His red coat glowing against the dreary day, a British officer points his sword at the Lexington militia arrayed in front of him.
“Lay down your arms and disperse!” he shouts. “You will not be harmed! Disperse, you damn rebels!”
The rebels do not disperse. They stare stonily ahead, muskets on their shoulders.
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On April 19, Massachusetts will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War. We asked reenactors, historians, and museum directors what lessons Americans can take from the founders.
“You will not drive me off my common!” shouts one in reply.
Dark SUVs splash by on a nearby avenue, heading for macchiatos or some other post-Colonial suburban pursuit. This is not a real confrontation, or even a movie shoot. It is a dress rehearsal for April 19, when Lexington, Concord, and other Massachusetts towns will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the daylong rolling battle between redcoats and minutemen that began the Revolutionary War.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Battle reenactments happen here annually. The gear is museum-worthy – muskets longer than men are tall, coats ranging from rich brocade to dun homespun.
But this year’s iteration of “the shot heard round the world” might be especially important, say local historians. That’s due to the anniversary’s round number, and the tense, chaotic state of American politics itself. Looking backward at the whole time and place – not just the battle that exploded from it – could help put today’s uncertain way forward in perspective.
We’ve come a long way since 1775, but much of that way was rocky. The founders were not perfect. Neither are we.
“Our history is messy and complex,” says Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, a nonprofit that oversees the famous Old North Church in Boston. “I think the pursuit of liberty and justice for all has not yet been achieved, but again I think we’ve made great progress when I look at this sum total of 250 years.”
Back on Lexington Common, British troops are sweeping forward, bayonets fixed. The Colonial militia members, outnumbered, shift uneasily. Their commander orders them to break formation.
Then a shot rings out. Others follow. Gunsmoke that smells of rotten eggs wafts over the field. When it clears, six militiamen lie on the ground. The rest of the colonials quit the field, gathering at a tree line close by.
Rehearsing for a Revolution
On this cool rainy day in early April, the reenactment rehearsal has drawn a surprisingly large crowd. Several hundred onlookers surround the roped-off area, most with cellphone cameras held high. Some are surprised that the Colonial militia melted away so quickly. Didn’t the soon-to-be-independent Americans on this day in history send the British military – the most powerful in the world at the time – to ignominious defeat?
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“I guess I thought the Americans weren’t going to run away immediately,” says Connor Barrett, a professional sailor and U.S. native who has brought his British girlfriend, Lucy Zabel, to see some historical Colonial sites.
In fact, the Lexington skirmish was only the battle’s beginning, occuring at 5 a.m. on April 19, 1775. The British marched on to Concord, in search of hidden military stores. They found a few caches and destroyed them. Meanwhile, rebels rushed to the surrounding area by the hundreds. A much larger militia force confronted the British at Concord’s Old North Bridge.
An exchange of fire at 9:30 a.m. – the source of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetic “shot heard round the world” in “Concord Hymn” – sent the British reeling back down the Concord road. The rest of the day the British retreated toward Boston, fighting increasingly desperate battles against a militia that grew to some 4,000 combatants.
To commemorate the 250th battle anniversary, this year Lexington and Concord will hold reenactments. The National Park Service will hold what it calls “tactical demonstrations” at several historical sites along the Battle Road Trail, which stretches about 5 miles between the towns.
A wide variety of people will participate in the reenactments, if the crowd at rehearsals is representative. They are old, young, fit, and not so.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
What they share is a commitment to time-traveling back to the 18th century.
“It clears the mind – you can be an altered person. You can be somebody else,” says Paul O’Shaughnessy, a Lexington native who has been a reenactor for 53 years.
In his hobby life Mr. O’Shaughnessy has risen to the ranks of top redcoats, serving as commander of His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. He says he joined the British at age 15 when he started because “the minutemen reenactors were quite rude at the time.”
The group actively recruits and has taken on four or five new members in recent months, he says. They train and provide initial kit for rookies. A network of tailors, seamstresses, leather workers, and other specialists helps produce historically accurate equipment.
Mr. O’Shaughnessy himself fixes muskets.
“I joke that I’m a minor arms dealer in Lexington,” he says. “I’ve got muskets, bayonets, swords, scabbards, musket carts, belts, buckles, and so much more.”
Reenactor groups try to maintain a steady schedule of events to keep members busy. They don’t just wait for big anniversary dates. Through the spring the 6th Middlesex Regiment of Massachusetts, for instance, has carried the colors at a hockey game, appeared at a Colonial-themed fair, and taken part in local parades.
The regiment often visits with student groups, typically fifth graders. That’s the age children often learn about the American Revolution, says member John Greenwood. It’s usually a two-week unit for one subject, so reenactors can provide a lot of detail the classes otherwise wouldn’t cover.
“It’s not just the American Revolution. I think the teaching of history is something that is not emphasized as much today,” says Mr. Greenwood.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
The midnight ride of Paul Revere … and some other folks
It’s true that there are a lot of things about the American Revolution in general, and the context of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in particular, that Americans don’t fully understand, say local historians and museum officials.
Take Paul Revere. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem depicted him as a lone rider sounding “The British are coming!” alert all the way to Concord.
But he wasn’t alone – a tanner named William Dawes rode a different warning route out of Boston. Neither man made it to Concord. British officers stopped him in Lincoln, questioned him, and took his horse. A third man named Samuel Prescott was the only one to complete the midnight ride. (Other riders, including a teenage girl named Sybil Ludington, also warned colonists over those first few days.)
It’s also likely that Revere never saw the lanterns hanging in the steeple of Old North Church – the two lights that indicated the British were launching out by sea. They were meant to alert others on the far shore of the Charles River.
In reality, Revere was part of a warning network that he had helped put together, says Nina Zannieri, executive director of the Paul Revere Memorial Association.
As a skilled tradesman, a working man who did not attend Harvard, he was also an exemplar of the everyday people who stood up 250 years ago and mobilized against the British.
“He goes out the door on April 18 at 10 o’clock at night, and he’s leaving behind his wife and little kids. She doesn’t know if he’ll be back. He doesn’t know if he will be back,” says Ms. Zannieri. “And that was playing out all over that evening. People were going out the door and they didn’t really know what they were getting into. And some of them didn’t come home.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
The geographical extent of the battle may be another aspect of that April day in 1775 that many Americans do not fully grasp.
Shooting was not limited to the commons in Concord and Lexington and sniping on nearby roads. Some of the battle’s most desperate encounters and many of its casualties happened after the British had left Concord, retreated through Lexington, and were struggling through a more thickly settled area to reach Boston and safety.
Menotomy – today called Arlington – was the scene of bitter house-to-house encounters. The two sides together suffered more than 200 dead, wounded, or missing in the town, says Matthew Beres, executive director of the Arlington Historical Society.
Among the casualties was Samuel Whittemore, said to be 81 years old and thought to be the oldest combatant to take part in the Revolution. He suffered bayonet and gunshot wounds while fighting behind a stone wall at the Menotomy town line, but survived, living another 17 years – long enough to see his great-great-grandchildren.
“Most of the actual fighting occurred in Menotomy,” says Mr. Beres.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“The spot on which the first blood was spilt”
At the Lexington Common reenactment, the British, victorious in the skirmish, reform their lines to whistles and the beat of drums.
“What are you doing!” a portly man playing a sergeant roars at a few laggards.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, in real life, these British lines continued marching up the road to Concord. There they searched for military stores. They found flour, some musket balls, spare carriage wheels, and hidden wooden spoons – and one large cannon buried in the floor of a tavern.
Today’s group readies to replay the opening battle skirmish, practicing to get their roles down for the upcoming anniversary celebration. They expect much bigger crowds than the several hundred now watching from the edges of the common.
In fact, tourists of a sort have been coming here almost since the founding of the republic, says Dan Marshall, director of education and interpretation at the Lexington History Museums.
President George Washington, on a grand tour of the states in 1789, stopped at Lexington to see “the spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with Great Britain,” as he wrote in his diary. Remaining veterans of the battle reenacted it in the 1820s.
But as time moved on, American memories of the battle became less vivid. Tricorn hats and dun-colored breeches became markers of a distant age.
“The farther we get away from an event throughout time, it’s harder to look at the people involved in that event as real people,” says Mr. Marshall.
Primary source materials – many unearthed as part of the social history emphasis of recent decades – could help close that gap.
Kim Frederick, a history teacher at Concord Academy, has been working with the Concord Museum to help put together a new Revolutionary War curriculum for third, fifth, and seventh graders. Among the items it features are a letter from Eliza Stiles, a preteen girl whose loyalist family fled Boston for Canada; the story of two Concord sisters who ran an etiquette school for young ladies during the Revolutionary period; and the trial transcript of two enslaved people from Charlestown who poisoned their captor.
The curriculum also includes study of old standbys, such as a powder horn. It is neither “woke” history nor conservative history, Ms. Frederick says.
“We’re trying to understand what is [the Revolutionary War’s] legacy in terms of, What does it mean to be an American in 2025? What does it mean to have a 250-year history as a republic?” she says.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
So, what would the founders think?
The founders would probably be aghast if they were dropped in today’s America, says Ms. Frederick. Their idea of democracy was that only property-owning men could vote. Since then, the franchise has expanded beyond what they imagined, adding all men, women, Native Americans, Black Americans, and other formerly excluded groups.
Looking back, it’s easy to see the failures and hypocrisy in U.S. treatment of excluded groups. The steeple of Old North Church, where hung the lights that warned the minutemen, was built with the proceeds of enslaved labor.
But looking forward from the viewpoint of April 19, 1775, one can also see progress that the nation has made in trying to apply the ideals of the Revolution to all.
“This anniversary is a moment both to reflect, which is always good, but also to allow ourselves to commemorate and even celebrate the country for what it has done that’s worked out well,” says Ms. Zannieri of the Paul Revere Memorial Association.
And the United States of America remains a young country. That’s made clear talking to Mr. Barrett and Ms. Zabel at Lexington Common.
Reminded that the festivities are for the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the nation’s independence, Mr. Barrett says, “Yeah, I didn’t think about that. That’s pretty crazy.”
“America is only 250 years old?” says Ms. Zabel, whose native country is … much older.
“1776, right?” says Mr. Barrett.
“That’s nuts,” Ms. Zabel says.
