On April 19, 1775 British troops and American colonists faced off in initial skirmishes near the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord, marking the beginning of the American Revolution. Acting on orders from London to suppress the rebellious colonists, General Thomas Gage, recently appointed royal governor of Massachusetts, ordered his troops to seize the colonists' military stores at Concord.
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Did You Know?
The militia's success at Old North Bridge in Concord was memorialized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as "the shot heard round the world."
En route from Boston, the British force of 700 men was met on Lexington Green by 77 local minutemen and others who had been forewarned of the raid by the colonists' efficient lines of communication, including the ride of Paul Revere. It is unclear who fired the first shot. Resistance melted away at Lexington, and the British moved on to Concord. Most of the American military supplies had been hidden or destroyed before the British troops arrived. A British covering party at Concord's North Bridge was finally confronted by 320 to 400 American patriots and forced to withdraw.
The march back to Boston was a genuine ordeal for the British, with Americans continually firing on them from behind roadside houses, barns, trees, and stone walls. This experience established guerrilla warfare as the colonists' best defense strategy against the British. Total losses were British 273, American 95. The Battles of Lexington and Concord confirmed the alienation between the majority of colonists and the mother country, and it roused 16,000 New Englanders to join forces and begin the Siege of Boston, resulting in its evacuation by the British the following March.
Copyright © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.
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