The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn | Page 4

are a familiar chapter in its history. On the morning of the 19th of
April, 1775, an expedition of British regulars, moving out from Boston,
came upon a company of provincials hastily forming on Lexington
Common, twelve miles distant. The attitude of these countrymen
represented the last step to which they had been driven by the
aggressive acts of the home Parliament. Up to this moment the
controversy over colonial rights and privileges had been confined, from
the days of the Stamp Act, to argument, protest, petition, and legislative
proceedings; but these failing to convince or conciliate either party, it
only remained for Great Britain to exercise her authority in the case
with force.
The expedition in question had been organized for the purpose of
seizing the military stores belonging to the Massachusetts Colony, then
collected at Concord, and which the king's authorities regarded as too
dangerous material to be in the hands of the people at that stage of the
crisis. The provincials, on the other hand, watched them jealously. King
and Parliament might question their rights, block up their port, ruin
their trade, proscribe their leaders, and they could bear all without
offering open resistance. But the attempt to deprive them of the means
of self-defence at a time when the current of affairs clearly indicated
that, sooner or later, they would be compelled to defend themselves,
was an act to which they would not submit, as already they had shown
on more than one occasion. To no other right did the colonist cling
more tenaciously at this juncture than to his right to his powder. The
men at Lexington, therefore, drew up on their village grounds, not
defiantly, but in obedience to the most natural impulse. Their position
was a logical one. To have remained quietly in their homes would have
been a stultification of their whole record from the beginning of the
troubles; stand they must, some time and somewhere. Under the
circumstances, a collision between the king's troops and the provincials
that morning was inevitable. The commander of the former, charged

with orders to disperse all "rebels," made the sharp demand upon the
Lexington company instantly to lay down their arms. A moment's
confusion and delay--then scattering shots--then a full volley from the
regulars--and ten men fell dead and wounded upon the green. Here was
a shock, the ultimate consequences of which few of the participants in
the scene could have forecast; but it was the alarm-gun of the
Revolution.
Events followed rapidly. The march of the British to Concord, the
destruction of the stores, the skirmish at the bridge, and, later in the day,
the famous road-fight kept up by the farmers down to Charlestown,
ending in the signal demoralization and defeat of the expedition,
combined with the Lexington episode to make the 19th of April an
historic date. The rapid spread of the news, the excitement in New
England, the uprising of the militia and their hurried march to Boston
to resist any further excursions of the regulars, were the immediate
consequence of this collision.
Nor was the alarm confined to the Eastern colonies, then chiefly
affected. A courier delivered the news in New York three days later, on
Sunday noon, and the liberty party at once seized the public military
stores, and prevented vessels loaded with supplies for the British in
Boston from leaving port. Soon came fuller accounts of the expedition
and its rout. Expresses carried them southward, and their course can be
followed for nearly a thousand miles along the coast. On the 23d and
24th they passed through Connecticut, where at Wallingford the
dispatches quaintly describe the turning out of the militiamen: "The
country beyond here are all gone." They reached New York at two
o'clock on the 25th, and Isaac Low countersigns. Relays taking them up
in New Jersey, report at Princeton on the 26th, at "3.30 A.M." They are
at Philadelphia at noon, and "forwarded at the same time." We find
them at New Castle, Delaware, at nine in the evening; at Baltimore at
ten on the following night; at Alexandria, Virginia, at sunset on the
29th; at Williamsburg, May 2d; and at Edenton, North Carolina, on the
4th, with directions to the next Committee of Safety: "Disperse the
material passages [of the accounts] through all your parts." Down
through the deep pine regions, stopping at Bath and Newbern, ride the

horsemen, reaching Wilmington at 4 P.M. on the 8th. "Forward it by
night and day," say the committee. At Brunswick at nine the
indorsement is entered: "Pray don't neglect a moment in forwarding."
At Georgetown, South Carolina, where the dispatches arrive at 6.30
P.M. on the 10th, the committee address a note to their Charleston
brethren: "We send you by express a letter and newspapers with
momentous intelligence