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When America was born
In the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of America's independence, Post Opinions is publishing a series of essays and letters about the nation's founding — and how the events of that era remain relevant today.
April 19, 1775 | LEXINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS
(Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral for The Washington Post)
By Rick Atkinson
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.
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June 2, 1775 | PHILADELPHIA
(Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral for The Washington Post)
By Joseph J. Ellis
On June 2, 1775, barely six weeks after British troops and colonial militias had clashed at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. He was in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress had recently convened, and she had reported to him about more recent skirmishing around Boston Harbor. He asked whether she had been frightened, and added: 'Poor Bostonians! My Heart Bleeds for them day and Night' — then reported encouraging signs of militancy stirring in Philadelphia, even if many in the Continental Congress resisted it.
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June 18, 1775 | BOSTON
(Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral for The Washington Post)
By Joseph J. Ellis
It took more than a month for the letter to reach John Adams in Philadelphia, but on June 18, 1775, Abigail Adams wrote the following words about events unfolding in Charlestown, just north of Boston: 'The Battle began upon our entrenchments upon Bunker Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o'clock, and has not ceased yet and 'tis now 3 o'clock Sabbath afternoon. … How many have fallen we know not. The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot Eat, Drink or Sleep.'
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June 23, 1775 | LONDON
(Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral for The Washington Post)
By Nick Bunker
In mid-June 1775, as the combatants far away at Bunker Hill in Massachusetts counted their dead, the English elite — as yet unaware of the battle — were welcoming the summer with horse racing, cricket and perhaps some flirtation in the pleasure gardens by the Thames. With Parliament adjourned until October, the landowning classes would soon leave London for their estates.
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