So the Otis boy had to go to school by the long way round; and as he ran into the schoolhouse late, and just a bit frightened and excited over all the soldiers he had seen on Tremont Street, he heard his schoolteacher say sharply and rather excitedly, too, I imagine, "Put away your books. War’s begun; school’s done."

The schoolmaster was right. War had begun, at last; and Massachusetts had begun it. Month by month the bonds had been drawn more tightly around the defiant colony. Enraged at the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, angered at Samuel Adams and John his cousin, at John Hancock arid other determined and pugnacious Massachusetts men, the English ministry had resolved to punish the refractory Bay colony, and proceeded by a decree called the Boston Port Bill to shut up the port of Boston to all trade until the town should repent and pay for the tea it had destroyed.

But Boston was not in a repentant mood, and did not intend to pay for the tea. The colony supported the town in its refusal. The king sent General Thomas Gage, with a dozen regiments and warships, as military governor, to take charge of affairs, and Boston was in bonds.

Toward Samuel Adams and John Hancock the general was especially bitter. He called them rebels and traitors, and when orders came to him from England to arrest them for treason and send them to London for trial he hastened to obey.

Gage had word of this; so he decided to capture them, and, at the same time, break into and destroy or bring away the military stores which the colony had gathered at Concord, eight miles beyond Lexington.

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So the redcoats whom the Otis boy had run against on his way to school on that memorable 19th of April were bound alike on a man hunt and a powder hunt. After his school had been thus quickly "let out," he watched the soldiers from where the Revere House now stands in Bowdoin Square as they paraded through to Washington Street on their roundabout march to Cambridge.

What the Otis boy did not then know, however, was that these especial troops were dispatched as reinforcements to a smaller force which had already been sent in advance, in the dead of night, to march in secret to Lexington and Concord for the capture of the rebel leaders and the secreted stores.

But, secretly as they had slipped away from town, the patriots had been on the watch and were ahead of them. That prince of patriots, Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston (he lived on the spot now occupied by the American House on Hanover Street), had word of the British movement by one of the secret "patriot patrol," and gave warning by a signal lantern in Christ Church steeple to three swift riders across the river—Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott. By three separate routes the fleet riders galloped through the night to warn the farmers of Middlesex of the British design and to tell Hancock and Adams to be on their guard.

You know what came of it all:

The countryside was roused; Hancock and Adams escaped capture; the battles of Lexington and Concord followed, and all the world soon knew that Massachusetts, on that 19th of April, 1775, had burst her bonds, and that speedily the thirteen colonies of North America would be in arms against the king. The "yeomanry of Middlesex" had lighted the way to liberty.

The general proceeded to fortify the town carefully; but he could get little or no help from outside, and he sent to England a hasty appeal for reinforcements. They came; but the colonies also sent on reinforcements to the men of Massachusetts. The Continental Congress at Philadelphia took matters in hand; while Gage, who was as great a blunderhead as his master, King George, went to work to conciliate the colonies in the wrong way, for he issued a ridiculous proclamation, begging them to lay down their arms, and offering pardon to all but those terrible Massachusetts agitators, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

The colony was making a record for itself elsewhere. The first Continental Congress, convened at Philadelphia, had elected John Hancock of Massachusetts president. The man upon whose head the King of England had set a price as a traitor was made the chief one in the colonial councils, and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia said, as he escorted Hancock to the president’s chair, "Now Great Britain can see how much we care for her proscriptions."

In the second Continental Congress John Adams of Massachusetts nominated George Washington of Virginia as commander in chief of the American army. Thus were the North and South joined in a common cause; the elevation of Hancock and Washington to the chief civil and military offices of the confederation drew the colonies closer together. Virginia and Massachusetts headed the revolt against the crown; they directed the congress and led the army.