Oct. 8, 2023, column from the Amarillo Globe-News:

Revolution began in colonies that had godly heritage

By Mike Haynes

                I must have been 10 or 12 when Mom and Dad gave me a big book called “The Golden Book of the American Revolution,” by the American Heritage Publishing Co., dated 1959.

                It had lots of color pictures, and some that fascinated me were of the April 19, 1775, skirmish at Lexington Green in Massachusetts, where British troops fired on American militiamen, killing eight before marching on to Concord in an attempt to seize weapons and gunpowder the militia had been storing there.

                The Lexington violence sparked the Revolutionary War and eventual American independence from Great Britain. The book’s Lexington and Concord pictures were done shortly after by militiaman Amos Doolittle, so as a kid, I thought, “Wow, this must be what it really looked like.”

                Last month, my wife, Kathy, and I got to see what it really looks like 248 years later as we took a tour from Boston, 15 miles away, during a fall vacation to New England. The triangular green remains much as it was in 1775 when the militia stood near a tavern and a meeting house to face the British “regulars.” The tavern still stands as well as a nearby minister’s house from which John Hancock and Samuel Adams had fled after being warned by Paul Revere.

                You would think it’s a routine public park except for the First Defenders of Liberty monument and the Minuteman statue next to Massachusetts Avenue. Three churches are visible from the green, but city leaders have done well in keeping commercial development such as Stop and Shop and Omar’s World of Comics a little distance away.

                Seven miles west is the Concord North Bridge, where more militia from surrounding towns, including those committed to being ready at a minute’s notice, confronted several hundred British redcoats. Americans on the west side of the bridge and British on the east side fired musket volleys that resulted in only three British soldiers and two militiamen killed, but that bridge is the inspiration for the lines in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 poem:

                “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”

                Seeing that colonists from the entire region were descending on them, British troops started on a march back to their Boston headquarters. They were harassed the whole way, suffering heavy casualties with militiamen firing at them from behind trees and fences.

                 Kathy and I rode back to Boston with our tour guide on roughly the same route, but in an SUV and no one shooting at us. I recalled a drawing in my childhood book of soldiers in red marching in formation on Battle Road between scattered groups of patriots.

                At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, we saw up close John Singleton Copley’s portraits of Hancock, Adams and Revere, three of the key “rabble rousers” of the revolution. Revere is best known for his “midnight ride,” which has been greatly exaggerated. He was one of several “express riders” who covered the country roads the night of April 18. But David Hackett Fischer’s 1994 book, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” makes it clear that even if Revere never had mounted a horse, he should be noted in history for his significant role in organizing informers and militia. He was an active member of the Sons of Liberty and supported opposition to British abuses with acts such as creating an illustration of the 1770 Boston Massacre, when soldiers killed five residents.

                Reading accounts of our nation’s beginning, I was struck by the fact that most – not all – of the players had strong Judeo-Christian values. Yes, the revolution was caused by economic and political factors shown in the cry, “no taxation without representation,” but the rebellion happened on a foundation of biblical principles.

   

             The house where Hancock and Adams were staying when Revere alerted them that “the regulars are out” was a parsonage built by Hancock’s grandfather, the Rev. John Hancock. Its 1775 occupant was the Rev. Jonas Clarke.

                Revere belonged to New Brick Church in Boston, a Puritan-influenced congregation, and according to Fischer, he attended church “as regularly as the Sabbath came.”

                In his early teens, Revere had helped organize a sort of “youth group.” He and some Boston friends started a bell ringers’ association for the North Church in which they agreed “not to demean themselves by Roman Catholic corruptions and promised to work for their rewards,” according to Fischer’s book.

                Fischer noted that the bell ringers drew up a document reflecting “founding principles of New England,” including “the doctrine of the calling.” One calling was for a career (Revere’s was as a goldsmith, silversmith, engraver and bell manufacturer), and the other was “a general calling to do Christ’s work in the world.”

                Another of my childhood memories is having to memorize part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous 1860 poem that begins:

                “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.”

                Like the poem, some of our history has been embellished and sweetened. We would do well, though, to remember the spiritual foundations on which the new nation was built.