• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1314 0

general Thomas Gage learned that the colonists had secretly stored weapons and ammunition in the tiny Massachusetts village of Concord, outside of Boston. Nearly nine hundred British troops were dispatched to seize this arsenal. The night before, silversmith Paul Revere and others rode through the countryside to warn residents of Concord, and other communities, that the British would be coming the next day. A company of armed local minutemen confronted the British regulars on the village green in the town of Lexington as the king’s troops tried to march through it on their way to Concord. A single shot was fired by someone—no one knows from which side—the “shot heard round the world,” and a battle followed, with the Redcoats chasing the Americans off the green. The British then continued to Concord, where they were engaged in another heated battle with militia. This time, the British fled and began a long march back to Boston, harassed by the militia all the way. The Americans, firing from behind buildings, trees, and stone walls, inflicted 273 casualties, with 72 dead, on the English force.

The American Revolution had begun.

The battles of Lexington and Concord, reported in colonial newspapers throughout the Atlantic seaboard, galvanized many Americans against the Crown. At the behest of Massachusetts leaders, thousands of men, young and old, left the security and comfort of their homes in the cities and on farms and joined local militia units. The formation of these companies was greeted with celebrations. In Williamsburg, Virginia, an afternoon of festivities was capped by a parade of soldiers attended by hundreds of cheering residents of the state capital. The editor of the leading newspaper in the colony wrote that Virginians were happy “that the domination of Great Britain was now at an end, so wickedly and tyrannically exercised for these twelve or thirteen years past.”1 These militia units then marched to Boston, where an army of nearly twenty thousand men was gathering to force the British out of the busy port city. There, under the command of several generals and later George Washington, the newly appointed commander in chief, these men became the first American army.

The militia companies were raised locally and were not national units like today’s army. Residents of the same town or county joined the same militia troop, along with cousins who lived nearby. Friends and men who worked in the same stores or farms joined up together. The men went to war in their own crude uniforms, carrying their own muskets. The leader of their militia was not appointed by superior officers or strangers, but elected by his own men. The officers came from all walks of life. One British army lieutenant, accustomed to professional soldiers serving as officers, was astonished that among a group of American prisoners he found a blacksmith, hatter, butcher, tanner, shoemaker, and tavernkeeper.2 The army included fathers and sons, cousins and siblings. All six brothers of the How family of Methuen, Massachusetts—David, Jonathan, James, Jacob, Isaac, and Farnham—enlisted at the same time.3 The units, with popular homegrown leaders, quickly came to represent the people of a county and, collectively, the new United States in the eyes of the American people.4 The British did not find themselves facing a professional military force, but a true people’s army.

The first American army was a sight to behold as it grew at the perimeter of Boston. Men from all over the New England states poured into the army camp. Huge tracts of white tents, brightly illuminated by campfires in the evening, expanded every day as more men arrived. Some crusty forty- and fifty-year-old veterans of the French and Indian War trudged into camp, their old uniform coats and breeches a little too tight on their frames, and regaled the men with their old war stories. Wideeyed teenaged boys, seated around campfires, listened to them with rapt attention. Everyone was ecstatic over the arrival of the bands of swaggering riflemen, in their frontier buckskin shirts, who