The Minuteman statue in Lexington, Massachusetts is said to represent Captain John Parker, who died on this day.
Except Parker wasn’t a minuteman.
He also probably didn’t look like the man in the statue, given his age and what other small details we know about him.
But as usual, nobody lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so just roll with it, hm?
(We’re guessing he probably wasn’t green, either. )
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This isn’t the first time you’ll see a statement like this, but the bottom line is: the history books aren’t 100% correct. Sure, the Shot Heard Round The World was at Lexington and Concord. But that’s not where the fighting started.
Nearly two weeks before Concord, there were small battles going on in Assonet, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border.
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Topsfield, Massachusetts wanted to be prepared when the British came. What’s more, they wanted to ensure that their militiamen were drilled and fully outfitted should the need arise. To that end, they offered some of the best wages for their Minutemen.
But they had some trouble recruiting at first, until the town’s selectmen decided that their initial force wasn’t nearly formidable enough.
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The interesting thing about surveillance in the 18th century is that, when you’re dealing with trans-Atlantic distances, the information moves slowly, and errors can be costly.
We told you not long ago about someone who’d heard about the Minutemen, but had their numbers wrong by a factor of thousands. Fortunately in that case, it was just casual gossip rather than actual spycraft. But today in history, a bit of information about Colonial artillery that was reported to the Provincial Congress in Massachusetts leaked to the British, along with information about the Minutemen’s numbers and level of preparedness. But as we’ll discover in the next couple of days, the British were already taking precautions.
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Only a few people had figured it out, and it’s not clear whether they were just guessing, but by this point in time both England and the Colonies were locked into a path that would lead inevitably to a shooting war.
To that end, Parliament approved sending over four thousand soldiers and sailors to the Colonies to help keep them in line. But it wasn’t as simple as that; there were still some people protesting the action, not that anyone listened to them.
Today we also peek in on someone who’s watching the action and has some thoughts.
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The Minutemen are among the more romantic images that many people have of the Revolution.
Around this time in 1975, the comic strip Doonesbury did a couple of series that were set in the Revolutionary War days. They focused on an ancestor of Zonker’s named Nate Harris, who was a Minuteman.
In one strip, Paul Revere shows up with the alarm “The British are coming!”
Nate asks, “How much time do you think we have?” Paul Revere says maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, and Nate replies “I only need one, you know.”
“Really?” asks Revere.
Nate’s wife Amy chips in, “Nate’s been specially trained.”
Nate Harris was a fun character; it’s kind of a shame that Doonesbury is a weekly strip now. It would be fun to see him return for America’s 250th anniversary.
Anyway: check out the story of the real Minutemen.
Minuteman statue photo by Donovan Reeves via Unsplash.
