FOURTH LECTURE

Brought to you by the Grosse Pointe Artist Association:

Reconciliation between England and the 13 colonies was failing.  Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion, and on April 14 General Thomas Gage received secret orders from England to suppress the rebels. On the night of April 18, Gage sent 700 British soldiers to Concord to seize patriot supplies there. At dawn the British reached the town of Lexington, just east of Concord, where they found 70 American militiamen waiting for them on the village green.

Warned of the British troop movement, the Lexington patriots had assembled in an effort to halt British progress toward Concord. Both sides stood their ground, and in a tense moment, a shot was fired. Though it’s unclear which side, British soldier or American patriot, fired that first “shot heard ’round the world,” history remembers it as the start of the American Revolutionary War.

Curator of Manuscripts at the Clements Library Cheney Schopieray, who developed a recent exhibition titled “Bloody Work: Lexington and Concord 1775," will help us relive this pivotal time in American history.