American History Hit
Lexington & Concord: The First Battles of the Revolutionary War
Thu, 26 Dec 2024
The shot heard ‘round the world'; the start of the American Revolution. An event that would have profound consequences for world history, especially western democracy. Who’d have thought that something of such magnitude would begin in a small settlement with as many cows as people living in it?Don Wildman hops across the Atlantic from American History Hit to Echoes of History to help Matt Lewis understand how two tiny towns became the spark that lit the fire of the American War of Independence.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast.Hosted by: Matt LewisEdited by: Tim ArstallProduced by: Matt Lewis, Sophie Gee, Robin McConnellSenior Producer: Anne-Marie LuffProduction Coordinator: Beth DonaldsonExecutive Producers: Etienne Bouvier, Julien Fabre, Steve Lanham, Jen BennettMusic:Main Menu Theme by Lorne BalfeBurial Mound by Lorne BalfeThe Convoy by Lorne BalfeFort Attack by Lorne BalfeDeadly Performance by Lorne Balfe
Chapter 1: What were the battles of Lexington and Concord?
Stay tuned as Matt and I explore how these quiet rural villages outside of Boston suddenly became the unlikely setting for the famous shots heard round the world as history was about to change forever. Hope you enjoy. Music
The peace of the dawn air is disturbed by the rasp of drums. Their inexorable rhythm is so alien to your rural surroundings that even the pink glow of twilight seems spoiled by the sound. Nearby, you hear the clatter of hooves from a solitary rider. The pace is furious and the heavy panting of the horse is almost as loud as the warning cries from its master.
You wonder for how long and how far the poor beast has galloped through the night. Nevertheless, you understand the rider's hurry. Punctuating the calm morning air, the drums get ever closer. Their snare is unmistakable, and underneath you hear the crunch of marching feet. There can be no doubt what's creating the martial rhythm. As the rider passes each farmhouse, he repeats his warning.
From within the wooden buildings, voices rise in response. A tone of panic dominates. Wives wake their husbands, fathers rouse their eldest sons, and the bustle of urgent activity soon joins the muffled cacophony. You recognise the metallic clack of wrought iron and the thud of walnut wood. The tapping of ramrods confirms your suspicions.
The residents of this normally quiet town are preparing their firearms. The sound of drums is as clear as the sun above the horizon now, as the warmth of the first light of day creeps across the dewy ground, elongating the shadows of the trees into infinite black chasms. You can almost feel the tremors of hundreds of stamping feet and the rumble of cannon wheels on the road outside town.
Yet, already lining up in well-rehearsed formation on the common, seemingly all the adult men and their barely adult sons of the town are gathered to meet the oncoming force. They don't wear uniforms. They don't have standardized weapons or regulation hairstyles. In fact, there's nothing regular about them at all.
They look like nothing more or less than what they are, a militia of citizens ready to defend their families. The drums are in the town, the pounding echoes between the houses, and it sounds as if the drums are all around you. You look over your shoulder instinctively, just in case you really are surrounded. But there is nothing.
Instead, the real position of the drumming is revealed by the harsh bark of a commanding voice. the indistinct vocalisation that carries the weight of an order that must be followed or discipline will be faced. The militia on the green turn to face the approaching army. Their captain orders them to stand fast and they obey with nervous determination.
When they went to bed last night, they had no idea that they would be so rudely awakened. You fear that most of them won't return to their beds tonight. This small town has never seen anything like this before. But you can see the red jackets and bearskin caps before they come around the corner. The warning cry of the rider resounds in your mind.
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Chapter 2: How did the Revolutionary War begin?
down to Virginia and all the way down to Georgia. Each one of these colonies is set up, you know, kind of autonomously to have its own relationship with the mother country. New England's different. And that's a really fundamental part of this to talk about. New England is really its own world because it has its own relationship based on very different values than otherwise.
Remember, this is the Puritan colony. This comes, the pilgrims come in 1620. And over the course of the 1600s, a lot of what is the general English policy towards all colonies especially affects New England. It is a very autonomous culture, certainly based on its religious values and all the governance that comes from that, very strict.
But it's also a different kind of mercantile relationship than the other colonies have, all the way down into the Caribbean, which are much more plantation-driven, much more lucrative to England. New England is a much more about the shipping and the export business coming back and forth. It's the closest one to England. And so it has its own sort of relationship.
And until 1763, that's a very, very autonomous one. And and that's kind of where we have the tipping point that leads to Lexington Concord.
I guess it's quite interesting that all of these colonies are kept kind of separately with their own individual relationships with England and Britain in the sense that it keeps them from being unified, doesn't it? It keeps them to some extent all dealing with Britain in a slightly different way, in a slightly different context and stops them being a united bloc.
So what we're talking about when we're leading up to the revolution is a sort of continuum towards tyranny. That's how the colonists see it, because as far as they were concerned, they were English citizens who were running their own world over here in the colonies and for that matter elsewhere in other parts of the world as well. But especially in New England, they felt very much on their own.
And so they were trusted. The term was salutary neglect, which was said in 1775 by Edmund Burke. This was a sense that the kingdom of England trusted its colonies to work out things on their own. All that changes with the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War. Once that war takes place and a huge amount of debt is suddenly saddled by the monarchy, they need to pay this off.
And the colonies, especially New England, especially the American colonies, are the source of that income. That's what really changes things. The other aspect of that period is that the king who was in charge for all those previous years, King George II, dies in 1760. And a new king, George III, who we will be burning in effigy very soon. takes over. He's the grandson of George II.
And that king has a different idea. He needs to shape things up and pay for the debts that were incurred protecting, as he sees it, these colonists.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the 'shot heard 'round the world'?
In Assassin's Creed 3, in Liberation, players are able to ride a horse through Lexington and Concord. You can see all of those towns. Do we have a sense of what they look like? The game tells us there are these big wooden buildings, it's muddy roads, there's big, large, green open spaces. Do we have any concept of what they would have actually looked like in 1775? Yeah.
Well, these were nice places. I mean, of course, they were small places because everything's small in those days. But you have these well-built houses by this time. The merchants who have been working and lawyers and all those sorts of people are living in nice houses on the main street. But that's kind of it. And then beyond that, you have farmland.
I've been inside these houses and explored inside of them for other shows that I've done. And they're wonderful. Well-built two-story houses, House of Seven Gables, these kinds of famous houses that people have heard of in this area are all of that kind of early American style.
I guess for the purposes of the game, you'd want to understand that there's a main drag, you know, one street going through that town and then maybe small alleyways off of that or small little roads off of that. But everything's very, very rural otherwise.
Interesting. So we're talking about... A fairly small agricultural community living outside the city of Boston. How do we reach a point where somewhere like Lexington and Concord then becomes a sparking point for a revolution that will kind of redefine an entire nation? What is it about Lexington and Concord that makes everything kick off there?
I'm smiling because this is the point where every American either gets on the train or not. There is a tremendous amount of history that leads up to this moment. When we go to school as elementary school students, we learn that taxation without representation led to a The shot heard round the world and the war began and we won and we were a country. That's kind of how it goes for us.
And that's almost understandable given the fact that when you get into it, the history is very complex, very interesting, but very complex. And it's really 150 years that press down on this moment in 1775 where when these forces meet each other on a bridge in Lexington. I remember when I was a kid, my dad was a historian and he took me all over the Eastern seaboard.
And one of the big ones, of course, was to go to Lexington and you stand on this rebuilt, built bridge there. In the middle of the battlefield where it all happened. And you can't really picture it. It's so small and so sort of minor. And in my case, my father instructed me, well, this is guerrilla tactics. You know, the militia are gathering here.
The Redcoats are coming in their ranked files and they're walking up this way and we have the battle. But in fact, that is very much a skirmish. certainly the one in Lexington, and then again in Concord, where really this action takes place is in the retreat. So that 150 years must be considered, but it gets into a very long conversation.
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