The Battle of Lexington and Concord

The Battle of Lexington and Concord was made up of two battles that began on April 18th, 1775. Dr. Joseph Warren learned of the British plans and sent Paul Revere to alert John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Paul Revere promised to warn them when the British soldiers started to march. Since he wasn't sure that he would be able to get out of Boston with the message, he made plans to alert people by putting lanterns in the Old North Church steeple. He would light one lantern if the British were coming by land, and two lanterns if the British were coming by sea. On the evening of April 18th, the British troops were ferried across the Boston Harbor to start their march on Lexington. Paul Revere hung two lanterns in the church steeple. Then Paul Revere, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott rode to warn the colonists that the British were coming.Paul Revere rode to Lexington and alerted Samual Adams and John Hancock. By the time the British soldiers reached Lexington, Samual Adams and John Hancock had escaped.So when the British came in to take and attack the Rebels, the Minutemen, Americans who were ready to fight in a minute, were waiting to attack at Lexington. The Americans were withdrawing when someone fired a shot, and the British troops started to fire at the Minutemen. The British then charged with bayonets. Nobody knows who shot first.Dawes covered the southern land route by horseback across Boston Neck and over the Great Bridge to Lexington.Revere first gave instructions to send a signal to Charlestown and then he traveled the northern water route. He crossed the Charles River by rowboat, slipping past the British warship HMS Somerset at anchor. Crossings were banned at that hour, but Revere safely landed in Charlestown and rode to Lexington, avoiding a British patrol and later warning almost every house along the route. The Charlestown colonists dispatched additional riders to the north. The British went to look at a nearby farm for weapons, they ran into a group of minutemen at Concord's North Bridge. There was a big fight, and the Minutemen made the British retreat. The Minutemen tried not to let the British retreat, but it was successful.The Battles of Lexington and Concord were battles that took many lives. By the end of the day, British troops had lost 273 soldiers, while the Colonists lost only 94 people. 18 of these Colonists had died during the battle at Lexington. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Thomas Jefferson

born April 2 1743, Shadwell, Virginia, died July 4, 1826, Monticello, Virginia, draftsman of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the nation's first secretary of state, second vice president (1797–1801), and, as the third president, the statesman responsible for the Louisiana Purchase.In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton ( Martha Jefferson), an attractive and delicate young widow whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. In 1774 he wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was quickly published, though without his permission, and launch him into visibility beyond Virginia as an early advocate of American independence from Parliament's authority. Jefferson's shyness prevented him from playing a significant role in the debates within the Congress. John Adams, a leader in those debates, remembered that Jefferson was silent even in committee meetings, though consistently staunch in his firm for independence.On July 3–4 the Congress debated and edited Jefferson's declaration of independence draft, deleting and revising fully one-fifth of the text. But they made no changes in this passage, which succeeding generations became the lyrical sanction for every liberal movement in American history. At the time, Jefferson himself was disconsolate that the Congress had seen fit to make any changes in his language.He returned to Virginia in October 1776 and immediately launched an extensive project for the reform of the state's legal code to bring it in line with the principles of the American Revolution. At the end of what was probably the most creative phase of his public career, personal misfortune struck in two successive episodes. Elected governor of Virginia in 1779, he was caught off-guard by a surprise British invasion in 1780 against which the state was defenseless. His flight from approaching British troops was described in the local press,unfairly, as a cowardly act of abdication. Then, in September 1782, his wife died after a difficult delivery in May of their third daughter. These two disasters caused him to vow that he would never again desert his family for his country.

Loyalists

American Loyalists, or "Tories" as their opponents called them, opposed the Revolution, and many took up arms against the rebels. Most educated Americans, whether Loyalist or Revolutionary, accepted John Locke's theory of natural rights and limited government. Loyalists wanted to pursue peaceful forms of protest because they believed that violence would give rise to mob rule or tyranny. The Loyalists were generally passive, waiting for London to send in an army to suppress the rebellion. Most loyalists were wealthy, well-educated conservative people who supported British authority in order to maintain domestic stability, and they would be able to maintain their current standards of living. Some Loyalists just considered themselves realists, and they weren't willing to sacrifice for a war that was inevitably going to be won by the larger, more elite, British military.Exact numbers of these groups are not available.Anglican clergymen and many wealthy landowners were often Loyalists. The ranks of the merchants and lawyers were more evenly divided.Loyalists probably were in the majority in New York, New Jersey and Georgia, but were weakest in the oldest colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts.More than 4,000 claims were made by Loyalists after the war, but the U.S. government dragged its feet on an issue that clearly had little public support. At the end of the war, thousands of Loyalists left the country; 30,000 departed from New York alone. Many from the North fled into Canada, particularly to Nova Scotia, while others in the South went to the Bahamas and West Indies. Homesickness was common and caused some to return to the United States. A number of the early returns were treated harshly, but it cooled over time.

Thomas Gage

Thomas Gage is a military officer. He was born in England approximated in 1721. He was the second son of Viscount Gage. Thomas entered the army when he was very young. When he finishes the process to begin to be a militar he was with the Braddock army, and they defeated the Monongahela army when he was lieutenant colonel and his job was to lead the fight.
Late in 1758 he married the daughter of Peter Kemble, that was the president of the council of New Jersey. Gage worked under Amherst in northern New York and Canada. On the capture of Montreal by the English in 1760 he was made military governor of that city. He was promoted to major-general, and in 1763 succeeded Amherst as commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America.
In 1774 he was successful in Hutchinson when he was as governor of Massachusetts. He also occupied Boston troops. He always Act under the instructions of his government not with his conscience and judgment, so he took decisions that brought armed resistance to British rule in the colonies. He demanded for 20,000 armed men at Boston but the ministry didn’t agree, and thought it was ridiculous believing that a few soldiers could accomplish all that was necessary to make the patriots cower.
On April 18/19, 1775, Gage ordered 700 men to march to Concord to capture colonial powder and guns. En route, active fighting began at Lexington and was continued at Concord. Though British troops were able to clear each town, they sustained heavy casualties during their march back to Boston.

Boston Massacre Cartoon

The Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks to British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech to express the ire of the colonists.

The presence of British troops in the city of Boston was increasingly unwelcome. The riot began when about 50 citizens attacked a British sentinel. A British officer, Captain Thomas Preston, called in additional soldiers, and these too were attacked, so the soldiers fired into the mob, killing 3 on the spot one of them was a black sailor named Crispus Attucks, rope maker Samuel Gray, and a mariner named James Caldwell, and wounding 8 others, two of whom died later Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr.
A town meeting was called demanding the removal of the British and the trial of Captain Preston and his men for murder. At the trial, John Adams and Josiah Quincy II defended the British, leading to their release. Samuel Quincy and Robert Treat Paine were the responsible of the persecution.

The Boston Massacre was a signal event leading to the Revolutionary War. It led directly to the Royal Governor evacuating the occupying army from the town of Boston. It would soon bring the revolution to armed rebellion throughout the colonies.

The Boston Tea Party

In 1770, American protests led to Parliament's for the Townshend duties, except for the duty on tea retained by the British as a matter of principle. The colonists demonstrated their indignation by stopping the tax of tea by drinking smuggled tea. The effectiveness of American resistance was shown in the discrimination in tea of British in the colonies. This drop the British tea over 70 percent in three years.

In 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which gave the English East India Company a chance to make a plan to make British to break up. This Tea Act allowed the company to sell tea to the colonists at a low price, lower than the price of smuggled tea, even including the required duty. The British reasoned that the Americans would easily pay the tax if they were able to pay a low price for the tea.

On November 28 the Dartmouth arrived in Boston harbor with a cargo of Darjeeling tea. Samuel Adams and other radicals were determined that the pack would not be landed in the city. His mobs look the streets in the evenings, threatening violence if challenged by the authorities.

When this ship arrived to America the Colonists toke on their plan to boycott British tea. Their plan was to dress as British and to come to the harbor and destroyed all tea that British had brought, they through the tea into the ocean making a big loss of money for the British. This was called The Boston Tea Party.