As part of the America250 celebrations, new content from the commemorative publication, Discover the Battle Road, will appear here twice weekly. The latest update features: "An Enemy to This Town: The Lexington Tea Burning" and "A Turning Point at Wright's Tavern." Join the people of Lexington as they burn their tea in protest (Charlestown quickly followed suit), and then journey down the road a short way to Concord and learn more about the pivotal role of Wright's Tavern in the American Revolution.
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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.
It was the law of the land that every man between the ages of 16 and 60 was required to serve in his town’s militia. They were not paid and met twice each year to conduct marching and musket drills. By contrast, minute companies were paid and met twice each week to drill and train and were arguably among the best trained soldiers in the area when hostilities broke out in April of 1775.
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.
John Adams once stated that “the Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people” long before the start of the Revolutionary War. Years before British soldiers fired on the townspeople in the first battle of the war, Lexington was fighting with economics rather than weapons.
As hostilities grew between Massachusetts and the English government in the 1770s, popular opinion was divided. Concord’s “Patriot preacher,” Rev. William Emerson, spoke out for liberty and served as chaplain for Concord’s minutemen. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, lawyer Daniel Bliss, remained loyal to the King, and would be forced to flee for his life to Canada when war erupted in 1775.
At the end of the Seven Years’ War (called the French and Indian War in America), England emerged as the big winner. It had gained control of eastern North America, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from Labrador to Louisiana.
This victory, sealed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, came at a steep price. England’s national debt had swelled by an additional £59 million, equivalent to nearly £15 billion today. And the drain on the Treasury didn’t stop there. England had to deploy thousands of soldiers to keep the French and Spanish out and to keep the Indigenous population under control.
April 19, 1775, marked the first battle of the American Revolution. On that day, 700 British soldiers marched from Boston to Concord to seize a stockpile of military arms and supplies. The expedition caused Patriot leaders to raise the alarm and muster the militia. The scale of the response is truly staggering and hints at a surprising amount of organization.
