By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
So goes the first stanza of a hymn written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 and sung to the tune of “Old Hundredth” for the dedication of an obelisk at the site of the Battle of Concord, April 19, 1775.
Why was there fighting at Concord’s North Bridge, and at Lexington Common earlier that morning?
Britain’s colonies had enjoyed degrees of self-rule, some of them for a century and a half. The Jamestown colony convened a House of Burgesses, modeled on the House of Commons, in 1619 which requested the power to modify directives from London “that did presse or binde too harde.” Permission was denied, but the desire became father to reality as the home country, preoccupied with its own affairs, allowed its settlers leeway. In the mid-18th century, Sir William Blackstone, English jurist, wondered how far the common law applied to England’s transatlantic “plantations.” Too late. Englishmen abroad had grown used to trials by jury, to electing local officials (in two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, including even governors), and flouting imperial mercantilist policies by smuggling. When, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War to you), administrators in the metropole decided to tighten up the empire the better to pay off its debts, Americans were unhappy. “Young man,” an old vet of Concord told a 19th century inquirer, “what we meant by going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to.”
Boston had been a locus of agitation, from polemics to riots, organized by James Otis Jr. and Samuel Adams. Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, descended from an old Massachusetts family, was torn between his roots and the system he felt obliged to uphold. London sent an army to assist, then supersede him. In April 1775, 700 troops made a sweep of the countryside to seize or destroy caches of weapons. English troops had done this before without incident. This time there was gunfire, and the war came.
Why were the shots heard round the world? It was a struggle for independence. Corsica had riveted European attention by revolting from 1755-68 from Genoa, then France. James Boswell wrote his first book about it. Napoleone Buonaparte was a Corsican nationalist before casting his lot with France. But the Corsicans lost. Now across an ocean the remotest provincials raised their flags, and managed to keep them flying. After their ally France experienced a domestic revolution of its own, the American and French examples set Haiti, then all of Latin America, alight. With the Battle of Ayacucho in Peru in 1824, a half century later, the American mainland from Oregon to Patagonia ruled itself (a few Caribbean coastal strips excepted).
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.
Emerson ended his hymn with this.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.