The Morning the Militia Turned Out

By 1774, relations between Massachusetts and the British government had broken down. After the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the measures colonists called the Intolerable Acts, and General Thomas Gage was made governor with orders to restore royal authority.

On 1 September 1774, Gage's troops removed gunpowder from a provincial powder house outside Boston. Rumors spread that fighting had begun, and thousands of militiamen from across New England began marching toward Boston before the reports were corrected. Historians call it the Powder Alarm. It showed how quickly the countryside could mobilize — and how seriously colonists took any move to seize their arms and powder.

Through the winter, towns drilled their militia and organized companies of minutemen, men pledged to be ready at a minute's notice. The provincial congress gathered military stores, including at Concord.

On the night of 18 April 1775, British regulars set out to seize and destroy those stores. Riders, including Paul Revere and William Dawes, spread the alarm through the towns along the route, and church bells and signal guns roused the militia.

At dawn on the 19th, the regulars reached Lexington, where a company of militia had assembled on the town common. Shots were fired — who fired first has never been settled — and several militiamen were killed. The regulars marched on to Concord.

At Concord's North Bridge, militia from surrounding towns engaged a British detachment and forced it back. As the regulars marched back toward Boston that afternoon, militia companies converging from across the region fired on the column for miles, and the British suffered heavy casualties before reaching safety.

The events of that day began the War of Independence. They also explain why the generation that wrote the Bill of Rights cared so much about the militia and the people's arms. In their memory, the attempt to seize powder and weapons was where the fight for liberty began.