Who fired the first shot at Lexington and Concord?

Nobody knows for sure. At sunrise on 19 April 1775, on the village green at Lexington, a shot rang out, and the first major fighting of the American Revolution began. The accounts of the people who were there, and the analyses of historians since, differ on who fired it and whether any definite conclusion can be made.

The historian David Hackett Fischer wrote that the British commander and the Patriot commander both ordered their men to hold their fire, but a shot was fired by an unknown person. Witnesses on each side claimed the other side fired first, but many more simply said they did not know. Some British troops blamed an American onlooker hiding behind a hedge. Militiamen later swore that the regulars fired on them while their backs were turned.

What is clear is what the British came for and what happened next. About 700 regulars had secret orders to seize colonial military supplies at Concord. But the Patriots had been warned, and riders such as Paul Revere had alerted the militias. After the skirmish at Lexington, eight militiamen were dead, and one British soldier was wounded. At Concord's Old North Bridge the militia fought back, and during the long march back to Boston the column came under heavy fire all the way.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 New England militiamen surrounded Boston. And the question of who shot first mattered almost as much as the shooting: both sides rushed out their own version of the story to win over opinion at home and abroad.