Swiss influence was partly responsible for the adoption of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Most Americans only understand the phrase; “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” while ignoring the preceding phrase, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…”
The Founders didn’t say a militia would be nice to have. Rather they said, to paraphrase, if Americans want to maintain a system of freedom and liberty, a well regulated militia is necessary.
In Switzerland, there is no central governing authority. Political power is diffused through its Cantons. Cantons are geographical divisions similar to our states. The central government is weak while power remains in the hands of the people. Our Founders, for the most part, also envisioned a weak central government with power residing in the states and with the people.
The Swiss militia system was unlike anything in Europe and possibly the world.. Instead of relying on a standing army, Switzerland was (and still is) defended by a national militia. Every man was trained in war, had his rifle at home, was encouraged to practice frequently, and could be mobilized almost instantly. And here’s a little tidbit that will make Sara Brady and her gun-grabbing nest of snakes see red. Swiss militia members are not only allowed to purchase and use full-automatic machine guns, they can also (if they can afford it) buy armored vehicles, anti-tank weapons and artillery pieces. They are truly the homeland security of their tiny nation.
The Swiss-style militia is exactly the vision our Founders had for the defense and preservation of the nation they founded. Almost to a man the they feared and loathed a standing army and considered it an army of mercenaries - not necessarily loyal to the people from whence it sprang but rather to the power that paid them.
“What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ...Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.”
Elbridge Gerry - founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence
The Founders preferred a militia for other important reasons as well. They considered the militia the best type of military because:
1. It protects the nation very well;
2. It is cheap;
3. It cannot be used for the wrong reasons;
4. It cannot be manipulated by power-seekers and
5. it cannot infringe on freedoms.
These criteria are the conditions that a good military must satisfy. A militia satisfies these better than the present standing army does.
A militia is also a purely defensive force. It cannot be used as an aggressor.
The Founders, despite their other views, almost to a man supported the usage of a militia over a standing army. A notable exception was Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who not only encouraged a standing army, but also advocated a national banking system.
A militia after the Swiss model could never challenge, let alone overthrow, the federal government. Yet our current federal establishment frequently takes the position that militias are only formed to challenge or overthrow the government and indeed some groups of outlaws call themselves militia and have the overthrow of the government as their goal.
What then is a constitutionally correct militia as envisioned by the Founders? Again, they turned to the Swiss model.
When the first U.S. Congress met and turned to defense measures in 1791, Representative Jackson argued: "The inhabitants of Switzerland emancipated themselves by the establishment of a militia, which finally delivered them from the tyranny of their lords." A law was passed requiring every able-bodied citizen to provide himself with a firearm and enroll in the militia, and it stayed on the books for over a century.
The "Swiss Confederation" developed only a weak central government, leaving most authority in the hands of the cantons or lower levels of government. The tradition of local autonomy helped keep Switzerland from experiencing the bitter civil wars between Catholics and Protestants that devastated Germany, France and England.
As one historian summarizes: "Switzerland was created in battle, reached its present dimensions by conquest and defended its existence by armed neutrality thereafter." The experience of Swiss history has made national independence and power virtually synonymous with an armed citizenry.
America’s Founders admired Switzerland as a “Sister Republic” amidst the despotisms of Europe. The American Founders—like the Swiss—understood the moral implications of a universal militia system: a people who are trained to self-reliance and responsibility will defend their freedom to the utmost. But a people who rely on a professional standing army may not have the nerve to resist tyranny.
As Switzerland proved in World War II, well-regulated militia really was necessary to the security of a free state. Swiss neutrality during WWII was not a gift bestowed by other nations or a declaration of neutrality but a status, earned through armed deterrence.
Further reading on the Swiss militia and gun control.
Click HERE to see where the Founders stood on the question of a standing army versus a militia and
additional reading about the Founders, the militia and gun control.
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
TWO STATES DEBATING NULLIFICATION OF OVERREACHING FEDERAL LAWS AND MANDATES - 28 other states are waiting in the wings
Two states say they will exercise their constitutional rights to ignore or refuse costly and invasive federal mandates, statues and executive orders.
Montana and Arizona this week introduced plans to set up standing commissions tasked with reviewing these federal orders “to determine their constitutionality.” The commissions then will recommend state lawmakers nullify any federal law or regulation outside the scope of powers constitutionally delegated to the federal government.
EDITORIAL COMMENT BY OLDTIMER:
The entire article (linked to below) is vitally important NOW and shows how states are standing up to the federal government and pushing back against Obama’s attempts to socialize the nation.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, nullification is a mild form of secession. We must never forget the federal government is the child of the states and people. We had a country before we had a federal government. We had a union before we had a federal government. We created the federal government to handle things the individual states were ill-prepared to do, such as enacting uniform maritime shipping laws and conducting foreign affairs with a unified front.
We neither gave the federal government permission nor authority to twist the simple wording of the so-called “Commerce Clause” of the Constitution into the justification for federal intrusion into nearly every aspect of our lives.
It was always in the minds and hearts of the founders of our Republic that any state that felt a federal law exceeded the limited authority given the federal government, that state or states could nullify, or simply ignore the law. NEVER was the federal government given authority to dictate laws to the states and force compliance.
Abraham Lincoln, one of the worst presidents in our history, changed that when he declared war on southern and western states for rebelling against what they felt were onerous and illegal tariffs that protected northern interests and hurt the Rebels.
States today face a similar challenge as the federal government passes illegal and unconstitutional laws. This may be our best chance, short of secession, to un-do Lincoln’s damage to state’s rights and tame our runaway federal government. We sure can't count on Congress to stand up for the people.
Please - read the entire report HERE. It’s a real eye-opener.
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Montana and Arizona this week introduced plans to set up standing commissions tasked with reviewing these federal orders “to determine their constitutionality.” The commissions then will recommend state lawmakers nullify any federal law or regulation outside the scope of powers constitutionally delegated to the federal government.
EDITORIAL COMMENT BY OLDTIMER:
The entire article (linked to below) is vitally important NOW and shows how states are standing up to the federal government and pushing back against Obama’s attempts to socialize the nation.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, nullification is a mild form of secession. We must never forget the federal government is the child of the states and people. We had a country before we had a federal government. We had a union before we had a federal government. We created the federal government to handle things the individual states were ill-prepared to do, such as enacting uniform maritime shipping laws and conducting foreign affairs with a unified front.
We neither gave the federal government permission nor authority to twist the simple wording of the so-called “Commerce Clause” of the Constitution into the justification for federal intrusion into nearly every aspect of our lives.
It was always in the minds and hearts of the founders of our Republic that any state that felt a federal law exceeded the limited authority given the federal government, that state or states could nullify, or simply ignore the law. NEVER was the federal government given authority to dictate laws to the states and force compliance.
Abraham Lincoln, one of the worst presidents in our history, changed that when he declared war on southern and western states for rebelling against what they felt were onerous and illegal tariffs that protected northern interests and hurt the Rebels.
States today face a similar challenge as the federal government passes illegal and unconstitutional laws. This may be our best chance, short of secession, to un-do Lincoln’s damage to state’s rights and tame our runaway federal government. We sure can't count on Congress to stand up for the people.
Please - read the entire report HERE. It’s a real eye-opener.
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
GUN CONTROLS and Hitler's near conquest of Europe
Would-be tyrants all seemingly have one goal before the total subjugation of a race or nation. That goal is the disarmament of common citizens. One such notable tyrant was Adolph Hitler. But tyrants even closer to home have also tried.
King George tried to disarm the colonists right here on our continent. Some Americans think the Boston Massacre was the beginning of the American Revolution. Others think the Boston Tea Party triggered the event. Those acts served only to agitate unrest among the colonists but the action that drove them to arms was the edict from the king for the British Army to seize all the guns, powder and shot in colonial possession. The Revolutionary War started over gun control.
READ ABOUT THE FAMOUS RIDE OF PAUL REVERE and THE SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD HERE
Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Lenin, Tojo Hideki, Pol Pot and other tyrants probably learned from the British experience because they all took steps to make sure the countries to be occupied had strict gun/weapons controls to make their conquest easier and the subjugation of the people possible.
The essence of Nazism, communism and socialism has always been based upon coercion, not persuasion. It is always imposed by a few elitists who think they have a right to rule over all of civilization because of what they arrogantly perceive to be their superior intellect or vast wealth or investment prowess.
Progressivism, like its collectivist cousins socialism, Marxism, Nazism and communism, is based upon brute force. And they don't recognize individual freedom or personal rights, either. To progressives, only the "collective" has rights! But ultimately, someone has to decide what those rights are, don't they? So of course, the elitists appoint themselves to dictate what those rights are!
They naturally resent it when we remind them that our rights are inalienable - they come directly from God - not some tin-horn dictator.
Here then is how Hitler disarmed most of Europe before WWII began.
First came the Nazi Weapons Act of 1938 which included: Classification of guns for sporting and possible military uses; registration and background check; types of ammunition that were legal and subject to control by bureaucrats and age restrictions.
Then came a gun-control law aimed specifically at Jews.
“Jews…..(in the Austrian and Sudeten-German districts) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.”
Penalties for violation were relatively light - forfeiture of firearms and ammunition and possible fines and jail time. That edict was signed by Minister of the Interior Frick.
The day before, Nov. 10, 1938, a much more restrictive law concerning guns was signed by SS Reichsführer Himmler, and the destruction of the Jews in Nazi Germany and all the subjugated countries of Europe was finalized. Even the New York Times on Nov. 8 warned the gun seizures were coming.
On the day the order was signed, all hell broke loose. Without warning and without giving people time to prepare, the raids began. Thousands of Jewish men were hauled off to the death camps and Hitler’s infamous “final solution” had begun. The “final solution” was the genocidal extermination of all Jews in German occupied territory.
Himmler, head of the Nazi terror police, would become an architect of the Holocaust, which slaughtered six million Jews. It was self evident that the Jews must be disarmed before the extermination could begin.
Finding out which Jews had firearms was not too difficult. The liberal Weimar Republic passed a Firearm Law in 1928 requiring extensive police records on gun owners. Hitler signed a further gun control law in early 1938.
Other European countries also had laws requiring police records to be kept on persons who possessed firearms. When the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was a simple matter to identify gun owners. Many of them disappeared in the middle of the night along with political opponents.
France soon fell, and posters threatening the death penalty for possession of a firearm went up everywhere. You can see one today in Paris at the Museum of the Order of the Liberation (Musée de l'Ordre de la Libération).
The Nazi invaders also set similar deadlines in: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece.
The New York Times, speaking of the French said: “Military orders now forbid the French to do things which the German people have not been allowed to do since Hitler came to power. To own radio senders or to listen to foreign broadcasts, to organize public meetings and distribute pamphlets, to disseminate anti-German news in any form, to retain possession of firearms--all these things are prohibited for the subjugated people of France…”
Today our own government is trying desperately to turn off the Internet and pass draconian gun control laws - both in DIRECT opposition to the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold and defend. Hmm, wonder why?
While the Nazis made good on the threat to execute persons in possession of firearms, the gun-control decree was not entirely successful. Underground resistance movements launched armed attacks. But resistance was hampered by the lack of civilian arms possession.
As far back as 1941, then U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson brazenly called on Congress to enact national registration of all firearms. Given events in Europe, Congress recoiled, and legislation was introduced to actually protect the Second Amendment.
Rep. Edwin Arthur Hall explained: "Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took power from the German and Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the OGPU, and the Cheka."
Rep. John W. Patman added: "The people have a right to keep arms; therefore, if we should have some Executive who attempted to set himself up as dictator or king, the people can organize themselves together and, with the arms and ammunition they have, they can properly protect themselves. . . ."
Not all the European Jews turned in their guns which eventually led to THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
Armed citizens were hurting the Nazis, so they took the sternest retaliatory measures to quell any further resistance. The Nazis imposed the death penalty on a Pole or Jew: "If he is in unlawful possession of firearms, . . . or if he has credible information that a Pole or a Jew is in unlawful possession of such objects, and fails to notify the authorities forthwith.
"Even British citizens had been disarmed by their government prior to the war. With no way to defend the general population, the British issued a call to the U.S. National Rifle Association and The American Rifleman magazine to “send a gun to defend a British home.”
British civilians, faced with the threat of invasion and after two decades of gun control, now desperately needed rifles and pistols in their homes. America responded and soon Brits were organized into the Home Guard. Armed citizens were now ready to resist the expected Nazi onslaught.
During the past century individual criminals wreaked their carnage on individuals or relatively small numbers of people. For example: On April 16, 2007, a gunman killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University; Dec. 5, 2007, a gunman killed eight people before shooting himself at a shopping mall in Omaha, Neb.; Dec. 9, 2007, four people were killed then killed himself at a church in Colorado; Feb. 2, 2008, 5 women were killed during a botched robbery in Chicago; Feb 7, 2008, two policemen and three city officials were killed at a city council meeting in a St. Louis suburb. (The gunman was killed by police); Feb. 8, 2008, a nursing student fatally shot two women and herself at a Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Feb. 14, 2008, a gunman killed five and wounded 18 before killing himself and on June 25, 2008, a worker at a plastics plant in Kentucky killed five people at the factory and wounded a sixth before killing himself.
SOURCE
These approximately 75 murders were and are a national tragedy. As were the tragic deaths of dozens of school children by crazed gunmen. But they pale in comparison to the horror unleashed on people by dictators and tyrants - by government if you will.
Hilter unleashed killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe and Russia. As Raul Hilberg observes, "The killers were well armed . . . . The victims were unarmed." The Einsatzgruppen, in less than three years, executed two million people between fall 1939 and summer 1942.
As this century has shown, terrorist governments have the capacity to commit genocide against millions of people, provided that the people are unarmed. Schemes to confiscate firearms kept by peaceable citizens have historically been associated with some of the world's most insidious tyrannies. Given this reality, it is not surprising that law-abiding gun owners oppose being objects of registration.
Yet somehow, as you will see later, during all the bloodshed of WWII, the Swiss managed to avoid invasion and provided safe haven for Jews and others fleeing Hitler’s hordes.
FOR FURTHER READING ON NAZI GUN CONTROLS CLICK HERE
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS or click HERE to find out how the Swiss ignored German gun-control laws, stood up to the German Wermacht and remained neutral during the war.
King George tried to disarm the colonists right here on our continent. Some Americans think the Boston Massacre was the beginning of the American Revolution. Others think the Boston Tea Party triggered the event. Those acts served only to agitate unrest among the colonists but the action that drove them to arms was the edict from the king for the British Army to seize all the guns, powder and shot in colonial possession. The Revolutionary War started over gun control.
READ ABOUT THE FAMOUS RIDE OF PAUL REVERE and THE SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD HERE
Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Lenin, Tojo Hideki, Pol Pot and other tyrants probably learned from the British experience because they all took steps to make sure the countries to be occupied had strict gun/weapons controls to make their conquest easier and the subjugation of the people possible.
The essence of Nazism, communism and socialism has always been based upon coercion, not persuasion. It is always imposed by a few elitists who think they have a right to rule over all of civilization because of what they arrogantly perceive to be their superior intellect or vast wealth or investment prowess.
Progressivism, like its collectivist cousins socialism, Marxism, Nazism and communism, is based upon brute force. And they don't recognize individual freedom or personal rights, either. To progressives, only the "collective" has rights! But ultimately, someone has to decide what those rights are, don't they? So of course, the elitists appoint themselves to dictate what those rights are!
They naturally resent it when we remind them that our rights are inalienable - they come directly from God - not some tin-horn dictator.
Here then is how Hitler disarmed most of Europe before WWII began.
First came the Nazi Weapons Act of 1938 which included: Classification of guns for sporting and possible military uses; registration and background check; types of ammunition that were legal and subject to control by bureaucrats and age restrictions.
Then came a gun-control law aimed specifically at Jews.
“Jews…..(in the Austrian and Sudeten-German districts) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.”
Penalties for violation were relatively light - forfeiture of firearms and ammunition and possible fines and jail time. That edict was signed by Minister of the Interior Frick.
The day before, Nov. 10, 1938, a much more restrictive law concerning guns was signed by SS Reichsführer Himmler, and the destruction of the Jews in Nazi Germany and all the subjugated countries of Europe was finalized. Even the New York Times on Nov. 8 warned the gun seizures were coming.
On the day the order was signed, all hell broke loose. Without warning and without giving people time to prepare, the raids began. Thousands of Jewish men were hauled off to the death camps and Hitler’s infamous “final solution” had begun. The “final solution” was the genocidal extermination of all Jews in German occupied territory.
Himmler, head of the Nazi terror police, would become an architect of the Holocaust, which slaughtered six million Jews. It was self evident that the Jews must be disarmed before the extermination could begin.
Finding out which Jews had firearms was not too difficult. The liberal Weimar Republic passed a Firearm Law in 1928 requiring extensive police records on gun owners. Hitler signed a further gun control law in early 1938.
Other European countries also had laws requiring police records to be kept on persons who possessed firearms. When the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was a simple matter to identify gun owners. Many of them disappeared in the middle of the night along with political opponents.
France soon fell, and posters threatening the death penalty for possession of a firearm went up everywhere. You can see one today in Paris at the Museum of the Order of the Liberation (Musée de l'Ordre de la Libération).
The Nazi invaders also set similar deadlines in: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece.
The New York Times, speaking of the French said: “Military orders now forbid the French to do things which the German people have not been allowed to do since Hitler came to power. To own radio senders or to listen to foreign broadcasts, to organize public meetings and distribute pamphlets, to disseminate anti-German news in any form, to retain possession of firearms--all these things are prohibited for the subjugated people of France…”
Today our own government is trying desperately to turn off the Internet and pass draconian gun control laws - both in DIRECT opposition to the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold and defend. Hmm, wonder why?
While the Nazis made good on the threat to execute persons in possession of firearms, the gun-control decree was not entirely successful. Underground resistance movements launched armed attacks. But resistance was hampered by the lack of civilian arms possession.
As far back as 1941, then U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson brazenly called on Congress to enact national registration of all firearms. Given events in Europe, Congress recoiled, and legislation was introduced to actually protect the Second Amendment.
Rep. Edwin Arthur Hall explained: "Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took power from the German and Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the OGPU, and the Cheka."
Rep. John W. Patman added: "The people have a right to keep arms; therefore, if we should have some Executive who attempted to set himself up as dictator or king, the people can organize themselves together and, with the arms and ammunition they have, they can properly protect themselves. . . ."
Not all the European Jews turned in their guns which eventually led to THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
Armed citizens were hurting the Nazis, so they took the sternest retaliatory measures to quell any further resistance. The Nazis imposed the death penalty on a Pole or Jew: "If he is in unlawful possession of firearms, . . . or if he has credible information that a Pole or a Jew is in unlawful possession of such objects, and fails to notify the authorities forthwith.
"Even British citizens had been disarmed by their government prior to the war. With no way to defend the general population, the British issued a call to the U.S. National Rifle Association and The American Rifleman magazine to “send a gun to defend a British home.”
British civilians, faced with the threat of invasion and after two decades of gun control, now desperately needed rifles and pistols in their homes. America responded and soon Brits were organized into the Home Guard. Armed citizens were now ready to resist the expected Nazi onslaught.
During the past century individual criminals wreaked their carnage on individuals or relatively small numbers of people. For example: On April 16, 2007, a gunman killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University; Dec. 5, 2007, a gunman killed eight people before shooting himself at a shopping mall in Omaha, Neb.; Dec. 9, 2007, four people were killed then killed himself at a church in Colorado; Feb. 2, 2008, 5 women were killed during a botched robbery in Chicago; Feb 7, 2008, two policemen and three city officials were killed at a city council meeting in a St. Louis suburb. (The gunman was killed by police); Feb. 8, 2008, a nursing student fatally shot two women and herself at a Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Feb. 14, 2008, a gunman killed five and wounded 18 before killing himself and on June 25, 2008, a worker at a plastics plant in Kentucky killed five people at the factory and wounded a sixth before killing himself.
SOURCE
These approximately 75 murders were and are a national tragedy. As were the tragic deaths of dozens of school children by crazed gunmen. But they pale in comparison to the horror unleashed on people by dictators and tyrants - by government if you will.
Hilter unleashed killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe and Russia. As Raul Hilberg observes, "The killers were well armed . . . . The victims were unarmed." The Einsatzgruppen, in less than three years, executed two million people between fall 1939 and summer 1942.
As this century has shown, terrorist governments have the capacity to commit genocide against millions of people, provided that the people are unarmed. Schemes to confiscate firearms kept by peaceable citizens have historically been associated with some of the world's most insidious tyrannies. Given this reality, it is not surprising that law-abiding gun owners oppose being objects of registration.
Yet somehow, as you will see later, during all the bloodshed of WWII, the Swiss managed to avoid invasion and provided safe haven for Jews and others fleeing Hitler’s hordes.
FOR FURTHER READING ON NAZI GUN CONTROLS CLICK HERE
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS or click HERE to find out how the Swiss ignored German gun-control laws, stood up to the German Wermacht and remained neutral during the war.
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Shot Heard Around the World
THE FAMOUS RIDE of Paul Revere
British troops were planning a march to Lexington to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams, then on to Concord to seize colonial arms and ammunitions. At nightfall on April 18, Paul Revere hung a two-lantern signal in the steeple of Old North Church, alerting his comrades that the Redcoats were crossing the harbor. Revere then galloped to Lexington and pressed on to Concord, where he was captured by a British patrol. Questioned at gunpoint, Revere was released after divulging nothing but misinformation.
THE SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD
More than 700 Redcoats (British regular army) marched through the night of April 18, 1775, reaching Lexington near dawn. Awaiting them were 77 Minutemen - farmers and laborers trained to be "ready in a minute." Then one musket went off. Historians still debate which side fired the first shot, but within seconds, eight colonists lay dead on Lexington Green.
At Concord, 400 Minutemen exchanged gunfire with 120 Redcoats at the North Bridge. Pealing church bells spread the alarm and colonial numbers grew to 5,000. The British would have been massacred, but reinforcements arrived as they fled back to Boston. April 19, 1775 … the war had begun!
RETURN TO ARTICLE
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS
British troops were planning a march to Lexington to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams, then on to Concord to seize colonial arms and ammunitions. At nightfall on April 18, Paul Revere hung a two-lantern signal in the steeple of Old North Church, alerting his comrades that the Redcoats were crossing the harbor. Revere then galloped to Lexington and pressed on to Concord, where he was captured by a British patrol. Questioned at gunpoint, Revere was released after divulging nothing but misinformation.
THE SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD
More than 700 Redcoats (British regular army) marched through the night of April 18, 1775, reaching Lexington near dawn. Awaiting them were 77 Minutemen - farmers and laborers trained to be "ready in a minute." Then one musket went off. Historians still debate which side fired the first shot, but within seconds, eight colonists lay dead on Lexington Green.
At Concord, 400 Minutemen exchanged gunfire with 120 Redcoats at the North Bridge. Pealing church bells spread the alarm and colonial numbers grew to 5,000. The British would have been massacred, but reinforcements arrived as they fled back to Boston. April 19, 1775 … the war had begun!
RETURN TO ARTICLE
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS
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