Lessons from Lexington and Concord

Donald Trump might be a greater threat to Americans’ liberty than King George III was 250 years ago.

Spring is coming slowly to Massachusetts this year. Daffodils are flowering bravely, but the forsythia has been struggling for several weeks in low temperatures, chilly rains and cloudy skies.

In 1775, however, Spring came early, and with it in the crossroads town of Concord came what Ralph Waldo Emerson later dubbed “the shot heard round the world”.

High school American history as it sometimes is taught — assuming it still is despite abundant evidence to the contrary — does not always get past the glamorized poetry of Emerson’s “embattled farmers” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “one if by land and two if by sea”.

The 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution are arriving on Sunday. It seems appropriate to ask what prompted the “rabble in arms” of small farmers, wheelwrights, carpenters and other ordinary townsfolk to answer the Lexington Alarm sounded by Paul Revere and William Dawes, Jr., grab their muskets and powder horns in the middle of the night and march out to face the Redcoats of the most powerful army in the world.

It’s easy to ignore the profound political, social, economic and other differences between provincial 18th Century Massachusetts and global 21st Century America, which do tend to appear over the course of 250 years, but that long ago chapter of U.S. history contains some lessons for today’s embattled America.

In fact, the Trump administration’s blind determination to ignore the law, control information, rewrite history, punish perceived enemies, investigate critics and dictate school curriculula may pose a greater threat to the American Revolution than “Mad King” George III, his army, the Royal Navy and his Hessian allies did.

The economic circumstances in Massachusetts in the decade before the Revolution might even seem vaguely familiar to American workers and others who have been left behind by billionaires.

According to historian Robert A. Gross, while there was no economic crisis in Concord in the years preceding the Revolution, some of the town’s young people were being forced to migrate to Maine or New Hampshire to find land of their own to farm, and “even those who stayed in Concord had to take their chances; many would slip behind their fathers’ level on the social scale and would struggle ever harder to support a family on run-down farms”.

“Members of the older generation had no answers,” Gross continues. “They had their own anxieties. They were failing as parents; failing to pass on their property and status to the next generation; failing to direct their children to their proper roles in life. They were failing as neighbors, fighting bitterly over one issue after another even as they invoked the values of community and peace.”

Britain had its own financial issues in the wake of the Seven Years War (the American portion of which is still called the French and Indian War), and London’s medicine bore some resemblance to Donald Trump’s tariffs and other measures in their erratic nature and in the fact that so far many have benefited the prescriber more than the patient.

Rather than meekly take the master’s medicines, however, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay dubbed them the Intolerable Acts and acted accordingly. Under the banner of “No taxation without representation”, some of them ignored 1764’s Sugar Act and continued to smuggle sugar and molasses from the West Indies. The Stamp Act the following year trumped that and raised the price of everything from newspapers to legal documents, but the colonists’ boycott of British imports forced Parliament to repeal it after only a year.

What came next amid the growing conflict between the mother country and her defiant children seems almost straight from the Trump playbook. In 1766, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, proclaiming its power to impose legislation on the colonists “in all cases whatsoever”.

Rather than recognizing the faraway parliamentarians’ right to do whatever they pleased, the colonists — a quarrelsome lot to begin with, and some of them descendants of the even more intolerant Puritans who had landed almost 150 years earlier — rebelled against the Townshend Act’s duties on lead, glass and other necessities with another boycott.

In what might serve as a warning to the Trump administration about grasping at the 1878 Posse Comitatus or 1807 Insurrection Acts to employ the military to enforce its dictates, Britain’s deployment of troops to keep order in its colonies only made matters worse.

Two years after Britain posted two regiments of soldiers in Boston, the hotbed of trouble, a fight broke out between protesting colonists and a detachment of soldiers, called the Boston Massacre, which was an overstatement but useful for rebel propaganda purposes.

In a move that’s hard to imagine from today’s cowardly Congress, Parliament retreated again, but in 1773 passed the Tea Act. The provincial ports responded by refusing to accept tea from the British East India Company. Bostonians predictably did more, dressing as Native Americans and throwing a Tea Party tossing the cargoes of the Beaver, the Eleanor and the Dartmouth into the harbor.

Still, the American colonists’ masters showed greater restraint in the face of opposition than the Trump administration has. They did not call the Boston Gazette or the Massachusetts Spy illegal or launch investigations of them for criticizing His Royal Highness. They did try to arrest rebel leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, but the Crown’s plan was to try them in court, not ship them to El Salvador. They did not order troublesome Harvard to revise its curriculum and hiring practices and teach only praise for His Majesty’s stable genius. There was no need to address DEI issues because there was little or no diversity, equity or inclusion at Harvard.

Nevertheless, resistance escalated into Revolution, and in addition to their addiction to independence from a gold-draped, snuff-sniffing master and their resistance to what many of them considered a corrupt and decadent royal government, the colonists had an asset that Trump’s opponents still lack, despite the commentary of Senators Chris Murphy and Cory Booker and former Republican Rep. Adam Zinzinger and recent bravura performances by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Antonia Ocasio Cortez.

The farmers and tradesmen had leaders they respected who shared their risks, as well as their contempt for the King and his ministers, but who had higher educations that most of the colonial population lacked. Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock and Joseph Warren — all of them graduates of that rebellious Harvard College — were more familiar with John Locke and Edmund Burke and the French philosophes — than were the farmers of Concord.

Most important, even the Minutemen and militia members of Lexington and Concord and the surrounding villages had a shared history of autonomy and self-government, quarrelsome as it could be. Their communities were built face-to-face in pubs and churches, not screen-to-screen.

There is a warning here for those who already are overreaching in their effort to dismantle and discard the Republic that emerged and evolved at great cost from the war that began at Lexington and Concord 250 years ago.

Like George III, they have surrounded themselves with courtiers who dare not challenge them — or lack the intelligence, experience, courage and integrity to do so.

Like His Majesty in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, Trump in his palmy palace with a bathroom chandelier fit for a king are distant from those he considers his subjects and their concerns. Those are mounting just as George’s subjects’ did from the combination of imposing economic hardships and ignoring political rights.

An America First international agenda that alienates national and natural allies is another grave, dumb mistake. The Patriots of the Revolution did the opposite, seeking help from the French fleet and from foreign warriors such as France’s Marquis de Lafayette and Poland’s Thaddeus Kosciusko.

Still, this history has lessons, too, for those few who have found the courage to challenge Trump and defend the birthright of all Americans, whether they arrived from Europe in 1620 or more recently from Afghanistan or Venezuela in search of the freedom, justice and opportunity that increasingly appear to be a mirage.

First, there is the importance of unity in the face of division. Prideful New Englanders flocked to Boston after Lexington and Concord and fought the British Regulars again at Bunker Hill. Soon thereafter, however, they accepted the leadership of a landed Virginia planter with whom they had little in common but a desire for independence.

Slavery was not a distinction: John Hancock and other prosperous Bostonians owned slaves. In the face of Trump’s assaults, though, many Democrats and some Republicans have more in common today than South Carolina planters and Salem privateers did in 1776.

Indiscipline, however, was a danger then and remains one today, as toasted Teslas testify. “God forbid that we should give our Enemies the Opportunity of saying justly that we have brought a civil War upon ourselves, by the smallest offensive action,” Concord’s Rev. William Emerson told his fellow revolutionaries.

Second is the need for leadership, which requires some to step up and others to step aside, as President Biden did not do and as others still are not doing.

Third, while journalists and historians tend to focus on celebrities who attract more attention and revenue, the Revolution, like all wars, was fought by farmers and fieldhands, and the occasional Molly Pitcher character who stepped in to swab and load cannon, even if DEI references to women in the military are now banned.

There is at least one more constant. When the Reverend Emerson, another rebellious Harvard man and the grandfather of Ralph Waldo, spoke to the assembled militiamen on that April morning 250 years ago, he told them it was their duty to defend the legacy of their forebears.

“We, the Descendants of such worthy Ancestors, are not willing, nay, dare not be guilty of such Edomitish Profanity as to sell, or rather tamely resign our glorious Birthright into the bloody fangs of hungry Courtiers and greedy Placemen,” Emerson said.

Even after 250 years, America is not rid of hungry courtiers and greedy placemen.

Assigned reading (I was an adjunct professor at Georgetown University for 26 years): The Minutemen and Their World by Robert A. Gross, Hill and Wang, New York, 1976.

Now that some of you have waded this far, here’s full disclosure of my interest in this topic. Six and maybe seven of my ancestors answered the Lexington Alarm. My grandfather x 6 Jabez Walcott, a farmer from rural Bolton marched as “J. Walkett” (no Harvard man he) to Cambridge as a private in Capt. Longley’s company. Jabez’s father Jesse served intermittently during the Revolution, including one tour of duty that included “running away from the Hessians at Kips Bay” during the Battle of Long Island in 1776, according to a family history. At least 22 more of my paternal and maternal ancestors also served, often for only days at a time. One family member was killed at Bunker Hill; another lost a leg in the war.

That does not entitle me or any of the millions of other descendants of the Revolution’s Patriots to any special status, or to anything at all. It does, however, demand that we do our best to ensure that the millions who have followed our forefathers through Ellis Island, across the Rio Grande or in an escape from Afghanistan enjoy the rights that generations of our forebears fought and died to secure and defend.