Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit How Did the American Revolution Start? About this episode On 19th April, 1775, just over 250 years ago, the opening salvos of the American Revolutionary War were fired at the battles of Lexington and Concord. Elite British Redcoats went head-to-head with the famed provincial Minutemen in bloody skirmishes across the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Ultimately, the British were forced to retreat, and the provincial victory galvanised colonial support for the cause of independence.
In today's Explainer episode, Dan travels to the sites of these momentous battles and takes us through that day from beginning to end - how did a political crisis transform into open rebellion, and what would it have been like to actually be there?
Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 14,560 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:21 Dan Snow? There was so little room in the boats that the men had to stand bolt upright as the sailors heaved on the oars crossing Boston Harbour. They landed just outside Charleston, but landed is probably a misnomer here. They came ashore on marshes. They had to wade through waist-deep water and then stagger through freezing mud until they truly came to land drier ground. It was spring in New England, but that can be an elastic concept. Covers pretty much everything from icebound to strangely warm. And tonight was definitely closer to the former.
3:05 Dan Snow? Steam rose off the cursing, stumbling redcoats as they made for the solid ground. Their legendary uniformity nowhere to be seen as the mass of young men floundered about in this unfamiliar terrain. It was midnight. They'd only received their orders two hours previously. And even then, the vast majority of them had no idea where they were going. Only that there was to be no bed or warm embrace of a lover tonight. Instead, there was the mud, the cold, and, as soon became obvious, a welcome committee of angry rebels.
3:54 Dan Snow? Their secret mission had been blown before they'd even left the city. Riders had galloped through the night. Lights had shone from Belfries. Church bells had rung. Warning shots had been fired.
4:10 Dan Snow? In Massachusetts Bay in 1775, news could travel a lot faster, even than the British Light Infantry.
4:23 Dan Snow? The Redcoats had been hurried off the boats, they'd been chivvied through the mud. But now, in the immortal tradition of the British Army, they had to wait. They had to wait for the second wave of troops to be rode over by the navy. They had to wait for their supplies, they had to wait for officers to try and impose order on the hundreds of men from different units that had been deployed. And while they waited, their enemies activated carefully laid plans. If the Redcoats were tired and angry now, in twenty hours' time, well, their world will be turned upside down. They would march out into the Massachusetts countryside, into a land in the grip of a
5:05 Dan Snow? tense, brittle peace. They marched back through the jaws of war. They would see comrades riddled with musket balls, or beaten down with sharp-edged steel. They would abandon wounded men. As the starving survivors staggered back to Boston, their mouths would be bone-dry from the gunpowder as they bit through countless cartridges, firing and reloading their weapons, until their ammunition was spent. Their feet would be raw after marching close to the distance of a modern double marathon, their haversacks empty of food, cartridge bags empty of shot after hours of rolling
5:50 Dan Snow? combat. But in those early hours, that morning, no one knew what lay in store for them, or for the great sweep of British and American history. It was April the 19th, 1775, 250 years before the release of this podcast. And those Redcoats were on their way to Lexington and Concord, and the world would never be the same. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is the story of that fateful day. Enjoy.
6:46 Dan Snow? By the spring of 1775, the time for talking, well, it was almost over. The relationship between Britain and its American colonies, well, a key group of them, was almost over. Let's have a quick recap about how we got to this point. We're talking about the 13 British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America, so not the Caribbean colonies or the colonies in what is now Canada. We're talking about those colonies that would become the founder members of the United States or America. They spread around 1,200 miles from what is now Maine to Georgia. There are about 2.5 million people in those colonies. That number doubles every 25 years. High rates of childbirth and massive immigration.
7:30 Dan Snow? We should say half a million of those people were black, and 90% of those black people were enslaved. Those black and white colonists massively outnumbered the indigenous population of the eastern portion of North America. There were probably by that stage only around a quarter of a million to 250,000 indigenous people living east of the Mississippi. The white population, who were socially, militarily, economically, politically dominant, were overwhelmingly drawn from Britain and Ireland, but society in North America was different. It was a little bit flatter, a little bit more egalitarian. There were very few British aristocrats, the sort of massively wealthy landowners, who ruled like little kings in their regions, the men who dominated Britain and Ireland,
8:15 Dan Snow? politically, for example. There were also fewer utterly penniless poor people, something like 2/3 of white Americans own land. That compares with 20% back in Britain. And related to that importantly, it meant that whereas around 2/3 of white American men could vote... In Britain, and historians like to argue about this, but certainly it was only a fraction of that in Britain. Perhaps 15% of white men could vote in England, but that figure may have been much lower. And it was certainly much lower in Scotland, very few voters there. Partly out of being a homeowner and a voter, but even more just generally, there was a
8:57 Dan Snow? spirit of individualism, of independence, I think you could call it, in those colonies. That sprang from landowning, it sprang from religion, and it sprang from geography. Many American colonials worshipped at independent churches, self-governing churches. These were not enmeshed in this episcopalian hierarchy, a world of bishops and archbishops with the king at the top that you get in the Anglican faith. They had their local pastor, they had their individual relationship with God and his scriptures. They were conditioned not to follow instructions from some distant bishop's seat or bishop's palace that could be hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
9:41 Dan Snow? That very important sense of religious autonomy that was sustained, it was sometimes created by the nature of those communities. These people had left Britain. Hell, many of these people had left Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. They'd headed inland. They'd gone to clear forestry and to hack farmland out of the wilderness to build new communities afresh. These were the very people, or certainly their descendants, who chafed under the harnesses, the restrictions of life in the Old World. They often didn't want their local landowner, their local bishop, that the heavy hand of government in their lives. They were happy to take their chances with their brothers and their cousins and their friends in tight-knit communities on the edge of civilization.
10:26 Dan Snow? So if you, or your revered granddaddy, or your beloved father, moved from Reading in England, or Stirling in Scotland, or Norfolk to rural Massachusetts, you were probably not the kind of person queuing up to take instructions, to accept prayer books, or to submit to a standardized prayer book, or a summons to taxation from a government across the Atlantic Ocean. The more I think about it, I guess the very act of building colonies in this new world was revolutionary. Their desire to get away, to create something new for autonomy, was baked into that founding ideal. It's part of their DNA.
11:10 Dan Snow? In 1775, that spirit, that revolutionary desire for autonomy, was embodied in the colony of Massachusetts Bay and in its main settlement, the city of Boston. About 15,000 people in Boston, it was a hotbed of the revolution, and it was the capital of a wider province that had around 375,000 people in it. There had been a bitter dispute in the 1760s and 1770s about whether or not the British Parliament could impose taxes on the king's subjects in the Americas. The problem was that there were colonial assemblies, there were little parliaments in each colony, and they saw themselves as equal to Parliament.
11:54 Dan Snow? The British Parliament, though, thought it had a sort of pan-imperial role, particularly when it came to regulating imperial trade. Yes, Parliament accepted. It may not be able to sort of whack an income tax on the people of North Carolina, for example, but it could announce a tariff on sugar to regulate trade within the whole empire, to protect the whole empire, for example, from nasty French sugar from their Caribbean islands like Guadeloupe. That revenue could then go into things like ensuring imperial defence. So after much back and forth, various taxes were proposed, various taxes were abandoned, except for one, a tax on tea.
12:37 Dan Snow? An angry crowd stormed aboard ships carrying tea in Boston Harbor, and they threw that tea into the sea. They threw it into the water. It became known as the infamous Boston Tea Party. These Americans declared that it was the ancient, inalienable right of all Englishmen to be taxed only with the consent of their representatives, only with their own consent, basically. They would agree to pay tax if in turn it was agreed upon by the representatives in their legislatures.
13:11 Dan Snow? Back in Britain, the King and much of the political class disagreed. In fact, they got quite angry. The Americans were famously undertaxed. Their fellow Britons in London, Shropshire and Glasgow paid more tax. Britain had spent millions of pounds protecting Americans from the French in Canada, from the indigenous people that periodically rose up in resistance to the ever-expanding British colonies in North America. And now, the Americans refusing to pay anything to contribute to those efforts or contribute to imperial policing. The reason the Boston Tea Party is so celebrated today is because it really marked the point of no return. And the reason for that is the British overreaction.
13:55 Dan Snow? The British went bonkers in response to the Boston Tea Party. And Britain and America, I think from that point, were locked onto a path that led to violence. The British passed what they called the coercive acts, the Americans called the intolerable acts. And the British very foolishly believed that a strong show of force would bring the colonials back to their senses. It would divide the sort of radicals from your Common and Garden centrist dad, who would step up to the brink and would shy away at that point. The Americans would be brought back to obedience through coercion. Boston port was closed. Now, in a world before decent roads, before canals and trains and planes, obviously, that means total economic blockade. Nearly everything arrives into Boston by boat.
14:40 Dan Snow? The Brits went even further. The Charter of Massachusetts, its constitution, was just suspended. The assembly, so its parliament, was disbanded. Massachusetts Bay was effectively placed under military rule. London appointed a new governor, but he was also to be commander of the British Army in North America. He was an out-and-out soldier, his name was Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. He'd fought the French in Europe, he'd fought the Jacobite rebels in the Highlands of Scotland, he'd fought in the American wilderness. He weirdly fought alongside, he'd served and befriended colonial troops, men like George Washington. He was from an aristocratic background, he had impeccable breeding, and he arrived with 4,000 soldiers.
15:23 Dan Snow? Another of these acts of Parliament specified that in certain cases, certain crimes, the people would be tried not in the place where they happened, in the Americas, but back in Britain. So this was seen as interfering again in a tyrannical fashion with traditional English rights around trial and punishment. To make matters even worse, astonishingly clumsy move, the British government really went and helped push neutrals into the rebel camp. When, in what is certainly the poorest timing in history, Parliament passed the Quebec Act in the summer of 1774. Though this in Britain was regarded as a bit of colonial housekeeping, but in British colonies
16:04 Dan Snow? of North America, this was seen as an existential threat to their ambitions, their freedom. During the Seven Years' War, sometimes called the French Indian War, a generation before, Britain had conquered all of French North America. The British had spent the intervening years just desperately trying to work out or organise this vast and unexpected new empire. Now, in this act, for administrative purposes really, they extended Canada all the way down through the Midwest, all the way to the Mississippi. An American settlement into that area was restricted. And in Quebec itself, so in this large area formerly the French Empire, now the British,
16:45 Dan Snow? the rule of the French Catholic settlers was confirmed, was locked in. They could go on in the political and religious manner to which they're accustomed. The Americans just couldn't simply believe this. They'd fought for that country. They'd fought for the right to drive the French out and expand into this virgin terrain, as they saw it. They dreamed of settling ever further west. They were rabidly Protestant, by the way, and so this added a religious dimension to it. There was also a land shortage in the thirteen colonies.
17:17 Dan Snow? Settlers were hungry for more land. So now the Americans said to themselves, they'd fought and died for this dream of a Protestant, English, westward expansion in the French-Indian War. They'd fought under those British banners. And now that Britain had won the war, they'd given all that land to the Catholic French anyway. So if you're a lawyer that's trying to claim that it's in the American colonies' interests to remain part of the British Empire, whilst also saying there's nothing tyrannical or arbitrary about the British government, well, things just got a lot harder. After the Tea Party, all the way through 1774, things moved at breakneck speed, right across the American colonies really, but particularly in Massachusetts Bay.
18:02 Dan Snow? Here you see placid little towns across the colony, gripped with the same spirit of defiance that had burned so bright in Boston. These provincials were convinced they were the heirs to the British tradition of self-government. This was their ancient writers' Britain's, they would be governed only with their own consent, and everything else was tyranny. So when they began to organise and resist and disobey King George's royal government, they didn't see themselves as revolutionaries. It was the government in London that was experimenting with dangerous new ideas. They were the ones tipping into absolutism and tyranny. Massachusetts Bay was thoroughly gripped by the desire not to collaborate with King George's government in London. And they weren't alone.
18:44 Dan Snow? In September 1774, delegates from 12 colonies, not quite the 13 yet, from those 12 colonies met in Philadelphia and agreed to boycott all British goods until Parliament repealed the intolerable act. This meeting in Philadelphia also urged the patriots, as they called them in various colonies, to establish unequivocally that they controlled the militia, not the king's government. Now, the militia was the colonial defence force. None of these colonies had professional militaries. They had militias made up of part-time soldiers. It had been the law since right at the beginning of these colonies that any male settler should keep a weapon in good condition handy, keep some powder and supplies, and be ready to
19:24 Dan Snow? turn out in the event of a threat, usually from the indigenous population, but also imperial adversaries like the French as well. Now, traditionally, these militias had been under the command of the governor and the assembly, but the militias were now told they would answer to a board of patriots in each colony. In Virginia, the militia, for example, elected one George Washington, a veteran of the French Indian War, to be its commander. Back in Boston, General Gage dissolved the Massachusetts Parliament, the Assembly, and interestingly, the Assemblyman said, "Fine", and they just simply moved to the town of Concord and they reformed.
20:07 Dan Snow? They became the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. And they just went on ruling Massachusetts, if you like. They became a shadow government. They collected the tax, they took over the militia, and they prepared for military conflict. They stockpiled supplies and weapons. There were certainly no shortage of men who knew the business of war. Fifteen thousand Massachusetts men had served in the French Indian War, in the Seven Years' War, fighting against the French, fighting against their indigenous allies. Now, loyalist officers were routed out of the militia. Towns voted new patriot officers in, usually men like Washington in Virginia with real combat experience. In Massachusetts, they set up special units.
20:50 Dan Snow? They were men who were particularly experienced in war, or they were young and fit, and single and keen, and they were to be a rapid-response force. In the event of trouble, they would drop the plough, they'd drop their shears or Smithy's hammer, and they would gallop to the sound of the guns. It was said that they would be ready at a minute's notice, and they would become known as the Minutemen. As news of this arrived back in Britain, it was clear that it was a major crisis. They were faced now with the task of basically pacifying a society that was in full revolt, thousands of miles away. And here is my hottest take. For all the drama of the eventual victory of the Americans in this War of Independence,
21:35 Dan Snow? actually, it was 1774, before any shots had been fired, that the British Empire in this party of America's was destroyed. In that year, peacefully but robustly, the Americans simply de facto dissolved their former arrangements with the British Crown. They did the most revolutionary thing that any of us can do. It's the nuclear option, once so seismic and yet so small and simple. They just called the bluff of government and courts and generations of accepted practice. Across the colonies, they just made their own governments. Is a royal governor a royal governor if everyone just ignores him and listens to someone else?
22:18 Dan Snow? Or is he just a guy with funny clothes? And in 1774, it became clear that the answer was yes. These colonies, and especially Massachusetts Bay, were effectively lost to the British in 1774, when the Americans simply said, "No, thanks, not anymore." The British, they tried to order them about, and the Americans replied, "Yeah, you and what army?" And the British said, "Uh, this army?" Britain had, once had, a very big army. In fact, it had 300,000 men under arms in the Seven Years' War. But that had come very close to bankrupting Britain, and as a result, by now, it had
23:02 Dan Snow? no more than 40,000 troops under arms. And most of those were required to keep the restless, unhappy people of Ireland obedient to their British masters. So there just weren't anything like the number of troops available to bring America back to its obedience. And the war that was coming is particularly interesting to historians of British politics because it's one of the few major wars in British imperial history, when there was a terrible schism within the British ruling elite. Even at this early stage within Britain, there was dissension. For example, the legendary former Prime Minister William Pitt, William Pitt the Elder, we now know him as, he'd been the, well, one of the architects of victory in the mid-century, one of the architects of the victory in the Seven Years' War.
23:44 Dan Snow? And he rose in early 1775, he rose in the House of Lords and gave a remarkable speech, in which he said, "All attempts to impose servitude on such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be in vain." Well, his warnings, though, they were ignored by the government and enough people in Parliament, who seemed to be gripped by a kind of madness. Many things seem to want war. The Americans would never stand up to a British army, declared one member. Well, if he was wrong, Britain had a massive problem. Because, as I said, Britain just didn't have the troops to fight a large-scale, determined, effective enemy in the Americas. Now, there is another option for the British, you can see it in the wish casting here by
24:29 Dan Snow? the Secretary of War, who announced, "A conquest by land is unnecessary." This is in 1775, he said this, "When the country can first be reduced to distress, and then to obedience by armoring." Throughout British history, we've usually had one strategy, and that's been to rely on the navy. But you know, that thing about strategy is that everyone's got one until they get punched in the mouth. And the navy strategy isn't going to work really with these American colonies, because the navy cannot occupy great swathes of the American hinterland. They cannot bring the people of Albany to obedience. They could blockade the coast, although it's a very, very long coast indeed, with all sorts of inlets and bays and safe havens for smugglers to come and go.
25:11 Dan Snow? Smugglers who'd been doing that for generations knew exactly how to avoid the excised man or the Royal Navy. But even if they did manage to blockade the coast, that strategy would take years. And meanwhile, the colonists were flouting their disobedience to the Crown. There are only one way to solve that, to solve the problems of these shadow governments just operating in places like Massachusetts Bay, was to put boots on the ground. You need redcoats to go and break up those meetings and, well, restore British rule. And that's pretty much what the British decided to do, albeit with utterly inadequate resources. King George III told both Houses of Parliament early 1775, that, referring to Massachusetts
25:51 Dan Snow? Bay, "A rebellion at this time actually exists within the said province." And he wasn't wrong about that. The colonials had built their own government, they were stockpiling weapons. Gage, sitting there in Boston, could only look on in horror. These Massachusetts Bay provincials, they stripped coastal forts of their cannon and their gunpowder. They trained volunteers just right out in the open. By early 1775, Gage reported that there were 30,000 men under arms in New England.
26:26 Dan Snow? And even worse, they were developing their own artillery train that wouldn't have looked out of place on European battlefields. Now, he had nothing like the number of troops you need to deal with that. He had 7,000 troops across all of the American colonies, with those 4,000 troops in Boston. Now, bear in mind, bear in mind, friends, the peacetime Prussian army at that time numbered nearly 200,000 men, and Prussia occupied a much smaller area than the rebellious colonies. The numbers just didn't stack up. But these were all just details to the bigwigs in London. Gage was told, in no uncertain terms, "Get out of Boston and do something." Gage had been trying a bit.
27:10 Dan Snow? He'd been hitherto sending very small surgical strikes out to seize military stores. He'd sent out troops, for example, to row up Mystic River and grab hold of the gunpowder in modern-day Somerville. He'd launched another raid on Salem. But overall, Gage was deeply pessimistic about his ability to put down this rebellion in any conventional sense. He wrote an astonishing letter to London. He said, "If you think 10,000 men sufficient, send 20. If 1 million is thought enough, give 2. You save both blood and treasure in the end." London must have thought their man-on-the-spot had lost his mind, but they did decide to send a few hundred Marines. But of course, Gage was completely right.
27:54 Dan Snow? Bringing the American colonies back to obedience would require a monumental military effort. Boots on the ground, garrisons in every significant town, the embers of revolution stamped out everywhere all at once. It was, frankly, far beyond the means of the early modern British state. Gage knew it at this point, Pitt knew it at this point, and yet it would take years of bloody, disastrous, expensive war.
28:25 Dan Snow? To drive that message into the brains of the key decision makers. On the 14th of April 1775, General Gage, sitting in Boston, received news from across the Atlantic from Britain that King George considered Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. And with that, he received orders to get on with it. Gage had to do something, he had to make a move. Now, he knew from informants that the provincials, which is what I'm going to be calling the revolutionaries, or the rebels, or the patriots, or the American colonials who didn't want British rule, that's what I'm going to be calling them from this point forward, the provincials, he knew that they'd gathered military supplies at Concord, a town 20 miles from Boston. "Perhaps," Gage thought, "a quick, firm confiscation of these warlike supplies, well, perhaps that
29:09 Dan Snow? would nip the whole thing in the bud. Perhaps that might end the rebellion at one single bloodless stroke. Well, might as well give it a go." He would send his best men, because it was only 20 miles away, they could be there and back in one day. And he thought the militia wouldn't have time to react, they'd just, the men would march quick there and back, and that would be the end of it. His troops would march with fife and drum playing, they would march not as sort of foreign conquerors, but as the king's troops, maintaining order in one of the king's provinces. He knew that the men chosen had to be pretty fit, so he ordered all of the battalion commanders in Boston to give him all of their light infantry companies. Now, a battalion of men, something like 500 or so people, could be more, could be less,
29:54 Dan Snow? was divided up into companies. When they stood in line of battle, there were two flank companies, they were kind of elite companies. One was called Grenadiers, they're big, strong, tough veterans, and the other flank company was the Light Company, so young, agile, super-fit and keen soldiers. And so he decided that this expedition would be purely made up of the Grenadier companies and the Light Companies from all of his battalions in Boston. That meant that only the finest physical specimens, the toughest, the fittest troops would march. He would weld them into one Grenadier Battalion and one Light Infantry Battalion, and he put them all under the command of a guy called Colonel Francis Smith. He in turn was given another officer, he'd never served alongside, a Royal Marine,
30:38 Dan Snow? Major John Pitkin, he was the second in command. And so it was a brigade of men from entirely different units thrown together under unknown officers. On the afternoon of the 18th of April, Smith received his orders from Gage. He was to leave Boston with, I'm quoting, "the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military tools, whatever." And that basically means steal everything, chuck the gunpowder in the river, spike the cannon, destroy the gun carriages. One of the ways of disabling a cannon was to knock the trunnions off, it's a word I like, so you'll forgive the digression. A trunnion is the bit that sticks out the side of a cannon that connects it to the
31:23 Dan Snow? carriage, and it acts as a fulcrum, and if you bash those off, the cannon's unusable. Anyway, Smith was told he should proceed with, quote, "the utmost expedition and secrecy, but you will take care that the soldiers not plunder the inhabitants or hurt private property." Gage didn't specify what to do if they met any opposition. Now, the problem for Gage and Smith is the plan was blown before Smith had even had time to round up the units involved. One of Gage's assistants, an officer, Lord Percy, he was wandering about on Boston Common, and people just came up to him and said, "We know you're off to Concord, you've got no chance of getting the guns there." He raced back to Gage and told him it was already the talk of the town, and Gage was absolutely furious.
32:05 Dan Snow? You cannot prosecute a campaign if your headquarters is that leaky, and it is possible, it has been argued by historians, though it's controversial, that the leaks were coming from inside Gage's own house, possibly from inside his bed. His wife, Margaret Kemble Gage, was an old New Jersey family, and the gossip at The Times suggested that her sympathies lay with her fellow Americans. So incredibly awkward situation. But whoever it was, it was the worst-kept secret in Boston. And the leaders of the provincial government, provincial militia in Concord, well, they would learn about it very, very soon indeed, albeit via a slightly complicated process, more on that in a second. So the British soldiers did leave Boston that night on their secret mission that was
32:49 Dan Snow? already not a secret. And you can imagine the grumbling and the cursing as the various platoons of all the different battalions were told they were going to be busy that night. On went the kit. Well, not full backpacks, but definitely they have a sacks, so little smaller sacks if you like. There's enough food in those for a one day expedition. Everyone was issued with 36 pre-prepared rounds of ammunition. So that's a bit of paper, like a paper container. It's wrapped up. It's got black gunpowder in there. It's got a lead ball. It's got a musket ball in there as well. So I'm simplifying here, but that whole thing was basically pushed down the barrel of a musket. The projectile and the propellant wrapped up, a bit like an old school Christmas cracker. The Navy then took them in small boats through
33:31 Dan Snow? the black waters of Boston Harbor. Such a different geography to what it is today. Much of the water they rode across is now reclaimed. It's now heavily urbanised landscape. But the bit where the Charles River enters the harbour still gives you a little sense of what it was like. Just as with every amphibious operation in history, there's always a shortage of boats, a shortage of able seamen to man them, and soldiers blithely assume that crossing the water is like moving a piece across a chessboard, get very frustrated. The redcoats were rammed in, they stood together packed while sailors hauled on muffled oars. They were dropped off on a stretch of coast just outside Charleston to try and maintain secrecy and then the boats
34:13 Dan Snow? rode back to get the second wave. It was a really ponderous process. And as I said in the introduction, it was particularly ponderous because the redcoats had to splash ashore through marsh and shallow water, mud, still patches of snow on the ground, actually. They were having a very tough time. They'd been awake all day. They'd now been suddenly told to head off on this secret mission. They were having a tough time. They were wet and they were cold and they were tired. And that was the beginning. That was the start. It was only going to get worse.
34:46 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Battle of Lexington and Concord. More coming up.
34:56 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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37:41 Dan Snow? It was probably about 1:30 in the morning by the time they set off, and it became immediately obvious that the whole countryside was up like a swarm of bees. Hooves clattered in the night, warning shots were fired, bells were being rung, the Minutemen were mobilizing. There was no surprise here. They were marching straight into the heart of bandit country, and they were expected. Because before they'd even left Boston, word was flying across Massachusetts. There was a pre-prepared network that just needed the order to move. Riders were on standby to get out of town. One rider made it overland through the narrow strip of land called the Boston Neck that connected to the mainland. Another rider would cross the Charles River
38:23 Dan Snow? and then get on a horse from Charleston. Meanwhile, lanterns were lifted to the steeple of the Old North Church in central Boston. This was a message to pre-positioned riders about the particular route the British were taking. And so these men, as soon as they saw the signal, they galloped out of Charleston. William Dawes was a Boston Tanner. He's the one who managed to slip out of town via the neck at 9:00 PM, and he made for Lexington to warn senior provincial figures that they might face arrest the following day. He told them to make their escape. Meanwhile, a prosperous silversmith called Paul Revere also rode across Boston Harbor, and he got a horse in Charleston and galloped out of town. He was chased by British scouts, but he used his knowledge of the terrain to outstrip
39:06 Dan Snow? them, and he took a roundabout route to Lexington. And all the way, he galloped along, warning people on the route that the redcoats were coming. Key militia commanders were alerted, who in turn called out their Minutemen. When Revere arrived at Lexington, he found the two senior patriot leaders there. He found John Hancock and Sam Adams. He warned them and told them to get going. And there's a famous moment in Lexington as well, when he's going around telling everyone that the redcoats are coming. And some people shouted on an upstairs window, "Be quiet, we're trying to get some sleep up here." And he responded, "Noise? You'll have noise soon enough. The regulars are coming out." Now, after shouting at a few sleepy townsfolk, Revere, Adams and Hancock, they decided the
39:49 Dan Snow? best course of action, very sensibly, was to go to the pub to discuss their next move. Around about the same time, the redcoats were beginning their journey towards Lexington, Revere left Lexington, that's how early he'd got there, and he went with Dawes, who he'd met up with, and another man, Dr Prescott. He'd been riding through the night, having visited his girlfriend, but he was keen to get involved in the action. The three of them were then intercepted by British scouts. Dawes was thrown from his saddle. Prescott jumped a fence and escaped, and he was the one who would take the news on to Concord. But Revere was captured. And he told his captors, that wasn't entirely true, he told his captors that the militia was out, ready for action. And his British captors at that seemed to have panicked.
40:32 Dan Snow? They freed Revere and they galloped back to Boston. The actions of Paul Revere's captors, I think they do show that the British were nervous. And certainly Smith was nervous too, back with the main force that's marching now inland. He decided to split his forces. He knew that word was out, and he decided to send his second-in-command, Pitcairn, ahead with light infantry to make a dash straight through to Lexington. In the grey light of the very early dawn, Pitcairn and his men approached the town. As they did so, they saw a large group of armed colonials, provincial troops, watching them from the high ground. This was ominous.
41:16 Dan Snow? They were all supposed to be in their beds. Pitcairn had not been instructed what to do in the event of opposition. But he wasn't taking any chances, so he ordered his men to load their muskets. But he beseeched them. They had to hold their fire until they had a specific order. Pitcairn did not want to start a war by accident. Slightly behind Pitt came with the rest of the troops, the Grenadiers. Smith was also feeling the tension and he sent messages back to Boston, back to General Gage, saying he didn't like the look of what he was seeing and hearing and he was pretty sure he would need reinforcing before the day was out. Only a few hours had passed since they started marching and Smith had just asked Gage to
42:01 Dan Snow? send help. Now, for this episode of the podcast, I was lucky enough to go to Massachusetts. I visited Lexington, Concord, Boston. I walked the route taken by the soldiers that night and I did so because here at History Hit, we are making a couple of documentaries about 1775, the big 250th. Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston. So, please make sure you subscribe to History Hit and you can access our TV channel with our hundreds of documentaries. But for the purpose of this podcast, what you'll hear for the rest of this episode is a mixture of me on location in Lexington and Concord and then back in the studio as well. So, as dawn breaks on that April morning 250 years ago, let me take you to Lexington itself.
42:45 Dan Snow? I'm just walking on to the green in the town of Lexington. It was called the common back then. The sun is just coming up. I've got it bright and early. It's unbelievably cold, but it's worth it because it's a magical place. The sun is just now tickling the white façades of the beautiful houses that line the square with their handsome porches, shuttered windows and sloping roofs, American flags mounted above many of the doors. One there is the American flag of 1775, so the flag that predates the Declaration of Independence, so very appropriate for this period. And off to the right there, it's the Buckman Tavern, a very handsome building, sadly no longer a tavern.
43:27 Dan Snow? But that is where the militia here in Lexington had spent the night, talking, planning, drinking, listening to rumours and gossip and... Stories about where the British were and when they might be coming. But those militiamen were about to find out for real. Because as the sun came up on the nineteenth of April, the redcoats marched into town. Now, the redcoats had been listening to rumours of their own. They had heard, in fact, from Paul Revere, when he'd been apprehended by those British officers and let go. He'd told them that there were a thousand militiamen waiting in Lexington. Pitcairn had heard this news and was obviously a bit nervous. So he'd paused outside the town and he told his men to load their muskets, load it with balls.
44:09 Dan Snow? So the British units were marching in here, apprehensive, expecting trouble. As they arrived on this triangular green where I'm standing now, they spotted the militia drawn up in formation. Not a thousand men, but around seventy. And critically, they weren't blocking the road to Concord. They were standing beside it, observing it. Now, this is one of those fascinating moments in history. You see it quite often. You find that there's a lunar pull towards violence when you bring two large bodies of armed young men into close proximity. There's something elemental about it. These men are scared, they're pumped up. Some might feel genuine hate.
44:54 Dan Snow? Others are desperate to conquer their terror and project strength to their mates. The militiamen are serving alongside their friends, their family, their sons, their kid brother. Some of the men out there, maybe they desire that action, the immediacy of battle, to break the tension of the waiting. That day, you can be certain there were white knuckles gripping musket stocks. There were officers' hands worrying the brass hilts or the wire grip of their swords. On occasions like this, there's an impulsion to action. The men of the Lexington militia, they watched as the redcoats deployed from the column in which they'd been marching into line. Now, this was battle array. In a column, you can't bring all your muskets to bear. You're all marching one behind the other.
45:38 Dan Snow? But in a line, two, perhaps three ranks deep, then every single one of them can fire when ordered. A crashing volley, the likes of which I've talked about on this podcast several times before. The likes of which decimated the brave Highlanders on the sleek, lashed field of Culloden a couple of generations before. Or drove the French fleeing from the plains of Abraham outside Quebec. These volleys were famously lethal.
46:05 Dan Snow? And the militia would have watched, that column deploying into line like a snake uncoiling. The militia's commander was a man called Parker, told his men, "Stand your ground, don't fire unless fired upon." "But if they want a war, let it begin here." For various reasons, there's great confusion at this point. Pitcairn appears to have been slightly separated from his lead units. There were officers charging around on horses, giving contradictory orders. Pitcairn rushes over and attempts to de-conflict this situation, I think. He, he roars at the rebels to lay down their arms. Other officers shout, "Disperse, ye rebels." There's confusion, there's noise, there's, there's tension. It seems that Parker reluctantly at this point does order his men to disperse, to pull back.
46:49 Dan Snow? And Pitcairn then roars at his men to disarm the rebels, but not fire. Amid this confused, heightened situation, well, something utterly predictable happened. A shot rang out. And no one knows who and no one knows why, and obviously afterwards both sides blamed each other. But that shot provoked an immediate reaction. The regulars responded as men who have felt themselves to be in the sights of an enemy for hours, or for months. They set about the militia, they fired a volley, they killed several of them. Most of those were shot in the back as they'd been moving away.
47:30 Dan Snow? The regulars seemed to have lost their sort of vaunted discipline at that point. The machine became now a mass of brawlers. They closed with the provincials, they used their bayonets. The officers desperately tried to regain control. At this point it seems that Smith suddenly arrived and he had his drummer repeatedly sound the signal to reform their ranks. The beat to arms, remember at this period, most of the instructions took a musical form. Men knew when to get up and pack up the camp and eat and march and stop and quit drinking for the evening, all via drum and fife. And finally that drum recalled the men to their discipline, they formed up. But in front of them lay the bodies of dead colonial subjects of King George, dead provincial militiamen.
48:14 Dan Snow? I've walked across the common now, I'm standing in front of one particularly beautiful house, painted white. It was here that Jonathan Harrington lived, and he'd been among the men in the militia that day on the common. He'd been wounded by the Redcoats, he crawled back to his home a few dozen metres, crawled up the steps and died right there at the feet of his terrified wife. After months and months of tension, the situation had been suddenly transformed. The British formed up. Smith, I think rather oddly, allowed the infantrymen to give three cheers and fire a celebratory volley as if they'd just vanquished an enemy. It looked bad, and it was also an unwise use of powder.
48:59 Dan Snow? They would need it as the day went on.
49:04 Dan Snow? I've often wondered about that celebratory volley. It's odd that the British seemed to be feeling so cheerful, they'd just shot and killed some of their fellow countrymen, but perhaps they felt they'd finally confronted these wretched rebellious farmers, and they had scattered them as they'd hoped with one ragged volley. Perhaps this whole thing would be as easy as they had bragged themselves in the taverns of Boston. On they marched. They were blissfully unaware of the news and the gossip and the misinformation that was now galloping across the colony far quicker than their measured step. They were headed for Concord. There, the militia had been spending their time dispersing and hiding the warlike supplies.
49:48 Dan Snow? But as they did so, other minutemen from the surroundings, from right across New England in fact, had been flooding towards the town. And as they gathered, the talk was all about the advance of the Redcoats and the violence at Lexington. Blood had been spilt. Let's head now to a very important bridge just north of the town of Concord. I'm standing now in a field just north of Concord. It's a beautiful river valley, there's an alluvial plain. It's flooded at the moment in, in spring here in New England. It's got a river snaking through the middle of this landscape, beautiful river. And across that river, there's a wooden bridge. It's always described as a rude bridge in the, the songs, the tales, the stories that are
50:31 Dan Snow? written about what happened here that fateful day. This is one of the routes in and out of Concord. This bridge was seized by some light infantry, three companies of light infantry were sent here, Redcoats, to secure the bridge while their colleagues, Grenadiers, they searched the town, found warlike supplies and destroyed them. But it was out here as well that the provincials had gathered. The militia of Concord had not contested the town, they hadn't tried to stop the Redcoats getting in. They'd retreated just here north of the town, they're on a, the hill, I'm standing on the side of it now, and they, they were slowly trying to get a sense of what was going on. They were on this hill, waiting, building their strength, deciding what to do. They'd watched the Redcoats, they entered Concord, one of them had left an account, he
51:13 Dan Snow? said, "The sun was arising and shined on their arms, and they made a noble appearance in their red coats and glistening arms." The Redcoats had marched into town three abreast, their pace set by fife and drums. It was almost like they were on the parade ground. They'd entered town at about seven o'clock in the morning. Most of them had found out, looking for military equipment in town, and in fact, they found a chest containing the provincial congress's entire treasury, all the money of the provincial congress. But locals had persuaded the men that it was private property and the Redcoats remarkably believed them and not confiscated it. But in this field where I am now, a very interesting dynamic was taking place. The Redcoats, the hundred or so Redcoats manning that bridge, they watched as the group of
51:56 Dan Snow? militia men, minutemen on this hill just swelled, just grew bigger and bigger. More and more men joined their ranks. And those men on the hill, they prepared themselves for battle, they didn't know what was to come, they, they did their pre-battle checks, they, they got new flints out from pouches, the flint was very important, a flintlock musket, you, you have a little hammer mechanism with a nicely knapped, sharp flint in it, that slams down and causes a spark, that spark ignites a small charge of gunpowder, which in turn sends a spurt of flame through a little hole into the barrel of the gun itself where it ignites the main charge and sends that musket ball flying out. Their guns are loaded, those rounds rammed home snug, and there's new flints in those hammers, so there'll be no misfires.
52:40 Dan Snow? The militia commander on this hill, he seemed to grow, in some ways, more confident as his force expanded. But he also had the strong sense that was a desire within his ranks to do something, to take some action. No one knew what was happening in Concord, but they were fired up by stories, gossip, rumours of atrocities carried out in Lexington. They imagined what the redcoats could be doing in their community, in their town, with their friends, their loved ones, their wives, their children, their property. The redcoats might be going on a rampage, and that's when they saw smoke rising above the town. Now, in fact, we now know that the redcoats had been burning some tents and warlike supplies they'd found, and some of the sparks had spread to a roof of a house, and the redcoats immediately
53:21 Dan Snow? helped the locals put out this fire, but it had sent smoke into the air. And that was the moment that the militia here decided to act. Was a hostile force, torching their town, their property, their livelihood? It was too much. A young, thrusting lieutenant, ambitious, aggressive, he went up to the commander, and he said pointedly, "Will you let them burn the town?" The commander decided he would not let them. He decided to act. Checking that muskets were loaded, he sounded the advance. The militia stepped off, but he ordered every single one of them, "Do not fire first. Do not pull that trigger unless we are fired upon." And so they marched down the hill where I am now, they marched towards Concord and
54:06 Dan Snow? towards war. Now, the British troops on that bridge grew very nervous, they were heavily outnumbered, and they decided to pull back to the opposite bank of the river. A lieutenant reported that the provincial troops, well, they looked regular and determined. This was not the rabble of farmers that they'd been expecting. They sent back for reinforcements, they slowly retreated across the bridge. And on came the provincials in a very warlike manner. It was around ten in the morning now, they got to within fifty metres of the Brits, some Brits still clinging on to the bridge, the rest arrayed along the far bank. And at that great moment of tension, after hours of staring each other down, in fact, after weeks and months of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of tension.
54:47 Dan Snow? That's when the British troops opened fire. The British shot first. It was unclear whether scared young men took matters in their own hand, or whether it was at the order of an officer. But British muskets spat their smoke and sent lead balls flying towards the enemy. Captain Davis of the provincials was the first to fall. Just this morning, he'd told his wife as he left home, he'd simply said, "Take good care of the children." Now he was lying dead on the banks of the river here, just north of Concord. The Continental Commander, Major John Buttrick, his family had been farming this field since 1638. And upon receiving that ragged British volley, he roared at his men, "Fire, fellow soldiers!
55:32 Dan Snow? For God's sakes, fire!" The King's regular troops, the British Army, and the King's American subjects were now deliberately firing at each other in this field in Massachusetts Bay. This was the shot heard around the world. This was the shot that signaled the start of a war in the Americas. A war of liberation, but also a civil war. A terrible conflict that would forge the USA itself. It was a war that would eventually spread from this field across the world's oceans to Europe, Africa, and Asia. And what's fascinating, in this first clash, tellingly, the provincials, the rebels, they fared better.
56:17 Dan Snow? The redcoats were shooting too high. There's an old problem with inexperienced troops, that the kick from the muskets forces the muzzles up, and those bullets just go a little bit too high. By contrast, the provincial troops poured accurate fire into the redcoats. And then something extraordinary happened. The British units broke. They fled. Their officers had been felled, leaderless, panicked. They ran back into town. An uneasy peace had now been transformed into a shooting war.
56:55 Dan Snow? The British fled until they found their discipline under the furious glare of Smith, who was marching towards the bridge. He'd brought up reinforcements, and the men fell back into their ranks. Smith was not happy, but he also realised the situation was getting completely out of control. He ordered the search of Concord stopped. He wanted his brigade back together. And he was particularly worried because he could see from the high ground more and more provincial units flooding towards the sound of the shooting. The jaws were closing around Smith, and he decided he had no option but to retreat. Back to Boston the Brits would go. Carts were found for the wounded officers. The wounded men could walk if they could. If they couldn't, they'd be left behind.
57:41 Dan Snow? Now, if you ask any soldier, they will tell you that one thing they try to avoid doing at all costs is to conduct a fighting withdrawal, to retreat in the face of the enemy, to retreat whilst still fighting with the enemy. Because you have to judge when to stand and fight, to exchange blows, and then when to make a rapid withdrawal. It's bad for morale. And if morale plunges just when you need the men at their most alert to carry out this most difficult of tasks, then you risk getting into a death spiral. To make matters worse for this particular unit, they knew that the enemy dominated all the territory through which they're having to retreat. We don't know how much of this was going through the mind of Smith
58:25 Dan Snow? as he gathered his force together and ordered them home to Boston. Blood had been spilt. There were now rumours of atrocities flying through the ranks on both sides. But I think there was a general feeling now that if there was a fight to be had, let it be had here. And every provincial militiaman, from miles around, something like 14,000 men, they were gathering. And most of them realised exactly the route the British would have to take on their way back to Boston.
58:58 Dan Snow? It was around midday. The 700 redcoats, already exhausted, now faced a march of 20 miles. And it was abundantly clear that the march would take place in a very different atmosphere to the one of the morning. Smith abandoned the parade-ground-like formation of the morning and instead moved through this landscape as if it was a hostile war zone. Grenadier companies stuck to the road, but out on either flank were the light companies, like infantrymen. And their job was now to push back any provincial troops from the verge of the road, keep them out of musket range, check any buildings for hostile snipers, push through the woods
59:42 Dan Snow? on either side, using muskets and bayonets to drive off any provincial troops that might threaten the column.
59:52 Dan Snow? I am now walking along that road, named today Battle Road. And I'm in the footsteps, those redcoats, that British column that snaked through this landscape. It was anything from 300 metres to half a mile in length. The road here is flanked by the famous New England Dry Stone Walls. It was an agricultural landscape, so crisscrossed with hedges and walls, but it's also a rolling landscape. There's plenty of cover here, big boulders, trees. Frankly, it's a pretty ideal place for an ambush, and that's what the British were now marching into.
1:00:38 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Battle of Lexington and Concord. More coming up.
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1:02:20 Dan Snow? It went all right, I suppose you could say, until they reached a spot called Merriam's Corner. There, they found 500 militiamen waiting for them. Again, we don't really know who fired first, but any hope that Concord might have been a freak occurrence, well, that was extinguished. Here, things quickly descended into a blazing battle. The provincials, the colonials, fired from balm buildings and from behind low walls. The redcoats were stuck on the road. They were marching through a blizzard of fire. Some units would occasionally halt. They'd send a volley of musket balls rattling into the side of a barn. The light infantry were then sent off the roads. They did very valuable work at this point. They would advance, not on the road itself, but along the verges, trying to keep the
1:03:05 Dan Snow? colonials back from the main column. They tried to ensure that the provincial fire would be less lethal. So now the light infantry have got to move parallel to the column on the road, about 80 meters or so from the road, chivvying out the colonials from farm buildings, from behind walls, from outhouses with bayonet and musket butt. At 1,300 hours, a little bit further down the road, the column marched straight into a thousand more well-placed provincial troops. At a sharp turn in the road that would become to be known as Bloody Angle, the redcoats found themselves in a bloody crossfire. They staggered through. A desperate rearguard formed up and lashed the provincials with those musket volleys that the British were so famous for. Just beyond there was the militia from the town of Woburn.
1:03:51 Dan Snow? It was a running battle, Smith no longer attempting to gather up his wounded. Like a shark trying to keep oxygen over its gills, the British had to keep moving through ambush after ambush. The flanking infantry were knackered. They'd been jogging to and fro alongside the column, they'd been climbing fenders and jumping streams and fighting. And most of them were now lagging behind. The column was blundering blindly on. And they were about to face another body of men. And these men were bent on revenge.
1:04:26 Dan Snow? I'm walking the route now from Concorde to Lexington and I've just arrived at the boundary of Lexington itself, just outside the town. And like those flanking units, like those light infantry, when I've left the road and I've pushed into the woods that line this road, as they would have done to keep those provincial troops back, to try and secure the road and prevent ambush. The reason I've come to this particular part of the battlefield is there's been some very recent archaeology here that's really cast the battle in a new light. Because this is where the Lexington militia were waiting for the British troops and they were hankering for revenge. Don't forget, it all began with the Lexington militia at sunrise that morning.
1:05:09 Dan Snow? They'd been fired upon on the Lexington Common, they'd lost several of their comrades killed and more wounded. And now they were not waiting placidly out in the open for the British, they were in this wooded landscape, actually very well placed. I'm in the woods, you can hear the leaves thick on the ground and this area was wooded back in 1775. And there's a ridge in front of me that runs horizontally to the road. And there's big, big boulders on that ridge as well, so it's an ideal landscape, plenty of cover, plenty of protection from British bullets. And this is where the Lexington militia were drawn up.
1:05:44 Dan Snow? From analysis of musket balls done by metal detectors on this particular stretch of ground, we think that the British would have sent out a unit, a flanking unit, to enter this woodland and try and sweep the militia away. So that the rest of the column were free to pass up the road. But as they were deploying in this exactly Standing now, the Lexington militia fired a crashing volley at about, I'd say about fifty metres range. The piece of ground that I'm on now was thickly littered with musket balls from that one volley. Then the British pits have fired back, but those musket balls are quite widely spread. So it seems like the militia would have been spread out there behind trees and rocks, or they'd have been retreating over the crest of the hill and the British would have been firing at individuals.
1:06:26 Dan Snow? The provincials were unable to work their way back through the woods and live to fight. Another day, they were able to attack the British column again in just a few hundred metres, keeping up that pressure, perpetuating that misery for the British troops, who were effectively surrounded on all sides. The Lexington militia ahead of them, to the sides of them, and the provincials from bloody angle following them up, like hyenas, ready to pounce on the wounded or exhausted stragglers. One British lieutenant wrote an account. He said, "The country was an amazing, strong one, full of hills, woods, stone walls and the like, which the rebels did not fail to take advantage of, for they were all lined with people who kept an incessant fire upon us, as we did too upon them, but not with
1:07:11 Dan Snow? the same advantage." And it's so exciting now, really being in that landscape, as it's described in that account. Just here, as they pushed into the town of Lexington, Smith was hit in the thigh. He was forced to take his place on one of the wagons of wounded officers. Pit Kent took control, but very soon he was unhorsed. As you might expect, he's riding a horse up and down the column, trying to be a commanding presence, trying to calm and reassure his men, but that was just a target that invited a tornado of fire. So Smith's been taken out of the battle. Pit Kent's been knocked off his horse. Things are unraveling.
1:07:50 Dan Snow? The column was on the verge of annihilation. Officers started to threaten their own men. One ensign, a junior officer called De Bernier, he recounted later that, faced with men that were sort of breaking ranks and beginning to run away, just charge off, "The officers", and I'm quoting, "got to the front and presented their bayonets and told the men, if they advanced, they should die. Upon this, they began to form under very heavy fire." So it's becoming very, very difficult to maintain the cohesion of this battered unit.
1:08:25 Dan Snow? It's hard not to put yourself in the position of those redcoats as you trudge along battle road. They'd been awake, polled the previous day, well over 24 hours by now. They were already into their second marathon in terms of distance travelled. Their feet would have been killing them. I think their water canteens were long ago have run dry. They were hungry. It was very hot and on top of all of that, they're in a seemingly never-ending ambush. A moving circle of fire, like some torment dreamt up by the devil himself. Around every bend, seemingly more and more units of the militia, thousands upon thousands of them, pouring their fire into this British column. The men out on
1:09:09 Dan Snow? the flanks, the light infantry, doing heroic work, trying to keep those provincial troops away from the road, trying to push them back beyond the range of their musketry, so they could try and buy some breathing room for the men who trudge along the road. But that meant the light infantry were scaling these walls, they were leaping over the felled trees, they were even going house to house on occasion. In fact, I'm just passing a beautiful house that was a tavern at the time, and they'd have had to sweep through this tavern, the barn, the pig house, the outhouse, making sure there were no provincials lurking in there, ready to snipe out a window or have a pot shot at the troops as they passed by. The council agreed, they could all just see these provincial militiamen
1:09:51 Dan Snow? moving along the verges, looking for spots to ambush, to turn and have a pot shot at the British on the road. They could see more militia units arriving on these little minor roads from other parts of Massachusetts. There seemed to be no end to their punishment that day. And I think as this march went on, they just started to doubt their officers. They were now traumatised, not just by the danger they faced, but by seeing their friends, their comrades, shot down, wounded beside them, having to abandon them on the side of the road. No time to scoop them up, no way of getting them back to Boston, just leaving the dead, the dying. And the wounded lying in ditches and on the verges.
1:10:34 Dan Snow? Officers too being killed and wounded, weakening the leadership, weakening the unit cohesion. I'm not surprised that tired, scared men start to think, well, perhaps the the only way of surviving this rout, this suicide march is actually to just abandon the ranks, to to strike out by yourself across country, hope that maybe you can make a straight dash through to Boston. But those were the desperate hallucinations of men at the very limit of their endurance. If the column fractured, if it lost its unity, then the survivors would surely be hunted down.
1:11:12 Dan Snow? The British did start to break. Men with blackened, powder-stained faces, well, they looked around and despite the threats to their officers, they opted for personal survival. Some did break ranks, some tried to run, they tried to make their own way back. And the threat of the savage discipline of the Georgian army melted in the minds of the sleep-deprived, exhausted, traumatised young men who were now running very low on ammunition. They made the split-second judgement: better the cat and nine tails, better a flogging later than a minuteman's bayonet in the guts now. But then, at this moment of extreme peril, of great crisis, the British expedition on the brink of total destruction, a ragged cheer went up.
1:11:55 Dan Snow? Because there in Lexington, as they moved through, there was a very welcome sight. One thousand smart-looking redcoats, reinforcements had arrived, drawn up, a couple of field guns and cannon in front of them, firing six-pound projectiles at the rebels, their standards snapping in the breeze. Regular Lord Hugh Percy, who I mentioned earlier, he'd been sent out by Gage with these thousand troops to rescue Smith's force, and that's exactly what happened. The survivors of that original expedition, of Smith's force, collapsed behind Percy's men, gulping down water, swallowing the biscuit offered to them. Lord Percy later simply said, "I had the happiness of saving them from inevitable destruction."
1:12:40 Dan Snow? But there was still a very long road between them and Boston. At fifteen thirty or so, three thirty or so, they set off and it was not over, not by a long shot. This new, enlarged British column simply faced the same threat. I went to Arlington in Massachusetts, which used to be known as Monotamy.
1:13:01 Dan Snow? They reached the town of Monotamy and the fighting reached a new pitch of intensity. And there's evidence for that in a very special building that I'm in now. This is the Jason Russell House. It stood here in seventeen seventy-five. It's now the home of the Arlington Historical Society. A couple lived here, Jason Russell and his wife, with their children in seventy-five. He was a farmer, there would have been orchard around here. The road to Boston was just out the front, still is there, about twenty yards away. And this house is a handsome house, it's large, a big structure. Clapboard in its cladding, that classic New England clapboard, so long horizontal planks running along the outside.
1:13:43 Dan Snow? By a remarkable twist of fate and that the careful stewardship are the same family that lived here for a century after the battle. It's beautifully preserved, not just the layout and the structure of the house, but also the bit that I'm interested in today, the bullet holes. This house is peppered with bullet holes. They were plastered over, but the wooden walls that they penetrated and gouged were left in place. And it's thought the family realised, because of the importance of that day, they were custodians of that history and they wanted to protect these bullet holes, these scars, as a memorial to what occurred that bloody day. So as you move through this wooden house, you see that it is absolutely riddled with bullet holes, with musket ball holes.
1:14:28 Dan Snow? So we've got a parlour and you can see an impact strike in the far wall, so it must have come through the outer wall of the building, possibly through the window. And then it's penetrated an internal wall, it's gone straight through that. And then it's gouged a piece of the corner post, the newel post, which are the the uprights that hold up the stairs. And that is still there today, it's like someone's taken a bite out of it. That's in the very heart of this house. And now if you come through here. You can also see in this room where there's a bed in this room. There's a bullet hole in the outer wall that's been filled in, but it's blasted away. It's like a big exit wound, it's blasted away, splinters of wood as it enters the room, which is very typical. And then that bullet has continued up here and smashed through again another internal wall.
1:15:13 Dan Snow? These lead musket balls were quite soft, so they get misshapen as they pass through something, so now that's quite an oval shape that it's left there. And then I come through that next internal wall and the bullet has hit the ceiling here, gouged out a piece of the roof and would have dropped the floor after that.
1:15:31 Dan Snow? So you've got musket balls coming from the road where the redcoats were, but also interesting from the yard, which really reinforced the idea that those flanking units, those light infantry units, were moving along the verge of the road, through yards and farms and houses, trying to push back any enemy troops from the verge of those roads, but also, I think probably, as they're entering a more built up area as they approach Boston and Cambridge, pushing back any civilians, people who didn't particularly feel they're involved in this fight. But of course, when people's blood is up, when the tempers are up, when you've had a long grueling day like these redcoats have, suddenly every single person can look very like a militiaman. And there's a final fascinating room here downstairs, the kitchen. A new door here, I'll just open it now.
1:16:16 Dan Snow? And musket balls pass through this door and indeed the frame, I can see one here, and then punch through the uprights on the stairs and into the heart of the house. And we think that's because there are actually redcoats in this kitchen firing on some militiamen that had taken shelter in the basement, which is the only safe place to be, we now learn, these wooden structures, as these musket balls flew through this neighbourhood. Before I came here, I thought of Lexington and Concord as a rural encounter, people firing volleys at each other in the woods and rolling open pasture land outside Boston. But this is altogether different, this really gives the impression of an urban battle almost, a battle in a built up area. It would have been a terrible place to be led flying from every direction.
1:17:00 Dan Snow? And this house really makes me think about the, well, the nature of that violence. The spiral of violence that now had the people here in its grip. Earlier in the day, don't forget, earlier in the day, those redcoats had helped put out fires in Concord, working with the local population. Now, they were smashing into these homes. They were clearing them, they were firing musket balls in confined spaces, through doors into a hidden enemy. They were smashing windows and inevitably, they started to loot, they started to burn. Percy admitted he could not keep order and he said later the plundering was shameful. We know that a silver tankard was actually taken from this house. Funny enough, they managed to get it back from the pawnbroker, so it's still on display here.
1:17:46 Dan Snow? But what never came back was the mechanisms, the inside of a grandfather clock that now stands in the entrance way, hollow and empty. As I look out this window here, I can still see the Boston Road. And if I look down it to the left, I can see the place where one of the most legendary encounters took place. And that was the story of the remarkable eighty-year-old Samuel Whitmore. He was, well, he was a veteran. He'd fought through his life, he'd fought on the violent colonial frontier. And when the redcoats marched back through this town, he grabbed his musket, he grabbed his pistols and he fired them onto the redcoats. And then he gripped his saber and he set to. And for his valor, he received a bullet in the face and thirteen bayonet thrusts and he was left for dead. But extraordinarily, he survived, he was taken to a tavern, treated,
1:18:30 Dan Snow? and he lived for another two decades. I very much doubt in all that time whether he ever had to buy his own beer. So this road that I'm standing on now would have just been a trail of destruction. Corpses, animal corpses, human corpses, wounded people left for dead. Jason Russell tragically was one of those that fell. One story says that he was, he was killed on his own doorstep. But either way, his body was laid out in the kitchen here alongside other militiamen at the end of that terrible day. It's very hard to be sure, but it seems that the regulars lost something like forty men killed here in Monotomy and eighty wounded. Those are shocking figures. And the roads to and from this town would have been clogged with refugees, women and children desperately trying to escape the fighting. We call it the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but this is where the fighting was
1:19:15 Dan Snow? at its fiercest. The following day, Boston Minister David McClure walked the battlefield and said simply, dreadful, were the vestiges of war on the road.
1:19:28 Dan Snow? Lord Percy said that it was torment. It was like marching in a moving ring of fire. He actually decided that he couldn't face trying to get it all the way to Boston. He knew the Cambridge militia would be out barring the way, and so instead he turned for Charleston. At the outskirts of Charleston, the emboldened militia tried to block the road, but Percy set his six-pound cannons on them and tore ragged holes in their lines of artillery and allowed his men to break through. There's a great story about a 65-year-old provincial called James Miller. He disobeyed the order by his militia superiors to retreat. "I am too old to run," he said calmly. He stood his ground, and he would never leave it. It's a familiar story in British military history.
1:20:12 Dan Snow? It was only once that the British soldiers were back at the coast, at a place underneath Bunker Hill, that they could relax, because it was only there that they were under the guns of His Britannic Majesty's battleships. Not for the last time, the British safety, the British writ, ran inland only as far as the range of a naval 32-pounder. At the end of that exhausting, bloody, terrible day, the British counted 73 dead, with 26 missing and 174 wounded.
1:20:47 Dan Snow? The British had lost more men than Wolfe had lost beneath the walls of Quebec in his epic assault on the plains of Abraham in 1759, a generation before. The provincial figure was something like 50 dead and 39 wounded, but they had access to enormous pools of manpower, and so militarily, that number of dead did not really shift the balance. The British Army, though, at the end of a very long, insecure supply chain, well, for them, every experienced redcoat, killed or wounded, was a blow to their ambition to bring the colonies back to heel. What's extraordinary about Lexington and Concord is how the strategic situation was transformed.
1:21:26 Dan Snow? Within hours, and certainly days, a massive provincial army marched on Boston and blockaded the British. The survivors of the expedition under Percy were forced to abandon Charleston, they had to retreat across the harbour to Boston proper, where the entire British army became trapped like fish in a barrel. General Gage had sought to nip the rebellion in the bud. Instead, he just sprayed gasoline on its glowing embers. Far from being pacified or reconciled, the vast mass of the northern colonies was now a seething, open, proudly-defined hotbed of revolution. By the end of that day, tellingly, Gage refers to the provincials for the first time as
1:22:11 Dan Snow? the enemy. Britain is now, obviously, at war. The Americans step up their response, the Continental Congress, who'd been meeting to harmonise the actions of all the different colonies. They transformed those colonial militias, they just rebadged it as the Continental Army. The US Army was born in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord. Its commander was a man called George Washington. That day had begun with a political crisis within the British Empire, with different ideas and voices about how best to keep it together. By the end of the day, the British Empire is at war with what will become the United States of America, the American Republic.
1:22:54 Dan Snow? Everyone on the ground that day felt the hand of history on their shoulder. They knew what it meant. Lord Percy warned in a letter home, "You may depend on it, that as the rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go through with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home." Well, Lord Percy was right, it was not a despicable rebellion at all. It was one that would morph into a great power war and lead to the emergence of the United States of America.
1:23:37 Dan Snow? We here on the podcast and at History Hit more generally on the social media, on the YouTube and on our subscription TV channel, we will be marking the events of that Great War. We'll be hitting all the big 250s. We've got a documentary out now on our TV channel about Lexington and Concord. We'll be following that up with a documentary about the Siege of Boston. And next year, we get to go to Long Island, we get to go to Brooklyn and chart the course of that astonishing confrontation when George Washington pulled off the Dunkirk of the American Revolutionary War, crossing the East River into Manhattan. But that for the moment is all in the future. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your pods and it will just drop seamlessly into your feed. And don't forget
1:24:19 Dan Snow? to go and check out our subscription TV channel, History Hit, multi-award winning. But in the meantime, thanks so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it. See you next time.
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