FOLLOWING Samuel Adams’s ‘Boston Tea Party’ protest in 1773,* London quartered some three thousand soldiers from the Regular army all around the port, with orders to destroy the rebels’ stockpile of weapons at Concord, and arrest Adams and John Hancock, then in Lexington.
Paul Revere was hastily despatched on a midnight ride to Lexington, to warn Adams and Hancock, and to urge the people along his route, most of whom still thought of themselves as ‘British’, to decide what that really meant to them, before the Regulars came.
After he was captured by a patrol, he even warned the soldiers of the dangers they faced. But though they released him, they took no heed.
At dawn on April 19, 1775, even as Revere was smuggling Adams and Hancock out of the town, shots were fired on Lexington Common, and later at North Bridge in Concord; but by this time thousands had made up their minds that being ‘British’ meant being free.
The revolution had begun.
See The Boston Tea Party.