America’s battle for independence began this weekend in 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The message below was sent my way years ago and the lesson is part of the National Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places.
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flags to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most noted residents of Concord, Massachusetts, penned these words for the town’s bicentennial in 1835. In April 1875, for the Centennial Celebration of the Battle of Concord, another Concord native, sculptor Daniel Chester French, created his first great public work. Emerson’s words were incised on the stone pedestal.
A century before, a group of express riders, including Paul Revere, rode across the Middlesex County countryside. They did not shout “The British are coming! The British are coming!” as myth would have us believe. Rather, the riders warned that the King’s troops were on the march, arousing the embattled farmers praised by Emerson. At that time the riders and farmers alike were still loyal subjects to England’s King George the III. Independence was the furthest thing from their minds. Instead, these minute men and members of local Massachusetts militia assembled to defend their rights, as they perceived them under English law.
British General Thomas Gage had ordered 700 soldiers to march in what he thought was a clandestine operation. His objective was to destroy the cache of colonial weapons located in the town of Concord. Within twenty-four hours, more than 70 of the King’s finest troops lay dead and many more wounded. Forty-nine provincials died, as well. One of history’s greatest unintended consequences proved to be the nascent seed that launched a revolution, forever changing the world!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the famous poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride” almost a century after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Published in 1861, Longfellow’s poem reveals the type of memory Americans wanted to have of the events of April 18, 1775. The following paragraphs from the poem help us understand how 19th century Americans remembered Paul Revere’s midnight ride:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
…So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
For the nation’s 1876 centennial celebration, the town of Concord wanted to commemorate its role in the nation’s birth. Ebenezer Hubbard, a Concord resident, had died recently and left in his will a thousand dollars to the town. He wanted the town to use his money to commission a memorial for the spot where the Americans fell on April 19, 1775. A prominent Concord resident, John S. Keyes, suggested that a local sculptor and family friend named Daniel Chester French create “a model for a large figure for a monument on the hill where the minute men assembled for the Concord fight.” The town set up a committee in 1872 and gave the committee a year to decide what form the monument should take. The committee’s report to the town suggested it “procure a statue of a Continental Minute Man, cut in granite, and erected on a proper foundation.” The committee also recommend that the design include the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn on its base:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The sculptor’s ideal figure was a local farmer-citizen-patriot, responding to the call to action. In the figure’s right hand he holds his musket. His left-hand rests on the handle of his plow. His gaze is intense and focused straight ahead of him. The minute man’s coat is draped across the plow. The plow relates directly to the idea of a farmer dropping his work at a minute’s notice heading off to defend himself and his community.
When the sculptor was finished it was called “The Minute Man” and was unveiled and dedicated during the celebrations for the centennial of the Concord Fight on April 19, 1875. President Ulysses S. Grant attended the ceremony along with the Vice President, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State. I thought it was also amazing that the statue was cast from melted-down Civil War cannons at the Ames Foundry.
On April 19, 1975, the 200th anniversary of the Concord Fight, President Gerald Ford gave a speech at the bridge and placed a wreath at the base of “The Minute Man” as part of the United States Bicentennial celebrations. A crowd of over 15,000 people attended the exercises to pay tribute to our freedom and to all of the brave farm families that helped to forever change the word! May we never forget our beginnings…
