The Acton Minutemen were formed at the end of 1774 at a town meeting. Tensions with England had grown to a boil, and towns everywhere were responding by training their men to fight. The town of Acton, which had previously been part of Concord, chose their best men from their existing militia units to form the new Minute Company, and those men voted 30-year-old Isaac Davis as their Captain.
Lafayette was a French aristocrat who volunteered with the Continental Army, defying the will of his family to pursue what his heart commended him to do. His commitment to the American cause continues to be a powerful reminder of the universal appeal of the American Revolution.
In the autumn of 1774, colonists in Concord were preparing for the cold winter months and a potential military conflict with the British Army. This particular winter was quite difficult due to a domino cause and effect of events.
Shortly after sunrise, Reuben Brown crouched on a hill just outside the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. He was out of breath from his six-mile ride from Concord, and what he saw didn’t make him breathe any easier. More than 700 British troops were on the road, and 70-odd provincial militia were all that stood between them and Concord.
In 1774 when Parliament passed the Boston Port Act in an attempt to break the Massachusetts colonists of their resistance to crown policy, it also authorized English General and acting Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage to undertake any military measures necessary to help bring the colony under control. In late winter and early spring of 1775, Gage received a series of dispatches from London ordering him to not only arrest the leaders of Massachusetts’ opposition party but to launch a major strike against the apparently growing provincial stockpiles of weapons and munitions located throughout eastern Massachusetts.
In 1774, a war between England and Massachusetts Bay Colony appeared inevitable. In preparation, Massachusetts militiamen relied upon muskets obtained from various sources: inheritance, the French and Indian War, the Siege of Louisbourg, and commercial markets.
The result was a variety of weapons of different caliber, origins, and values.
There are 34 muscles in the human hand.
You can stretch them wide to claim something or clasp them tight to hold on. It depends on what your brain commands, but sometimes, it’s not up to you; the hand of fate cuts in
and pushes you where you were never
meant to be.
Brands thinks we get important facts backwards in regard to the loyalists. As he points out, historical retrospect leads us to treat the decision for independence as the default for Americans in the 1770s, but in fact the opposite was true.
In war, there are many ways to define victory. So, who won the Battles of Lexington and Concord? On the surface this may seem simple. The colonists were able to keep most of their military supplies safely out of British hands. The British soldiers then suffered heavy casualties during their retreat to Boston where they were trapped and besieged. However, though things certainly did not go the way they wanted, did the British Army actually lose on April 19, 1775? The answer depends upon how you define victory.
Colonial rebels in Concord did not wait until April 1775 to reject British rule. They did so in October of 1774, a full six months earlier—and a small tax on tea was the least of their complaints.
Earlier that year, as punishment for the Boston Tea Party, Parliament had passed the so-called Coercive Acts. Today, closing the Port of Boston gets all the press, but two different measures actually tipped the scales and led to revolution. The Massachusetts Government Act revoked the 1691 Provincial Charter, effectively disenfranchising the citizenry: no more town meetings, no more say in choosing local and provincial officials. The Administration of Justice Act allowed the Crown to transport accused citizens to Great Britain for trial. Before this, the colonial population was divided between so-called “Whigs” or “patriots,” who protested various acts of Parliament, and so-called “Tories” or “government men,” those more sympathetic to British law. But after these measures, only a handful of diehards dared argue that disenfranchisement was the way forward. Their constitution nullified and their right to a fair trial abrogated, people throughout Massachusetts, more united than ever before and possibly ever since, rose up as a body to say: “No way!”
