Major Pitcairn entering Lexington. The Battles of Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775 were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War AKA American War of Independence
Original illustration from British Battles on Land and Sea by Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Company circa 1880. Info from wiki: The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War.[9] The battles were fought on April 19, 1775 in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge. They marked the outbreak of armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in America. About 700 British Army regulars in Boston were given secret orders to capture and destroy Colonial military supplies reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. Eight militiamen were killed, including Ensign Robert Munroe, their ranking officer. The British suffered only one casualty. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they broke apart into companies to search for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, approximately 400 militiamen engaged 100 regulars from three companies of the King's troops at about 11:00 am, resulting in casualties on both sides. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the bridge and rejoined the main body of British forces in Concord. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge in his "Concord Hymn" as the "shot heard round the world"
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Photo credit: © Historical Images Archive / Alamy / Afripics
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