Run up to the Revolution, VIII: The shot heard round the world

Although today we honor the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, as the commencement of the Revolutionary War, we should recognize that the timing of the war’s onset was almost inevitable, as was its location, near Boston, epicenter of American resistance since the Tea Party of December 1773.

As the readers of prior columns know, the British reaction to the Tea Party was a series of Draconian measures, in particular to punish Massachusetts and the port of Boston. These strictures, in turn, gave reason for the First Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia in August-September 1774, which instituted a broad boycott of British goods and began militia preparations in hundreds of towns. When the boycott started to hurt British shipping, King George III and Parliament decreed additional tough measures. General Thomas Gage, head of all British forces in the colonies, pleaded with London for 20,000 soldiers, but the powers that be decided that number couldn’t be spared and sent far fewer.

That the “shot heard ‘round the world” would be fired in the early spring of 1775 was guaranteed three months earlier by two directives from secretary of state Lord Dartmouth.

The first instructed all provincial governors to prevent Americans from becoming delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The second tasked Gage with arresting and imprisoning all former delegates to the First Congress and likely delegates to the Second, and to seize powder, rifles, etc., that might be used in a rebellion.

By late March, due to bureaucratic and weather delays, these directives still had not arrived in America. Yet hordes of Tory colonists had by then fled the countryside to Boston for the protection of British soldiers from their neighbors’ growing animosity. Under their impetus, British troops tarred and feathered a local farmer/patriot, parading him through town in a cart while a band played and soldiers sang, “Yankee Doodle come to town/ For to buy a firelock;/ We will tar and feather him/ and so we will John Hancock.”

The wealthiest man in Massachusetts and the head of Boston’s safety committee and the colony’s provincial congress, Hancock was busy buying medicines and ammunition enough for an army of 15,000. However, his provincial colleagues thought him a bit trigger-happy and so passed an edict that Hancock was not to summon the militias unless and until Gage and 500 men “shall march out of the Town of Boston, with Artillery and Baggage.”

Hancock and John Adams, understanding that Gage would likely try to arrest them, left early for the Second Continental Congress, and kept moving around in Massachusetts to avoid detection. Readying to leave town, Hancock ordered his safety committee to steal four mounted cannon from the British, which they did.

In early April, Gage’s spies reported Hancock and Adams hiding in Lexington, and that the patriot arsenal was hidden in Concord. On April 14, the letters from London to Gage finally arrived and he sprang into action, sending out two forces, one to Concord to destroy the armaments and another to Lexington to arrest Adams and Hancock.

But the patriots also had spies and operatives, knowledgeable ones who understood the implication of small boatloads of soldiers debarking from moored men-of-war, and columns of Redcoats marching toward a muster point on Boston Common. Among these operatives was silversmith Paul Revere.

At ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, April 18, Dr. Joseph Warren — the leader of the safety committee in Hancock’s absence — sent for Revere and asked him to ride to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams that Gage was coming.

Revere did. Hancock, on receiving the news, sent messages to gather militias to counter Gage’s troops. The bell of Lexington’s main church pealed all night, and its alarm, and similar ones in nearby towns, alerted militias from as far away as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, so that on the 19th of April, when the British arrived in Lexington and Concord (and Hancock and Adams hid in the fields to avoid capture) trained and armed Americans were out in force to meet them, and to take casualties, but to win the day and begin the American Revolution.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written many books, including three about the Revolutionary Era.