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

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 this instant arrived." The news reaching Savannah, a party of citizens immediately took possession of the government powder.
The wave of excitement which follows the signal of a coming struggle was thus borne by its own force throughout the length of the colonies. And from the coast the intelligence spread inland as far as settlers had found their way. In distant Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, men heard it, and began to organize and drill. At Charlotte, North Carolina, they sounded the first note for independence. From many points brave and sympathetic words were sent to the people of Massachusetts Bay, and in all quarters people discussed the probable effect of the startling turn matters had taken in that colony. The likelihood of a general rupture with the mother country now came to be seriously entertained.
Meanwhile the situation to the eastward assumed more and more a military aspect. On the