The Shot Heard Round the World
Wednesday, April 19, 1775, dawned “clear and fair” with a “fresh wind,” Dr. John Jefferies of Boston wrote in his diary—“serene” and “pleasant,” a Salem diarist added. In Lexington, it was “a normally crisp morning and an afternoon somewhat on the cool side, skies fair, wind movement fresh,” the meteorologist David Ludlum later wrote. “In all, an ideal day for outdoor activity.”
But the day was far from serene or pleasant on the long road back to Charlestown from the little village of Concord. “We retired for 15 miles under an incessant fire, which like a moving circle, surrounded and followed us wherever we went,” a British soldier wrote. “It was impossible not to lose a good many men.”
American militiamen, hidden behind stone walls, trees, and farmhouses, took aim and relentlessly bombarded the King’s troops. “Every piece of wood, every rock by the wayside, served as a lurking place,” George Bancroft wrote. “Scarce ten of the Americans were at any time seen together.”
Both exhausted and annoyed, a British soldier recalled, “I had my hat shot off my head three times. Two balls went through my coat and carried away my bayonet from my side.” From the vantage point of the country’s hills, John Andrews gazed down and observed “a scene the most shocking New England ever beheld,” he recorded the next day in his diary. “It was very bloody for several hours.”
The night before, Lt. Col. Francis Smith stood on the beach in Back Bay and opened a sealed envelope containing secret orders from the British commander Thomas Gage. “You will march with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever.”
Twenty longboats then carried twenty-one companies of light infantry and grenadiers—eight hundred British troops in all—across the Charles River to marshy Lechmere Point, where they marched under the cover of darkness to Concord.
Speculation and rumors of a British expedition into the countryside, aided by a sophisticated patriot spy system that all but confirmed an offensive action days prior, doomed the secrecy of Gage’s plan from the beginning. Two lanterns, indicating a departure by sea, hung in the bell tower of Old North Church on Salem Street to warn those across the river in Charlestown.
Instructed by Joseph Warren, Paul Revere rode through the countryside and alerted the inhabitants; his primary objective, however, was to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were hidden at the Lexington parsonage of the Reverend Jonas Clarke. “The regulars are coming out,” Revere warned as he rode through the countryside.
As night became early morning, scores of militiamen turned out to meet the British regulars at both Lexington and Concord. While it is impossible to know with certainty who fired the first shots at Lexington—both claimed it was the other side—we do know what happened next.
“Without any order of regularity, the light infantry began a scattered fire,” a British officer later wrote. “The men were so wild they could hear no orders.”
Lexington, the historian Arthur Bernon writes, “was less a battle or even a skirmish than an hysterical massacre at the hands of badly disciplined British soldiers.” When the smoke from the gunpowder cleared, eight Americans lay dead and nine were wounded. The British suffered only three casualties, all light wounds—two soldiers and one horse. Escaping in a carriage as the shots rang out, Samuel Adams, joyous and “with the voice of a prophet,” declared, “Oh, what a glorious morning is this!”
At Concord Bridge, three minutes of gunfire left two militiamen and two regulars dead, along with thirteen wounded. “Now the war has begun,” Noah Parkhurst from Lincoln said, “and no one knows when it will end.” Years later, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would memorialize the musket fire in his “Concord Hymn.”
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.”
The march back to Charlestown was bloodier than either side had experienced at either location. Exhausted, many wounded, and all angry, the British soldiers “were so wild and irregular that there was no keeping ‘em in order,” an officer recalled. “The plundering was shameful.” The killing, too, was cruel and indiscriminate. “All that were found in the houses were put to death,” the Lieutenant Barker confided in his diary.
By sunset, the king’s troops had suffered almost 300 casualties; the militiamen, 93. “Thus ended this expedition, which from beginning to end was as ill planned and ill executed as it was possible to be,” Barker wrote—and all “for a few trifling stores.”
“Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find themselves much mistaken,” Lord Percy wrote of the Americans. “You may depend upon it, that as the rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go through with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home.”
In one day, the nature of the constitutional struggle had changed. “The Battle of Lexington,” John Adams wrote, “changed the instruments of warfare from the pen to the sword.”
To John Andrews, it was a heartbreaking sight. “When I reflect and consider that the fight was between those whose parents but a few generations ago were brothers, I shudder at the thought,” he told his diary; “there’s no knowing where our calamities will end.”
Rather than strangling the budding revolution in its cradle, London had swung open the rails and set it free. Riding through the countryside, John Adams saw a people strengthened, not weakened. Their condition, he wrote, “did not diminish my ardor in the cause; they, on the contrary, convinced me that the die was cast, the Rubicon passed.”
“We are at last plunged into the horrors of a most unnatural war,” Joseph Warren wrote to Benjamin Franklin. “Whatever price our brethren [in England] may be pleased to put on their constitutional liberties, we are authorized to assure you that the inhabitants of [the colonies]… are inflexibly resolved to sell theirs only at the price of their lives.”
A few weeks later, Warren, refusing to retreat, died fighting at Bunker Hill.