The Powder Keg.

However intricate the political causes of the American Revolution, the military flashpoint was a simple matter. On the night of 18 April 1775 the governor of Massachusetts, Gen. Thomas Gage, sent a column of troops under Lt. Col. Francis Smith and Maj. John Pitcairn to seize weapons and gunpowder stored by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress at Concord, some sixteen miles west of Boston. Early in the morning of the nineteenth, Pitcairn, pushing ahead with six companies to secure the bridges over the Concord River, encountered on the town green at Lexington a local company of militia captained by John Parker. Pitcairn ordered them to disperse. A single shot was fired, nobody knows by whom, and the British troops fired several volleys into the colonials, killing eight of them and wounding ten. The colonials scattered; Smith came up with the rest of...