The Historical Society of Moorestown’s New Jersey History Speaks Lecture Series will feature Matt Skic, curator of the Museum of the American Revolution, at the Moorestown library on Monday, April 21, at 7 p.m.
Skic’s talk – “A Shot Heard Round the World: Spreading the news of April 19, 1775” – will fall around the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the start of the Revolutionary War.
“April 19, 1775, is the day that the Revolutionary War began,” Skic said. “That is the date of the battles of Lexington and Concord, so these were battles that took place in Massachusetts when an expedition of British troops left Boston to try and seize military supplies from the people of Massachusetts, and this was at a moment when tension was high between the British troops that were occupying Boston and trying to enforce law and order in that city.”
The people of Boston and the surrounding countryside were upset that their rights and liberties were being restricted, Skic explained, but the British troop presence in Boston had been expanding since the 1760s in relation to events such as the 1770 Boston massacre and the 1773 Boston Tea Party.
“ … Massachusetts starts to increase the training of its militia,” Skic recounted. “(They) gather military supplies to be ready in case of any sort of military actions by the British, and that happened on the night of April 18 to the early morning of the 19th, when hundreds of British troops leave Boston, marching out, with their destination being Concord.”
Various troops left Boston and the surrounding areas to warn of the military excursion, and in response, the British were met with opposition at Lexington, Skic noted. A shot is fired in the middle of town, but nobody knows by who, and that sparked a brief fight between British troops and the Lexington Minutemen, who were to be ready at a minute’s notice for battle.
“The British continue on to Concord, where they meet further opposition, especially at the North Bridge over the Concord River just on the other side of town,” Skic pointed out, “and that’s where what Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call ‘the shot heard round the world,’ was fired, and that’s the first shot that kills a British soldier during the Revolutionary War.
“The first British soldier is killed at the North Bridge at Concord … the spark of the Revolutionary War.”
The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. It recognized the sovereignty of the United States over the territory bounded by what is now Canada to the north, Florida to the south and the Mississippi River to the west, according to www.revolutionarywar.us.
“Nobody in 1775 on April 19 knew that the United States would be created and declared just over a year later with the Declaration of Independence,” Skic said, “but what was on the minds of these Massachusetts men was protecting their rights and liberties, not to break away from Great Britain.”
Skic’s library talk will focus on how the news of the American Revolution spread. The people of Boston learned about it rather quickly, he stated, through the newspapers, but there were also express riders (people who rode horses to deliver mail or other important messages quickly) going out to deliver the news.
“ … The people of the Delaware Valley hear about what happened on April 19 by April 24 …” Skic added. “On the late afternoon of April 24, the express rider arrived in Philadelphia with the news of what happened on April 19, and then it was published in the Pennsylvania Packet immediately … It’s about April 24, 25, that people in southern New Jersey hear this news. Some of them might have heard the word trickling out as the express riders are coming through New Jersey down from New York. Word might have spread a little bit in that way, but we know that the news arrived in Philadelphia on April 24, so five days later.”
Skic’s talk is free, but patrons must register at www.events.moorestownlibrary.org/event/14161624.
“That effort, 250 years ago, created the United States, but it also left a lot of unresolved issues that the United States would face in the subsequent decades – and we still face even today – about who has access to this promise of equality that’s stated in the Declaration of Independence, who has a right to claim to be an American, what is our job as a citizen to participate in government?” Skic mused.
” … These are questions that have really been ones that are difficult to answer for the United States over the years … but at the core of this is that promise of equality, which is the centerpiece of the foundation of the United States of America.”
The Museum of the American Revolution will mark the 250th anniversary of April 19, 1775, with a new exhibition, “Banners of Liberty: An Exhibition of Original Revolutionary War Flags,” opening Saturday, April 19, in the museum’s Patriots Gallery. It will feature the largest gathering of rare and significant Revolutionary War flags in more than two centuries.
“These flags, which vary in design and color and symbolism on them, are really interesting to study, to understand how the United States, as a new nation, was really trying to figure out how to represent itself to the world,” Skic observed.
“ … This is the largest gathering of original Revolutionary War flags in one room, in one space, since the Revolutionary War, so this is 250 years in the making.”
