Roughly 700 British troops marching to seize colonial arms at Concord met 77 militiamen assembled on Lexington Green before dawn. A shot rang out — no one knows from which side — and eight militiamen fell dead within minutes. By the time the British retreated to Boston that evening, harried the whole way by colonial fire, the fighting had spread to Concord's North Bridge and beyond, transforming a tax dispute into an armed rebellion.
Paul Revere and William Dawes had ridden through the night warning that the British were coming, and by 5 a.m. Captain John Parker had drawn his 77 militiamen into ranks on Lexington Green, reportedly telling them, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
What happened next remains disputed. A shot cracked the morning air — fired by an unknown hand from an unknown side — and within moments British volleys had killed eight Americans and wounded ten more, for the loss of a single wounded regular. The British column pressed on to Concord, where colonial minutemen turned them back at the North Bridge, then harassed their long retreat to Boston with musket fire from behind stone walls and trees.
By nightfall 49 Americans and 73 British soldiers lay dead. Word of the fighting spread by rider and newspaper through the colonies within days, hardening opinion that had wavered between reconciliation and rebellion. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later immortalize the moment at the North Bridge as "the shot heard round the world," and the date became a fixed point in American memory, still marked as Patriots' Day in Massachusetts.
Key people: John Parker, Paul Revere, Thomas Gage