Lexington and Concord: The Shot Heard Round the World

At four thirty in the morning on April nineteenth, seventeen seventy-five, seventy-seven militiamen stood on the village green in Lexington. They were farmers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers. Facing them, marching from Boston, were roughly seven hundred British regulars under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, sent to seize colonial weapons stockpiled in Concord.

Captain John Parker commanded the Lexington militia. By most accounts, he ordered his men not to fire unless fired upon. Who fired first remains disputed. Eight colonists died on the Lexington green. The British column marched on.

At Concord's North Bridge, the situation reversed. The Concord militia, joined by men from surrounding towns, outnumbered the British detachment at the bridge. When shots were exchanged, the British fell back. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing decades later, called it the shot heard round the world.

The British retreat to Boston became a running battle across sixteen miles of Massachusetts countryside. Militiamen fired from stone walls, farms, and woodlines. By the time the column reached Charlestown, roughly three hundred British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. Forty-nine colonists were dead.

The battles of Lexington and Concord did not begin the American Revolution. The political break had been building for a decade through the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, and the Tea Party. But April nineteenth, seventeen seventy-five crystallized everything. Before that morning, the quarrel between the colonies and Britain was still, theoretically, a political dispute. After it, there was a war.