It was the shot heard around the world... But who fired it?

It's 250 years since British troops clashed with American colonists at Lexington and Concord. George Goodwin reveals how one fateful day triggered the American Revolutionary War - and sparked a ferocious race to blame the other side

- 

At 5am on 19 April 1775, two groups of British subjects faced each other across the town common of Lexington, 11 miles north-west of Boston, Massachusetts. One group was composed of local inhabitants, militiamen who would fight as Patriots. The other was of red-coated British troops under the immediate command of Marine Major John Pitcairn.

The militiamen were certainly not there by chance: the plans of General Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, had been revealed to his opponents.

Simmering tensions over London's repeated assertions of control over its American colonies, dating back to the 1760s, had brought the two sides to this point. After a tense standoff, the Redcoats and militiamen traded fire. At the end of this brief but fateful exchange, eight Patriots lay dead.

A bloody retreat

Major Pitcairn and his men were just the vanguard of a 1,500-strong force under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith. The colonel had a clear mission that day: to seize Patriot-held cannon and munitions in nearby Concord, the main town in Middlesex County and the centre for mobilising the county militia regiments of 6,000 men. And so, shortly after the clash at Lexington, Smith's Redcoats pushed on to Concord.

Hostilities were resumed at Concord's North Bridge at around 9am, shortly after the British had undertaken a largely fruitless search for weaponry to the west of the town. The intensity of the engagement now increased: colonist numbers had grown to around 400, with the local men now joined from surrounding areas by militia that included the elite Minutemen, whose name reflected their timely readiness for action.