Lexington Green, 1775

At first light on April 19, 1775, about seventy-seven Lexington militiamen stood in two thin lines on the common as the advance companies of a British column came up the road from Boston — some 700 regulars sent to seize the stores of powder and shot at Concord. Captain John Parker, a farmer and veteran of the French war, had them in a row facing the meetinghouse.

Major John Pitcairn rode forward and ordered the rebels to disperse. They had begun to, keeping their muskets, when a shot was fired. No one has ever established by whom. The regulars fired a volley and charged with the bayonet.

Eight militiamen were dead on the green and ten wounded. One British soldier was hit. The column marched on to Concord, and the war began.

The viewer stands with the militia — behind them, at their shoulders, looking past a row of homespun coats and hunting shirts at the wall of scarlet forming by the meetinghouse. Long shadows run across the wet grass from a sun just clearing the trees. A man is already down in the foreground. The steeple, the stone wall, the drifting powder smoke: it is a quiet New England morning that has just gone wrong, and no one has moved yet.