The sun never set on the British Empire. It was the largest empire in world history.
Out of nearly 200 countries in the world, only 22 were never controlled or invaded by Britain.
In April of 1775, the British Royal Military Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, sent 700 British Army Regulars, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith,
on a preemptive raid to seize guns from American patriots at Lexington and Concord.
George Mason of Virginia stated:
"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
James Madison wrote (
Letters & Writings of James Madison, 1865, p. 406):
"The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... forms a barrier against the enterprise of ambition ... Kingdoms of Europe ... are afraid to trust the people with arms."
Supreme Court Justice
Joseph Story wrote in
Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 2nd Edition, 1833, p. 125):
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium (safeguard) of the liberties of a Republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers."
Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice
Thomas Cooley wrote in
The General Principles of Constitutional Law (2nd Ed., 1891, p. 282):
"The Second Amendment ... was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers ... The people ... shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose."
Patrick Henry wrote (Elliott, ed.,
The Debates in the Several State Conventions, 1836, 1941, p. 378):
"Let him candidly tell me, where and when did freedom exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle in human affairs interposed, no nation ever retained its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse ... The great object is, that every man be armed ... Everyone who is able may have a gun."
Joel Barlow wrote in
Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government (1792, 1956, p. 46):
"The foundation of everything is ... that the people will form an equal representative government ... that the people will be universally armed ... A people that legislate for themselves ought to be in the habit of protecting themselves."
Jeffrey R. Snyder, esq., wrote in "A Nation of Cowards" (
The Public Interest, 1993, no. 113):
"Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and willing to use them."
Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote (
Cicero, Selected Political Speeches, trans. M. Grant, 1969, p. 222):
"There exists a law ... inborn in our hearts ... that if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."
Montesquieu wrote in
The Spirit of the Laws (trans. T. Nugent, 1899, p. 64):
"It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life."
Aristotle wrote in
Parts of Animals (trans. A. Peck, 1961, p. 373):
"Animals have just one method of defense and cannot change it for another ... For man, on the other hand, many means of defense are available, and he can change them at any time ...
Take the hand: this is as good as a talon, or a claw, or a horn, or again, a spear, or a sword, or any other weapon or tool it can be all of these."
Aristotle wrote in
Politics (trans. T. Sinclair, 1962, p. 274):
"Those who possess and can wield arms are in a position to decide whether the constitution is to continue or not."
Machiavelli wrote in
The Prince (trans. L. Ricci, 1952, p. 73, 81):
"Among evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible ... It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willing one who is unarmed."
Cesare Beccaria wrote in
On Crimes and Punishment (trans. H. Paolucci, 1963, p. 87-88):
"False is the idea ... that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it ... The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature.
They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most scared laws of humanity, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity ...
Such laws ... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
Roman historian
Livy wrote (trans. B. Foster, 1919, p. 148):
"Formerly (during the reign of Rome's 6th king, Servius Tullius, 578-535 BC) the right to bear arms had belonged solely to the patricians. Now plebeians were given a place in the army ... All the citizens capable of bearing arms were required to provide their own swords, spears, and other armor."
Thomas Paine wrote (
Writings of Thomas Paine, Conway, ed., 1894, p. 56)
"The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self defense.
The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order."
Thomas More wrote in
Utopia (trans. R.M. Adams, 1975, p. 71):
"Men and women alike ... assiduously exercise themselves in military training ... to protect their own territory or to drive an invading enemy out of their friends' land or, in pity for a people oppressed by tyranny, to deliver them by force of arms from the yoke and slavery of the tyrant."
Machiavelli wrote in
On the Art of War (trans. E. Farnsworth, 1965, p. 30):
"Citizens, when legally armed ... did the least mischief to any state ... Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time, but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberty in less than forty years."
Machiavelli wrote in
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (trans. L. Walker, 1965, p. 492):
"If any city be armed ... as Rome was ... all its citizens, alike in their private and official capacity ... it will be found they will be of the same mind ... But, when they are not familiar with arms and merely trust to the whim of fortune ... they will change with the changes of fortune."
Jefferson wrote to George Washington, 1796 (
The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed., New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls
Co., 1900, No. 2138, iv, 143; Paul Leicester Ford, ed., vii. 84):
"One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them."
Machiavelli wrote in
The Prince (trans. L. Ricci, 1952, p. 73, 81):
"An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens."
Noah Webster wrote in
An Examination into the leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Oct. 10, 1787, (Paul Leicester Ford, ed.,
Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, 1888, 1968):
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed."
Adam Smith wrote in
The Wealth of Nations (ed., Cannan, p. 309):
"Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous of liberty ... The standing army of Caesar destroyed the Roman Republic. The standing army of Cromwell turned the Long Parliament out of doors."
Earl Warren wrote in
The Bill of Rights and the Military, (37N.Y.U. L. Rev. 181, 1962):
"Our War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies ... Thus we find in the Bill of Rights, Amendment 2 ... specifically authorizing a decentralized militia, guaranteeing the right of the people to keep and bear arms."
Jeffrey R. Snyder, esq., wrote in "A Nation of Cowards" (
The Public Interest, 1993, no. 113):
"Political theorists as dissimilar as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one's government is tantamount to being enslaved by it."
The Texas Declaration of Independence, March 2, 1836, stated:
"The late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez Santa Ana, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now
offers, as the cruel alternative, either abandon our homes acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny ...
It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defense - the rightful property of freemen-and formidable only to tyrannical governments."
Mahatma Gandhi wrote in
An Autobiography of the Story of My Experiments with the Truth (trans. M. Desai, 1927):
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
Islamic Sharia law forbids non-Muslims from possessing arms, swords or weapons of any kind.
Adolph Hitler acted similarly with his
Edict of March 18, 1938:
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms; history shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected people to carry arms have prepared their own fall."
German Firearm Act of 1937 stated: "Firearm licenses will not be granted to Jews."
Richard Munday reported in "The Monopoly of Power," presented to the American Society of Criminology, 1991, the Nazi order regarding arms, SA Ober Führer of Bad Tolz:
"SA (Storm Troopers), SS (para-military adjunct of the Gestapo), and Stahlhelm ... Anyone who does not belong to one of the above-named organizations and who unjustifiably keeps his weapon ... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government and will be brought to account without compunction and with the utmost severity."
Jefferson wrote in the
Declaration on Taking Up Arms, July 1775 (The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed., New York & London, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1900, No. 2152; Paul Leicester Ford, ed. i, 476):
"We ... most solemnly, before God and the world declare that ... the arms we have been compelled to assume we will use with perseverance, exerting to their utmost energies all those powers which our Creator hath given us, to preserve that liberty which He committed to us in sacred deposit."
Democrat Vice-President
Hubert Humphrey was quoted by David T. Hardy,
The Second Amendment as a Restraint on State and Federal Firearms Restrictions (Kates, ed.,
Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, 1979):
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
On April 19, 1775, the British continued their march to Lexington and Concord intent, not only on seizing arms, but to arrest Boston Tea Party leader
Samuel Adams and Massachusetts Provincial Congress president
John Hancock.
They were also going to arrest
Jeremiah Lee, who was America's largest colonial ship owner and the wealthiest man in Massachusetts.
John Hancock, who had previously experienced British tax collectors confiscating his merchant ship
Liberty in 1768, led the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to declare, April 15, 1775:
"In circumstances dark as these, it becomes us, as men and Christians, to reflect that, whilst every prudent measure should be taken to ward off the impending judgments ...
(a day) ... be set apart as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer ... to confess their sins ... to implore the Forgiveness of all our Transgression."
Connecticut Governor
Jonathan Trumbull, whom Washington called 'the first of the patriots', was the only colonial governor at the start of the Revolution to support the patriot cause. He proclaimed a Day of Fasting, APRIL 19, 1775, that:
"God would graciously pour out His Holy Spirit on us to bring us to a thorough repentance and effectual reformation that our iniquities may not be our ruin;
that He would restore, preserve and secure the liberties of this and all the other British American colonies, and make the land a mountain of Holiness, and habitation of righteousness forever."
On April 19, 1775, the sun rose with 800 British regulars approaching the Lexington town green.
There they were confronted by Lexington's militia, comprised of 77 men who were mostly members of the Church of Christ, pastored by Rev. Jonas Clark, whose wife's cousin was John Hancock:
Captain John Parker told the militia:
"Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have War, let it begin here!"
It is disputed who fired first, but the British opened fire and killed or wounded eighteen of Captain Parker's men.
In his sermon preached a year later, April 19, 1776, Pastor Jonas Clark described:
"Under cover of the darkness, a brigade of these instruments of violence and tyranny, make their approach ...
They enter this town ... like murders and cut-throats ... without provocation, without warning, when no war was proclaimed, they draw the sword of violence, upon the inhabitants of this town,
and with a cruelty and barbarity, which would have made the most hardened savage blush, they shed INNOCENT BLOOD!...
And the names of Munroe, Parker, and others, that fell victims to the rage of blood-thirsty oppressors, on that gloomy morning ...
And from the nineteenth of April, 1775, we may venture to predict, will be dated, in future history, THE LIBERTY or SLAVERY of the AMERICAN WORLD, according as a sovereign God shall see fit to smile, or frown upon the interesting cause, in which we are engaged."
The American militia retreated, growing to number 400, and took a stand at Concord's Old North Bridge.
The British fired first, wounding four and killing two.
Patriot militia commander John Buttrick yelled:
"Fire, for God's sake, fellow soldiers, fire!"
Taking many casualties, the British began a hasty retreat 20 miles back to Boston, being ambushed along the way by John Parker's militia in "Parker's Revenge."
Thus the Revolutionary War began with an attempt by the government to seize Americans' guns.
The poem,
Paul Revere's Ride, written by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, described how the warning sent from Boston's Old North Church that the British were coming:
"Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the 18th of April, in 75;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, 'If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light ...
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm ...'"
Though
Paul Revere was captured along the way,
William Dawes and
Samuel Prescott continued their midnight ride.
"Through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight."
Another rider that night who carried the warning north to Medford, Massachusetts, was 29-year-old African-American
Wentworth Cheswell of New Hampshire.
A similar situation occurred on the night of April 26, 1777, when 16-year-old
Sybil Ludington mounted her horse, Star, and frantically rode to alert the American militia in Danbury, Connecticut, under the command of her father, Colonel Henry Ludington, that the British were approaching.
Another instance was 27-year-old
John "Jack" Jouett, Jr., the "Paul Revere of the South" who hurriedly rode the night of June 3, 1781, to warn Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson that the British cavalry led by Colonel Tarleton was headed to Charlottesville to capture him.
Miracles in American History - 32 Amazing Stories of Answered Prayer
Longfellow's poems continued, describing how American patriots confronted government troops on Lexington Green and Concord's Old North Bridge:
"You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load."
Longfellow ended:
"So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere."
Two months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Continental Congress, under President
John Hancock, declared, June 12, 1775:
"Congress ... considering the present critical, alarming and calamitous state ... do earnestly recommend, that Thursday, the 12th of July next, be observed by the inhabitants of all the English Colonies on this Continent, as a Day of Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer,
that we may with united hearts and voices, unfeignedly confess and deplore our many sins and offer up our joint supplications to the All-wise, Omnipotent and merciful Disposer of all Events, humbly beseeching Him to forgive our iniquities ...
It is recommended to Christians of all denominations to assemble for public worship and to abstain from servile labor and recreations of said day."
Though it took eight years, Americans won their independence.
A century later, on APRIL 19,
1875, at that same
Old North Bridge, American patriots were honored by the dedication of the
'Minute Man Statue' designed by
Daniel Chester French.
On the statue's base is a stanza of the poem
The Concord Hymn, written
Ralph Waldo Emerson, APRIL 19, 1860:
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And time the ruined bridge has swept,
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
O Thou who made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid time and nature gently spare,
The shaft we raised to them and Thee."
APRIL 19th is celebrated as
"Patriots' Day."
