In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, historians Rick Atkinson, author of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777; Mary Beth Norton, author of 1774: The Long Year of Revolution; and Rosemarie Zagarri, author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic, join Jeffrey Rosen to explore the events leading to the first shots of the American Revolution, the battles themselves, and the colonists’ response to this pivotal moment in history.
Please follow We the People and Live at the National Constitution Center on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
Today’s episode was produced by Samson Mostashari and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock and Dave Stotz. Research was provided by Yara Daraiseh, Gyuha Lee, and Samson Mostashari.
Participants
Rick Atkinson is the author of seven narrative histories about five American wars. His most recent book is The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, which spent nearly three months on the New York Times bestseller list in 2019. He is also the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy―An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light―among other books.
Mary Beth Norton is the author of five books and co-editor of several others. Her textbook, A People and a Nation—a survey of U.S. history written with five other authors—has been published in 10 editions and has sold more than 500,000 copies. Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University. Her most recent book is 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.
Rosemarie Zagarri is a distinguished university professor at George Mason University. She has published four books, the most recent of which is Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Her articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals and in numerous edited collections. Her latest book project is titled Liberty and Oppression: Thomas Law and the Problem of Empire in Colonial British India and the Early American Republic.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (2019)
- Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (2020)
- Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2008)
Excerpt from interview: Rosemarie Zagarri explains Massachusetts led the rebellion against Britain due to taxes, the Boston Massacre, and the Tea Party, which led to the Intolerable Acts.
Rosemarie Zagarri: I think one of the big questions here is how did Massachusetts become the center of the nascent rebellion against Great Britain? And Massachusetts was from a very early date, a very active participant in civic government and self government. Their whole tradition of town meetings is a very robust assembly. But they were loyal subjects of the crown and like most other colonists at the end of the French and Indian War, didn't anticipate separating from Great Britain. But as Rick mentioned, circumstances changed and Parliament for the first time started taxing the colonists directly. And that changed the game. And Massachusetts, the people of Massachusetts, the political leaders of Massachusetts, very quickly took the lead in resisting what they saw as parliamentary infringements on their right to self government. And so, you see some of the most violent and some of the most robust actions against the Stamp Act of 1765 in Boston and in Massachusetts. In fact, a rioting mob in Massachusetts in The summer of 1765 attacked Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's house and actually dismantled the house, hacked it apart, stole his valuables and his family barely made it away with their lives.
So, Massachusetts was gaining a reputation for radicalism. After the repeal of the Stamp Act. I think some people hoped that things would go back to normal. They did, very, very briefly. But American colonists were on the alert. And in 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which the colonists once again saw as an infringement on their own right to tax themselves. And so, there was once again a revival of protest. And it's at this point in 1768 that the British decided to send in two regiments of troops to Boston. And they entered on October 1st, 1768. And on that date a woman named Mercy Otis Warren, whose family was at the center of the revolution in Boston, wrote these words in a book she published, "The History of the American Revolution." The American war may be dated from the hostile parade of this day, a day which marks with infamy the councils of Great Britain. So, in her mind, and in the minds of many other colonists, the use of a standing army against what they regarded as peaceful civilians was really a major turning point. And the relationship between Bostonians and Massachusetts deteriorated further from there.
That led to, of course, the so-called Boston Massacre in March of 1770. Situation continued to be tense after that. Bostonians commemorated the Boston Massacre every year on March 5th by having their speakers dress up in togas and talk about how great the colonists were for standing up to British tyranny. And so, I just want to emphasize how tense things were in Massachusetts. And then that led to, after the passage in 1773 by Parliament of the Tea act, which was actually not designed to tax the colonists, but to help the British East India Company. It would have resulted, the colonists feared, in them inadvertently paying the tax on tea. And so to preempt that, the Bostonian leaders organized this group event that led to the dumping of the tea in Boston harbor in December of 1773, which in turn led Parliament to pass these very, very harsh acts we call the Intolerable Acts, or they call the Intolerable Acts, which were meant to make Boston pay for the tea, which curbed the right to self government among Bostonians and in Massachusetts more generally, which was an attempt to isolate Boston from the rest of the colonies, to isolate Massachusetts.
Excerpt from interview: Rick Atkinson describes how a British march to seize arms in Concord triggered the Revolutionary War at Lexington with the first shots fired.
Rick Atkinson: He's [General Gage] not going to chase people like Samuel Adams and John Hancock all over New England. He thinks that that's a losing proposition. But he is going to try and seize what he knows to be caches of munitions in places like Concord. Concord specifically. So, this 1900 word order for Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith says, "March with a group of picked men. There'll be about 800 of them in Concord. Seize what you can, come back and do it quickly." What we see on the night of April 18th is Colonel Smith tries to tiptoe out of London, out of Boston. All of Boston, of course, is entirely aware that there's a column of 800 British troops going out. Warnings are sent out to the countryside. Famously, two couriers in particular, William Dawes and another guy, a silversmith named Paul Revere. They carry word out into the countryside, not that the British are coming, which wouldn't have made sense to people who at the time still thought of themselves as British. This would be like saying we are coming. But what Revere is quoted as calling out over and over is the regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army coming out of Boston.
This column heads toward Lexington, which is on the way to Concord, 18 miles from Boston. And Colonel Smith sends an advance party, 200 men, because he wants them to seize the bridges over the Concord River. They get to Lexington, and they find that the rebels there have been alerted. There is a group, initially it's about 150 militiamen. They have waited and waited and waited, and they get bored and they're cold, and basically they disperse. Many of them go into Buckman Tavern and have a glass of flip, and then there is an alarm that in fact they are coming. And so about 70, maybe a bit fewer, muster again on Lexington Common. And the vanguard of this British column showed up. Officers, British officers, yelling, "Disperse, you rebels." The commander on the scene at the time, Captain John Parker, who is dying of tuberculosis, orders his men to disperse. They turn their backs. A shot is fired. No one knows who fired the first shot, but undisciplined fire, particularly by the British, continued for several minutes. And at the end of that time, you've got eight Americans dead, 10 wounded, and the American Revolution has begun.
The British soldiers gather together. The rest of Colonel Smith's column closes up. They've got 800 men again, and they're going to march on to Concord. When they get to Concord, they find that the militia there are ready, waiting, and angry. And what we're going to have in Concord is a decision by the local commanders to not fight in Concord, but to retreat across, famously, the bridge over the Concord river, and they will fight there where they've got better fields of fire. More men are coming all the time to join this. We're eventually going to have about 15,000 militiamen from 58 villages and towns all over Massachusetts and eventually from other colonies in New England. About 4,000 of them are actually going to be involved in combat against the British. It's going to be a long, bloody day for everyone, but particularly for the British. Two things I'll mention, and then we'll move on. One, the shot heard around the world. Famously, it's estimated that about 75,000 rounds were fired by the Americans during this long day at Lexington, Concord, and the British retreat to Boston. About one out of every 300 of those rounds actually hit a red coat.
Muskets were notoriously inaccurate, but when you have 75,000 rounds being fired, you're going to hit eventually. About 259 British soldiers are wounded, 279 and 79 of them are killed, but the shot heard around the world probably missed. Second, the British quickly discerned that the Americans were shooting, specifically aiming at the officers. And it's true that the Americans eventually made it a practice of aiming at the reddest of the Red Coats, those that were almost vermilion in hue because they were usually worn by officers who could afford them more expensive dyes that made those coats pop. And the belief was that if you kill or incapacitate the officers, discipline falls apart and you've got a leg up. And this begins, really, on April 19th, 1775. I'll stop there. We'll pick up the rest of the battle later.
Excerpt from interview: Mary Beth Norton highlights that while most colonists opposed the "Murder Act," the war divided them into supporters, opponents, and neutrals, with many switching sides based on control.
Mary Beth Norton: I'm going to start a little bit before the battle. There were, Rosemarie mentioned earlier, the coercive acts and the opposition that was developed to them. But I have to say that as I read what happened in 1774, there were people who defended, these are mostly future Loyalists who defended the Coercive Acts. There were people who said, "Yeah, Boston should have paid, should pay for the tea, so they deserve what they're getting." There were people who said, "You know, the changes in the Massachusetts government just made it like the rest of the colonies, so there's not a problem." But the one coercive act that everybody hated, including future Loyalists, was what they called the Murder Act. And this was the act that was officially known as the Administration of Justice Act. And basically, had it ever really been implemented, just the easiest way to think about it is that it would have moved the Boston Massacre trial to England. And it basically gave people who were trying to support British authority, either troops or civilians, the ability to kill colonists in the eyes of the colonists. And that's why they called it the Murder Act.
And everybody hated it. Everybody hated it. And so, I found nobody in 1774 who defended the Murder Act. Zero. And. But once the war started, there were debates. Obviously, the debates had continued over the later period of '74 and '75. And basically what happened was the war hardened what had been debates among a whole bunch of people and led to the people who defined themselves as Loyalists very much becoming ostracized, on the outs with the rebel community, with the committees that were in the Congresses that were now controlling the government. And they were isolated, very deliberately prevented, for the most part, from organizing themselves, and they began to flee to England, where they thought they would wait for a couple of years, or not even a couple years, a few months, and then they'd be able to come back because they were sure that the British were going to win. I mean, I think the best estimate of the eventual divisions of the American colonists was made by Paul Smith, a researcher at the Library of Congress. And he made this estimate a few years ago. We're all familiar, I think, with John Adams saying one third, one third, one third, but that's really not Right.
Basically, Paul Smith shows, I think, very clearly that the populace eventually divided about 2/5 in favor of the Revolution, about one fifth opposing the revolution, and about 2/5 in the middle, who sort of went back and forth and it kind of depended. And this is especially true in the south, of which armies were in control of the area at the time, as people changed their allegiances, which, by the way, got people who ended up on the Loyalist side into trouble when they were in England asking for compensation as Loyalists. And if they had actually at some point supported the Americans, which many people in the south had done, when the Americans were in control of areas, it got them into trouble, and the British didn't want to give them the compensation that they claimed for the loss of their property.
Full Transcript
View Transcript (PDF)
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Stay Connected and Learn More
- Questions or comments about the show? Email us at [email protected]
- Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr.
- Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate.
- Follow, rate, and review wherever you listen.
- Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube.
- Support our important work.
