The Original Patriots’ Day

This April marks the 250^th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, the first battle of the American Revolution. Both Concord and Lexington are having special (but separate) events to commemorate this historic date over Patriots’ Day weekend.

Filmmaker Ken Burns will be on hand in Lexington to discuss his new series on the American Revolution premiering on PBS later this year. At noon on that Monday re-enactors representing Paul Revere and William Dawes will ride horseback into Concord. (Let’s not forget that William Dawes also rode on the night of April 18, but he didn’t get a poem in his honor.)

Both the Minuteman National Historical Park and the Concord Museum are always worth visiting by anyone with an interest in American history, but the weekend of April 19-21 should be special. You can find a list of all the activities on https://visitconcord.org/concord-250  and at https://lex250.org.  

Another name for a 250^th anniversary is a semiquincentennial, for those with a residual interest in Latin. I remember when I was a child and Ohio was having its 150^th anniversary of statehood, I thought that “sesquicentennial” was such fun to say. My own interest in the American Revolution was taken to another level when my sister, while doing genealogy research, discovered that we had colonial-era ancestors at the Battle of Bunker Hill.  

In case anyone has forgotten the reason for Patriots Day, this is from the Concord website: “On the morning of April 19, 1775, approximately seventy members of Lexington’s town militia faced down eight hundred British troops on the Lexington Green. The British were marching to Concord, where they expected to confiscate a stockpile of weapons intended to be used for rebellion. The troops stopped on the Lexington Green and faced the Lexington militia. A shot was fired. Nobody knows who fired that shot, but with it and with the ensuing musket fire, the American Revolution began. The Battle of Lexington was brief, but resulted in the deaths of eight colonists. The British marched on to Concord, where they faced a much larger group of colonists, from all over the area, at the North Bridge. The Revolutionary War would end six years later with a colonial victory in 1781 and the birth of the United States of America.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” (first read on July 4, 1838 on the dedication of the battlefield monument) commemorates this momentous event in American history, in a poem memorized by many school children in days gone by: “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.” Patriots’ Day is a good time to remember what our Founding Fathers worked so hard for and what our Massachusetts ancestors went through during the American Revolution.

In a time of turmoil and chaos in the nation’s capital, it is important to recall the idea of democracy that our Founding Fathers fought for.  The story goes that when Benjamin Franklin was asked by someone in Philadelphia what type of government the Constitutional Convention had adopted, his cautionary response was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” That is the question. We don’t have a king. A   democracy is supposed to be governed by officials elected by the people.

Fourscore and seven years later Abraham Lincoln memorably said: “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” in his Gettysburg Address. Early in his political career (in 1838) Lincoln gave an address in Springfield, Illinois in which he said, “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American … remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.”

Another famous quote about democracy comes from Winston Churchill, who was American on his mother’s side, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Let’s try to keep it.