SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Today marks 250 years since the first battles of the American Revolution. And to commemorate that day, let's revisit a story we originally aired back in 2019.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GERRY MARROCCO: This is the green behind you. We call it Battle Green today, but it's really a common.
SIMON: April 19, 1775, the shot heard round the world was fired on the Lexington, Massachusetts town green.
MARROCCO: And Captain Parker, captain of our militia, he knows this is folly. I'm outnumbered. So he tells his men, his militia, to leave, but he never says lay down your arms. He says leave.
SIMON: Gerry Marrocco, who gives guided tours in a tri-cornered hat, waistcoat and breaches, told us...
SIMON: Eight militia - they called themselves rebels then, not yet Americans - fell dead. Rick Atkinson, who wrote the bestselling and greatly honored "Liberation Trilogy" about the American effort in Europe during the Second World War, has now written the first book in a new trilogy to tell the story of the war that made America. It's called "The British Are Coming."
MARROCCO: Now, if you turn around, folks, and you look across the street here, this yellow house is called Buckman Tavern. That was the militia's headquarters.
SIMON: That's where we spoke with Rick Atkinson - right across from the green where many militia spent the night waiting to see the whites in the eyes of more than 800 British soldiers who'd been sent to stop the American Revolution before it could begin.
What happened here April 19, 1775?
RICK ATKINSON: Well, the ambition of the British was to send a force of about 900 men into Concord - 18 miles from Boston - to seize the cannons, the muskets, the gunpowder, the other war material that they knew to be in Concord. They got here 12 miles outside of Boston to Lexington, found a small militia force waiting for them - maybe 50 men by the time everything had settled out. And there was a massacre, is really what it amounted to. And then they proceeded on to Concord. By that point, Concord was ready for them.
SIMON: But nobody shot at the actual title of your book.
ATKINSON: No. "The British Are Coming," the title of the book, refers more to the larger theme involved. And, of course, it wouldn't have made any sense to people who lived there. They were British. It would be like shouting that we are coming.
Subsequently, one of the things that war does is straighten out identity politics. And within a year or two, I think, if someone had yelled the British are coming, then people would have understood, meaning, the enemy's coming. But it was probably the regulars are coming.
SIMON: Your portrait of Washington - if anyone needs convincing that he deserves to have his picture on the dollar bill, they will be convinced. But he did make mistakes.
ATKINSON: He wasn't a very good tactical general. He does not see the battlefield spatially and temporally the way a great captain does, the way a Napoleon does. What you can see in Washington, though, is a man for - great responsibility enlarges him. When he first arrives in Cambridge to take over the Continental Army in the summer of 1775, he's disdainful of New Englanders. He's a Virginian. He doesn't really see how - why these dirty, obnoxious, obstreperous people - he doesn't really like them, and he doesn't understand the mystical bond between a leader and led. He's got to learn that. The relationship that he's got to build with his army is something that we see develop over the first several years of the war.
SIMON: Washington had a phrase about the difference between an army that was driven and one that was led.
ATKINSON: Yeah. He says - and this is in January 1777, after he has nearly lost the war several times and recouped from the disastrous defeat across New Jersey by recrossing the Delaware and capturing the Hessian garrison at Trenton. He says a people not used to being forced to do things will not be drove. They must be led.
And he is a leader. And in the army that he's commanding - the Army we have today, actually - that's a fairly critical insight that he's got and a recognition that this is the essence of leadership.
SIMON: A question must be asked in this day and age. Was the American Revolution truly a revolution for freedom, or was it a white patriarchy of slave owners and apologists for slave owners who simply wanted a bigger slice of the money pie?
ATKINSON: I don't think they're necessarily completely contradictory. Certainly you had some people - white slave owners in the South, for example, who felt pinched economically by the restrictions that have been placed on them. But I think that it's not romanticizing that era excessively to believe - particularly when you look at the contemporary writings and what it is they believed at the time - that they had their eye on a grander future than simply a slaveholding country that was a nice place to be if you were white and rich. Really, we sell them short if we don't acknowledge that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator and all those other fine words out of the Declaration of Independence are things they really believed. They're aspirational, yes.
SIMON: They didn't really mean it when slaves, obviously, were...
ATKINSON: Five hundred thousand of the 2 1/2 million people here, it doesn't apply to them. It doesn't apply to women.
SIMON: Yeah.
ATKINSON: It doesn't apply to the indigent. But it does open a vista into a future in which you can see an egalitarian society that's quite different from the society that existed here in 1775 and is quite different from anything that exists anywhere else on earth.
SIMON: What can we learn in today's fractious political environment from that period?
ATKINSON: Well, I think one of the things we can learn is that the nation was born disputatiously. It's a very ornery people of 1775. And why should we be surprised that we are an ornery people today? We can also learn that however difficult our difficulties today, we've had much more difficult periods in our national history. And we have not only survived it. We've triumphed, ultimately. We can also learn, I think, that in difficult times, leaders have emerged to have helped us to get to where we need to go. And we've been fortunate enough to see men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower - and there's a long list of them, and they share frequently a list of traits that we recognize as really admirable among our leaders. And we should demand that. We should be insistent that a good, noble, accomplished people be led by good, noble, accomplished leaders. I think that comes through clearly from the period of the Revolution and the early republic.
SIMON: Rick Atkinson speaking with us back in 2019 at Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Mass, about his book "The British Are Coming" - a powerful title, even if nobody ever actually said it.
And back with us on the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord is Rick Atkinson. Rick, thanks so much for being with us again.
ATKINSON: Thank you, Scott. It's great to see you again.
SIMON: Do Americans appreciate today how long and costly to human life the American revolution was?
ATKINSON: You know, I - there's something about the revolution where over 250 years, the blood has been bleached out of it. It has kind of a sepia tint like an old lithograph, when in fact, for eight years, it was a terribly bloody affair. It was a civil war, our first civil war. We had at least 25,000 American dead in the American Revolution, maybe as many as 35,000. That is the largest proportion of our population of any of our wars, other than the Civil War.
SIMON: Rick Atkinson, how are you marking this day?
ATKINSON: I'm looking forward to the whole semiquincentennial era.
SIMON: Thank you for being the one to pronounce it.
ATKINSON: (Laughter).
SIMON: I was trying to avoid it. Yeah.
ATKINSON: Takes some practice, but the semiquincentennial begins today, and it's going to stretch at least through July 4, 2026, and in some cases, it'll stretch into - God help us - 2033. I think it's a good opportunity for us to take a deep breath, take one step back, be grateful for those who've sacrificed what they've sacrificed over the years, what they did 250 years ago, to remember that we have been through perils before. We've been through existential perils, and it should give us a sense that we've got a strong foundation and we've got strength for dealing with whatever ails us today.
SIMON: Rick Atkinson, the second book in his trilogy on the American Revolution, "The Fate Of The Day," is out later this month. Rick, thanks so much for being with us.
ATKINSON: Thank you so much, Scott.
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