How did the Revolutionary War start?
April 19, 1775 – The Shot Heard ‘Round the World – Lexington and Concord
British troops acted on orders from Governor-General Thomas Gage to seize caches of arms and powder stored by American colonists in Lexington and Concord.
However, Seventy-seven armed American Minutemen, under the command of Capt. John Parker, confronted the British soldiers on Lexington Green. This was due to intelligence gathering weeks before the planned British raid. Paul Revere was among those who found out about the planned British mission. In addition the weapons had been moved to another location.
As a result, the British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse.
The Patriots refused and “the shot heard ’round the world” was fired and the American Revolution began. A phrase coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his “Concord Hymn”
The continental army or Patriots at this time comprised common men of Massachusetts, standing at Lexington and Concord against one of the greatest military forces in the world. Men who didn’t know war, but were willing to take up arms to defend the lives they built. Men and women who had no idea how their resolve that day would change the world as everyone knew it.
The fighting began at Lexington and Concord, but also along the way back to Boston, there were not just soldiers now shooting at British soldiers, but other Americans as well put down their farm tools and followed the lead to rise up against the British.
It was a civil war from the first shot.
Open hostilities between Americans and the British would end six years later with a significant British surrender ending the battle of Yorktown in Virginia where American legend says that a British army band under Lord Cornwallis played this tune when they surrendered after the Siege of Yorktown (1781). Customarily, the British army would have played an American or French tune in tribute to the victors. However, General Washington refused them the honors of war and insisted that they play “a British or German march.”
