“Lay down your arms, ye damned rebels, lay down your arms!”
With that terse warning from Major Pitcairn of the British Army, his guard of
150 soldiers confronted the 77 assembled Minute Men on the town green at
Lexington, Massachusetts. The militia on the Lexington Green on April 19, 1775 had
responded to the alarms spread by Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Dr. Samuel
Prescott. At the time, no one cried “the British are Coming!” Most colonials
still considered themselves British. The cry that did ring out through the New
England countryside that night was “The Regulars are Coming!”
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| Lexington Green (Photo by Hunner) |
At the Lexington Green, a shot rang out, and the militia
scattered, some run down by the Regulars who charged with bayonets, killing
eight and wounding ten. The Regulars suffered no casualties. Pitcairn marshaled
his jubilant troops back to command and rushed his men to Concord to capture a
stockpile of rebel arms and ammunition.
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| Reenactors portraying British Regulars at Concord (From exhibit at Minute Man NHP) |
The fighting at Lexington and Concord that April in 1775 sparked
the American Revolutionary War and changed the world. The road to rebellion was
slow boil for the colonists in British America that dated back to the French
and Indian War. Administering the American colonies burdened the growing
British world empire, and Parliament thought payment was due. Beginning in 1733
with the Molasses Act, taxes on essential colonial products raised the ire of
the Americans. First Lord of the Treasury, George Grenville, justified the
taxes saying that they would go “toward defraying the necessary expenses of
defending, protecting, and securing the said colonies and plantations.” From
our early days, taxes have vexed Americans. A particularly odious tax on the
colonies was the Stamp Act of 1765, covered in last week’s blog. Local Sons of
Liberty began to organize against the rising “tyranny” of the British over
colonial matters.
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| Ben Franklin's call for unity during the protest against King George III and Parliament. (From Franklin House exhibit at Independence NHP) |
Revolutions need many elements to succeed. They need a
perceived threat to motivate people to rebel. They need talented leaders to
take charge and figure out how to rebel. They require a network of
communication to spread the word. And they need luck.
Talented writers fanned the flames of rebellion and
justified the challenge to the British and King George III. Virginians Patrick
Henry and John Dickinson, Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin, and Bostonian Samuel
Adams stoked popular resentment with pamphlets, broadsheets, and articles
decrying British tyranny and rallying the public with slogans such as “Taxation
without representation is tyranny,” and “Give me Liberty or give me Death.” From
leaflets to popular songs sung in taverns, the rebels organized against England. The patriots were lucky with such talented publicists.
Building on the growing discontent, rebels started
boycotting British imports. Sassafras tea replaced British tea as the protestors’
drink of choice. Women made garments out of homespun cloth, merging fashion
with defiance. Patriots organized militia to resist England. In Massachusetts,
almost all men between sixteen and sixty served in their town’s militia, with
the younger men serving as a rapid response force, nicknamed the Minute Men. All
knew that once open rebellion started, they would face the best military in the
world.
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| Political cartoon showing the English forcing tea down an American (From exhibit at Minute Man NHP) |
What did the rebels want? They fought for independence from an
oppressive regime; for equality (for white males with property); and for
representation in government. Newly arrived from England, Thomas Paine published
the influential Common Sense in January
1776. In it, he wrote:
It is not in the power of Britain
to do this continent justice: … for if they cannot conquer us, they cannot
govern us.… Independency means no more, than, whether we shall make our own
laws, or, whether the king, the greatest enemy this continent hath, or can
have, shall tell us, "there shall be no laws but such as I like.”
Cries for rebellion like Payne’s unified the disparate
colonies into a continent, into a whole land. Granted, the thin line of English
settlement along the eastern seaboard ignored the rest of North America continent; nonetheless,
colonials started seeing themselves as part of a larger country fighting against
a corrupt government.
In my tour of Independence Hall in Philadelphia led by
Ranger Greg, he mentioned militia Captain Preston’s reason about why they took
up arms against the King. Was it taxes? No. Was it the Boston Massacre? No.
Preston said they fought because those people in England felt that we Americans could no
longer take care of our own business, we could no longer govern ourselves. That
is why he and his fellow soldiers rebelled.
The First Continental Congress met at the Carpenters’ Hall
from September 5 to October 10, 1774 to respond to the Punitive Acts (aka the
Intolerable Acts) that Britain enacted due to the Tea Party. General Gage
placed Boston under martial law. The Congress, with representatives from all
the colonies but Georgia, petitioned King George III to remove these acts and
soldiers from the colonies. They then adjourned with the understanding that
they would meet again if the King rejected their petition. The King was not
amused.
Revolt ignited that April morning north of Boston. After the
British attacked the militia at Lexington Green, they continued to Concord. Nearby
Minute Men swarmed to the sounds of gunfire as the Redcoats searched for arms
and ammunition. When the militia saw smoke coming from Concord, they feared
that the British had started to torch the town. They charged the North Bridge
occupied by the Redcoats and exchanged fire which killed two Minute Men and
eleven English soldiers. British Colonel Francis Smith ordered his men to
retreat to Boston.
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| North Bridge at Concord where the shot heard 'round the world occurred (Photo by Hunner) |
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| The Minute Man statue at North Bridge (Photo by Hunner) |
A mile east of Concord at Meriam’s Corner, a narrow bridge
across a creek created a bottleneck for the British, and the gathering militia,
hiding behind fences, walls, and trees, started picking off the enemy. More
militia joined the fray and forced the English to run a gauntlet of deadly
gunfire as they retreated to Boston. Near Lexington, the British column faced
the men they had attacked that morning who exacted retribution from the Regulars.
A British officer wrote about their retreat:
The Rebels
kept the road always lined and a very hot fire on us without intermission; we
at first kept our order and returned their fire… but when we arrived a mile
from Lexington, our ammunition began to fail … so that we began to run rather
than retreat in order.[1]
Inconceivably, the ragtag group of colonial militia had forced
the Redcoats to flee in disorder. The Regulars ran into reinforcements at
Lexington sent from Boston or their retreat would have been worse.
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| The retreat from Concord (From Minute Man NHP exhibit) |
The engagement shocked the British —almost three hundred men
killed, wounded or missing, and their forces now under siege in Boston. The Minute
Men suffered ninety-three killed or wounded. As an irregular unit, the militia
inflicted serious damage to the best army in the world by using guerrilla tactics
learned from fighting Native Americans in the woods. This would be a different kind of war.
After the first skirmishes near Boston,
conflicts erupted at Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point in New York. Then, on
June 17, militia from the Boston area defended the strategic heights above Charlestown
from a Redcoat assault. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, a first wave of 2,200
Regulars struggled uphill over fences and hastily constructed bulwarks. Volleys
of bullets rained down from above and forced the Redcoats to retreat. They charged
again, and again the militia fought them back. The third charge proved successful
for the Redcoats as the Patriots started to run out of ammunition. The British suffered
1,054 casualties including 232 dead while the Americans had only 400 dead,
wounded, or missing. British General Clinton complained: “A dear bought
victory—another such would have ruined us.”
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| The vicious battle for Bunker Hill (From Bunker Hill exhibit at Independence NHP) |
Several consequences came out of these first armed clashes.
First, with cold weather approaching and surrounded by a hostile force, the
British abandoned Boston and retreated by boat to Halifax, Canada where they
wintered. Second, the British generals became more cautious in engaging the home
grown militia whose atypical combat style proved effective. Third, the British
decided to counter this rebellion with a show of force and sent their largest
contingent of soldiers up to that time anywhere for next summer’s campaign. Finally, the Continental
Congress called for all able bodied men to join the militia.
Not all Americans joined the rebellion. Perhaps a third of
the colonials wanted rebellion and freedom from England while another third
remained loyal to the king. The rest stayed neutral, but this was as much a
civil war as a unified struggle against the British. Finally, these Boston battles
sparked the years of combat and destruction as armies chased across the
colonies, killing one another, and often destroying whatever lay in their
paths.
In 1775, the Second Continental Congress convened in May and
in response to the fighting in Boston, declared the colonies independent. They
also organized the defense of the colonies as combat rang out in Boston and elected
George Washington to lead the nascent Continental Army. At the City Tavern, at
Quaker meetinghouses, in Carpenter’s Hall, debates rang out about whether to
rebel and if so, what to put in Parliament’s place.
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| Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia (Photo by Hunner) |
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| City Tavern in Philadelphia (Photo by Hunner) |
The Minute Man National Historical Park was created on
September 21, 1959 when President Eisenhower signed its enabling act. The sites
connected to the Revolution in downtown Philadelphia was designated as
Independence National Historic Site in 1934 and added as Independence National
Historical Park in 1938.
