April 19th: The Shot Heard Around the World

April 19th is the 236th anniversary of the Shot Heard Around the World at Lexington, Massachusetts. It was a fierce running battle that put the red coats to flight back to Boston. The rebel force included both men and women. Here is an account of a British soldier who survived the long retreat from Concord:

Although MacKenzie had seen few women or children, many were involved in the actions of the day. A man from the British ships in Boston Harbor wrote to England about the fury of the rebel attacks:


… even women had firelocks. One was seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and husband from their windows. There they three, with an infant child, soon suffered the fury of the day. In another house which was long defended by eight resolute fellows, the grenadiers at last got possession, when after having run their bayonets into seven, the eighth continued to abuse them with all the [beastlike rage] of a true Cromwellian, and but a moment before he quitted this world applied such epithets as I must leave unmentioned…

And here is the tally of British regulars and rebels who fought on that historic day:

Thus ended an unbelievable April day. About eighteen hundred British regulars had marched to destroy some secreted rebel stores: seventy-three of them had been killed, two hundred were wounded or missing. Probably an equal number of Americans had been engaged during the day, but no one could count accurately the men who came, shot at the red column, and then either came to Cambridge or hiked home. Forty-nine of them had died and forty-six were wounded or missing.

The aftermath of lost ones and thoughts of a rebel who made it to the action late:

Grief-torn homes in Lexington, Acton, Woburn, and a dozen more towns, and redcoats hastily buried across the road from Josiah Nelson’s boulder strewn yard in Lincoln and other spots along the roadside – these were more than statistics. They were the evidence that an intellectual rebellion had become a rebellion in arms.


A man named James Jones arrived at Concord too late for the fighting, but soon his company was in Cambridge, billeted in Harvard College, and he was writing his “Loving Wife” the only universal truth of the day: “Tis uncertain when we shall return … Let us be patient & remember that it is ye hand of God.”




Source:  Rebels & Redcoats