g. Day was breaking when the British troops approached the
town of Lexington; and there on the green they could see, in the
early morning light, perhaps half a hundred men standing in military
array--fifty against a thousand! The British rushed forward with huzzas,
in the midst of which shots were heard; and when the little band of
minutemen was dispersed eight of the fifty lay dead upon the village
green.

The battle of Lexington was begun, but it was not yet finished. Pushing
on to Concord, the thousand disciplined British regulars captured and
destroyed the military stores collected there. This was easily done; but
the return from Concord to Lexington, and from Lexington to Cambridge,
proved a disastrous retreat. The British found indeed no minutemen drawn
up in military array to block their path; but they found themselves
subject to the deadly fire of men concealed behind the trees and rocks
and clumps of shrubs that everywhere conveniently lined the open road.
With this method of warfare, not learned in books, the British were
unfamiliar. Discipline was but a handicap; and the fifteen hundred
soldiers that General Gage sent out to Lexington to rescue Colonel Smith
served only to make the disaster greater in the end. When the retreating
army finally reached the shelter of Cambridge, it had lost, in
killed and wounded, 247 men; while the Americans, of whom it had been
confidently asserted in England that they would not stand against
British regulars, had lost but 88.

The courier announcing the news of Lexington passed through New York
on the 23d of April. Twenty-four hours later, during the height of the
excitement occasioned by that event, intelligence arrived from England
that Parliament had approved Lord North's Resolution on Conciliation.
For extending the olive branch, the time was inauspicious; and when the
second Continental Congress assembled, two weeks later, on the 10th of
May, men were everywhere wrathfully declaring that the blood shed at
Lexington made allegiance to Britain forever impossible.

It might indeed have seemed that the time had come when every man must
decide, once for all, whether he would submit unreservedly to the King
or stand without question for the defense of America. Yet not all men,
not a majority of men in the second Continental Congress, were of that
opinion.

The second Congress was filled with moderate minded men who would not
believe the time had come when that decision had