The Minutemen and Their World: A Review

Robert Gross's book is a social history of the period before, during and after the first shots were fired at Concord, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775 which seeks to explain why and how Concordians and their defenders, the Minutemen, joined together in support of the American revolutionary cause and also examines the effects of the Revolutionary War and its aftermath on the town and its inhabitants. His fundamental point is that the townspeople were fundamentally motivated by local concerns and turned against British rule only gradually as they began to appreciate that their local liberties and other interests were threatened by the imperial policies of the Crown.

At the time of the Revolution, Concord was a crossroads town 20 miles northwest of Boston containing about 1,500 inhabitants. Gross said that "it was a hub of communications and one of the trading centers of the province" (the Massachusetts Bay Colony) since it was first settled in 1635, Concord had been peopled by farmers of white English Protestant stock. Clearing the land, pushing back the Indians and earning a living from the rocky, sandy soil had been an arduous task. Nevertheless, a number of families had become wealthy, either from farming or trading or both. As the time of the Revolution approached, this traditional elite, men such as Colonel John Cuming, a country squire whose bequest later started Harvard Medical School, and Ephraim Wood, shoemaker-farmer and a s

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. However, during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, the town meeting instructed its representative on the General Council, Charles Prescott, a Tory, to vote in favor of repeal. Moderate in its opposition, Concord was far from ready for a break with Britain, but opposed in principle taxation without representation. Gross said "the town took little part in the protests against the Townshend Acts in 1767 and 1768." When, however, the General Council opposed Concord's campaign to locate the Middlesex County Courthouse there, Concord in May 1768 dropped Prescott in favor of the more militant Captain James Barrett. Opinion in Concord, however, hardened against the British who undertook a series of actions in the early 1770s which Concordians regarded as infringements upon their liberties: (a) the decision to pay senior Justices by the Crown rather than through the Council which Barrett was instructed to oppose; (b) the Coercive Acts of 1774 which had resulted in the closing of the Port of Boston (after the Boston Tea Party), the arrival of British troops, the proroguing of the House of Representatives and the appointment of General Thomas Gage as military Governor. These measures reduced the differences between the townspeople where Gros

Category: History - T