“The Redcoats are Coming!”
“Lay down your arms, ye damned rebels, lay down your arms!”
With that terse command 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. On April 19, 1775, the battles at Lexington and
Concord launched the Revolutionary War which led to American independence and created
a freedom movement and a form of government that changed the world.
The militia on the Lexington Green that morning 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 through the New
England countryside was “The Redcoats are Coming!”
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| Route the Redcoats took to Concord from Lexington (NPS map) |
The opposing sides on the Lexington Green fired at each
other, and then the British soldiers charged with bayonets, killing eight and
wounding ten. The Redcoats suffered no casualties. The colonial militia
scattered, and Pitcairn rushed his men to Concord to capture rebel arms and
ammunition.
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| A re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington Green (http://www.lexingtonminutemen.com/) |
The battles at Lexington and Concord that April in 1775 sparked
the American Revolutionary War. Administering the American colonies burdened
the growing British world empire, and Parliament wanted income. Beginning in
1733 with the Molasses Act and increasing after the costly French and Indian
War (1754-1763), taxes on essential colonial products raised the ire of the
Americans. The 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.
The Road to Rebellion
A particularly odious tax on the colonies was the Stamp Act
of 1765. It required revenue stamps on newspapers and most printed material,
even playing cards. Thus, the Stamp Act angered the influential people who shaped
public opinion—the newspaper editors, lawyers, and tavern owners. As a result,
open acts of rebellion flared, including the sacking of the Bostonian homes of
the Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver, a stamp
act commissioner. In response, the British sent troops to Boston to quell the
growing rebellion.
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| The stamp required for all printed materials from the act of 1765. |
Grenville also imposed the Quartering Act in 1765 which
required the colonies to supply British soldiers with food and housing. Since
the major British force resided in New York, this hit that city particularly
hard. More controversial acts followed, adding fuel to the fire. Local Sons of
Liberty began to organize against the rising “tyranny” of the British over
colonial matters.
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 rule and rallying the public with slogans such as “No taxation
without representation,” and “Give me Liberty or give me Death.” From leaflets to popular songs
sung in taverns, the rebels organized against England.
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,
nicknamed Minute Men. Such units mustered for drills that included weapons’ training
and rapid responses to any threat to their communities. They knew that if open
rebellion occurred, the Patriots would face the best military in the world.
The Boston Massacre and Tea Party
As tensions rose, violence erupted. On March 5, 1770, a lone
British sentry in front of the customs house at Boston cried out as a group of
youths pelted him with snowballs. Reinforcements poured out of the nearby
barracks and tussled with the gathering crowd. A British solder fired, then
more shots rang out, killing five and wounding another eight. Ironically, the first person
killed in the fight for American independence was the African-American Crispus
Attucks, a runaway slave who worked on the ships in the harbor. With these martyrs
to the cause of rebellion, the Boston Massacre escalated the conflict.
On December 16, 1773, a group of men disguised as Mohawk
Indians stormed three ships in the Boston harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea
into the frigid waters to protest the taxes. Parliament punished Boston with the Coercive
Acts, aka the Intolerable Acts, which closed the port until the equivalent of $90,000
in today’s dollars was paid for the tea. Other punitive acts followed which
forced Bostonians to house the Redcoats without recompense. Public assemblies
could only happen with the approval of the governor, Gen. Thomas Gage. The
British military now ruled Massachusetts. In reaction, Benjamin Franklin called
for the First Continental Congress to assemble in Philadelphia. We will take up
this part of the revolutionary story in the next chapter on the Independence
National Historical Park.
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| Sons of Liberty tossing crates of imported tea into the Boston Harbor (http://www.history.com/) |
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; nonetheless,
colonials started seeing themselves as part of a larger whole fighting against
a corrupt government.
The Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill
Revolt ignited that April morning north of Boston. After the
British attacked the militia at Lexington Green, they continued to Concord. Neighboring
Minute Men swarmed to the sporadic 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 Patriots (the
first causality from nearby Acton) and eleven English soldiers. Colonel Francis Smith ordered
his men to retreat to Boston.
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| Minute Men re-enactors crossing the North Bridge (NPS photo) |
A mile east of Concord at Meriam’s Corner, a narrow bridge
across a creek created a bottleneck for the retreat, and Minute Men, 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 militia
they had attacked that morning who exacted retribution from the Redcoats. 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 and … 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.
After the first skirmishes at Lexington and Concord in April
1775, conflicts erupted at Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point in New York. 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 over 2,000 Redcoats 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 as the rebels 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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| Map of Bunker and Breed's Hills |
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| The British Regulars at the Battle of Bunker Hill |
The Impact of the Boston Battles
Several consequences came out of these first armed clashes.
First, with cold weather approaching and surrounded by the Continental Army,
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 militias whose atypical combat style proved effective. Third, the
Continental Congress called for all able bodied men to join the militia;
however, not everyone supported 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. The call to enlist in the army and indeed,
the war itself split families and communities into divided camps of Patriots and
Loyalists. Finally, these Boston battles sparked the years of war, of combat,
and of destruction as armies marched across countrysides, killing one another,
and often destroying what lay in their paths.
The American Revolution, begun in April 1775 in Concord,
lasted until the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia in October 1781. We will
explore the history of the war in the following chapters.
The Minute Man National Historical Park was created on
September 21, 1959 when President Eisenhower signed its enabling act.
Minute Man National Historical Park
174 Liberty Street
Concord, MA 01742
978/369.6993
