by TOM MACKAMAN
On April 19, 1775, 250 years ago today, the first battles of the American Revolution took place at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. The day of fighting, itself the outcome of a gathering revolutionary crisis, presaged the outcome of the war: the victory of the revolution over what was then the world’s greatest power, Great Britain, and the establishment of the world’s first major modern democratic republic.
By the spring of 1775, the upheaval in the British North American colonies had reached an advanced stage, especially in Massachusetts, where “the flames of sedition had spread universally throughout the country beyond conception,” in the words of Thomas Gage, the Commander-in-Chief of British North America and the recently appointed Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
On April 14, 1775, General Gage received his orders to extinguish those “flames of sedition” directly from Lord Dartmouth, secretary of the state for the colonies in the government of Prime Minister Lord North. “Seize and destroy all military stores,” Dartmouth wrote, and “arrest the principal actors.” Gage was told to put down the colonials lest their rebellion mature to “a riper state.”
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