The Start of the War

Lexington and Concord

April 19,1775

The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements in the Revolutionary War. British troops marched towards Concord in order to seize and destroy guns and ammunition that the colonists had been keeping. General Thomas Gage from Massachusetts had sent out a scouting party earlier that week, which had alerted the colonists that the British were on their way. By the time the British arrived at Concord, most of the supplies had already been transported somewhere safer and the colonial militia was ready to fend off the British troops. After an intense confrontation in Lexington, many of the British troops could be found quickly retreating from the colonists angry gunshots. Lexington and Concord proved to the British army that the colonists had finally had enough of being pushed around by England. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the first shot fired here as the "shot heard round the world" in one of his poems.