Let It Begin Here

'Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.'

~Attributed to Captain John Park, 19 April 1775

Shortly after dawn on the morning of 19 April, 1775, several companies of His Majesty's elite light infantry marched with high spirits and iron discipline into the sleepy Massachusetts village of Lexington. They marched under the command of Major John Pitcairn, very much the proud vanguard of a peerless army en route to the town of Concord- yet several more miles.

The mission for which they had already marched through the night from Boston was to 'seize and destroy' a large cache of military supplies stored by the Massachusetts colonial milita in Concord. The royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had ordered them out for the purpose of preventing any possible uprising by the Whig partisans and militia of Massachusetts, increasingly resistant to his attempts to exert Royal authority over the entire colony through legislative acts the colonists deemed intolerable.

This resolute English legion marched not to war, but to the prevention of war. Paradoxically, it marched to avoid a rebellion, to enforce royal authority, and to keep the peace. Yet to keep the peace and prevent a war, General Gage had sent these professional soldiers (trained only to follow orders and paid to kill whomever they were ordered to kill) to deprive free subjects of the English crown of their traditional and legal liberties. Little irony, then, that their march to keep the peace provoked the very rebellion Gage sought to avoid by sending them. After all, what peace can be built upon the reduction of free men, deprived of their freedoms and laid low to slavery? Furthermore, what manner of free men will choose the peace of slaves over the clarion call of the vigilant and the sacrifices of the just?

When these soldiers paid by the English King George III met 77 farmers of Lexington arrayed across the town common, the dice of destiny were cast. After Major Pitcairn shouted 'Disperse you rebels; damn you, throw down your arms and disperse!' and the brave men of Lexington failed to immediately comply, there issued a shot never identified, yet which provoked the English soldiers to fire several vollies at the militiamen before lowering bayonets and charging. The result would see 8 colonists dead and an additional 10 wounded, while a single English soldier suffered a wound. Shortly thereafter the soldiers were successfully reformed and continued their march to Concord, which they occupied later in the morning.

At Concord, however, they would encounter not 77 militiamen, but a progressively swelling levy of freemen in the hundreds, congregating to prevent the further loss of life, liberty and property which they saw inflicted by the King's soldiers that day. Resolved to stand and fight rather than permit their liberties to be taken by the bayonet and the bullet, these militiamen offered resistance on the North Bridge over the Concord River, and struck repeatedly against the soldiers during their withdrawal from Concord back towards Boston throughout the afternoon. By day's end an army of free men in the thousands had routed the English and laid siege to the city of Boston, determined to rise with all valour against an army brought across the sea by a distant king for the sole purpose of depriving Englishmen of their cherished freedoms and rights.


As word of the battles at Lexington, Concord and the route of the King's army along the road to Boston spread, it became the metaphorical 'shot heard round the world.' Free men who had repeatedly petitioned a tyrant for redress of their grievances had been met with usurpations, occupations and the imposition of violence. In the aftermath of the battles, the men who would go on to become the Founding Fathers of the new American Republic clearly established the moral and political dimensions of the stand made by the initial militiamen.

John Adams rode through the battlefields the morning after, and understood that 'the die was cast, the Rubicon crossed.' The distant Virginian George Washington, acclaimed hero of the French & Indian War, heard of the battles and perhaps best recognized the significance. He wrote 'the once-happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?'

Think long on that query at the end... 'But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?' To preserve liberty in the face of violent oppression and governmental usurpations, Washington recognized that a virtuous man must lament the bloodshed and pain of the conflict, but must not hesitate to fight with all vigour to secure the blessings of liberty for all posterity. Nearly two and a half centuries later, do we citizens of the American Republic recognize the same?