L&T Publisher Earl Watt
Perhaps the most important day for independence recently passed and no one took notice.
It was 250 years ago, April 19, 1775, when the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place.
In the grand scheme of military conflicts, it would seem rather small. It started with just a handful of Americans and a few hundred British.
But it meant so much more.
A quick glance at history tells us that the French and Indian War that ended in 1763 was the precursor to American freedom, even though the Americans had little to do with the battle.
England and France had a long history of being at each other’s throats, and the French and Indian War was just another chapter with the colonists being witnesses to the event.
Something the history books fail to share is that one of the agreements at the end of the war was the prevention of colonists from expanding into the Ohio Valley.
Seems insignificant except that in his young life, George Washington was a surveyor, and he had explored the Ohio Valley territory. He knew the vast wealth and land that was available and was one of many who felt betrayed by England to be told the colonists could not expand into the territory.
What’s worse, Parliament believed that since the conflict was in America, the American colonists should share in the costs of the war, and so they passed taxes on the colonists.
Americans had been on their own for more than a century with very little input from the Mother country. As long as the raw materials shipped to England, all was well.
But the Americans didn’t get to vote on these new taxes. Parliament had no representatives from the near 3 million people who made up the eastern seaboard of North America.
And the people started to murmur about these taxes and if the colonies really needed England for anything.
Talking treason is one thing. Doing something about it is quite another.
When colonists rioted in Boston in 1770 and several Americans ended up dead in the Boston Massacre, it was still not enough to confront Britain.
When all the taxes except tea were removed, Bostonians boarded a ship in 1773 and tossed the tea overboard in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.
Still, these civil acts of disobedience were footnotes.
But when the Americans started to gather arms in the countryside around Boston, and the British General Thomas Gage decided to disarm them, that’s when Americans were faced with a decision that would lead to one inescapable conclusion — war.
When the word came that the British were heading to Lexington and Concord to disarm the Americans, a group of about 80 Americans prepared to gather on the green near Lexington, not to confront the 400 British troops who were headed their way, but to show their resistance to the action.
Instead of simply marching by the American force which was gathered to the side of the road, the British decided to confront the rag-tag group and order them to disarm.
They didn’t.
— They didn’t. —
And legend says someone fired. Was it British? Was it American? No one knows, and it really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is the stage was set for conflict, and the British were willing to kill to maintain British authority while the Americans were willing to die for independence.
The British easily routed the small American band and left eight dead while the rest scattered from the field.
And the word of the skirmish spread like wildfire across the countryside.
By the time the British reached the North Bridge outside Concord, a force of 400 Americans gathered. But these Americans weren’t the same as they were earlier that morning. These Americans had heard of the eight killed. And as they opened fire, the British quickly headed back to Boston.
The Americans followed, brows dropped. The British Army was now an invading force on their homeland, and they were willing to fight and die for their homeland from the foreign British crown.
The Declaration of Independence was still 15 months away.
Much like any seed that is planted, it takes time to grow, but on that April morning in 1775, after the ground had been cultivated for more than a century and weathered by British force, American freedom sprung from the fields at Lexington and Concord.
Taxing the Americans was one thing, sending troops was something else, but coming after the weapons was the line Americans were not willing to endure.
While many always believe that is the rich and wealthy that push for economic gain through war, it was a group of farmers and small town people who set the tone, who stood their ground and defied the greatest military force on the planet. It took more than a year for the representatives of the people to catch up to the will of the people.
American freedom would have died in the cradle had the British been able to disarm the countryside. Boston was already occupied, and later cities like New York and Philadelphia would be taken by the British.
But not the countryside.
While military leadership like Washington and Daniel Morgan and orators like Thomas Payne and Benjamin Franklin were critical, none of it mattered without the will of the common people who were willing to die for the idea of independence.
It was their understanding of living free, of working hard for themselves and being rewarded for their labor that led those brave men to stand their ground 250 years ago.
They demonstrated something more important than military might. They showed a willingness to die for people to live free, and they changed the world.
