Definition
After Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had towns organize minutemen, part-time citizen soldiers who were ready to turn out at a minute's warning. They came from the militia, the local company of adult men that each town already kept. On April 19, 1775, about seventy-seven militiamen met British regulars on Lexington Green, where eight colonists died, and later that day militia and minutemen from many towns fought at Concord and fired on the British column all the way back to Boston. By nightfall, 73 British soldiers had been killed and 174 wounded, and 49 colonists had been killed.
Why it matters on the AP exam
The minutemen mark the move from protest to war: the fighting at Lexington and Concord began the Revolutionary War, and within two months the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army under George Washington. Questions on why the Patriots won list colonial militias among the causes, with the Continental Army, Washington's leadership, and French aid; militia often broke in open battle, but they swelled the army at Saratoga in 1777 and kept the British from holding the southern backcountry. A common trap confuses militia, part-time soldiers called out for short terms close to home, with the Continental Army, the regular army Congress created in June 1775. Both sides at Lexington were British subjects, and most colonists still said they wanted their rights, not independence.
In the sources
“Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”
Connections
- Coercive Acts: Massachusetts organized minutemen in response to the acts of 1774
- Olive Branch Petition: Congress still sought peace with the king less than three months after the fighting
- Lexington and Concord: the first battles of the war, fought on April 19, 1775
- Battle of Yorktown: the war that began with these battles saw its last major battle there in 1781