235 Years Ago

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Revere was one of many riders who rode out to alert the Colonists that the Lobsterbacks were marching out to confiscate the military supplies of the local militia.*

The Battle of Lexington fought just after sunrise on April 19th, 1775, was the opening battle of the Revolutionary War. The Colonials fell back, the British Army marched on Concord and were turned back at the North Bridge over the Concord River. The Lobsterbacks were harassed all the way back to Boston.

Boston, in the 18th Century, was almost an island; it was connected to the mainland by a thin strip of land known as the Boston Neck. The British Army had fortifications at the mainland side of the Neck, but the Redcoats were effectively bottled up in the city, with their only supply route by sea, which was iffy in bad weather and when the wind wasn't right.

A month after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Eathan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys took Ft. Ticonderoga from the British. In June, General George Washington was appointed by the Continental Congress to command the Continental Army, which at that point was the Massachusetts Militia and some troops from other colonies in New England. A brilliant young officer from Boston, Henry Knox, proposed that he could bring the guns of Ft. Ticonderoga to Boston and he did so, without losing a single gun along the way.

On the night of March 4th, 1776, in an exceedingly well-planned and massive overnight effort, the Continental Army constructed fortifications and emplaced many of the heavy guns from Ft. Ticonderoga on the Dorchester Heights. The British planned to attack the new fortifications, but a heavy snowstorm blew up, delaying their attack and giving the Continental Army time to improve their works. When the storm ended, the British officers concluded that an attack on Dorchester Heights would make the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was a Phyrrhic victory for the British, look like a garden party and that this time, they would likely lose.

The British abandoned Boston on March 17th, 1776, never to return, ending the Seige of Boston.

There would be many British successes in the war, but they ultimately were defeated, thanks in part to the French Navy defeating the British Navy in the Battle of the Chesapeake and ending all hope of General Cornwallis of lifting the Siege of Yorktown. The surrender of the British Army at Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War and sealed the independence of what would come to be known as the United States of America.

And it all began this night, 235 years ago.

*What people forget was that it was common, back then, for obvious reasons of safety, to have a communal store of gunpowder in a local magazine. People kept on hand the amount of gunpowder they expected to use before their next trip into town, which was typically the amount that fit into a powder-horn.&