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What kind of man was this Isaac Davis, and how did he come to lead the group of men who would march down the Concord path and into the history books?

The thirty-year-old son of Ezekial and Mary Gibson Davis, Isaac was a gunsmith by trade and lived with his wife Hannah and children in the small farming village of Acton, a town that had broken away from Concord four decades earlier. A "thoughtful, sedate, serious man, a genuine Puritan like Samuel Adams," Davis was said to have been so moved by a Sunday sermon on the state of the colonies that he applauded at its conclusion and asked the minister to repeat it.

Some months before this April day, Davis had been elected captain of Acton’s company of minutemen. Thomas Thorpe–one of his men–would later swear in a deposition that the captain was "esteemed, a man of courage and prudence and had the love and veneration of all his company."

Thanks to his trade as a gunsmith, Davis’s troops were fully equipped with guns, cartridge boxes, and bayonets. They drilled regularly, assembling twice a week (their efforts were noted by their fellow townsmen, who voted to pay them for their training).

Now, in response to the messenger’s call to arms, Davis rallied about thirty men in his yard. Some of them had floured their hair while they waited so that they might meet the king’s troops as gentlemen. Finally, Davis ordered his company into line and stepped off down the path.

As they reached the road, he halted his men and turned back toward his wife, who was watching from the doorway of the house where their four young children lay sick. Taking one last look at Hannah, he admonished her to "Take good care of the children." Then he was gone.

The company marched up the lane and over Nashoba Brook by an old stone bridge to Strawberry Hill and then into neighboring Concord. Their thoughts must have been sobering, for they knew that if their cause failed, their defiance would brand them as traitors. Undeterred, Davis was heard to say as they walked: "I have a right to go to Concord on the king’s highway, and I will go to Concord." Fifer Luther Blanchard and drummer Francis Barker struck up the company’s signature tune, "The White Cockade," as they strode along.

Shortly after entering Concord, they paused near Colonel James Barrett’s farm, where a contingent of redcoats was breaking up gun carriages and setting the pieces afire in the yard. But Davis’s orders had been to rendezvous at the bridge, so the Acton men passed by, marching between newly-plowed fields planted with a strange crop indeed–hidden cannon and muskets!

When the Acton company arrived at the colonial forces’ gathering place on Punkatasset Hill above the bridge, the men took their places at the extreme left of the line (the company’s place dictated by the fact that Davis was the most junior officer present). While the men waited, their captain hurried farther up the hill to a meeting with fellow officers to decide on a course of action.

As Colonel Barrett and the others conferred, they were unaware that when General Gage’s British troops arrived at Lexington Common earlier that day during the pre-dawn hours, they had found several dozen defiant rebels waiting for them. Although commanders on both sides later insisted that their men had been ordered not to fire first, blood had been shed. The finger that first pulled the trigger remains shrouded in mystery. But there is little doubt that the colonials, being outnumbered by three to one, obeyed the order to disperse. The British fired into the breaking ranks, killing eight and wounding ten more.

The several hundred colonials already mustered at Punkatasset Hill when the Acton men arrived were being augmented by troops from communities such as Bedford, Lincoln, and Westford. Surely, they thought, this force could take the bridge, guarded only by a small troop of redcoats, and drive the British forces back toward Boston. But if they did not act now, British reinforcements were certain to arrive, and the colonists might be dangerously outnumbered.

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