The Myth Heard Round the World
As April 19, 2025, approaches—the 250th anniversary of the so-called "shot heard round the world"—your inbox and social feeds will, if they look anything like mine, be flooded with event notices, patriotic trivia, and a steady stream of hollow memes. All of it draped in that soft-focus, two-dimensional aesthetic of propagandized white nationalism. Emerson's "embattled farmers" against Lowell's British redcoats who "came three thousand miles, and died, to keep the Past upon its throne." It sells tickets. It sells t-shirts. It earns likes. And now it stokes political division: Believe this fairy tale, or else.
But here, we take a different road. One that strips away 19th-century myth-making and lets Emerson and Lowell rest where they belong—in the literary canon, not as guides to history. And the historians of today who know better but keep cashing in? Let them have their book sales and streaming deals. That’s not the work.
The work is recovering the real Battle Road—the one actual people traveled on April 19, 1775. Minutemen, British soldiers, young loyalists, all caught up in a moment that had nothing to do with independence and everything to do with resisting arbitrary power. The fight wasn’t for a United States. The idea hadn’t even taken shape. It was a fight against an occupying military force acting beyond the boundaries of justice. Period.
We have the pamphlet debate between John Adams (writing as Novanglus) and Daniel Leonard (Massachusettensis) to prove it. Just months before Lexington, they argued over Parliament’s authority—not independence. When Francis Smith marched from Boston to Concord on the night of April 18, the alarms sounded not for freedom’s birth, but to stop a military raid.
Almost 4,000 men—Black and white, free and enslaved—turned out that day. They fought because they knew exactly what they were fighting against: oppression in real time. And by the end of that day, after Lexington Green, Old North Bridge, and fifteen bloody miles back to Boston, power had been forced to retreat. That’s what resistance looks like.
But there was no plan for what came next. New Englanders formed an army—not a Continental Army, but a New England army under the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. By June, 20,000 men surrounded Boston, including as many as 1000 Black men and men of color. No continental vision. No grand ideals. Just regional outrage and a siege.
At Bunker Hill, on June 17, 1775, that army of New Englanders—Black and white—faced off against British regulars. It wasn’t about independence. It was about pushing back against injustice. And the price paid by the British was steep: one out of every eight British officers who would die in the entire war fell that day.
But then came George Washington. Two days before Bunker Hill, he was appointed to take command—and with him came hierarchy, order, exclusion, and racism. He didn’t like what he saw: New Englanders acting on their own, Black men serving in the ranks. He brought a continental vision in which liberty had a color.
First, he ordered out all enslaved men. Then, with Congress’s blessing, he banned Black men from serving altogether. On November 12, 1775, his general orders made it plain: “The rights of mankind and the freedom of America will have numbers sufficient to support them without resorting to such wretched assistance.” Followed immediately by: “Neither Negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men unfit for fatigue are to be enlisted.”
Nobody’s marking that anniversary this year.
Reality, of course, forced Washington’s hand. By early 1776, free Black men were allowed to reenlist out of sheer necessity. There were not enough white men willing to serve. Prince Estabrook, Peter Salem, and others returned. In 1777, John Laurens pushed hard for the inclusion of enslaved men in exchange for freedom, but most states refused. Only Rhode Island broke ranks, briefly, fielding a segregated regiment of Black soldiers under white officers. It didn’t last.
By war’s end, around 5,000 Black men and men of color had served (including those who had been removed from Washington's Continental force). How many gained freedom for their service? Maybe a hundred. Promises were rarely kept. The continental vision didn’t include them.
Meanwhile, the British offered something real. Freedom, first in exchange for service, and then—through the Philipsburg Proclamation—for anyone who escaped enslavement and made it to British lines. Tens of thousands took that chance. John Graves Simcoe, who’d arrived in Boston two days after Bunker Hill, never forgot what he saw. His experience with Black people in besieged Boston inspired him to push for Black loyalist units in the British Army. As commander of the Queen’s Rangers, he freed hundreds of enslaved people during operations in Virginia. Later, as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he began the process of abolishing slavery entirely.
You won’t see that in the Instagram posts or the living history events this year.
But if you go to Concord’s Old Hill Burying Ground, almost within sight of Old North Bridge, the truth is literally carved in stone on the epitaph of John Jack, a native of Africa, whose gravestone was inscribed by Loyalist Daniel Bliss:
"Tho' born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho' he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho' stolen, labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom"
April 19, 1775, wasn’t the birth of American liberty. It was the end of revolutionary resistance. What came after—the Continental Army, the Constitution—was built by white men with a constitutional vision in which liberty had a color.
And here’s the part we can’t ignore: twelve years later, that same struggle returned in the fight over the Bill of Rights. Another battle between centralized power and those trying to hold it accountable. Another resistance.
