Ensign Francis Grose and the Battle of Lexington Concord

This is the conclusion from the third chapter of my book on the First/Second Fleeters and their association with the American Revolution. Enjoy.

At this distance in time it is difficult to assess the adverse psychological impact that the experience of the Lexington-Concord conflict had on the young Francis Grose. Alan J. Guy has argued convincingly that traumatic stress had a major impact on the eighteenth century British soldiery.⁴⁷ Grose must have been affected adversely in some way by the devastating slaughter at 'The Bloody Angle' in particular, and the militia's harried pursuit of the Concord espedition from Concord to Lexington. He was almost certainly involved in the bloody hand-to-hand and house-to-house combat at Menotomy. It is very likely that he may have killed his first man at Menotomy. He would certainly have been traumatised both by the sight of the apparently scalped British private near Concord's North bridge, and by the normal onset of fear soldiers experience in battle - '... I never had such a tremor come over me before -' Those experiences may have been heightened for him because he went into battle with very little training compared to many of his fellow officers.

Nevertheless, Grose's experiences on this police action turned murderous were nowhere near as severe as many of his comrades. To state the obvious, he was neither killed nor wounded. He was not at the first fight in Lexington. He missed the battle at the North bridge in Concord. At Barrett's Farm, though he was in a situation that engendered tension, he was one of the officers treated with a strained courtesy and dined on bread and fresh milk. At Mrs. Brown's Tavern he had a further opportunity to quench his thirst after a long, hot march, an opportunity not given to many of his peers. Basically, he missed the actual beginning of the War of American Independence.

One series of events do seem to have had an impact on his impressionable mind: the impunity with which the rank and file, along with some officers, were allowed to loot the houses of possibly innocent colonists. It is probably drawing a long bow to argue from this that his witnessing of the looting and its lack of punishment alone planted the seeds for his later attitudes of leniency toward the New South Wales Corps seventeen years later in Sydney. A long-formed regimental loyalty and the tradition that soldiers were entitled to land to settle on in the colonies in which they served undoubtedly also informed his attitudes in that instance.⁴⁸

47 Alan Guy, 'The Army of the Georges, 1714-1783' in The Oxford History of the British Army,p. 107; Samuel Blacheley Webb to Joseph Webb, Cambridge, June 19, 1775, in John Rhodehamel, (ed.) The American Revoluition. Writings from the War of Independence,New York, 2001, p. 37, for an 18C. Expression of fear in first battle.

48 Manning Clark, A New History of Australia, Sydney, 1963, p. 29; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. I, p. 183.

As this post has been transposed directly from the original manuscript, the original numbering of footnotes has been retained.