At dawn on April 19, 1775, more than 700 British troops reached Lexington. There they found Captain John Parker and about 70 colonial militiamen waiting. The British commander ordered the Americans to drop their muskets. The colonists refused. No one knows who fired first, but within a few minutes eight militiamen lay dead. The British then marched to Concord, where they destroyed military supplies.  A battle broke out at a bridge north of town, forcing the British to retreat.  Nearly 4,000 Minutemen and militiamen arrived in the area. They lined the road from Concord to Lexington and peppered the retreating redcoats with musket fire. “It seemed as if men came down from the clouds,” one British soldier later recalled. Only the arrival of 1,000 more troops saved the British from total destruction as they scrambled back to Boston. Lexington and Concord were the first battles of the Revolutionary War. As Ralph Waldo Emerson later wrote, colonial troops had fired the “shot heard ‘round the world.” Americans would now have to choose sides and back up their political beliefs by force of arms.

 The American Revolution had begun.