Massachusetts 250: Unsung Heroes of the Revolution

Massachusetts turns 250 this year, and the Commonwealth is finally shining a light on the revolutionary fighters history textbooks left out.

Everyone knows Paul Revere rode through the night. Everyone’s lifted a Sam Adams and offered a quiet toast to the founders. But walk the back roads of Sharon or stand on Lexington Battle Green and you’ll find markers honoring people whose names never made it into Longfellow’s poems, people who bled for this country just as hard.

Deborah Sampson grew up in Plympton and decided that wasn’t going to stop her. She disguised herself as a man, enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, and kept her cover for nearly two years. When a musket ball tore into her, she dug it out herself with a penknife, needle, and thread, because letting a doctor examine her meant exposure. Eventually a fever she couldn’t hide brought her secret into the open. She was honorably discharged, became the only woman in the Revolutionary War to earn a full military service pension, and in 1983 the Commonwealth proclaimed her its official Heroine. She’s buried in Sharon, and a life-size statue stands outside the public library there. You should go see it.

Boston Lyric Opera is staging Daughter of the Regiment at Emerson Colonial Theatre from April 24 through May 3, a comic opera about a woman soldier during the Napoleonic Wars that echoes Sampson’s story in ways that feel anything but coincidental. “The parallels are remarkable,” a cast member told Yankee Magazine during coverage of the production. The show is worth your night out.

Worth your afternoon, too: Lexington.

Prince Estabrook was an enslaved man who fought at the Battle of Lexington, the very first engagement of the Revolutionary War. He took a wound there. A plaque near Buckman Tavern in Lexington honors his valor and his patriotism, and the Massachusetts 250 commemoration is working to make sure stories like his reach wider audiences during this anniversary year.

That’s what the sesquicentennial moment is doing at its best. The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian holds George Graham’s 1797 portrait of Sampson, painted after she’d already become a public figure. Look at it and you’re looking at someone the history industry nearly erased. The Massachusetts Historical Society and other archives have spent years pulling these stories back into the record, and the 250th is giving them a public platform they haven’t had before.

Don’t mistake this for a correction to history. It’s an addition. Hancock and Adams earned their statues. The point is that the revolution was wider than the famous names suggest, fought by women who sewed their own wounds shut and by enslaved men who picked up muskets anyway, knowing the country they were helping build might not free them.

Massachusetts has always been good at making people care about the past. Stand on Lexington Battle Green on a cold April morning, the way you can right now, and you feel it without anyone telling you to. The National Park Service’s Minute Man National Historical Park runs ranger programs through the spring that put you exactly where Estabrook stood on April 19, 1775. That date is not abstract when you’re standing on the green.

The heroes are there. You just have to look for the smaller plaques.