For some months, people in the colonies had been gathering arms and powder
and had been training to fight the British, if necessary, at a moment's notice. The
Continental Congress had approved of preparations for defensive fighting, in case the
British made an aggressive move. But General Thomas Gage, commander of British troops in
Boston, had been cautious. He thought his army too small to act without reinforcements. On
the other hand, his officers disdained the colonists as fighters, thinking they would flee
with any show of British force.
Gage received orders to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, rumored to be
near Lexington. When Gage heard that the colonists had stockpiled guns and powder in
Concord, he decided to act. On the night of April 18, 1775, he dispatched nearly 1,000
troops from Boston. He hoped to catch the colonists by surprise and thus to avoid
bloodshed. But all British activities were carefully watched by the patriots, and William
Dawes and Paul Revere rode out to warn people in the countryside that the British were
coming.
When British regulars (known as redcoats because of their uniform jackets)
arrived at Lexington the next morning, they found several dozen minutemen waiting for them
on the town's common. Someone fired--no one knows who fired first--and eight minutemen
were killed and another dozen or so were wounded. Then the British marched on Concord and
destroyed what was left of the store of guns and powder, most of which had been hastily
removed by the patriots. During the redcoats' entire march back to Boston, minutemen
harrassed them, firing from behind fences, houses, trees, and rocks. By the end of the
day, the redcoats suffered three times more casualties than had the colonists.
Whatever the truth of who fired the first shot, the patriots were first to
get their version of the events out to the American public. The effect was to rally
hundreds, if not thousands, of colonists to the rebellion. When the Second Continental
Congress met three weeks later--the meeting had been scheduled since October--it agreed to
support Massachusetts in the conflict. Even so, many representatives disagreed among
themselves about the purpose of the fighting.
At one end of the continuum of opinion were such men as Sam and John Adams
of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia who already favored independence. At
the other end of that continuum were such men as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania who hoped
for a quick settlement and reconciliation with Great Britain. Most delegates, like most
colonists, were moderates with opinions somewhere in the middle of that continuum. Over
the next year of conflict, bungling British policy-makers tried to recruit Indians,
slaves, and foreign mercenaries, they blockaded colonial ports, and they rejected all
efforts at conciliation. These actions pushed more and more colonists to favor
independence.
For additional documents related to these topics, search
American Memory using such key words
as General Thomas Gage, Richard Henry Lee, Peyton Randolph, minutemen, specific dates such as April 18, 1775,
and the terms found in the
documents to the right of the page. Another strategy is to browse relevant collections by
date.
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