Battles of Lexington and Concord Totally Explained

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but no direct evidence exists that rifles were present on either side in this particular battle. (All surviving weapons from the battle on both sides were smoothbore muskets.) Hitting the dispersed British flankers was difficult, however.
   Once a militia unit had fired its ammunition at the swiftly retreating Regular Army troops, they left, went home, and turned the job over to the militiamen of the next town along the road.
   Wounded regulars rode on the cannon and were forced to hop off when they were periodically fired at gathered militia. Percy's men were often surrounded, but they'd the tactical advantage of interior lines. Percy could shift his units more easily to where they were needed, while the colonial militia were required to move around the outside of his formation. Percy gave orders that Smith's men would form the middle of the column, while the 23rd Regiment's line companies were given the task of being the column's rear guard. Because of information provided by Smith and Pitcairn about how the Americans were attacking, Percy gave orders for the rear guard to be rotated every mile or so, to allow some of his troops to rest briefly. Flanking companies were sent to both sides of the road, and a powerful force of Marines acted as the vanguard to clear the road ahead.
   Percy wrote of the colonial tactics: "...the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body. Indeed, they knew too well what was proper, to do so. Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken." Nonetheless, the main advantage the colonists enjoyed was in numbers. Heath attempted to maintain a moving circle of intentionally scattered forces by directing company-level officers in the field and sending orders to distant units marching towards them, but, since the Massachusetts Army of Observation (its proper name) hadn't yet formed a unified command structure, most disregarded him, and went on with the same tactics anyway, with or without him. Pickering's Essex county militia refused to fire on the retreating British troops, even when ordered to do so. Heath and Warren did lead skirmishers in small actions into battle themselves, though. This stage of the battle has often been correctly described as having a chaotic colonial command structure. The fighting grew more intense as Percy's forces crossed from Lexington into Menotomy (modern Arlington). Fresh militia poured gunfire into the British ranks from a distance, and individual homeowners began to fight from their own property. Some homes were also used as sniper positions. It now turned into a soldier's nightmare: house-to-house fighting. Jason Russell pleaded for his friends to fight alongside him to defend his house by saying, "An Englishman's home is his castle." He stayed and was killed in his doorway. His friends, depending on which account is to be believed either hid in the cellar, or died in the house from bullets and bayonets after shooting at the soldiers who followed them in. The Jason Russell House still stands and contains bullet holes from this fight. A militia unit that attempted an ambush from Russell's orchard was caught by flankers, and eleven men were killed, some allegedly after they'd surrendered.
   Percy lost control of his men, and British soldiers began to commit atrocities to repay for the purported scalping at the North Bridge and for their own casualties at the hands of a distant, often unseen enemy. Based on the word of Pitcairn and other wounded officers from Smith's command, Percy learned that the Minutemen were using stone walls, trees and buildings in these more thickly settled towns closer to Boston to hide behind and shoot at the column. Percy proceeded to give orders to the flank companies to clear these colonial militiamen out of such places.
   Many of the junior officers in the flank parties had difficulty stopping their exhausted, enraged men from killing everyone they found inside these buildings. For example, two innocent drunks who refused to hide in the basement of a tavern in Menotomy were killed, because they were suspected of being involved with the days events. Although many of the accounts of ransacking and burnings were exaggerated later by the colonists for propaganda value (and to get financial compensation from the colonial government), it's certainly true that taverns along the Bay Road were ransacked and the liquor stolen by the troops, who in some cases became drunk themselves. The church's communion silver was stolen but was later recovered after it was sold in Boston. Aged Menotomy resident Samuel Whittemore killed three regulars before he was attacked by a British contingent and left for dead. All told, far more blood was shed in Menotomy (now known as Arlington) than in any other town. The colonial rebels lost 25 men killed and nine wounded there, and the British lost 40 killed and 80 wounded. (The 47th Regiment of Foot and the Marines suffered the highest casualties that day, in Menotomy.) Each was about half of the day's fatalities.

Menotomy to Charlestown

The British troops crossed the border into Cambridge, and the fight grew more intense. Fresh militia arrived in close array instead of in a scattered formation, and Percy used his two artillery pieces and flankers at a crossroads called Watson's Corner to inflict heavy damage on them.
Earlier in the day, Heath had ordered the Great Bridge to be dismantled. Percy's brigade was about to approach this broken-down bridge and a riverbank filled with militia when Percy directed his troops down a narrow track (near modern-day Porter Square) and onto the road to Charlestown. The militia (numbering about 4,000) were unprepared for this movement, and the circle of fire was broken. An American force moved to occupy Prospect Hill (in modern-day Somerville) which dominated the road, but Percy moved his cannon to the front and dispersed them with his last rounds of ammunition.
A large militia force arrived from Salem and Marblehead. They might have cut off Percy's route to Charlestown, but these men halted on nearby Winter Hill and allowed the British to escape. Some accused the commander of this force, Colonel Timothy Pickering, of permitting the troops to pass because he still hoped to avoid war by preventing a total defeat for the regulars. Pickering later claimed that he'd stopped on Heath's orders, but Heath denied this. It was nearly dark when Pitcairn's Marines defended a final attack on Percy's rear as they entered Charlestown. The regulars took up strong positions on hills. Some of them had been without sleep for two days and had marched 40 miles (65 km) in 21 hours, eight hours of which had been spent under fire. But now they held high ground at sunset while supported by heavy guns from the HMS Somerset. Gage quickly sent over line companies of two fresh regiments—the 10th and 64th—to occupy the high ground in Charlestown and build fortifcations. Although they were begun, the fortifications were never completed and would later be a starting point for the militia works built two months later in June before the Battle of Bunker Hill. General Heath studied the position of the British Army and decided to withdraw the militia to Cambridge.

Aftermath

In the morning, Gage awoke to find Boston besieged by a huge militia army, numbering 20,000, which had marched from throughout New England. This time, unlike during the Powder Alarm, the rumors of spilled blood were true, and the Revolutionary War had begun. The militia army continued to grow as surrounding colonies sent men and supplies. The Continental Congress would adopt and sponsor these men into the beginnings of the Continental Army. Even now, after open warfare had started, Gage still refused to impose martial law in Boston. He persuaded the town's selectmen to surrender all private weapons in return for promising that any inhabitant could leave town.
In terms of accomplishments and casualties this wasn't a major battle. However, in terms of supporting the political strategy behind the Intolerable Acts and the military strategy behind the Powder Alarms, the battle was a significant British failure because the expedition contributed to the fighting it was intended to prevent and because few weapons were seized.
The actual fighting was followed by a war for British political opinion. Within four days of the battle, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had collected scores of sworn testimonies from militiamen and from British prisoners. When word leaked out one week after the battle that Gage was sending his official description of events to London, the Provincial Congress sent over 100 of these detailed depositions on a faster ship. They were presented to a sympathetic official and printed by the London newspapers two weeks before Gage's report arrived. Gage's official report was too vague on particulars to influence anyone's opinion. Even George Germaine, no friend of the colonists, wrote, "…the Bostonians are in the right to make the King's troops the aggressors and claim a victory." Politicians in London tended to blame Gage for the conflict instead of their own policies and instructions. The British troops in Boston also often blamed Gage for Lexington and Concord. John Adams left his home in Braintree to ride along the battlefields on the day after the fighting. He became convinced that "the Die was cast, the Rubicon crossed." Thomas Paine in Philadelphia had previously thought of the argument between the colonies and the Home Country as "a kind of law-suit", but after news of the battle reached him, he "rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever." George Washington received the news at Mount Vernon and wrote to a friend, "…the once-happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?" A group of hunters on the frontier named their campsite Lexington when they heard news of the battle in June. Their campsite eventually became the city of Lexington, Kentucky.

Legacy

It was important to the early American government that an image of British fault and American innocence be maintained for this first battle of the war. The history of Patriot preparations, intelligence, warning signals, and uncertainty about the first shot was rarely discussed in the public sphere for decades. The story of the wounded British soldier at the North Bridge, hors de combat, struck down on the head by a Minuteman using a hatchet, the purported "scalping", was strongly suppressed. Depositions mentioning these activities were not published and were returned to the participants. Paintings portrayed the Lexington fight as an unjustified slaughter.
The issue of which side was to blame grew during the early nineteenth century. For example, older participants' testimony in later life about Lexington and Concord differed greatly from their depositions taken under oath in 1775. All now said the British fired first at Lexington, whereas fifty or so years before, they weren't sure. All now said they fired back, but in 1775, they said few were able to. The "Battle" took on an almost mythical quality in the American consciousness. Legend became more important than truth. A complete shift occurred, and the Patriots were portrayed as actively fighting for their cause, rather than as suffering innocents. Paintings of the Lexington skirmish began to portray the militia standing and fighting back in defiance.
In 1837, in his Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson immortalized the events at Old North Bridge:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled; Here once the embattled farmers stood; And fired the shot heard round the world.

(What he did wasn't meant to disparage the events at Lexington Common [whichwould not be dubbed the more romantic "Lexington Green" until the 1850s] hours before, but rather to acknowledge that only at Concord were the colonists first able to fire back at the regular army, under orders of their own commanders. The shot isn't one you can hear, but rather an idea, which so many all over the world took as inspiration for their own struggles of liberation.
   As for the "flag to April's breeze unfurled"...well, there were no flags at the North Bridge, April 19, 1775. No accounts even mention the famed Bedford flag being used anywhere that day. There had been a liberty cap and unknown flag on a flagpole on a hill near the town, but it had been quickly chopped down by the British when they entered the town about an hour before.)
   After 1860, several generations of schoolchildren memorized Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Paul Revere's Ride. Historically it's inaccurate (Despite what the poem says, Paul Revere never made it to Concord, for example), but it captures the idea that an individual can change the course of history. Anglophilia in the United States after the turn of the twentieth century led to more balanced approaches to the history of the battle. During World War I, a film about Paul Revere's ride was seized under the Espionage Act of 1917 for promoting discord between the United States and Britain.
   The tactics of the British Army at Lexington and Concord have often been compared, albeit wrongly, to those of American troops in the Vietnam War. During the Cold War, the right-wing in the United States portrayed the Minutemen as symbols of free enterprise, while the left-wing portrayed them as anti-imperialists. Today, the battle is often cited by those on both sides of gun control and Second Amendment issues in the United States.
   In 1961, novelist Howard Fast published April Morning, an account of the battle from a fictional 15-year-old's perspective, and the book has been frequently assigned in secondary schools. A film version was produced for television in 1987, starring Chad Lowe and Tommy Lee Jones. Patriots' Day is celebrated in honor of the battle in Massachusetts, Maine, and Wisconsin on the third Monday of April. Annual re-enactments of the battle occur each Patriots' Day on Lexington Green, and ceremonies and firings are held at the North Bridge in Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord.

Centennial commemoration

On April 19, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant and members of his cabinet joined 50,000 persons to mark the 100th anniversary of the battles. The sculpture by Daniel Chester French, The Minute Man, was unveiled on that day. A formal Ball took place in the evening at the Agricultural Hall in Concord.

Bicentennial commemoration

The Town of Concord invited 700 prominent U.S. citizens and leaders from the worlds of government, the military, the diplomatic corps, the arts, sciences, and humanities to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the battles. On April 19, 1975, as a crowd estimated at 110,000 gathered to view a parade and celebrate the Bicentennial in Concord, President Gerald Ford delivered a major speech near the North Bridge, televised to the nation. He said, in part,

Freedom was nourished in American soil because the principles of the Declaration of Independence flourished in our land. These principles, when enunciated 200 years ago, were a dream, not a reality. Today, they're real. Equality has matured in America. Our inalienable rights have become even more sacred. There is no government in our land without consent of the governed. Many other lands have freely accepted the principles of liberty and freedom in the Declaration of Independence and fashioned their own independent republics. It is these principles, freely taken and freely shared, that have revolutionized the world. The volley fired here at Concord two centuries ago, 'the shot heard round the world,' still echoes today on this anniversary.

President Ford laid a wreath at the base of The Minute Man statue and then respectfully observed as Sir Peter Ramsbotham, the British Ambassador to the United States, laid a wreath at the grave of British soldiers killed in the battle. Mr. Ford then rode in his presidential limousine to Lexington, where he delivered brief remarks before 50,000. The President departed nearby Hanscom Air Force Base aboard Air Force One, with his aircraft passing low over Concord before heading south to Washington, D.C. The Bicentennial commemoration of the battles included the issue of a U.S. postage stamp featuring a painting by artist Henry Sandham (1842-1912) and a Franklin Mint coin. Several musical pieces were commissioned to be written and performed for the Bicentennial events, such as Norman Dello Joio's "Satiric Dances", Joyce MeKeel's "Toward the Source", as well as David Fielding Smith's award-winning play, A Flurry of Birds.

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