The Dangerous Afterlives of Lexington and Concord

The story of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, has united generations of Americans around deeply enshrined democratic commitments that helped Americans define their nation as a community that cherishes the dignity and virility of its common-born members. This story of rustic minutemen who emerged from the woods to repel an invasion from the period’s greatest military power emerged almost overnight as what Richard Slotkin has called a national myth: “a story and set of symbols whose interpretation becomes standardized through repetition.” Many mythic impressions and images emerged from the American Revolution, such as those of Valley Forge, the Continental Congress that issued the Declaration of Independence, and the Battle of Yorktown. Yet more than any other moment in the nation’s collective memory of the war, the myth of Lexington and Concord has for generations represented commitments to equality and democracy and an aversion to aristocratic rule. 

According to legend, the Revolutionary War started suddenly, when an aggressive and conceited British regime based in Boston sent soldiers to seize arms stored in Concord. In response, roughhewn American farmers heeded the call to defend their homes and hearths from British tyranny. Miraculously, the underdogs succeeded. The tenacity and will of virile American farmers, it turned out, could vanquish a well-trained army of British Regulars, foreshadowing the ultimate success of the American Revolution as a monumental event in world history.

This mythology, however, is inaccurate. In reality, the Americans were initially overwhelmed by extensive British forces at Lexington. But the larger force of fighters that engaged the Redcoats further along the road in the Battle of Concord led the British to retreat to Boston, so as not to be stranded so far from reinforcements. It was on the road back to Boston — not in Lexington and Concord — where most of the fighting took place, and that counterassault was largely led not by militia members, but rather by minutemen. These highly trained units, composed of thousands of the region’s hardiest gun-owning fighters, were accustomed to irregular guerilla warfare. During the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) many New Englanders had served in provincial regiments that proved crucial for turning the tide of war in favor of the British. Moreover, since the British had sent several expeditions into rural Massachusetts over previous months that turned out to be dry runs for April 19, the minutemen were already drilled and ready when the actual fighting began. 

If the memory of the battles were simply inaccurate, that would hardly be odd; most public memories are imprecise. What is problematic is that the myth of common-born militia members taking on tyranny has become a touchstone for extremists. One need only look at two of the most traumatic events in recent history to gauge the danger this myth poses to American democracy today: the 2021 Capitol riot, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Many of the rioters on January 6, Gadsden (Don’t Tread on Me) flags in hand, cast themselves as modern-day minutemen: commoners intent on rooting out a condescending cabal of coastal elites. Though Timothy McVeigh probably chose April 19 as the day for his attack first and foremost because it would mark exactly two years since the federal raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, there are several indications that he also grew obsessed with April 19 for its connection to the Lexington and Concord battles. Which, if true, would make the bombing his rejoinder to the “shot heard round the world.”

Since the story of April 19, 1775, features common Americans — as opposed to the so-called founders — it has acted as a counterweight to memories of the Revolution that highlight the heroics of elites such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams. And the most famous allusions to the myth of Lexington and Concord in the early United States do appear to harness the memory of the battles toward democratic and leveling commitments. This began in the immediate aftermath of April 19, when, for example, one American hailed the victory “a circumstance that highly spirits us, when we consider that with all [British] vaunts of infinite superiority, our Militia, suddenly assembled, without plan or leader, and at no time equal to them in numbers, could force them to retreat with confusion and loss.” A few decades later, Mercy Otis Warren rehearsed an already familiar refrain when writing one of the first comprehensive histories of the American Revolution. “Armed in the cause of justice, and struggling for every thing they held dear,” she enthused, “this small body of yeomanry… maintained their stand until the British troops, though far superior in numbers, and in all the advantages of military skill, discipline, and equipment, gave ground and retreated, without half executing the purpose designed.”

Yet perhaps the most famous and memorable mentions of Lexington and Concord that helped reinforce the myth belong to two of the most eminent New England poets of the early United States: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Both authors were supportive of the abolitionist cause and are regarded as icons of a more progressive version of American nationalism. In his “The Concord Hymn” written in honor of a monument to the battles erected in his hometown in 1837, Emerson gave us the epic turn of phrase “the shot heard round the world.” Nearly 25 years later, in a poem written for The Atlantic, Longfellow hooked Americans on to the legend of Paul Revere’s ride to warn Massachusetts that the British were coming in a poem that championed American commoners standing up to tyranny. “You know the rest,” Longfellow wrote in “Paul Revere’s Ride, “In the books you have read, / How the British Regulars fired and fled,— / How the farmers gave them ball for ball.” Longfellow’s poem, written on the eve of the Civil War and harnessed by the North to ramp up support for the Union cause, clearly associated the myth of Lexington and Concord with a more capacious strain of American nationalism. Future generations often agreed; in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.” As Jill Lepore pointed out in 2010, Longfellow also led the way for future mythmakers by getting “almost every detail of what happened in 1775 wrong,” especially the fact that he rode alone.

From quite early on, there were critical moments in the genealogy of the myth that suggested alternative, more disturbing interpretations and legacies. With hindsight, no moment appears more ominous than the passage of the Second Amendment — a crucial development that linked the myth of Lexington and Concord with the Constitution. In his book about the deep history of the Second Amendment, Noah Shusterman views Lexington and Concord as a pivotal test case for contemporary republican ideas that held militias to be superior and safer to the community than standing armies. At the time, the Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the Constitution, written after its ratification — embodied the logic of those who worried that the Constitution was a hostile takeover by the elites and insisted, in Thomas Paine’s phrasing, that governments are expressions of “wickedness.” Though the Second Amendment embodied a compromise between what might be called Federalist and anti-Federalist interpretations of the militia and its role, as part of the Bill of Rights and as an elaboration on the militia clause in the Constitution, it in large part captured the emerging myth of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. To prevent a reoccurrence of tyranny in American politics, the republic ought to have virtuous and armed common-born Americans ever-ready as a check on the government, as there had supposedly been on April 19, 1775.

On its face this seems rather innocuous, but here we come up against the question of who exactly is being overthrown, and who is doing the overthrowing, which suggests other considerations beyond the threat of a tyrannical government. The militia myth and today’s cult of the Second Amendment also rely on the notion of an outside enemy from whom the democratic community defends itself. In the United States, a fraternity of white men constructed what they labeled a democracy; they perceived themselves as gun-toting freedom-loving men prepared to defend their wives and children from the nation’s antagonists. As Carol Anderson persuasively argued in her recent book, The Second, these antagonists included not only haughty British tyrants, but also the slaves their way of life had come to rely on and Native nations with whom American settlers were in an almost constant state of warfare. Anderson and other historians, including Robert Churchill and Kathleen Belew, also make clear that in the late-20th century United States, the cult of the Second Amendment, the influence of the National Rifle Association, and the rise of self-appointed militias emerged in conservative circles as part of a backlash to what some viewed as an increasingly tyrannical government. The context, of course, were the changes in America wrought by the civil rights movement and the rise of the welfare state, seen by many white Americans as forced upon them by a hostile central government. 

While the Second Amendment makes no explicit mention of race, the first federal law that oversaw militias, the 1792 Uniform Militia Act, did. It stipulated that “every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty five years … shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” Legislators passed this law shortly after General Arthur St. Clair’s humiliating defeat in November 1791 to a Native American coalition in the Northwest Territory. Fearing that Native American successes in recent battles would inspire further attacks by raiders on frontier settlements, American legislators passed an act that empowered local communities to organize militias in “self-defense,” as they saw it. The law remained until 1862; Black men were permitted to join Union militias one year into the Civil War.

Another formative moment came during the War of 1812, when southwestern frontiersmen pounced on the opportunity to reenact the legend of Lexington and Concord. While the War of 1812 did not go very well for the United States — the Canadians repelled the American invasion of their country — the last battle of the war became the stuff of myth as militia troops under the command of Andrew Jackson successfully defeated a British invasion of New Orleans early in 1815. The battle became the prism through which many Americans remembered the whole war, and a cause for celebrating the war itself as a victory. While in truth the battle was won by Black, white, and mixed-race troops cobbled together by Jackson, as I relate in my recently published book, mythmakers quickly delivered what Americans thirsted for most, a retelling of Lexington and Concord, but this time with a more racial bent. According to this fictionalized account of the battle, prominent in news stories of the time, not only did Tennessee and Kentucky militiamen defeat the British, but they protected New Orleans from rapine and plunder. Lurid stories of runaway slaves seduced by British promises of “beauty and booty” in New Orleans blended with the supposed heroism of militiamen from Tennessee and Kentucky under the command of General Andrew Jackson. The country’s preeminent frontier Indian fighters, in this retelling, also protected the women of New Orleans and the rest of the South from Black marauders. 

A myth-fed euphoria overtook the nation after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, just as it had 40 years earlier in the wake of Lexington and Concord. “History,” boasted one Kentucky paper, “will scarcely authenticate the mighty deed, effected by citizens who left their homes late in November, reached the scene of action in boats on the 4th of January, and four days after destroyed and captured more than a hundred of the enemy for one of their own men.” Another paper exclaimed that Jackson “has proved to the enemy that there are, in every part of America, men who in defense of their firesides are determined and able to repel the most numerous and disciplined hosts of an invading foe.” Thus not only did Southerners make the myth of Lexington and Concord their own, they also made race a salient component of the myth. This new version evoked the image of rugged and virile frontiersmen defending white women from the nation’s non-white enemies. As historian Alan Taylor noted in his 2013 book The Internal Enemy, if we read beyond the opening stanza of the War of 1812’s most famous song, “The Star Spangled Banner,” we encounter this darker current in the song’s reference to the “hireling and the slave.”

The Civil War reinforced this emerging connection between Southern notions of common (white) men’s virility at arms, the myth of Lexington and Concord, and more explicit links to white supremacy. As the historian David Blight has written about at length, though Northerners won the military war, by the 1890s Southerners won the war over the war’s meaning. As part of their “Lost Cause” revision, Southerners blended the memory of the Civil War and the Revolution. If the minutemen at Lexington and Concord fought for home rule, the myth went, so too did the rebels of 1861. As Michael Hattem noted in his recent book about American memory of the Revolution, a new generation of Southerners, more comfortable with the Revolution’s legacy than their Confederate parents had been, appropriated both the Revolution and the Civil War for their own purposes. In this context, the Confederate battle flag emerged as a symbol of rebellion and freedom, first for Southerners and later for anxious and conservative white Americans nationwide who felt that their country was being taken away by un-American forces.

By the Cold War era, as Southerners and conservative Americans more broadly synthesized these ideas, they increasingly established strong links between Lexington and Concord and a chauvinistic and even white supremacist interpretation of American nationalism. An anti-communist 1930s organization that saw the New Deal as a socialist plot to overthrow freedom in America was called the Paul Revere Sentinels. An anti-communist, extra-legal militia called the Minutemen, inspired by the John Birch Society, formed in the 1960s. By the last third of the 20th century many white Americans who felt a growing need to protect their society from what they viewed as outside forces, effortlessly blended Lost Cause imagery with references to the Revolution — and especially the mythology of the Lexington and Concord militiamen. The 1990s militia movement’s early online webpage was called the Paul Revere Bulletin Board. Later, in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement leaned into Revolutionary-era symbolism, including championing the Gadsden flag; the same symbols were later adopted as staples of the MAGA movement. 

As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s formation, what should we do with the myth of anti-tyrannical violence that we’ve inherited from generations past? Over the years, and with increasing urgency given recent breakdowns in the country’s civic and legal culture and procedures, liberal commentators and historians have often turned to cherished American tropes, such as appealing to the country’s supposed legacy as a beacon of democracy and the leader of the free world. According to this logic, offering Americans an inclusive, interracial nationalism in the mold of Emerson and Longfellow could unite Americans around a more just interpretation of the country’s history. Yet the history of the United States, and many other nations besides, warn us that for every liberal interpretation of the nation there are violent interpretations that learn to co-opt them. As tempting as it might be at times to secure political capital by submitting to and reinforcing nationalist tropes, we must come to terms with the disturbing legacy of nations and their myths. When it comes to nationalism, the dangers tend to outweigh the benefits. Unleash them at your own peril — as well as the peril of future generations.