SAN JOSÉ, Calif., April 26, 2016 — After the shocking news spread regarding the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, it seemed as if all hell had broken loose in the colonies. Shooting at royal soldiers could be considered the same as shooting at King George himself. Shooting at the king’s troops was indeed an outright act of war.
Yet, instead of reacting with widespread fear and panic, various militia leaders marched volunteers from around the surrounding area in Massachusetts and from other New England colonies toward Boston to confront the British forces in the city.
Newly appointed General George Washington would arrive in Cambridge and take command of this “military force” on July 3, 1775. Initial leadership of the rag–tag band of men and boys had been assumed by General Artemus Ward, a veteran of the French and Indian Wars. But the Continental Congress had voted to place Washington in command.
After the skirmishes in Lexington and Concord, the revolutionary leadership in Massachusetts saw the real need to re-organize the “colonial troops” in order to create a more cohesive and realistic fighting force. Various volunteer militias eventually aggregated in Massachusetts, intent upon armed conflict with the British after what had happened on the 19th of April.
Why would such men willingly volunteer? Were they out of their minds? Did they each have a death wish?
The same questions could also be asked of George Washington. Emerson tried to capture it in his Concord Hymn: “…Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free…”
These ordinary men, British citizens, knew the impossible odds stacked against them in their open defiance of their government — the ruling elite and system of laws within the powerful British Empire. Yet, they still went out Lexington Green to wait in the cool April morning air, uncertain of what would happen next, as it had never happened before. They still went out – to fight and to die for freedom.
These ordinary citizens became the embodiment of Patrick Henry’s rousing line: “Give me Liberty, or give me death,” and George Washington became the personification of such sentiment. As he willingly accepted the nomination of his peers to command the newly adopted “army,” he knew he would risk his life on a regular basis.
Within three weeks of the incidents at Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress convened once again after a crisis in the colonies. They had convened in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party. This time they reconvened on May 10th in order to decipher eyewitness accounts of the battles against British regulars.
There seemed little doubt that the British government would send more shiploads of troops, but there were some in Congress who held the belief that the King George III and the British government could be still be trusted to look upon the colonials with respect and esteem after all that had happened. Washington, the former colonel in the British Army, most likely harbored no illusions about the future.
There would definitely be a reckoning, and circumstances had deteriorated in the weeks since shots were fired at the King’s troops, the day acknowledged by historians as the initiation of the American War for Independence. During this time, Congress had argued about a proper course of action, yet no decision was made to formally declare war against the mother country. Finally, on June 14, 1775, John Adams rose on the floor of Congress to offer an appeal from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for assistance with organization and some assumption of authority for the crisis. Adams addressed the delegates of Congress with a sense of urgency to avoid a disaster should the British troops manage to break out of Boston and “spread desolation as far as they could go.”
It was true patriots like John Adams and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin who understood the ruthlessness of the British, for they all had worked closely in their own ways with such men of ruthlessness. John Adam’s first formal resolution was for the Congress to tak