The Outbreak
The First Continental Congress meeting at Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, addressed respectful petitions to Parliament and King but also adopted nonimportation and nonexportation agreements in an effort to coerce the British government into repealing the offending measures. To enforce these agreements, committees were formed in almost every county, town, and city throughout the colonies. In each colony, these committees soon became the effective local authorities, the base of a pyramid of revolutionary organizations with revolutionary assemblies, congresses, or conventions, and with committees of safety at the top.
This loosely knit combination of de facto governments superseded the constituted authorities and established firm control over the whole country before the British were in any position to oppose them. The de facto governments took over control of the militia and other colonial military resources such as armories and powder stores. They also identified which local militia officers could be trusted and which were known to be loyal to Britain. Where possible the various colonies reorganized the standing militia and formed rapid response units, including the famous Minutemen intended to turn out fully armed “in a minute’s notice.” In colonies where a British governor’s official control over the militia could not be challenged, volunteer companies began training under the guidance of veterans of the French and Indian War. As winter turned into spring in 1775, patriot leaders were busily shaping the military forces that, if the necessity arose, might oppose the British Army in the field.
Massachusetts, the seat of the crisis, led the way in making military preparations. The Provincial Congress, eyeing Gage’s unprecedented military force in Boston, directed town officials to formally enlist a third of their adult males as Minutemen. It began plans to combine local militia companies into regiments and started selecting generals to command the force. It also began to collect ammunition, artillery pieces, and other military stores at locations outside of Gage’s immediate reach. One of the most important of these depots lay at Concord, about twenty miles inland from Boston.
The Minuteman
The Minuteman of 1775 did not represent an entirely new idea. The Massachusetts militia’s tradition of readiness went back long before King Philip’s War; a colonywide directive in 1645 ordered that 30 percent of the entire militia force be ready “at halfe an howers warning.” The Minutemen were selected out of the wide pool of able-bodied militia—in essence the entire male population of the colony—to be ready at any time for emergency operations. They were organized into companies that usually consisted of neighbors. Most carried their own smoothbore flintlock muskets, though there was a fund to purchase weapons for militiamen too poor to buy their own. By the spring of 1775 some militia companies were drilling every week and practicing marksmanship. When word of a British advance on Concord spread through the country north of Boston in the early hours of that April Wednesday, the Minutemen were ready.
General Gage learned of the collection of military stores at Concord and determined to send a force of Redcoats to destroy them. His preparations were made with the utmost secrecy. Yet so alert and ubiquitous were the patriot eyes in Boston that when the picked British force of 700 men set out on the night of April 18, 1775, two messengers, Paul Revere and William Dawes, preceded them to spread the alarm throughout the countryside. At dawn on the next day, when the British arrived at Lexington, the halfway point to Concord, they found a body of militia drawn up on the village green. Some nervous finger— whether of a British regular or an American militiaman is unknown to this day—pressed a trigger. The impatient British regulars, apparently without any clear orders from their commanding officer, fired a volley then charged with the bayonet. The militiamen dispersed, leaving eight dead and ten wounded on the ground. The British column went on to Concord, engaged in another unanticipated skirmish, and destroyed such of the military stores as the Americans had been unable to remove. Their return journey to Boston took a civil disturbance issue and transformed it into open warfare.
By this time, the alarm had spread far and wide, and both ordinary militia and Minutemen had assembled along the British route. From behind walls, rocks, and trees, and from houses, they poured their fire into the columns of Redcoats, while the frustrated regulars found few targets for their accustomed volleys or bayonet charges. Only the arrival of reinforcements from Gage enabled the British column to get back to the safety of Boston. At day’s end the British counted 273 casualties out of a total of 1,800 men engaged; American casualties numbered 95 men, including the toll at Lexington. What happened was hardly a tribute to the marksmanship of New England farmers—it has been estimated that 75,000 shots poured from their muskets that day—but it did testify to a stern determination of the people of Massachusetts to resist any attempt by the British to impose their will by armed force.
The spark lit in Massachusetts soon spread throughout the rest of the colonies. Whatever really may have happened in that misty dawn on Lexington Green, the news that speedy couriers riding horses to exhaustion carried through the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia was of a savage, unprovoked British attack and of farmers rising in the night to protect their lives, their families, and their property. Lexington, like Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, and September 11 in subsequent years, furnished an emotional impulse that led all true patriots to gird themselves for battle. From the other New England colonies, militia poured in to join the Massachusetts men; together they soon formed a ring around Boston. Other forces mobilized under Ethan Allen of Vermont and Benedict Arnold of Connecticut seized the British forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, strategic positions on the route between New York and Canada. These posts yielded valuable artillery and other military stores. The Second Continental Congress, which assembled in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, found itself forced to turn from embargoes and petitions to the problems of organizing, directing, and supplying a military effort.
Before Congress could assume effective control, the New England forces assembled near Boston fought another battle on their own. After Lexington and Concord, the New England colonies implemented their military plans and, as they had in the earlier wars with the French and Indians, moved to replace the militia gathered before Boston with volunteer forces, constituting what may be loosely called a New England army. Each of the four New England states raised and administered its own force under its own commander. As might be expected with such a loose organization, discipline was lax and there was no unified chain of command. Though Artemas Ward, the Massachusetts commander, exercised overall control by informal agreement, it was only because the other commanders chose to cooperate with him; all decisions were made in council. The volunteers in the Connecticut service had enlisted until December 10, 1775, those from the other New England states until the end of the year. The men were dressed for the most part in homespun clothes and armed with muskets of varied types; powder and ball were short, and only the barest few had bayonets.
Late in May Gage received limited reinforcements from England, bringing his total force to 6,500 rank and file. With the reinforcements came three major generals of reputation—Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, and Sir John Burgoyne—men destined to play major roles in England’s loss of its American colonies. The newcomers all considered that Gage needed more elbow room and proposed to fortify Dorchester Heights, a dominant position south of Boston previously neglected by both sides. News of the intended move leaked to the Americans, who immediately countered by dispatching a force onto the Charlestown peninsula, where other heights, Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, overlooked Boston from the north. (Map 3) The original intent was to fortify Bunker Hill, the eminence nearest the narrow neck of land connecting the peninsula with the mainland, but the working party sent out on the night of June 16, 1775 decided instead to move closer