In the fall of 1774, only months from the confrontation at the North Bridge, the Town of Concord was a thriving farming community and a regional trading hub accessible to Boston via two roads and with a population of nearly 1,500 inhabitants. The Town had grown gradually since its incorporation in 1635. Townspeople actively engaged in Town government and established businesses, schools, and churches to support the needs of its growing population. The inhabitants regularly squabbled over factional conflicts, but the community was harmonious in many respects.
The people of Massachusetts were slow to anger, but when they got mad, there was hell to pay. They protested the Stamp Act in 1765, but they remained British subjects. They denounced the killing of five civilians in the Boston Massacre in 1770, but they didn’t strike back against the soldiers who patrolled their streets.
What finally provoked them to take up arms was a play by the English government to disenfranchise them—in effect, to suppress their voting rights. The Massachusetts Government Act, passed by the British Parliament in May 1774, was the most intolerable of the so-called Intolerable Acts.
On the morning of April 19, 1775, 71-year-old Martha Moulton witnessed a terrifying scene: hundreds of red-coated British Regulars marching into the town of Concord. These men were on orders from British General Thomas Gage to seize and destroy contraband military supplies stockpiled by the Provincial Congress. The ensuing conflict between the Regulars and Provincials sparked the American Revolution.
Concord, Massachusetts, is home to two important revolutions: a military one starting on April 19, 1775, and a moral, intellectual, and ideological one, epitomized more than half a century later by the Transcendentalist movement and its staunch support for the abolition of those enslaved in America. Few heroes in American history resonate so strongly with both of these movements as the iconic Frenchman, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Grab your shovel and a rope, we’re going to go dig up two bodies. It won’t take long; we just need their heads. We’ll start by making our way down the Battle Road from Concord Center towards the neighboring town of Lincoln, retracing the frantic footsteps of King George’s men as they fled back to Boston on April 19th, 1775. The unexpected battle at the North Bridge still ringing in their ears, the British troops and colonists were engaged in an 18-mile battle back to Boston, sometimes collectively referred to as “The Battle of Concord.” Along the road in Lincoln, near Hartwell’s Tavern, a colonist’s musket ball slammed into the head of a British solider. Legend says that, on impact, the soldier’s body levitated high into the air before crashing dead to the ground. Around him, four more British soldiers were struck down, blood seeping through their blood red jackets into the dirt of centuries now below our feet.
Imagine regiments of heavily armed men marching past your front door with grim determination—almost 800 of them, half the population of Concord in 1775. That was the scene that greeted the residents of the town on the morning of April 19th of that year.
If you weren’t one of the well-trained Minutemen loading your musket at the North Bridge, what was it like to be in Concord on the morning of that historic day?
There are places where you can stand for a moment between worlds. Concord Center’s Main Street is one of them. Over it, on April 19th, 1775, British officer Major John Pitcairn crossed from a world securely under English sovereignty and into one at war, fast on its way to American Independence.
Have you ever tried to quickly clean up the house before last minute guests come over? Heart pounding down the seconds until their obnoxiously presumptuous fists knock on the door, you do a little frantic shoving, maybe commit a little bit of treason, and hope the house looks presentable.
April 19th, 1775, 3 AM:65-year-old farmer, Massachusetts Provincial Congress member, and local militia commander Colonel James Barrett lay sleeping next to his wife Rebecca in their farmhouse two miles outside of Concord Center. The fields around their home and nearby mill were quiet in the darkness - and full of artillery and stores needed to support a Continental Army in the making.
The holiday season is here; time for awkward family gatherings! And if you were Concord resident Phebe Bliss Emerson, you might find yourself in the middle of one.
Born in 1741, Phebe was the second child of the Reverend Daniel Bliss. Her family lived in Concord, MA, where Rev. Bliss was the pastor of the Congregational Church from 1738-1764. Rev. Bliss’ fire and brimstone sermons left his parishioners quaking, crying, and praying for salvation.
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Thus cried Shakespeare’s King Richard the III during the Battle of Bosworth as his horse was cut out from under him during England’s War of the Roses for control of the English throne. No horse came for Richard, and his kingdom was lost to Henry Tudor (Henry VII). But 290 years later, a horse did materialize in the darkness, galloped towards Concord, Massachusetts, and once again the power of the English throne was transformed.
