The Minuteman at Lexington

The regulars marched in from Boston in the half-light, around five in the morning on April 19, 1775. On Lexington Green, Captain John Parker had about seventy-seven men of the town militia drawn up in two thin lines.

The regulars were light infantry under Major John Pitcairn, on their way to seize militia supplies at Concord. Parker's men stood on the green, not across the road. Orders were shouted on both sides, someone fired, and the British companies answered with volleys and a bayonet charge. When it was over, eight Lexington men were dead and ten wounded. Nobody has ever proved who fired first.

By afternoon the whole countryside was out. At Concord's North Bridge the militia fired back, and the march back to Boston became a running fight. A war that would last eight years had started on a village common before breakfast.

The painting stands in the middle of that morning. A young militiaman in a linen shirt, brown waistcoat and gray stockings holds his musket low across his body, a powder horn at his hip, and looks toward a line of red-coated soldiers advancing under a flag through drifting smoke. A white meetinghouse steeple rises through bare April trees on the left, and the sun is breaking gold under heavy cloud.