The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [7]
The British regiments left their ship and assembled smartly on the wide, lengthy wooden pier with its long row of shops and warehouses and marched through town on the main thoroughfare, King Street, to the grassy field that served as the Boston commons. They were led by their regimental fife and drum band, which played martial music to impress the large crowd of colonial onlookers that had gathered to watch them parade to the commons.
The Bostonians, angry at their arrival, glowered at them as they walked by. In the groups of people scattered along the route to the commons stood young Greenwood, then just eight years old, who was fascinated by the men playing the high notes on the fife. He moved from block to block, following them along King and past Cornhill Street, winding his way between people or jumping up and down to see the band as it marched by.
Shortly afterwards, Greenwood obtained an old, rather tarnished fife. The long, slender instrument had a crack in it which he sealed with putty. He watched and listened to the British fifers on parade in Boston whenever he could and taught himself to play just by observing them. He became good enough to be taken in as a volunteer fifer with a local militia company. He was fifteen. While many of the men in the militia went through their routines monotonously, some there perhaps only for the beer that was served at the end of the day, the young fifer delighted in playing the tunes he had learned in music books he had purchased. The men enjoyed his music and nodded approvingly at him as he played while they drilled. The boy’s love of fife music continued over the next few years, but his esteem for the British soldiers did not.
Samuel Maverick was a teenager who worked as an apprentice for Greenwood’s father, a local dentist in Boston. The dentist paid Maverick small wages for his work in the dental office, but gave him meals and allowed him to live in his home, where he shared a bedroom with his son John. The two teenagers became fast friends. In 1770, Maverick, who loved to discuss politics, dined at the home of some teenaged friends, the Carys, and then went out. He and John’s older brother Isaac approached troops gathered on King Street near the Customs House shortly after 9 p.m. but were separated. Maverick worked his way toward the front of the crowd that was harassing British soldiers. Residents shouted at the troops, some screaming “kill them!”
At the height of the dispute, when the frightened soldiers raised their muskets to threaten the crowd, Maverick shouted, “Fire away, you damned lobsterbacks!” They did. The musket fire killed Maverick and four others and sent fifteen-year-old John Greenwood spiraling into a deep depression over the loss of his close friend in what was quickly called the Boston Massacre by the press.1 He not only grieved publicly, but was tormented in private. “After his death, I used to go to bed in the dark on purpose to see his spirit, for I was so fond of him and he of me,” Greenwood wrote in his journal.
His father, who also experimented with early electrical inventions, was the son of a Harvard professor. He enrolled Greenwood in the city’s prestigious North School, where he earned good grades. He was not in school for long, however, because his uncle asked his father to send John to live with him in Falmouth, a fishing community on the southwestern tip of Cape Cod. His uncle, a wealthy man, had recently become a widower and had no children. He needed someone to help him around the house and to run errands for his business. He also yearned for company.
The teenager arrived in Falmouth in the spring of 1773, a few months before the Boston Tea Party. He wrote, “The whole country at this time was in commotion and nothing was talked of but war, liberty, or death; persons of all descriptions were embodying themselves