BEGIN WITH CORROBORATION
What is not in dispute
Gage sent roughly seven hundred men out of Boston on the night of 18 April to seize the stores at Concord. The country was warned and the alarm ran ahead of the column. At about half past four in the morning, six light infantry companies under Major John Pitcairn reached Lexington and found Captain John Parker's company, something under eighty men, formed on the common beside the road.
Words were exchanged. The militia began to leave. Firing broke out. Eight Lexington men were killed and nine or ten wounded; one British soldier was slightly hurt. The column re-formed with some difficulty and marched on to Concord, and by nightfall had lost around two hundred and seventy-three men killed, wounded and missing on the road back to Boston. The provincials lost about ninety-five.
Everything in that paragraph is agreed by both sides. What happened in the four or five seconds before the firing is not, and never has been.
PURPOSE SHAPES A SOURCE
Why the depositions exist
They were not taken to find out what happened. They were taken to win an argument in London, and the Provincial Congress was entirely open about it.
A committee began work on 22 April, three days after the fight, and by the 25th had sworn statements from Lexington, Concord, Lincoln and the towns along the road, together with depositions from British prisoners. They were printed at Worcester by Isaiah Thomas as A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King's Troops under the Command of General Gage, and the title tells you the finding before you open it.
That does not make them worthless. They were taken under oath before justices of the peace, notarised, and given by men who expected to be read in England by a hostile government, and most of them are careful, specific and internally consistent. But they were assembled by one party to a dispute for the purpose of proving that party right, and they should be read the way a lawyer reads the other side's brief: closely, and with attention to what the witnesses decline to say.
INFORMATION IS POWER
The race across the Atlantic
This is the part that mattered most at the time, and it is a straight continuation of what Boston had learned in 1770.
Gage's official dispatch went aboard the Sukey, a slow merchantman, which sailed on 24 April. The Provincial Congress hired the schooner Quero at Salem, stripped her of cargo so she would run light and fast, and sent her out at the end of the month under Captain John Derby with the depositions aboard and orders to avoid being spoken by any vessel.
Derby reached England around the end of May and put the papers into the hands of Arthur Lee in London. They were in the London press within days. Gage's dispatch did not arrive for roughly another fortnight.
So for about two weeks the only account of how the war began that anyone in Britain could read was the sworn version taken by one side, and the government had nothing official to answer it with. Lord Dartmouth was reduced to telling the papers that no credit should be given to the report until the King's servants had been heard from. The first draft of history was won by a fast boat.
A USEFUL CONTRAST
Concord, where it is not in doubt
Four hours later and five miles on, at the North Bridge, the question does have an answer, and it is worth setting beside Lexington for contrast.
Several hundred militia under Colonel James Barrett had gathered on the ridge above the bridge, watching smoke rise from the town where the regulars were burning gun carriages. Believing Concord was being put to the torch, they advanced in column. The British light companies at the bridge fired, killing two. Major John Buttrick turned and gave an order that nobody has ever disputed, and the militia fired a volley into the King's troops and drove them back across the bridge.
That was a deliberate, ordered, collective decision by American officers to fire on British regulars. Whatever happened at Lexington, Concord was unambiguous, and everyone involved knew it at the time. The reason the argument has always been about Lexington is that Lexington is the one both sides could hope to win.
CLAIM / LIMIT
What the file actually shows
Read through, the evidence supports three conclusions and refuses a fourth.
First, the militia were dispersing when the firing began. Both sides say so, including Gage's own dispatch, which records that they went off in great confusion. Nobody was blocking the road to Concord.
Second, the volume of fire came from the British. Eight men died on the green and one soldier was grazed. Whatever the first shot was, what followed was one-sided, and Pitcairn's own report concedes that his men fired without orders and that he could not stop them.
Third, the first shot was probably not fired by Parker's company in its ranks. This is the striking thing about the British accounts: the official dispatch places it behind a stone wall and in the meeting house, and Pitcairn places it behind a wall. Those are not descriptions of the militia line on the common. Meanwhile several American deponents place it in a pistol fired by a mounted officer. Neither of those is the story either side was telling in public.
Fourth, and this is the refusal: who fired it cannot be established, and could not be established in 1775 by the men standing there. The senior British officer on the ground said as much privately. Two and a half centuries of work on the problem have not improved on his answer.
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
What changed after the shooting?
The uncertainty at Lexington should not hide the certainty of what followed. By the end of 19 April, an argument over taxes, representation, and imperial authority had become an armed conflict. Blood had been shed by British regulars and colonial militia, and neither side could return to the political world of the day before.
The alarm became mobilization
News of the bloodshed raced along the seaboard. Thousands of volunteers converged on the Boston area, while militia from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island formed an Army of New England and began the siege of British-held Boston.
The battle became an argument
Massachusetts gathered sworn depositions and hurried its account across the Atlantic. The question of who fired first mattered because each side wanted to define the other as the aggressor—and make its own use of force appear defensive.
Congress inherited a war
The Second Continental Congress had already been scheduled if Britain did not answer colonial grievances. Lexington and Concord did not call it into existence; they changed the problem awaiting its delegates. Congress now had to pursue reconciliation while deciding what to do about an army already surrounding Boston.
A New England force became continental
Congress adopted the forces around Boston as the Continental Army and selected George Washington of Virginia as commander in chief. A regional military response was becoming an institution of the united colonies.
WHY THIS STOP MATTERS
The crisis crossed a threshold
Lexington and Concord did not make independence inevitable, and many colonists still hoped for reconciliation. They did make the dispute harder to contain. Resistance now required armies, money, officers, and decisions made across colonial boundaries. The issue was no longer only whether Parliament had violated colonial rights. It was also whether Americans could take up arms against the King's troops and still claim loyalty to the King.
That contradiction leads directly to the next stop: Congress would send an Olive Branch Petition while also issuing a declaration explaining why Americans had taken up arms.
Follow the larger sequence through the National Park Service timeline ↗, the NPS account of the Army of New England and Siege of Boston ↗, and the U.S. Army history of the Continental Army ↗.
Source notes, qualifications, and interpretive choices
- Pitcairn's own report to Gage survives, but the most revealing account of his view comes second-hand, through Ezra Stiles, who recorded what he understood Pitcairn to have said. It is hearsay, and is labelled as such on the card. It is also consistent with what Pitcairn wrote himself.
- Sylvanus Wood's account was given decades later and is much more vivid than anything taken in 1775. Later recollections of famous events tend to grow, and his is flagged accordingly.
- Spelling and capitalisation follow the printed sources, which already differ from one another; the manuscript depositions and the 1775 Worcester printing are not identical in small details.
- Casualty figures for the whole day are the standard ones and vary by a few men between accounts. The Lexington wounded are given as nine or ten.
- Sailing and arrival dates for the Quero and the Sukey differ slightly between sources; the gap of roughly a fortnight is not in doubt.
- The number of depositions is often given as about a hundred. The figure depends on whether joint statements signed by dozens of men are counted once or once per signatory.
American testimony is quoted from the depositions printed in A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King's Troops (Worcester, 1775) and from the manuscript of Captain Parker's deposition in the Papers of the Continental Congress. British testimony is quoted from Lieutenant Barker's diary, Major Pitcairn's and Lieutenant Sutherland's reports to General Gage, and the dispatch laid before Lord Dartmouth.