Kickstarting a Revolution: A British Officer’s Perspective, Part 2: Chaos in Concord
Popular legend named it “the shot heard ‘round the world”, but on the morning of April 19, 1775, the shot that began America’s War of Independence seemed like a regrettable nuisance to British officers commanding the ‘redcoats’ marching through Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The events of that fateful day astounded and disturbed the British, who soon realized they had badly misjudged the colonists’ mentality and mood.
Kickstarting a Revolution: A British Officer’s Perspective, Part 1: Shots Fired in Lexington
Some of history’s biggest turning points have occurred in small frontier towns of no consequence, witnessed by observers who could not guess their long-term impact. One such town was Lexington in the Crown Colony of Massachusetts. On the morning of April 19, 1775, a group of British soldiers entered Lexington on a routine mission: to confiscate weapons belonging to a colonial militia. The shots fired in Lexington that day took them by surprise.