So that you won’t be fooled by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claiming Second Amendment supporters were celebrating the Oklahoma City bombing this week — as she has on April 19 in years past — Tuesday was the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, a date all Americans used to know.
This year, New Yorkers celebrated by voting to keep the country that was christened in blood at Lexington and Concord.
Until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, most Americans knew as little about Paul Revere’s ride as Rachel Maddow does today.
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Suspecting that the British would soon be mobilizing to crush the brewing rebellion, American patriots had been watching and waiting. When rebel leader Dr. Joseph Warren received a secret message that the British were planning to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock in Lexington that night, he immediately alerted Paul Revere and two others in their clandestine group.
By pre-arrangement, each rider took a different route to Lexington. If any two were captured by the British, the message would still be delivered. The fate of a nation was riding that night.
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