Throw down your arms

What happened

General Gage had received his orders on 14 April and meant to strike first. On the night of 18 April about seven hundred soldiers crossed to the mainland and marched for Concord to seize the province's stores and arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and word of it raced ahead of them. At Lexington, Captain John Parker, a veteran of the French and Indian War already dying of consumption, called out his company, about seventy men of the town, and drew them up in two lines on the green beside the road to Concord. At sunrise the British advance guard came up with Major John Pitcairn riding in front. Pitcairn, who boasted that the Massachusetts rebels would flee if he drew his sword half out of the scabbard, ordered the militia to lay down their arms and go home. Parker told his men to disperse, but they kept their guns. In the middle of it a shot rang out, and nobody knows who fired it. The British fired on, far longer than Pitcairn's orders allowed, at men who were leaving, and eight Americans died. Rothbard calls it a massacre, and says it made the provincial congress's resolution not to fire first obsolete. A war had started. Hearing the firing, Samuel Adams cried out, "What a glorious morning is this!"