The Nineteenth of April

Two hundred thirty-five years ago, British regulars and American militiamen exchanged the first gunfire of the American Revolution at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The military component of the Revolution, which would drag on for several years (at least until Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown in 1781), was to be accompanied by the most important moral and intellectual revolution in history––giving rise to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1787, with its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, ratified by 1791.

I took a few photographs of the reenactment yesterday at the Old North Bridge in Concord:

A Minuteman, forced to defend his life and property, looks ahead, eager to return to his family and get back to the business of living.

It is not clear who fired the “shot heard ‘round the world,” but it ignited the military engagement of the American Revolution.

Above, a group of Americans commemorate a time––an age that seems tragically distant now––when ordinary citizens grasped and lived according to principles, stood on their own two feet, and recognized encroaching tyranny as a threat to be repelled, not as a “safety net” to which one meekly submits.