The date April 19, 1775 has been etched in the New England mind since it happened.
The storied events of the day started on April 18, 1775, around 9:30 p.m., when Paul Revere rode from Boston to Lexington, Mass., to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams the British were on their way to arrest them. He supposedly shouted “The British are coming,” only he didn’t, because he was British himself. Redcoats marched to Lexington, where patriot minute men lined up on the green. Someone fired a shot, setting off the American Revolution.
Then the redcoats marched to Concord, Mass., where they fought more patriots at Old North Bridge. The Lexington Alarm went out, and militia from neighboring towns shot up the retreating redcoats from behind stone walls.
Sort of.
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood
1. Paul Revere’s ride wasn’t that big a deal.
His obituary didn’t even mention it. The death notice featured his subsequent success as a businessman with many friends. The ride didn’t become famous until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about it many years later.
Revere, of course, had a lot of help. Not just Billy Dawes or Samuel Prescott, either. Approximately 40 riders set out that night to warn that “the regulars are out!”
The battle at the Old North Bridge in Concord
2. Concord and Lexington.
The question, “Where was the shot heard round the world fired?” surfaced in 1824. Then the Marquis de Lafayette visited all 24 states to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence. When he arrived in Lexington, people told him he’d reached the “birthplace of American liberty.” But then he went to Concord, where people told him the patriots made the “first forcible resistance” there.
That infuriated Lexington, having been deprived of “the honour of having raised the first standard of an armed opposition to the unjust and tyrannical measures of the mother country.”
So in 1825, the Lexington Town Meeting appointed a committee to publish a statement of facts about the April 19, 1775 affair, “as may be supported by undoubted testimony.”
From that testimony, Elias Phinney compiled a book. In it, he explained the confusion. Shortly after the battles, British Gen. Thomas Gage claimed the patriots fired the first shot. To refute that claim, witnesses in Lexington said the patriots hadn’t even fired.
But in the opening days of the war, Phinney wrote, no one wanted to admit that Lexington patriots had shot at British regulars. The outcome of the war was then far from certain, and militiamen identified as shooters could wind up on the gallows.
The argument went on for years. President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 considered not showing up to the centennial celebration of April 19, 1775 because of the animosity between the two towns.
In 1894, Lexington petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature to proclaim April 19 as “Lexington Day.” Concord countered with a petition to call it “Concord Day.” Gov. Frederic T. Greenhalge came up with a compromise to honor the shot heard round the world: Patriots’ Day.
The Minute Man
3. The “Shot Heard Round the World” wasn’t uttered until 1837.
The anonymous first shot fired in anger or fear on April 19, 1775 may be best described as the shot heard round the world, but no one described it as such for more than 60 years after it was fired.
A poet came up with that graceful turn of phrase.
In the days after the hostilities broke out in Massachusetts, the incident was just another dustup between a group of uppity Americans and the British soldiers tasked with keeping order in the North American colonies. Then, as the scale of the hostilities became more apparent, the skirmishes of Lexington and Concord were eclipsed by pitched battles that stretched from Boston and Saratoga to Trenton and Yorktown.
The news account of the Battle of Lexington and Concord reprinted in newspapers around the colonies was prosaic and perfunctory: A general battle ensued which, from what we can learn, was supported with great Spirit on both sides, and continued until the King’s Troops reversed to Charlestown, which was after sunset. Numbers are kill’d and wounded on both Sides.
The reports concerning this unhappy affair and the causes that concurred to bring on an engagement, are so various that we are not able to collect anything confident or regular, and cannot therefore with certainty give our readers any further account of this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.
The poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson considered the enormity of the day’s events. His grandfather had watched the fight at Old North Bridge from a second-story window at The Old Manse. His grandson lived in the house. That may be why he gave the world the phrase, “the shot heard round the world,” part of “The Concord Hymn.” A chorus sung the words at the official unveiling of a The Minute Man statue by Daniel Chester French on July 4, 1837 (President Grant did come after all). It was set to the tune of “The Old Hundred,” a French melody dating to the 1500s.
Emerson clearly sided with Concord as the birthplace of the American Revolution.
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 British Entering Concord, by Amos Doolittle
4. The Weaponry Was So Lousy It’s Amazing Anyone Got Shot.
Some rudimentary math shows the unreliability of 18th century guns. The patriots, all told, started out with 77 men in Lexington and 400 in Concord. Then, when the Lexington Alarm sounded, their numbers swelled to 3,763, give or take. The British began with 700 regulars, but reinforcements brought their strength to 1,500.
Add in casualties: 49 patriots killed, 39 injured and five missing. The British suffered far worse casualties, mostly on the retreat: 73 killed, 174 wounded, 53 missing.
Historian Harry Schenawolf estimates the average patriot warrior fired off 18 rounds. That means, he wrote, that about 75,000 bullets were fired (making the battlefield a good spot for a metal detector). “Though weapons were fired at extremely close range, only one in fifteen patriots even nicked the shoulder of a redcoat,” wrote Schenawolf.
Jeremiah Lee, caught cold in a cornfield
5. Not all the deaths were caused by bullets.
Jeremiah Lee was one of the great lost leaders of the American Revolution. Lee, a Marblehead, Mass., shipping merchant, accumulated an enormous fortune. He owned a warehouse and wharf, a fleet of trading ships and fishing vessels, and he employed a great many sailors and tradesmen.
Lee believed British rule would soon ruin him and his fellow Marblehead merchants. So, he became a representative to the rebel Congress and began preparing for war. He imported cannons, powder and shot from Europe, and he established connections in Maryland and Virginia to buy war materiel. Lee also raised an interracial regiment of mariners and fishermen, and he would have led it had he lived. Instead, Col. John Glover took charge, and the Marbleheaders famously ferried Washington across the Delaware on Christmas Eve, 1776.
On the night of April 18, 1775, Lee met with his neighbor Elbridge Gerry, Sam Adams and John Hancock in Lexington. The men were plotting against the British. When Paul Revere warned the regulars were comng to arrest them (they weren’t), the men hid in a field overnight. New England weather being what it is, Lee developed pneumonia and died soon afterward – an early victim of the war.
Reenactors on the march to Lexington to commemorate the shot heard round the world.
6. The U.S. Army Got Started at David Brown’s Farm.
Officially, the Army recognizes June 14, 1775 as its birthday. The Continental Congress that day authorized one-year enlistments of riflemen to form the Continental Army.
However, just west of the Old North Bridge, minute men and militia gathered at David Brown’s farm. Together, in combat formation, they marched under orders toward the battle at the bridge. Today, the Stars and Stripes flies over what is now called the Muster Field. As an FYI, Minute men were highly mobile volunteers who trained more frequently; militia men were required by law to serve.
7. The Real Battle Took Place in Menotomy.
After the little skirmishes in Concord and Lexington, thousands of men from Eastern Massachusetts flocked to Menotomy, now Arlington. From behind trees and stone walls they shot at British troops. That battle resulted in 25 patriots and 40 British captured. Historian A. Michael Ruderman called Lexington an “accident,” Concord Bridge a “skirmish,” but Menotomy the “most brutal and deadly warfare of April 19, 1775.”
It took 230 years for Massachusetts to acknowledge one of the heroes of that battle–the oldest, bravest and craziest revolutionary.
Samuel Whittemore left his field in Menotomy, gathered his old weapons and positioned himself behind his stonewall.
When the regiment passed by, 78-year-old Samuel Whittemore stood and shot point-blank at a British regular with his musket. Then he took out his dueling pistols and shot two more soldiers to death.
The old farmer then grabbed his ornamental sword to fend off the British soldiers who swarmed over him. It didn’t go so well. The British shot him in the cheek, bayoneted him and beat him with the butts of their rifles.
When his family found him, they thought he was dead. But a doctor patched up Samuel Whittemore and he lived for another 18 years.
The Massachusetts Legislature declared him the official state hero in 2005.
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Images: Reenactors By Jrcovert – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19639046. Minute_Man_Statue_Lexington_Massachusetts.jpg: w:User:Daderot derivative work: Hohum (talk) – Minute_Man_Statue_Lexington_Massachusetts.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9425447.
