Four spirited responses to my short essay in Liberty & Law on the battles at Lexington and Concord at their 250th anniversary prove that no significant historical event, no matter how limited in time and space—in this case, to a single day, in a single Massachusetts county—can ever be fully explained or appreciated in ten pages, or in a hundred pages, by a single historian. If it could be, history would be a much simpler and much duller enterprise than it is. In offering their effective critiques of my essay, each of these respondents adopts a different approach to understanding the complexity of human thoughts and emotions, developed over many decades on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, that contributed to the clash, on April 19, 1775, between 700 British army regulars and, at sunrise, less than a hundred, then by noon perhaps a thousand, and before sunset at least another thousand Massachusetts militiamen from as many as two dozen towns. The varied arguments of the respondents also suggest that I may have too highly favored the Classical Republican interpretation of the coming of the American Revolution, developed in the twentieth century by so many scholars, perhaps most notably by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, to the detriment of other valid ways of viewing that complex event.

Hans Eicholz writes most firmly in the Classical Republican tradition that has been central to so much of my own teaching, editing, and writing over several decades. To this tradition, however, Eicholz adds two important points. First, this way of thinking about political liberty, across several European cultures, was widely recognized by American writers of the period, not only Patriot voices like those of Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, and John Adams, but by Tory voices as well. Jonathan Sewall, John Adams’s close friend until he became a Tory in the 1760s (and eventually a Loyalist exile), declared in May 1775, just after Lexington and Concord, that he saw “that ancient Republican Spirit” of England’s republican martyr Algernon Sydney in the work of Adams’s Letters of Novanglus, and of other Patriot writers. Second, Eicholz stresses the Patriots’ fear of standing armies, their insistence on the supremacy of civil authority over military power, and their belief in the right of citizens to bear arms in all free governments. Both arguments are central to a full appreciation of the Patriot position in Massachusetts in 1775, and I am grateful to him for pointing them out.

Aaron N. Coleman freely acknowledges the importance of the republican tradition in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, but he sees both the essence and the contours of the colonists’ struggle with Britain rather differently. Where my essay stressed the writings of both British and American political authors, Coleman emphasizes the actual experience of British North America’s provincial legislative assemblies over the words of their pamphleteers. This argument has also been extensively developed in much twentieth-century writing on the coming of the Revolution, most notably in the work of my mentor, Jack Greene. In making the case for this interpretation, Coleman nicely contrasts the British concept of a constitutional monarchy as “King in Parliament” with the colonies’ constitutional tradition as “King in Provincial Legislatures.”

To this argument, Coleman adds a second: That Massachusetts’ Minutemen did not read John Locke or other republican writers, but did listen to their towns’ preachers who endorsed the lesson of their late colleague, the Boston divine, Jonathan Mayhew, whose Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1750) taught the Christian duty to defy tyrannical government. And it is certainly true that both Lexington and Concord had long settled ministers in the Calvinist tradition, and that of the major divisions of Christianity in America in 1775, Calvinist Protestantism was the most favorable to a right of revolution. I find this a persuasive but quite partial explanation for Lexington and Concord. What it lacks is the colonists’ need for some persons or some sequence of events to teach the Minutemen that what they faced in 1775 was a tyranny. Both the Classical Republican tradition in Europe, Britain, and North America, and America’s century of “King in Provincial Legislatures” powerfully taught that lesson.

The third respondent to my essay, Michael Auslin, more directly challenges the adequacy of my approach. He appears to have no quarrel with my argument as a plausible explanation for what did happen on April 19, 1775, but he sees so many points of contingency, of a possibility of a different turn of events, in the entire sequence of action leading up to Lexington and then on to Congress’s vote for Independence on July 2, 1776, that my entire narrative, and the narratives of so much writing on the Revolution, strikes him as highly deterministic. We must always, he argues, be attuned to the possibility that even small changes in the course of the historical past could have set matters off on a different course.

I have no quarrel with this argument of possibility (except the fact that things did not happen that way), but Auslin begins his reasoning by quoting John Adams’s observation “that only one-third of Americans supported war with Great Britain, another third—mostly Loyalists—opposed it, and a middle third [were] undecided.” As both a firm admirer of John Adams and as a descendant—in part—of Nova Scotia Loyalists, I should like to accept this neat formulation, but I believe it is both simplistic and wrong. The Loyalists were outnumbered even in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and more heavily elsewhere (nowhere more so than in Massachusetts). The possibility of a majority of British North Americans acting in favor of continued British rule in 1776 was small, and thereafter, whenever the British army made an incursion into America’s vast back country, it came to a bad end.

Auslin’s speculation that had the British ship Falcon, which carried London’s orders to General Gage, been delayed, Lexington-Concord would not have happened on April 19, and Congress’s forming of the Continental Army would have been postponed, perhaps for a considerable period, is sound enough as a counterfactual speculation. But its main difficulty, and the difficulty of any imaginable contingency after Britain’s Coercive Acts in 1774, is the steady majority in Britain’s government in favor of suppressing America’s rebellion. And the two major problems of Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union in September 1774 were Britain’s firm opposition to American autonomy and his own Plan’s provision that the decisions of its American Congress would still be subject to British approval.

None of these considerations, of course, determined that America’s War for Independence would succeed. No one at Lexington-Concord could know, and as far as we know, and no one then said, that Americans would choose, and achieve, Independence—not even Samuel Adams who, according to tradition, upon hearing the opening gunfire a few miles away at Lexington Green, said to his friend John Hancock: “What a glorious morning for America” (now the motto incorporated in the seal of the Town of Lexington).

The fourth respondent, Richard Samuelson, raises the most basic questions about my argument, and even suggests that twenty-first-century Americans may not be in so favorable a position to learn from Lexington and Concord as their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ancestors. Concerning the event itself, he argues, in general agreement with Coleman, Adams, and Greene (and myself), that by the mid-eighteenth century, Britain and America held fundamentally different views of the governments under which they lived, and therefore they inhabited two fundamentally different political worlds. He concludes his response with a strong defense of Anglo-American common law, not John Locke, as the prime motivator of the Patriots’ decision, in 1775, not only to bear arms, but to fire them.

What most distinguishes Samuelson’s response, however, comes near its beginning, where he draws attention to the conclusion of my essay. After first quoting the final stanza of Longfellow’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, I suggested that it was the poet’s intention, on the eve of the Civil War, to draw attention to that crisis and express his confidence that Americans would again heed the alarm, as they had in 1775, and again defend their nation’s liberties. For some reason, Samuelson doubts that I intended to convey the message that there are times when men must take up arms to defend their liberties. In fact, I did intend to convey that message, and I still endorse it.

Samuelson then argues that, whatever my intention, I raised a troubling question: Have we now, as a modern and enlightened nation, progressed to the point where a physical defense of our liberties is no longer necessary? It should go without saying that such an idea, however morally attractive, is simply preposterous. An hour’s reading of any good international newspaper, published in any country, should dispel such a fanciful notion. But as I read on, I began to suspect that Samuelson’s real fear is that something may have so undermined America’s will to defend its liberties that its people will not behave as they did from 1775 to 1781, and again from 1861 to 1865. And soon after expressing this concern, he wonders if the growth of “the administrative state” may have so unnerved Americans that they cannot behave with the same bravery and determination that their ancestors proudly displayed.

No one can answer the question: “How will Americans behave in any future crisis?” The Minutemen of 1775 could not know just what their countrymen would do in 1776. But I am not persuaded that certain features of our current American government, politics, and culture—however much I might deplore some of them—have undermined our nation’s ability to defend its liberties. As for “the administrative state,” I know many Americans are deeply fearful of this nebulous entity, but I am not one of them. America is very different from what it was in 1775 and in 1861. How could it not be? That does not mean that we cannot or should not learn from those periods in our history, and from many other periods as well. As a historian and as a citizen, I have always felt that the past is very much with us. I still feel that to this day, some 250 years after Lexington and Concord.