Lexington, Mass. (AP) – Thousands of people came to this city in Massachusetts on Saturday just before dawn to attend the beginnings of the American Revolution.
In the middle of a hail of gunshots, they watched the British soldiers face a group surpassing men from Lexington Minute on Lexington Battle Green. The battle, which made eight Americans who died and 10 injured, marks the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. The day offers the opportunity to reflect at this seminal moment in history, but also to consider what this fight means today.
“It’s really capital,” said Richard Howell, who portrayed the man of Lexington Minute Samuel Tidd in the battle.
“This is one of the most sacred pieces of terrain in the country, if not the world because of what it represents,” he said. “To represent what happened that day, how a small town in Lexington was a vortex of so many things … Lexington was the first city that could bring together men and was the first to face the British assault.”
The semi-printing comes as president Donald TrumpThe learned community and other divides if it is necessary to have a part of a year before July 4, 2026, as Trump asked, or to balance any celebration with questions about women, enslaved and indigenous people and what their stories reveal.
The story of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts is half known, the myth deeply rooted.
What exactly happened in Lexington and Concord?
Reconituators can tell us that hundreds of British troops walked from Boston early in the morning of April 19, 1775 and gathered around 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) to the northwest in the city of Lexington Green.
First -hand witnesses remember that some British officers shouted: “Throwing their arms, the bad guys, you rebellious!” And that in the middle of chaos, a shot was heard, followed by a “dispersed fire” of the British. The battle became so fierce that the area rocked to burn powder. At the end of the day, the fighting had continued about 7 miles (11 kilometers) to the west for concord and some 250 British settlers and 95 settlers were killed or injured.
But no one learned who shot first, nor why. And the revolution itself was initially less a revolution than a demand for better terms.
Woody Holton, professor of early American history at the University of Southern Carolina, says that most researchers agree that the rebels of April 1775 did not seek to leave the Empire, but to repair their relationship with King George III and to return to the days preceding the stamp law, the law on tea and other disputes from the previous decade.
“The colonists did not want to turn around in 1763,” he said.
Stacy Schiff, a historian winner of the Pulitzer Prize whose books include the biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, said Lexington and Concord “galvanized the opinion precisely as the men of Massachusetts hoped that he should have been declared on April 20, 1775.”
But at the time, Schiff added: “It did not seem possible that a country and its colony came with blows.”
A fight for ages
The rebels had already believed their cause greater than a disagreement between the subjects and the leaders. Long before the turn of 1776, before the declaration of independence or that Thomas Paine boasts that “we have in our power to start the world again”, they threw themselves into a drama for the ages.
The so-called suffolk resolved from 1774, written by civic leaders of the County of Suffolk, Massachusetts, prayed for a life “unhindered by power, not blocked by channels”, a fight that would determine the “fate of this new world, and millions to be born”.
The revolution was a continuous story of surprise and improvisation. The military historian Rick Atkinson, whose “fate of the day” is the second of a trilogy planned for the war, called Lexington and Concord “a clear victory for the team at home”, if only because the British did not expect such resistance passionate by the militia of the colony.
The British, who ever underestimate those whom King George considered as a “deceived and unhappy multitude”, would be returned when the rebels quickly framed and transmitted a story blaming the royal forces.
“Once shots were fired in Lexington, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren have made all their power to collect declarations of witnesses and to circulate them quickly; it was essential that the colonies and the world understand who had pulled first,” said Schiff. “Adams was convinced that the Lexington skirmish would be” famous in the history of this country “. He knocked out to specify who had been the attackers. »»
A country still underway
None of the two parties imagined a war lasting eight years, nor had to trust what type of country would have been born. The founders united in their quest for government autonomy but differ how to actually govern and if government autonomy could even last.
The Americans have never stopped debating the balance of powers, the rules of the exhaust or the way in which the application of exhortation, “all men are created equal”.
“I think it is important to remember that the language of the founders was ambitious. The idea that it was obvious, all the men were created equal was absurd at a time when hundreds of thousands were enslaved,” said Atkinson, who quotes the poet of the 20th century Archibald Macleish affirmed that “democracy is never done”.
“I do not think that the founders have a sense of a country that would one day have 330 million people,” said Atkinson. “Our country is an unfinished project and will probably always be.”
