook, was among the wounded. His role is recalled each year in Lexington’s re-enactment of the battle.

Also present at Lexington, in the British line, was Marine Major John Pitcairn. Facing him in the Patriot line was black Minuteman Peter Salem. The two were to meet again at the Battle of Bunker Hill. There, Salem was among the group of Minutemen credited with killing Major Pitcairn in the third and final British charge. Peter Salem was later presented to General George Washington in recognition of his service.
John Trumbell’s famous 1798 painting, “The Battle of Bunker’s Hill,”
hanging now in the Library of Congress, prominently portrays black Minutemen in the Patriot line of battle.

Shortly after the Battle of Concord and Lexington, a Minutewoman, Prudence Cumming Wright, commanded a Patriot band, that also included Minutewoman, Sarah Hartwell Shattuck. Armed with muskets and pitchforks, their task was to repel British troops making more sorties to capture Colonial arms. They took positions at Jewett’s Bridge over the Nashua River between Groton and Pepperell. There they intercepted and captured Tory Captain Leonard Whiting who was acting as a British courier.

American Indians also served as Minutemen, including a company from Stockbridge that responded following the Concord and Lexington battle.
Indian Minutemen engaged the British at Noddle’s Island in Boston and at Cambridge. Seventy Indian women of Mashpee became widows of Minutemen and by the end of the Revolutionary War half of the Stockbridge Indian Minutemen had given their lives.

As for the Minuteman’s musket, how else were men and women to lift the military yoke of the world’s most mighty empire? And Minutewomen helped arm them. Meliscent Barrett Swain ran the Concord musket cartridge factory, a target of the fateful British expedition. Elizabeth Hager Price, while nursing Minutemen wounded at Concord, discovered six spiked cannons left behind by the British. She recognized that they could be repaired, had them hauled to a blacksmith’s shop and helped put them back in service for the Patriots.

The official heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is Deborah Sampson Gannett. Disguised as a man, she enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment under the name of Robert Shurtleff. The first female to enlist as an American soldier, Deborah was wounded at the Battle of Tarrytown. Upon recommendation of Minuteman Paul Revere she was later awarded the first military pension granted to a woman. Her pension was approved by John Hancock.

No discussion of the Minuteman as a symbol of UMass Amherst would be complete without mention of the special tie between our campus and the sculptor of the original Minuteman statue. The first President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Henry Flagg French, had a son who worked on the campus farm before the first student class arrived in Amherst. President French later referred to his son as “the first graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College.” The French home was the Stockbridge House, still standing on our campus, now housing the University Club. The French boy drew imaginative pictures on his bedroom wall and went on to make the Minuteman statue at Concord his first public work of art. His name was Daniel Chester French, also sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.

No symbol for students and alumni, men and women of all hues, could be more appropriate than the Minuteman. We shall be forever in their debt, those original Minutemen and Minutewomen. They laid the foundations of our government. From this government arose the freedoms of speech, free association and open enquiry so necessary to the functioning of a great university.

Joseph S. Larson ’56, G’58
Natural Resources Conservation
Retired Faculty Emeritus

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