American Revolution

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.

The Journal of the American Revolution is pleased to announce The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) as winner of the 2020 Journal of the American Revolution Book-of-the-Year Award.

Honorable Mention is awarded to A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution by David Head (Pegasus Books).

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. 

Before the pandemic of 2020, thousands of people from all around the globe came to Concord to celebrate the events that gave birth to a new nation. In most years, the events of April 19, 1775 would be remembered with parades, reenactments, candlelight processions, living history events, and more. This year, while we are still not able to gather in large groups, Concord and its cultural institutions have come together to provide a variety of experiences, both live and online, that will honor this important day in American history.

In 2020 or early 2021, did you try to visit Concord, or leave it to go anywhere? If yes, you might have experienced global variants of fate cannonballing you into history’s category of “people who tried to go somewhere and couldn’t quite make it.”  And in this category, you would find First Lieutenant and Adjutant Welch Fusilier Frederick Mackenzie whose miserable attempted journey to Concord started in 1773, and like a stretching pandemic, never seemed to get better.

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.  

If he had lived in the eighteenth century, Henry Cooke would have been called a Master Tailor. Today we call him a historical costumer, but his tailoring is no less masterful. In an era when all clothing was hand- made, proper fit was important. Achieving the right fit and the right look means understanding the way clothing was constructed. Cooke has made a livelihood out of studying original garments, finding the best materials, and mastering the techniques of measurement, cutting and construction that make reproduction clothing look like the real thing; if you’ve been to a museum, a site with historical interpretation, or a reenactment, you may have seen his work or at least seen his influence. We spoke with him about his remarkable profession.