🇺🇸 At Lexington, Capt. John Parker’s 77 Lexington militiamen stood on the green facing about 700 British regulars. Parker told his men to disperse, as no one was looking for a fight on those odds... and then a single shot rang out (nobody knows who fired it) and then the Redcoats let loose a line of musket fire, killing eight colonists and wounding ten

📌 The British then marched toward Concord... by the time they got there, hundreds of minutemen from the surrounding towns had already gathered. Around 11 a.m. at the North Bridge, the militia saw smoke rising over Concord and figured the regulars were torching the place. When the British fired first at that bridge killing two militiamen, Major Buttrick yelled “For God’s sake, fire!”, the colonists returned fire dropping three regulars and wounding nine more. That exchange at the bridge became known as the “shot heard round the world.”

📌 Finally came the long, ugly retreat back toward Boston... as Colonial militiamen made up of farmers and tradesmen harassed them from stone walls and trees for miles
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✍️ By the end of the day the regulars had taken heavy losses: 73 killed, 174 wounded, and 53 missing

The Militia had: 49 killed, 39 wounded and 5 missing