The colonists were at first demanding only equal rights with British citizens, until the events of April 1775.
In 1837, the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson published a poem called Concord Hymn, to mark the dedication of an obelisk in Concord, Massachusetts. This obelisk commemorated the events of 19 April 1775, which sparked the beginning of the American War of Independence. That day saw the firing of what Emerson called “the shot heard round the world”. It was indeed a historic day – truly a decisive moment both in British history and in the history of what became the United States.
“After the issue had become independence then it could only be sorted out by a war to the bitter end”
The events at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 were the culmination of ten years of growing tension between the colonists and the British government. At the heart of that tension lay the issue of whether the government could legitimately impose various taxes and duties on the colonists if the latter’s representatives had not given their consent. This principle of no taxation without representation had effectively been established in Britain by the end of the 17th century, and the colonists wished to be treated on an equal basis. As the Virginian lawyer Patrick Henry put it in 1765, this was “the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom”. The British government, however, insisted that it had a right to control the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”.
From the mid 1760s, this issue became progressively more contentious and each step that the British took to reassert their powers proved counterproductive. The situation escalated, and the colonists’ protests became not just verbal but physical, as in the celebrated Boston Tea Party of December 1773. General Thomas Gage, commander of the British military forces in America, wrote that “the seditious here have raised a flame in every colony”. By February 1775, the threat of disorder was so great that the British parliament, led by prime minister Lord North, declared Massachusetts to be in rebellion. They ordered Gage to restore British rule, to disarm those whom they blamed for stirring up protests, and to arrest their leaders.
When Gage received these orders, he sent British troops to destroy the munitions stored at Concord lest they fall into the hands of protesters. On 19 April, the troops reached Lexington, where they found about seventy of the local militia (‘minutemen’) waiting on the common. There was a confrontation, a shot rang out – nobody knows who fired this first shot – and the British opened fire, leaving eight minutemen dead and ten wounded. The British then marched on to Concord where there was another, larger confrontation which forced the British troops to retreat to Boston under what one of them called “an incessant fire”. By the end of the day, the British had 73 dead, 174 wounded and 53 missing; the corresponding figures for the colonists were 49, 39 and five.
These events were crucial in transforming what until then had been a constitutional demand for the American colonists to enjoy the same rights as British subjects into a demand for their actual independence from British rule. Before that moment, the colonists’ demands were couched in terms of wanting rights equal to those that the British already possessed. In 1764, the Boston lawyer James Otis wrote that “the colonists, being men, have a right to be considered as equally entitled to all the rights of nature with the Europeans”. For more than ten years after that, even the most radical colonists based their demands on the premise that they would remain ruled by the British Crown. In January 1775, John Adams, who later became the second president of the United States, could still write that “we are part of the British dominions, that is, of the King of Great Britain, and it is our interest and duty to continue so”.
“Even the most radical colonists based their demands on the premise that they would remain ruled by the British Crown”
Twelve months later, the picture was very different. In January 1776, the radical Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, in which he made a passionate case for independence: “O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!” Paine argued that there was nothing predestined or irrevocable about British rule over the American colonies: “even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven”. It was therefore possible to conceive of those ties being broken.
This was the crucial intellectual step towards the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. In that declaration, the representatives of each of the colonies, assembled in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, asserted that “the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States”. They therefore declared that “they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved”.
In one simple but gigantic step, the framework of allegiance to Britain within which debate had been conducted before 1775 was removed, and the principle of independence was enacted. As long as the debate had remained one over constitutional rights, it was possible that it might have been resolved, but after the issue had become independence then it could only be sorted out by a war to the bitter end.
Over the years that followed, other powers entered the conflict on the American side – France in 1778, Spain in 1779, and the Dutch in 1780 – until the British surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781. The British lost the war primarily because they were outnumbered and overstretched, but to explain why there was a war at all we need to go back to those dramatic events at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. More than any other single moment, that day changed the point at issue between the colonists and the British government. The “shot heard round the world” was truly a decisive moment both for Britain and for what became the United States.
David L. Smith has been a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, since 1988 and Director of Studies in History since 1992. His books include Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640-1649 (1994), A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1707: The Double Crown (1998), The Stuart Parliaments, 1603-1689 (1999), and (with Patrick Little) Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007). He has also edited two series of A-level history textbooks for Cambridge University Press.
