On the morning of April 19, 1775, a column of roughly seven hundred British regulars marched into the quiet village of Concord, Massachusetts, expecting to seize a cache of provincial military supplies and return to Boston before nightfall. By sunset, the regulars were staggering back toward Charlestown under relentless fire from thousands of colonial militiamen, and the political quarrel between Parliament and its American colonies had become a shooting war. What happened in Concord that day — and in the months of preparation that preceded it — was not an accident of geography or a stroke of luck. It was the product of deliberate political organizing, logistical planning, economic resistance, and, ultimately, an extraordinary collective decision by ordinary citizens to stand in the path of the most powerful military force on earth. Concord's place in the story of American independence is not simply that of a battlefield. It is the place where the idea of citizen resistance became an irreversible fact.
PEOPLE
KEY EVENTS
PLACES TO VISIT
STORIES
HISTORICAL VOICE
Rebecca Barrett's Field
Colonel James Barrett's farm was the primary target of the British expedition. Intelligence reports had identified it as a major storage site for colonial military supplies—cannons, powder, shot, prov...
HISTORICAL VOICE
Fire! For God's Sake, Fire!
John Buttrick was forty-three years old on the morning of April 19, 1775. A farmer, a militia officer, a man who knew his neighbors and his land. He was not a professional soldier. He had never comman...