The Military Journals of Two Private Soldiers, 1758-1775 With Numerous Illustrative Notes — A Closer Reading

Two Campaigns, Seventeen Years Apart

The journals cover two distinct conflicts: the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War) and the opening of the American Revolution. The first soldier’s diary records a single campaign around 1758; the second describes the American siege of Boston in 1775–1776. Tomlinson notes in his advertisement that the diaries were written “at periods seventeen years apart,” yet both share the perspective of enlisted men rather than officers. The editor’s decision to reproduce them without modernization—retaining original spelling and phrasing—gives modern readers direct access to the language and concerns of common soldiers.

Eyewitness Depositions on Lexington

The supplement includes several depositions taken on April 25, 1775, just days after the Lexington skirmish. Witnesses such as Timothy Smith, Levi Mead, Levi Harrington, and William Draper describe the sequence of events from their vantage points. Draper reports hearing the commanding officer order, “Fire! fire! damn you, fire!” before any shots from the militia. Smith states he saw “eight of the Lexington men who were killed, and lay bleeding at a considerable distance from each other.” These accounts emphasize that the regulars fired first, a point the deponents stress repeatedly. The depositions are signed and dated, lending them the formality of legal testimony.

Annotations and Editorial Framing

Tomlinson’s preface explains that he sought Lossing’s notes to provide “a proper understanding of the historical facts to which allusions are made.” The annotations thus bridge the gap between the soldiers’ terse entries and the broader military context. The volume also includes an introductory essay on the origins of the French and Indian War, framing it as a dispute over territorial limits. While the excerpts do not reveal the full extent of Lossing’s commentary, the structure suggests a deliberate effort to make the diaries accessible to a mid-nineteenth-century audience interested in the founding of the republic.

Readers should approach the journals as primary sources filtered through a nineteenth-century editorial lens. Tomlinson’s museum background and Lossing’s reputation as a popular historian shape how the diaries are presented. The depositions, however, stand as unadorned testimony, offering a rare glimpse into how ordinary colonists narrated the outbreak of war.

There’s something humbling in reading a soldier’s own words, knowing he couldn’t see where they’d land. The Lexington depositions here feel almost startlingly close, like a voice through a thin wall. That same quiet ache surfaced again in the History of the Second Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry: A prisoner's diary A paper read at the officers' reunion in Boston, May 11, 1877 — Background and Themes, where a captive’s days pass in small, brave notations. War diaries rarely shout; they just endure, line by line.