But let the significance of the campaign be measured by the record itself, to which the following pages are devoted. It will be found to have been the year in which Great Britain made her most strenuous efforts to suppress the colonial revolt, and in which both sides mustered the largest forces raised during the war; the year in which the issues of the contest were clearly defined and America first fought for independence; a year, for the most part, of defeats and losses for the colonists, and when their faith and resolution were put to the severest test; but a year, also, which ended with a broad ray of hope, and whose hard experiences opened the road to final success. It was the year from which we date our national existence. A period so interesting and, in a certain sense, momentous is deserving of illustration with every fact and detail that can be gathered.
What was the occasion or necessity for this campaign; what the plans and preparations made for it both by the mother country and the colonies?
The opening incidents of the Revolution, to which these questions refer us, 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.