Concord and Lexington: How Far We’ve Drifted

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, the “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired on Lexington green; the phrase was coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson decades later. According to this nationalist narrative, the skirmishes at Concord and Lexington that took place that day were the first shots in the War for Independence. At the time, however, the colonial militiamen who took up arms against British regulars believed only that they were defending their constitutional rights as Englishmen.

Fourteen months later, the provisional inter-colonial government – the Second Continental Congress – would vote to declare independence from Great Britain. Although they framed that declaration in the language of natural rights (“all men are created equal”), the protests that led to the violence in Concord and Lexington were against Parliamentary trespasses of Englishmen’s rights.

Yet twelve years before, at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, which the French and British fought the world over and which was felt deeply in North America, the colonists were supremely happy with their place in the British empire. At the announcement of British victory, refrains of “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” was sung throughout the British colonies.

Even before the war ended, in 1760, Benjamin Franklin, who would later become an ardent American nationalist, wrote “No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do on the [recent successes against France in North America] and this, not merely as I am a Colonist, but as I am a Briton. I have long been of Opinion that the Foundations of the future Grandeur and Stability of the British Empire lie in America.” 

Soon after, however, a number of measures enacted by Parliament raised the ire of the colonists. At the root of this resistance lay a fundamental belief held by many of those who protested: Parliament did not represent them and therefore Parliament did not have the right to tax them or to legislate for them apart from those laws necessary to regulate the empire. The colonial legislatures were the colonists’ rightful lawmakers, not Parliament to which no English colonists was sent as a representative. But their staunch commitment to their rights rested not in some nascent notions of American independence, but in their identity as English citizens and subjects. As brewer-patriot Samuel Adams wrote in 1772, “All persons born in the British American colonies are . . . declared to be entitled, to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights, liberties, and privileges of subjects born in Great Britain, or within the realm.”

So what were their complaints? There were many. The most important were the taxes: the Stamp Act (1765), which required most legal and business documents to use embossed paper upon which a duty was imposed. And two years later came the Townshend Duties, which taxed an array of goods imported from the mother country to the colonies – tea, lead, paint, glass, and paper.

While complaints about the effect of such duties on colonial pocketbooks were present, the fundamental issue was “no taxation without representation,” a catchphrase that pointed to the assertion of their rights as Englishmen. It also highlighted their belief that it was their respective colonial assemblies through which they were represented. Rules and regulations imposed by anyone else, whether a royally-appointed governor or by Parliament itself represented tyranny. And colonial fears that such rights were being broadly and systematically threatened seemed well-founded. Throughout the 1760s and early 1770s, Parliament passed a variety of laws that appeared to the colonists to strike at their traditional rights and liberties, not least because it was Parliament, and not their own legislative bodies, that imposed these laws.

The Quartering Act of 1765 was also high on the list of liberty-threatening laws. Contrary to popular belief that this law allowed the British to quarter troops in private residences, it no less threatened colonial rights. One objection was that this law constituted another tax since it required colonial officials to feed, house, and transport troops. Once required to do so, the only way to fund it would be to raise local revenue. 

More importantly, however, was the more general threat to liberty. The war with France was over, threat of popish tyranny was gone, and freedom could now run its course in North America. Why, then, did Parliament need to provide for a resident army? Maintaining a continuous, professional soldiery – a standing army – could mean only one thing: empowering the government to make arbitrary decisions (that is, to make laws without respect to the sovereign will of the people). This was a long-standing concern of Englishmen that had roots stretching back to ideas of ancient Rome, when Caesar replaced the republic with an empire. 

The Sugar Act, passed before these others in 1764, was less concerning for the issue of taxation (it actually lowered the duty on foreign molasses and arguably fell under Parliament’s right to regulate trade for the empire), but it enhanced enforcement of duty collection. Fair enough, except that this included a provision to try smuggling cases in an expanded admiralty court located in Halifax. The chief difference between such courts and local courts was the absence of a jury, considered by the colonists a fundamental constitutional right.

Over the next several years, Parliament and the colonists skirmished over these and similar laws. Things came to a head in 1774. At the end of the previous year, radicals in Boston prevented payment of the import duty on British tea by boarding merchant vessels in the harbor and dumping the tea into the salty waters of the bay. Upon hearing the news months later, Parliament enacted a new series of laws aimed at bringing the colonists to heel. Believing that resistance was localized and committed by only a small minority of rabble rousers, MPs believed that punishing Boston and Massachusetts would finally bring an end to resistance in the colonies. 

The Coercive Acts included the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port until the tea (and duties) was paid for. It also included an upgrade to the Quartering Act that empowered British commanders to choose better and more convenient accommodations for troops (rather than in out-of-the-way and run-down buildings). A act third provided for the transport of royal officials accused of a crime in the colonies back to England (where presumably they would be safe from mobs and receive a fair hearing, but where colonists assumed they would be given preferential treatment). The most objectionable of the four, and the one which cut closest to the heart of English constitutional rights was the Massachusetts Government Act, which effectively shut down the provincial government. Thus the citizens of Massachusetts lost their official political voice. 

Far from dividing the colonies, these Intolerable Acts, as many colonists called them, led to the creation of the First Continental Congress. Although it would be two years before independence was declared, the two sides were edging towards armed conflict. The congress advised the colonies to prepare militarily for defense of their rights while taking diplomatic steps to resolve things peacefully.

While some voices in favor of independence began to be heard, by far most of the colonists sought only recognition of their rights as Englishmen, and they hoped to have Parliament recognize them without resorting to violence. But their commitment to these rights was deep and abiding, and they believed Parliament was acting arbitrarily – without respect to their political voices as manifest in their respective colonial legislatures. 

The right to tax themselves, the right to trial by a jury of their peers, the right to due process, the right to their property, freedom from fear of tyranny imposed by a standing army – these were their concerns on April 19, 1775, when General Thomas Gage, then occupying Boston as enforcement of the Coercive Acts, sent out troops to arrest what he considered rebel leaders and to confiscate powder and shot.

The initial show-down on Lexington Green between Gage’s regulars and local militia quickly turned lethal when a gun was fired, perhaps inadvertently. The Lexington militia was quickly dispersed and the regulars moved down the road to Concord where they met a better prepared defense. Things quickly turned sour for Gage’s troops, they failed their objective in Concord, and had to fight their way all the way back to Boston.

This may not have been an irreversible moment, especially given the reluctance of some of the strongest proponents of colonial rights to consider independence (for example, John Dickinson), but as a matter of historical fact, it was a major step towards revolution. 

Once independence was declared the following year, an armed resistance now became a war of political revolution, the concerns that fueled colonial resistance to Parliament in the previous decade were still in play. Added to these were more fundamental rights – “life, liberty, and property” – but these absolute human rights would only reinforce the constitutional rights these (now) Americans fought for. This is why most states when first establishing their individual constitutions as they transitioned from their colonial charters in 1776 established bills of rights that provided for free speech, freedom of the press, the right to publicly congregate, the right to trial by jury, the right to due process, habeas corpus, protection from illegal search and seizure, among others. The system of government at the state and inter-state level was one of representative democracy, and when the second general government was created via the Constitution (the first iteration of today’s national government), the Founders refined these ideas to create a balanced government that distributed sovereignty between state and national government (all granted by the people) and that provided for checks and balances between distinct branches of government.

What is astounding to me today is the profound transformation in the American political order. There seems to be quite a high tolerance among many Americans for state and national governments to engage in illegal search and seizure, to ignore due process, to violate the right of habeas corpus, to restrict and even punish free speech and the right to publicly congregate. And President Trump’s first hundred days have been rife with these transgressions. 

As shocking and truly terrifying as his actions have been, what most astounds me is that legislators – those elected to represent the people’s interests – are so deeply partisan in their commitments that they have forgotten their fundamental role as the people’s representatives in protecting the sovereignty of those people as manifest in the elected assemblies. I’m speaking primarily of Republican congressmen and senators, of course. The Republic is truly at risk, and whatever differences they have with Democrats, these differences should pale in comparison to the threat to our constitutional system of government, a system with roots that run much deeper than the American Revolution. The president is running roughshod over the rights and privileges of Congress – they who represent us, determine the raising of revenue, and who decide how to spend it. Colonial patriots recognized how profound the threat to their liberty was when Parliament acted without their consent, when Parliament taxed and legislated for them. So profoundly threatened they felt that they took up arms to defend their constitutional rights. 

Yet today, when the executive branch of our national government poses the same threat, the Republicans in Congress choose to ignore it, defend it, or even support it. Is it craven desire for political power? Is it fear that the man who occupies the White House can end their political careers? I’m reminded of John Adams’ ire expressed in the John Adams miniseries at John Dickinson (I don’t know if he actually said these words), when he suggested that Dickinson’s unwillingness to stand up to Parliamentary tyranny was “to lie down in the ground like a snake and crawl toward the seat of power in abject surrender.” The alternative is that they have already given up on our constitutional ideals and embrace the tyranny of a dictator to advance their social and cultural ideals.. 

Either way, in two hundred and fifty years, we have fallen very, very far from our founding political ideals, ideals that saw power as dangerous and that inspired the Founders to create governing systems designed to limit and check political power. To live up to those ideals today is to embrace such limits, to accept limitations on what we expect society and culture to look like rather than to support despotism to create a society that seems good to us.