From the Boston Massacre to Lexington

On March 5, 1770, British soldiers in Boston fired into a crowd that had been taunting and pelting them with snowballs and ice, killing five men. It was a chaotic, provoked clash, not an execution. Paul Revere's engraving told a different story: a disciplined line of redcoats firing in unison on peaceful, unarmed colonists. That simple, false image spread through every colony and did more to shape opinion than the messy truth ever could have, proving that a clean story beats an accurate one when you want people angry.

Trade tensions kept building. In December 1773, colonists boarded East India Company ships in Boston harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water, protesting a tax policy that let the company undercut colonial merchants while Parliament still collected duty. Britain answered with the Coercive Acts of 1774, closing Boston's port and stripping Massachusetts of self-government. Colonies needed a way to act together rather than suffer alone, and committees of correspondence, networks of colonists sharing news and coordinating responses, carried Massachusetts's grievance to all thirteen colonies, turning one town's crisis into a shared cause.

That shared cause met armed force on April 19, 1775. British troops marched from Boston to Concord to seize colonial weapons, exchanged fire with militia at Lexington, found the arms already moved, and faced a running gauntlet of colonial gunfire the entire retreat back to Boston. The war that debt and taxes had been building toward for a decade had finally started, and the next question was no longer whether to resist but how to govern what came after.