were stored at Concord, some
twenty miles from Boston. Gage ordered 800 troops to march secretly to
Concord and destroy them.

Guarded as were the movements of the British, the Americans were
equally watchful and discovered them. Paul Revere dashed out of the
town on a swift horse and spread the news throughout the country. In the
gray light of the early morning, April 19, 1775, as the soldiers marched
into Lexington, on the way to Concord beyond, they saw some fifty minute
men gathered on the village green. Major Pitcairn ordered them to
disperse, and they refusing to do so, a volley was fired. Eight
Americans were killed and a large number wounded, the others fleeing
before the overwhelming force. Thus was the shot fired that "was heard
round the world."

The British advanced to Concord, destroyed the stores there, and then
began their return to Boston. All the church bells were ringing and the
minute men were swarming around the troops from every direction. They
kept up a continuous fire upon the soldiers from behind barns, houses,
hedges, fences, bushes, and from the open fields. The soldiers broke
into a run, but every one would have been shot down had not Gage sent
reinforcements, which protected the exhausted fugitives until they
reached a point where they were under the guns of the men-of-war. In
this first real conflict of the war, the Americans lost 88 and the
British 273 in killed, wounded, and missing. General Gage was now
besieged in Boston by the ardent minute men, who in the flush of their
patriotism were eager for the regulars to come out and give them a
chance for a battle. Men mounted on swift horses rode at headlong speed
through the colonies, spreading the stirring news, and hundreds of
patriots hurried to Boston that they might take part in the war for
their rights. Elsewhere, the fullest preparations were made for the
struggle for independence which all felt had opened.

[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY, America's greatest orator; member of the
Second Continental Congress.]

As agreed upon, the Second Continental Congress assembled in
Philadelphia, May 10, 1775. It included some of the ablest men in
America, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry,
Richard Henry Lee, and Peyton Randolph, of Virginia; Benjamin Franklin
and Robert Morris, of Pennsylvania; John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John
Hancock, of Massachusetts; John Jay, of New York; and Roger Sherman and
Oliver Ellsworth, of