The American experiment launched with the sound of gunshots

Washington Post

18-04-2025

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Rick Atkinson, a former reporter and editor at The Post, is author of the forthcoming 'The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780.'
It began just after dawn on April 19, 250 years ago, with an abrupt spatter of gunfire in rural Massachusetts that left eight Americans dead on Lexington Common, a bucolic crossroads of 750 people and 400 cows. For the next eight years, an obscure squabble on the edge of the world metastasized into both a civil war of internecine fury and a global conflict fought on four continents and the seven seas. By the end, after 1,300 battlefield actions, plus 241 naval engagements, the British Empire was badly diminished and the new United States of America was ascendant, a fledgling republic with its own imperial ambitions.
The American semiquincentennial begins now, marking the 250th anniversary of this country's founding. Like the bicentennial five decades ago, it's an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on who we are, where we came from, what our forebears believed and — perhaps the most fearsome question any people can ask themselves — what they were willing to die for.
Today, the revolution that midwifed a nation seems an ancient, arcane quarrel over taxes, trade policy and self-rule. But even now, certain truths can be discerned across the centuries: that this nation was born from violence, with bitter discord part of that birthright; that high-minded leaders worthy of esteem can rise to the occasion with pluck, wisdom and equanimity; and that regardless of the trials bedeviling us in 2025, when national unity is elusive and when partisan rancor seems ever more venomous, we have surmounted greater perils, existential perils, throughout our history.
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Much about the American Revolution has been forgotten or distorted. The nation's founders often are either embalmed in reverence or condemned for their manifest flaws. Certainly 18th-century revolutionary rhetoric tended to be aspirational, if not delusional. The galvanic assertion that 'all men are created equal' hardly held true for half a million enslaved Black people — 1 in 5 of all Americans occupying the 13 colonies when those words were written in 1776. Nor was it valid for women, Native Americans or poor people Throughout the Revolution, Americans still loyal to the British crown, or just skeptical of armed rebellion against their government, were subjected to disenfranchisement, jail, confiscation, torture, exile and even execution.
Yet the American creation story remains pertinent, vivid and exhilarating, a reminder that we are the beneficiaries of an enlightened political heritage handed down to us from that revolutionary generation. The bequest includes a legacy of personal liberty and strictures on how to divide power and prevent it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves. We cannot let that heritage slip away. We cannot permit it to be taken away. We cannot be oblivious to this priceless gift, or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past two and a half centuries.
Time and distance have largely bleached the blood from the Revolution, giving it the lusterless, tidy look of a faded lithograph. Yet the war was brutal, relentless and often cruel. British troops burned numerous towns, including Norfolk, Charlestown near Boston, Falmouth in what's now Maine, Kingston in New York, and Fairfield and Norwalk in Connecticut. Britain's German allies, the Hessians, were accused of many rapes in central New Jersey and pillaging everywhere. American troops captured and murdered Indians allied with the British before flinging their bodies into the Wabash River. Other American soldiers destroyed 40 Native American villages in western New York during a vengeful campaign.
Some of the towns burned down by British forces around New England
New Hampshire
Charlestown
Lexington
massachusetts
Boston
Norfolk
connecticut
R.I.
Fairfield
Norwalk
N
Atlantic
Ocean
50 miles
Falmouth
New
Hampshire
Charlestown
Lexington
New
york
Boston
massachusetts
Norfolk
Kingston
connecticut
Fairfield
Norwalk
N
Atlantic
Ocean
50 miles
Falmouth
MAINE
Vermont
New
Hampshire
N
Lexington
New
york
Charlestown
massachusetts
Boston
Norfolk
Kingston
connecticut
r.i.
Fairfield
Norwalk
50 miles
Atlantic Ocean
At least 25,000 of the 2.5 million Americans in 1775 perished in the struggle for independence, and possibly many more, a larger proportion of our population to die in any conflict other than the Civil War. The hostility convulsing the country bred partisan violence and retribution. 'Everywhere distrust, fear, hatred, and abominable selfishness,' a Lutheran pastor outside Philadelphia wrote. 'Parents and children, brothers and sisters, wife and husband were enemies to one another.'
Rebel militiamen whipped loyalists in Virginia until they shouted, 'Liberty forever.' South Carolina divided loyalists into four categories, with varying degrees of reprisal depending on the extent of alignment with the enemy. Mandatory oaths renouncing allegiance to the crown helped distinguish friend from foe; those who refused to swear could be fined or imprisoned without bond. 'Tory hunting' expeditions seized 'inimicals' such as Moses Dunbar, who was captured while enlisting Connecticut men for a loyalist regiment. Before his hanging in Hartford in March 1777 — and it was said that Dunbar's patriot father offered to provide hemp for the noose — his pregnant young wife was forced to sit beside him as he rode in a tumbrel to the gallows. This fracturing of the body politic foreshadowed the Civil War nearly a century later, not in the causes of the schism but in the bitter estrangement of American from American.
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Many myths persist about the rebellion. The romantic image of a yeoman farmer leaving his plow in the furrow to grab a musket on behalf of freedom hardly does justice to the real Continental Army. Rabid enthusiasm for the patriot cause faded quickly after 1775, when the ranks at first had been filled with propertied freeholders and tradesmen, many of whom soon returned to their farms, tanneries or shops to attend families and businesses they could no longer ignore.
Instead, the army increasingly depended on the landless young, the poor, the desperate and sometimes the shiftless. These ranks included unemployed laborers, apprentices, farmhands, servants, drifters and recent immigrants, notably Irish Protestants driven to America by crop failures and a collapse of the weaving industry. They needed the income, even if it was only the $6 and change that a private earned each month. States began conscripting troops, sometimes with names drawn from a hat, although some local governments permitted the hiring of substitutes for Continental Army service, or the buying of exemptions with a fine. In New Jersey, drafted masters enrolled their slaves or indentured servants in their stead, and up to 40 percent of that state's soldiers in the Continental Army were substitutes. Maryland began forcing vagrants into service. Desertion was such a persistent problem that Gen. George Washington warned that 'we shall be obliged to detach one-half of the army to bring back the other.'
Washington himself remains heavily mythified. The man proverbially incapable of telling a lie could certainly be disingenuous, notably in his dispatches to Congress after another battlefield setback. He at times was moody and self-pitying, with a molten temper. 'I do not think any officer since the creation ever had such a variety of difficulties and perplexities to encounter as I have,' he complained in 1777. For much of the Revolution, he was an indifferent tactician, and his generalship proved a medley of miscalculation and misfortune, periodically redeemed with bold aggression and the good luck provided by stumbling enemies, providential fogs and bullets that barely missed.
During Washington's lifetime at Mount Vernon, at least 577 enslaved people worked his plantation, an appalling reminder that much of the country's prosperity was predicated on human bondage. One of those enslaved men said, 'I never see that man laugh to show his teeth. He done all his laughing inside.' That no doubt reflected a lifetime of dental miseries that kept Washington tight-lipped, but it also was because, as an aide wrote, 'the weight of the whole war may justly be said to lay upon his shoulders.' John Adams, who was wary of what he called the 'superstitious veneration' accorded Washington by many Americans, nevertheless conceded that his 'great, manly, warlike virtues' reassured the public, as did his rectitude and readiness to sacrifice self-interest for the greater good.
And in truth he embodied the classical virtues cherished by his countrymen: fortitude, prudence, temperance and the subordination of private advantage to public benefit, 'one steady line of conduct for the good of the great whole,' as Washington put it. Repeatedly refusing to use his power for his own ends, he consciously tried to emulate the Roman republicans he admired, notably Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman military leader who saved Rome on the battlefield but then put away his sword to retire to his farm.
(Illustration by Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral for The Washington Post)
Americans faced daunting odds in opposing the British. No colonial rebellion in modern times had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles. Britain's advantages included the greatest navy the world had ever seen, sophisticated financing of military ventures, a population more than triple that of America and a knack for expeditionary warfare reminiscent of the Romans'.
But a dry rot had undermined King George III's cause virtually from those first shots at Lexington. Britain's war effort leaned on several strategic misconceptions in underestimating rebel resolve against British firepower and overestimating the depth of loyalist support across the colonies. Protecting and arming loyalists, so that the 'good Americans' (those loyal to the crown) could help subjugate the 'bad Americans' (the rebels) were critical if the insurgency was to be crushed. Yet recent scholarship has estimated that no more than 20 percent of White Americans during the Revolution were steadfast loyalists.
That was never enough to tip the scales during the war. Loyalists lacked national leaders, effective propaganda and self-sufficiency without massive British support. None of the 13 states remained under loyalist control as the war intensified, notwithstanding pockets of loyal strength along the western frontier from New York to Georgia and in maritime regions of the middle states. Despite few rebel military victories, virtually all levers of power, from municipal committees of safety to state governments and the national Congress, remained under insurrectionist control.
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British commanders also underrated the difficulty of feeding tens of thousands of redcoats deployed in North America, as well as the 4,000 horses that consumed 20,000 tons of hay and oats a year. Because foraging expeditions often faced ambush by aroused rebels, nearly all supplies — from flour, salt meat and fodder to candles, musket balls and opium — had to be shipped from England or Ireland across 3,000 miles of open ocean in the age of sail, a voyage that could take at least three months even if not disrupted by rebel privateers or Atlantic storms. 'We can expect no supplies or assistance from this country,' the British commissary general wrote to London from occupied Philadelphia in late 1777. 'We cannot with safety go a hundred yards beyond our lines without a large escort.'
George III and his ministers moreover believed that allowing the American colonies to detach themselves from the empire would encourage insurrections in Canada, Ireland, India and the West Indies sugar islands. Dominos would topple, pushing Britain into 'a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European states,' as the king declared in 1780. That premise, disputed by the likes of political economist Adam Smith, whose monumental 'The Wealth of Nations' was published in 1776, proved ruinously wrong, yet it underpinned the king's determination to wage war for eight years at an estimated cost of 128 million pounds — or roughly $25 billion in today's money — with more than 30,000 British and German casualties and the eventual reduction of the British Empire by half a million square miles.
Against such obduracy an indomitable American persistence survived from season to season through the war, not in every patriot heart and not without despair, but in enough hearts and with enough hope to fight on. Ebenezer Stanton, a Connecticut army paymaster, wrote to a friend, 'I could wish I had two lives to lose in defense of so glorious a cause. … I was freeborn, and if I can support myself, I will stand or fall in defense of my country.'
My country. That concept had taken root in the American seedbed, nurtured by a shared faith that this struggle — ostensibly over taxes, autonomy and other parochial complaints — was ultimately about the chance to build both a new nation and a better world. Capt. John Marshall of Virginia, who survived Valley Forge and the battles at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth and Stony Point, and who was destined to become chief justice of the United States for 34 years, wrote, 'I was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my country and Congress as my government.' He also added, 'I had imbibed these sentiments so thoroughly that they constituted a part of my being.' Faith in the future sustained an irrational optimism, despite all the obvious perils.
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During the dreary winter of 1778-1779, when the Continental Army was bivouacked across northern New Jersey, Washington and his officers organized a homely celebration to commemorate the first anniversary of France's joining the American cause, an alliance that eventually made victory possible. Thirteen cannons fired a salute, an army band played, and the guests wandered through 13 arches with illuminated paintings depicting scenes from the war: the first shots at Lexington; the stunning capture of British forces at Saratoga in 1777; the burning of Norfolk, Falmouth and other towns. A final arch imagined a future, peaceable America as 'a rising empire,' her rivers covered with merchant ships and new canals traversing the land. This is why they fought, suffered and died. They saw peace and prosperity, a land stretching from sea to shining sea. They saw us.
In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, whose service to the cause included duty in France as the country's first and greatest diplomat, died at the age of 84 in Philadelphia. But a few months before he passed, he wrote, in a letter to a friend, one of the lines for which he's best remembered: 'Our new Constitution is now established. Everything seems to promise it will be durable. But, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.' What he's telling us, virtually from the grave, is that there's work to be done. The dream endures, but so does the struggle.
America is predicated on an idea: that all of us are created equal, that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That should act as a polestar, providing true north and telling us what it is that we think we can do as a people. The perpetual challenge of the American experiment is to draw on these aspirational ideals, to make them our own, to hand them off to our children and our grandchildren, and to use that as a propulsion system for being the nation that those forebears thought we could become.
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Graphics by Sergio Peçanha. Design by Chiqui Esteban.