The First Shots on 19 April 1775
British officers filed reports emphasizing how they had heard alarm signals and seen provincials with guns moving over distant hills during the march out to Concord. Lt. William Sutherland described a specific example of gunfire from the provincials:
On coming within Gunshot of the village of Lexington a fellow from the corner of the road on the right hand Cock’d his piece at me, burnt priming, I immediately called to Mr. [Jesse] Adair & the party to observe this Circumstance which they did & acquainted Major [John] Pitcairn of it immediately.Lt.-Col. Francis Smith included this incident in his report to Gen. Thomas Gage, and Gage included it in his report to the ministry in London.
When the two forces approached each other on the Lexington common, Sutherland continued, someone shot “from the Corner of a house to the right of the Church”—probably Buckman’s tavern. After army officers ordered the militia company on the green to disperse, the lieutenant went on, “some of the Villains were got over the hedge, fired at us.”
Maj. Pitcairn reported “several Shott were fired from a Meeting House on our Left,” but other British officers pointed to the men grouped to the right side of the common. Some wrote that it was impossible to know where that first shot had come from, but no officers blamed the militiamen actually lined up on the green. (The impressions of the British enlisted men went unrecorded.)
In contrast, all the provincials insisted that the regulars on Lexington common had fired first. John Robbins said that “the foremost of the three [mounted] officers ordered their men saying, ‘Fire!—by God!—fire!’” Within a short time that officer was widely identified as Maj. Pitcairn. Benjamin Tidd and Joseph Abbot described hearing “first a few guns, which we took to be pistols, from some of the regulars who were mounted on horses.”
Many other Lexington men offered no details of the first shot beyond insisting that it had come from the redcoats before anyone had fired at them. In fact, dozens of men signed the same two depositions attesting to that vital fact. The only thing their accounts had in common with the British officers’ reports is that each agreed that the other was to blame.
Until the early twentieth century, almost all American historians echoed the provincial sources and described the British firing first. With more British sources appearing, more skepticism, and less defensiveness, more recent American authors acknowledged that the situation was probably more confused than that, and even that it was possible that the first short came from someone on the provincial side.
At his “1775” blog, Derek W. Beck has shared his conclusion that some American(s) must have fired first—though not necessarily while deliberately aiming at the soldiers. I’ve heard Christopher Bing, a son of Lexington who’s produced a handsome edition of Paul Revere’s Ride, make a similar argument: that the British soldiers were too well drilled to fire without being ordered to or being attacked (though even their own officers complained that, once attacked, the regulars on the green went out of control for a little while).
All that said, I think that for some of the men in Lexington that morning, the war had already started, making the first shot on the common less significant. Lt. Sutherland, for example, would state that locals had shot at him twice before the confrontation on the green. And one young man from Lexington had been in the thick of the conflict since the previous afternoon.
TOMORROW: Solomon Brown’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.
