James Baquet

In early 1775, the British colony of Massachusetts was declared by the British Crown to be in a state of rebellion. The colonials had formed a provisional government in response to parliamentary oppression and begun training local militias for possible defense of the colony.

When the Boston-based British troops were secretly ordered to destroy the militias’ supplies, stored at Concord, the colonials got wind of it, moved their supplies, and prepared to meet the expedition.

This was the night immortalized in the 1861 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which begins:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

Revere and as many as 40 others were rallying the troops. Legend says Revere called out, “ The British are coming! The British are coming!” — a foolhardy strategy, since the British were all over the countryside. Instead, according to Revere and eyewitness accounts, the cry was “The Regulars are coming out,” a hardly-more-disguised reference to the regular British troops. (The militias were “irregular,” not a formal army.)

The two sides met at Lexington, less than 20 kilometers from Boston, as the sun was coming up April 19, 1775. Eight of the outnumbered militiamen died in the encounter, and one British regular. The British moved on to neighboring Concord where, as that same poet, Longfellow, wrote in his 1837 “Concord Hymn,” 400 militiamen met about 100 regulars at the North Bridge, “And fired the shot heard round the world” — a reference to the overarching significance of the battle.

The main body of the British regrouped and marched toward Boston, harassed by colonial fire along the way. When they arrived, the colonials immediately organized the nearly year-long Siege of Boston, in which the colonial militias prevented British troops from venturing out of the city. The American colonies had revolted against their mother country, and the War of Independence — sometimes called the Revolutionary War — had begun.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. overwhelming, supreme

2. pestered, bothered

3. made to live forever

4. joined together again

5. informal group of “citizen soldiers”

6. people living in a colony

7. having fewer that the other side

8. Heard about it

9. calling together

10. recklessly bold, impetuous