“Shot Heard Round the World”
Shot Heard Round the World
by Stephen Hofer
You might have missed it this past weekend, with Saturday falling between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but April 19, 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of one of the most significant turning points in world history.
It was on April 19, 1775, in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, when the “Shot Heard Round the World” was fired. When I was in elementary school, those of my generation had to memorize the beginning stanzas of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s celebrated ode to the ride that Revere and two of his compatriots made under cover of darkness to warn colonists living in the Massachusetts countryside that 700 British soldiers were on the march, a 17-mile trek from Boston to Concord, with orders to confiscate weapons and gunpowder and arrest rebel leaders, among them, John Hancock and Samuel Adams.
Having been given advance warning, colonials confronted the British, first at Lexington and later at Concord. A small force of only about 80 militiamen had assembled on the Lexington Green and Captain John Parker recognized, even at dawn’s early light, that he was badly outnumbered. He is said to have told the men under his command, “Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
No one knows who fired that fateful first shot. Many theories have been propounded, including the notion that it may have come from one of the spectators who had surrounded the Green to observe the confrontation. In any event, once the firing began, it was followed by a British fusillade and a fixed bayonet charge that left eight colonists dead and another 10 wounded. One British regular suffered a minor wound. The remaining militiamen fled and the British soldiers reassembled and continued their march to Concord.
A much larger force of colonial militiamen, estimated at approximately 400, waited for the British just outside Concord. The British searched the town but didn’t find much since most of the colonial armaments already had been dispersed. The British then began their withdrawal but were confronted by the Americans on the opposite end of the North Bridge spanning the spring floodwaters of the Concord River. A mere 50 yards separated the two hostile forces. Once again, a first shot was fired, by whom no one knows, and this led to an exchange of musket fire with dead and injured casualties on both sides.
As more and more Americans continued to arrive from adjoining towns, the British made a strategic decision to withdraw back to Boston. The Minutemen knew the countryside; the British did not. Colonial sharpshooters hid behind trees and stone walls and fired at the retreating redcoats; by the time the British had marched back to Boston, some 250 British soldiers and 95 colonists were either dead or wounded.
The confrontations at Lexington and Concord were not major military events in terms of either tactics or casualties, but the battles were a significant failure for the British in that the expedition ended up inciting the very fighting it was intended to prevent and because very few colonial weapons were actually seized. From a historic perspective, however, their importance cannot be overstated. It would be more than 14 months before the Second Continental Congress would adopt the Declaration of Independence, but the die was irrevocably cast in these little Massachusetts hamlets 250 years ago. These were the first musket shots and the first deaths in a world-changing, eight-year war that would come to be known as the American Revolution.
Tens of thousands of Americans, both patriotic tourists and modern-day protestors, descended on Lexington and Concord Saturday to watch costumed reenactments of the historic confrontations. I watched from afar with pride. I am a member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution and can claim descent from 13 ancestors, both men and women, with proven roles, both military and civilian, in supporting the cause of American independence. They are among the thousands of soldiers and citizens, patriots all, whose sacrifices bestowed upon us all the precious legacy of a free and independent nation, the “shining city on the hill,” the United States of America.