A Lexington minister who sheltered John Hancock and Samuel Adams the night before the first shots of the Revolution stood inside the town meeting house one year later and raged against the British soldiers who had killed his neighbors just steps away.
A sermon that still burns on the page.
Jeff Croteau traces that fury in a new essay published Tuesday on the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library's website, examining Rev. Jonas Clarke's April 19, 1776 sermon and the rare pamphlet preserving his words. "[The British troops] approach with the morning's light; and more like murderers and cut-throats, than the troops of a Christian king, without provocation, without warning, when no war was proclaimed, they draw the sword of violence, upon the inhabitants of this town," Clarke thundered from the pulpit, "and with a cruelty and barbarity, which would have made the most hardened savage blush, they shed INNOCENT BLOOD!"
A minister who was there for all of it.
Clarke had served as Lexington's sole minister since 1755, preaching to roughly 125 families and 700 residents. His connection to the Revolution's opening moments ran deeper than most: his wife's cousin was Hancock, and both Hancock and Adams were staying in Clarke's home on the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere rode in with his warning. A year later, when Clarke delivered his anniversary sermon, he did so in the very meeting house that had once held the coffins of the eight men killed on the green.
A pamphlet that survived through one family's memory.
The museum's copy of that sermon reached Lexington through an unlikely chain of family history. Barbara Peirce Gove, a descendant of Solomon Peirce — a member of Captain John Parker's Lexington Company of Minutemen who was wounded in the thigh scaling a stone wall near Buckman Tavern, then rejoined the fight anyway to harass the retreating British — donated the bound volume of anniversary sermons after reading a 1990 museum publication featuring an exhibition on Lexington and the Revolution. The pamphlet had been passed down through her family for generations before finding its way into the archive.
Where to see it.
The pamphlet, cataloged as "The Fate of Blood-Thirsty Oppressors," is on display now in "Nothing Short of Independence: Selections from the Library & Archives," running through Oct. 16 in the museum's Van Gorden-Williams reading room. The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, at 33 Marrett Road, is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with occasional Saturdays listed on its events calendar. Admission is free. More information at srmml.org or 781-861-6559.
