The Guns Are For You

Don’t ask for whom the guns are — the guns are for you.

In the wee hours of April 18-19, 1775, seven-hundred British troops marched out of Boston, in their North American Colony of Massachusetts, toward the villages of Lexington and Concord. Their immediate goal was to confiscate the arms and ammunition reportedly stockpiled there by the colonists.

The mission’s larger goal was to crush widespread civil disobedience brought on by the British Parliament’s passage of the Massachusetts Government Act, replacing locally elected government with a British Governor and officials chosen by the King, three-thousand miles away.

Most Americans know the story; spies in Boston signaled riders to warn the colonists, and at sunrise those seven-hundred British troops arriving in Lexington faced a ragged line of seventy-seven civilians, vastly outnumbered, but determined to stop their government from confiscating their weapons.

Emerson immortalized what came next as “the shot heard ‘round the world” marking the beginning of what was actually a civil war, Englishmen fighting Englishmen, known to us as the American Revolutionary War, the conflict by which the colonists freed themselves from a government they thought distant, intrusive and oppressive, that little understood, and cared less about them.