It began just after dawn on April 19, 250 years ago, with an abrupt spatter of gunfire in rural Massachusetts that left eight Americans dead on Lexington Common a bucolic crossroads of 750 people and 400 cows. For the next eight years, an obscure squabble on the edge of the world metastasized into both a civil war of internecine fury and a global conflict fought on four continents and the seven seas. By the end, after 1,300 battlefield actions, plus 241 naval engagements, the British Empire was badly diminished and the new United States of America was ascendant, a fledgling republic with its own imperial ambitions.
The American semiquincentennial begins now, marking the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding. Like the bicentennial five decades ago, it’s an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on who we are, where we came from, what our forebears believed and — perhaps the most fearsome question any people can ask themselves — what they were willing to die for.
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Yet the American creation story remains pertinent, vivid and exhilarating, a reminder that we are the beneficiaries of an enlightened political heritagehanded down to us from that revolutionary generation. The bequest includes a legacy of personal liberty and strictures on how to divide power and prevent it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves. We cannot let that heritage slip away. We cannot permit it to be taken away. We cannot be oblivious to this priceless gift, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past two and a half centuries.
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Americans faced daunting odds in opposing the British. No colonial rebellion in modern times had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. Britain’s advantages included the greatest navy the world had ever seen, sophisticated financing of military ventures, a population more than triple that of America and a knack for expeditionary warfare reminiscent of the Romans’.
But a dry rot had undermined King George III’s cause virtually from those first shots at Lexington. Britain’s war effort leaned on several strategic misconceptions in underestimating rebel resolve against British firepower and overestimating the depth of loyalist support across the colonies. Protecting and arming loyalists, so that the “good Americans” (those loyal to the crown) could help subjugate the “bad Americans” (the rebels) were critical if the insurgency was to be crushed. Yet recent scholarship has estimated that no more than 20 percent of White Americans during the Revolution were steadfast loyalists.
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America is predicated on an idea: that all of us are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That should act as a polestar, providing true north and telling us what it is that we think we can do as a people. The perpetual challenge of the American experiment is to draw on these aspirational ideals, to make them our own, to hand them off to our children and our grandchildren, and to use that as a propulsion system for being the nation that those forebears thought we could become.
Hans Eicholz is correct: “The stand of the militiamen at Lexington and Concord is a vital touchstone of America’s constitutional tradition.” Here’s his conclusion:
General Gage appeared to Americans to be just that, a military ruler. His attempt to disarm the militias of Massachusetts by moving on Lexington and Concord fit the expected pattern of behavior. In that attempt, he animated not only that “ancient republican spirit,” but he also assured that it would become part of the distinctive constitutional tradition of a whole new and independent country.
Also recalling Lexington and Concord is George Will. A slice:
What Americans call the Civil War (1861-1865) was actually our second such. More New Yorkers fought for than against the British. [Rick] Atkinson says almost 20 percent of the population (excluding enslaved people) was loyal to Britain; 30,000 of them fought for it. Each side often treated the other savagely.
But, then, those who lived in the 18th century were inured to death, violent and otherwise, burying children swept away by disease and women who died during childbirth. “Typhus and other diseases,” Atkinson writes, “killed at least 8 percent of all passengers on transatlantic crossings.” Medicine was almost nonexistent, and where practiced was often more lethal than battle. Combat was often up close and personal, with edged weapons: swords, knives, hatchets and especially bayonets.
Eighteenth-century America, of which we are a reverberation, was both the age of reason and of barbarities. History, Atkinson reminds us, is always, as now, a compound of the elevating and appalling.
Americans who fear a rancorous plod toward America’s 250th birthday should remember: 250 years ago, the nation knew much worse. Then it healed, passed through the furnace of another civil war, then resumed its zigzag but upward path toward a more perfect union. Atkinson’s reminder is that the birth of this nation, like that of a baby, was painful but worth it.
Their ranks swelling, the colonials harried the regulars along the narrow Battle Road as they retreated back to Lexington, with the places where the fighting was especially intense known by names such as the Bloody Angle and Parker’s Revenge.
Members of the militia didn’t, as popular imagination believes, largely act on their own inspired initiative; they were well-led. The Americans repeatedly stood in formation against the British regulars during the course of the day. “It was an extraordinary display of courage, resolve, and discipline by citizen soldiers against regular troops,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes.
The more dispersed fighting along the Battle Road later on was itself the product of a colonial plan — to avoid direct confrontation with a now-reinforced, much larger British force.
By the time they made it back to Boston, the British had suffered a true mauling, experiencing roughly 300 casualties to 100 for the colonials.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Allen Guelzo celebrates this anniversary. Two slices:
But there was a revolution, and the commanding reason why we should pay attention to it is that it represented a fundamental break in the way human politics and societies in the West thought of themselves. For centuries, stretching back to classical times, peoples and nations were constructed as hierarchies—God in heaven, kings on earth, nobility beneath the kings and commoners beneath them all. Power and authority flowed downward; obligation and unity flowed upward.
The 18th-century Enlightenment offered a different notion of political life. Kings and nobles? They were merely accidental creations at moments of necessity. Real political authority began with the commoners, and if kings and nobles failed to satisfy the common people’s needs, the commoners were justified in heaving them aside and inventing a more satisfying form of government.
Much of this remained a thought experiment in the West—until the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson opens the Declaration of Independence with a frank embrace of Enlightenment political philosophy. Everyone possesses natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no matter his place in the world, and when a government fails to secure the exercise of those rights, then the people are perfectly justified in setting that government aside. Authority is based on “the consent of the governed,” not on the governors, even if they have crowns on their heads.
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No doubt the American Revolution had its share of hypocrites, and no amount of patriotic huffing and puffing can erase that. The same Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence was an owner of slaves, and an abuser of one female slave in particular, Sally Hemings. Washington, James Madison and even Benjamin Franklin also held people in bondage. Nor is anything gained by pleading that this is simply a “paradox.” Slavery persisted in the new American republic, despite its Enlightenment principles, until it had to be rooted out eight decades later at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
But the failure to live up to principles is a common human failing, and progress rarely proceeds in a straight line. It may be precisely the loftiness of the revolution’s principles that gives us high expectations of ourselves and then triggers a woe-is-us sense of disgusted resignation when we fall short. Still, the revolution isn’t an either/or proposition. We aren’t called on in 2026 either knowingly to celebrate mistakes or to fall to self-flagellation when we discover hypocrisy in our past.
There is a middle way. The question is whether we have enough time, and enough self-confidence, to find it.
Sam Negus reviews John Ferling’s Shots Heard Round the World.
Richard Brookhiser looks back on the Battle of Lexington and Concord. A slice:
Free countries can be as miserable as colonies, chaotic or despotic or both. In a decade of pre-revolutionary complaining, the farmers of Lexington and Concord had elaborated a revolutionary idea of self-government. Protestantism, legal reasoning, and ancient and English history taught them to fight, not as Massachusetts men, but as men. This would have implications for frontiersmen, immigrants, slaves, and women.
