On the morning of April 19, 1775, a loosely assembled group of roughly seventy-seven men stood on a triangular patch of common land in the small farming town of Lexington, Massachusetts. They were not professional soldiers. They were farmers, artisans, and laborers, many of them related to one another by blood or marriage, most of them bone-tired from a night of waiting and false alarms. The militiamen were part of Lexington's "training band", a local militia organization method dating back to the Puritans, and not a minuteman company. Their captain, John Parker, was himself a farmer and mechanic who had been elected to lead them. Parker got his first military experience with the British in the French and Indian War at two of the most important battles of the war, the Siege of Louisburg in 1758 and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. At this point, John Parker was forty-six years old, suffering from tuberculosis and on his death bed. Within minutes, they would become the first Americans to face British musket fire in what would grow into a war for independence. What happened on Lexington Green that morning — confused, brief, and bloody — transformed a political crisis into an armed revolution and gave the town a permanent place in the founding story of the United States.
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HISTORICAL VOICE
Prince Estabrook: A Wound and a Question
We know three things for certain about Prince Estabrook. He was enslaved. He was at Lexington. He was wounded. Everything else is inference, imagination, or silence. Why was he there? The historical...
HISTORICAL VOICE
Jonathan Harrington: The Distance Home
The distance from where Jonathan Harrington fell to his own doorstep was perhaps one hundred feet. It might as well have been a hundred miles. Shot through the body in the first British volley, Harri...