What happened at Lexington and Concord?
On 19 April 1775 about 700 British regulars marched from Boston to destroy colonial military supplies at Concord, Massachusetts. At dawn on Lexington green they scattered a militia company with a volley that killed eight men; at Concord's North Bridge militiamen fired back and drove off a British guard; and on the 18-mile march back the column was attacked from every wall and woodlot until a relief force rescued it. The British lost 273 men and the Americans 95. The day began the American Revolutionary War and the siege of Boston.3
On the night of 18 April 1775 two lanterns glowed briefly in the steeple of Boston's North Church, and riders galloped into the dark countryside. By morning church bells were ringing across the countryside, farmers were taking muskets down from their walls, and a column of British redcoats was marching toward Concord. Before the day was over, the long quarrel between Britain and its American colonies had become a war.4
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Next: Battle of Bunker Hill
A colony on the brink
By the spring of 1775 Massachusetts was close to open revolt. The previous summer British warships had closed Boston Harbor in punishment for the Boston Tea Party, and the royal governor, General Thomas Gage, had dissolved the colony's elected legislature under the hated Massachusetts Government Act. In October 1774 the towns sent delegates to a Provincial Congress instead. This illegal body took control of the militia and began stockpiling arms, ammunition and provisions, aiming to raise and equip an army of 15,000 men.5
Gage was isolated in Boston. Acting on orders from London to suppress the rebellion, he decided to strike at the heart of the colonists' preparations: the military stores gathered at Concord, a farming town about 18 miles northwest of Boston.6
Gage's secret expedition
Gage gave the job to Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith with about 700 men, the grenadier and light infantry companies of his regiments, the elite of the army. Smith's orders were to march "with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord" and seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions and small arms he found, while taking care that the soldiers did not plunder the inhabitants.7
Secrecy failed almost at once. The soldiers were woken in the dark and rowed across the Charles River to the Cambridge marshes, where they waded ashore up to their knees and then waited, wet and cold, until two in the morning for their rations to be landed. By the time the column finally set off, church bells and alarm guns were sounding across the countryside.8
The midnight riders
In Boston the Patriot leader Dr. Joseph Warren learned of the march almost as soon as it began. He sent two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes, by different routes to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at the minister's house in Lexington, and then to carry the alarm on to Concord. Two lanterns hung in the steeple of the North Church, a signal Revere had arranged a few days earlier, told Patriots across the river that the troops were going by water.9
Revere rowed past the British warship Somerset to Charlestown and rode through Medford and Menotomy, rousing the countryside as he went. At the minister's house in Lexington, when the militia guard told him not to make so much noise, he answered: "You'll have noise enough before long! The Regulars are coming!" Contrary to legend, he did not cry "The British are coming". After warning Hancock and Adams, he rode on with Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. A British patrol caught Revere on the road to Concord; Dawes turned back, but Prescott jumped his horse over a wall and carried the alarm to Concord.10
Dawn on Lexington green
Around 5 a.m. on 19 April the British advance guard, some 200 light infantry under Major John Pitcairn, came into Lexington. On the green stood 77 men of Captain John Parker's militia company. Parker's men had agreed not to meddle with the regulars unless provoked. As the light infantry deployed and mounted officers rode in among them shouting at them to disperse, Parker ordered his men to break up and not to fire.11
Then a shot rang out. Who fired it has never been settled. The British companies fired a ragged volley into the dispersing militia, then another, and charged with the bayonet. In less than three minutes it was over: eight Lexington men lay dead and ten were wounded. The regulars re-formed and marched on toward Concord.12
Concord and the North Bridge
The column reached Concord around 7 a.m., by the National Park Service's timeline. The militia there, outnumbered three to one, fell back across the North Bridge to a hill beyond the river to wait for help. Smith had his men search the town, and sent seven companies across the bridge to the farm of Colonel James Barrett, who had been in charge of the stores, leaving three companies, about 96 men under Captain Walter Laurie, to hold the bridge. But most of the supplies had been carried off or hidden days earlier, and the searchers found little.13
As more companies arrived from Acton, Bedford and Lincoln, the militia on the ridge above the bridge grew to some 400 men. Then they saw smoke rising over Concord. The regulars were only burning gun carriages and other captured equipment, and an elderly widow, Martha Moulton (Mary in the American Battlefield Trust's account), persuaded them to put out the fire when it spread to the town house; but the watching militia thought the town itself was being burned. "Will you let them burn the town down?" one officer demanded. Colonel Barrett ordered the column forward, with strict orders not to fire unless fired upon.14
The Acton minutemen led the way under Captain Isaac Davis. As they came down the causeway toward the bridge, the confused British fired, first a few scattered shots and then a volley, killing Davis and another Acton man, Abner Hosmer. Major John Buttrick of Concord shouted, "Fire, for God's sake, fire!" The militia's volley killed or mortally wounded three regulars and wounded nine others, and the British guard broke and fled back into town. Buttrick had become the first colonial officer to order his men to fire on British soldiers.15
The Battle Road
Around noon Smith started back to Boston with his tired men, now about 700 strong in a column a third of a mile long, flanking companies out on either side. At Meriam's Corner, a mile east of Concord, fresh militia companies from Reading, Chelmsford and Billerica opened fire, and from then on the shooting never stopped. Militia from dozens of towns ran ahead along farm lanes and back roads and fired from behind stone walls, trees, houses and barns, then ran on to fire again.16
In Lincoln, where the road bent sharply through a wooded hill, Woburn militia caught the column in a crossfire at a spot later called the Bloody Angle. Farther on, Captain Parker's Lexington company, which had regrouped after the morning's slaughter, waited on a ridge and fired into the head of the column. Smith himself was wounded in the leg, ammunition ran low, and by the time the redcoats neared Lexington, as one British officer admitted, "we began to run rather than retreat in order".17
Percy's rescue and the race to Charlestown
Smith's column was saved by a relief brigade of about 1,000 men under Brigadier General Hugh, Earl Percy, which had left Boston hours late, at about 9 a.m. Percy met the fugitives east of Lexington and opened fire on the militia with two six-pounder guns, the first artillery fire of the war. Under cover of the guns Smith's exhausted men rested, and the combined force, now some 1,700 strong, set off again.18
The worst fighting was still to come. In Menotomy, today Arlington, the road ran through what one officer called "one continuous village", and militia from Watertown, Medford, Roxbury and a dozen other towns fought the regulars house to house; British flankers stormed the homes that sheltered snipers. Finding the bridge at Cambridge held against him, Percy turned toward Charlestown, and as darkness fell the battered column crossed Charlestown Neck to the safety of the high ground and the guns of the warships.19
Aftermath: a war of words and a siege
By nightfall the British had lost 273 men killed, wounded or missing and the colonists 95. Overnight militia from all over New England poured in around Boston, some 16,000 to 20,000 men by the estimates of Britannica and the American Battlefield Trust, and the British army found itself besieged in the city. The siege lasted eleven months, until the British evacuated Boston in March 1776.20 › Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775
A second battle was fought over who was to blame. Both sides collected sworn depositions. Captain Parker swore that he had ordered his men "to disperse and not to fire", while Gage's official account claimed that the Americans had fired first. The Provincial Congress rushed its version to London on a fast schooner, and it reached the newspapers before Gage's report arrived. The colonists insisted they had fought only in defense of their rights as Englishmen.21
The shot heard round the world
Sixty-two years later, when Concord raised a monument by the North Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a hymn for the ceremony on 4 July 1837. Its first verse gave the battle its lasting name:22
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Emerson wrote it about the volley at the North Bridge, but the phrase is often applied to the first shot at Lexington as well.23
Visiting the battlefield today
Minute Man National Historical Park preserves the ground in Lexington, Lincoln and Concord. At the North Bridge stands Daniel Chester French's statue of a minuteman, and the North Bridge Visitor Center occupies a mansion built in 1911 by descendants of Major Buttrick; it displays the "Hancock", one of four brass cannon hidden in Concord in 1775 that Gage's troops were sent to find. The Minute Man Visitor Center near Lexington has a forty-foot mural of the fighting, and the five-mile Battle Road Trail follows the route of the retreat from Meriam's Corner past Hartwell Tavern, whose family sent three sons to fight as minutemen.24
