Colonists had been becoming more and more rebellious since that December night back in '73 when those trouble-makers calling themselves Sons of Liberty boarded ships full of tea in Boston harbor and threw overboard the loads. King George had ordered more troops to Boston after that in order to stunt the uprising, but for the last year and almost a half, that uprising had only grown. The Bostonians rebelling against their own government established Committees of Correspondence with others patriots in other Crown colonies to monitor the movements of Royal troops and to plan moves of their own in defiance of the King. By the winter of 1774, these trouble-makers had successfully produced more arms and munitions in anticipation of coming battles with the King's own. The main trouble-maker for the King was a Harvard graduate named Samuel Adams. Adams had befriended a very rich man named John Hancock; both became leaders of the Sons of Liberty, and the King figuratively wanted their heads. By April of 1775, the military Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had had enough of the boiling rebellion: he ordered his troops to march on both Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts - Lexington because it was rumored that Adams and Hancock were holing-up there, and Concord because it was thought an impressive amount of munitions had been stored-up there. Royal troops were ordered to capture Adams and Hancock and confiscate the weapons at Concord. So, very early in the morning of April 19, 1775, some 700 British troops marched into the town of Lexington and were met by the town's 38 or so militia... An aside here: Remember that the British troops were the military of the government of the colonies, just like the US Armed Forces is the military of the American government today. The rebels were criminals in the eyes of their government and, thus, enemies of the government's military. If you can picture that scenario clearly, and understand it was the government's military vs. citizen militias that day, you may have just gained some literal insight into why the 2nd Amendment reads: |
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Sylvanus Wood was 23-years old that April 19th morn, and several years later he committed his recollection to paper in an affidavit sworn to before a Justice of the Peace which was first published in 1858: |
I, Sylvanus Wood, of Woburn, in the county of Middlesex, and commonwealth of Massachusetts, aged seventy-four years, do testify and say that on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, I was an inhabitant of Woburn, living with Deacon Obadiah Kendall; that about an hour before the break of day on said morning, I heard the Lexington bell ring, and fearing there was difficulty there, I immediately arose, took my gun and, with Robert Douglass, went in haste to Lexington, which was about three miles distant. |
As you've just read yourself, the Battle at Lexington was hardly that as 700 vs. 38 could hardly be called any kind of a "Battle" at all. But the renown warnings of the Regulars are coming! were enough to get Samuel Adams and John Hancock out of Lexington well before the British arrived, and by the time the King's regulars marched into Concord, 500 more militia - Minutemen - were waiting for them. There, at the North Bridge of Concord, the Patriots forced all the King's men retreat...all the way back to Boston. And the more the regulars retreated, the more Minutemen came to fight them back. When the retreating British troops arrived back in Lexington, another 1,000 of their comrades were there waiting as retreating reinforcement. Still under tremendously heavy Patriot fire, the British troop, now over 1,500, made it safely to Charlestown where, with even more Minutemen converging upon it, the Siege of Boston began and the Revolutionary War was underway. As the Ides of March is eternally linked to the day Caesar was assassinated and the Roman Republic began its slide into Empire, so too it is with April 19 and the shot heard round the world that began the fall of the British Empire and the rise of the greatest republican experiment in individual liberty the world has ever known. Beware the 19th of April, indeed. |