Who Fired First Analysis

Lexington and Concord… Who Fired First?
The British were not defeated up until the Battle of Lexington but there is no true idea of who fired the first shot of that battle, the British soldiers or the Minutemen. When the smoke cleared from the field in the aftermath of the historical Battle of Lexington, eight Minutemen and one British soldier lay dead. Both sides accused each other of firing the first shot and neither would take the blame of kicking off the start of what would turn into the Revolutionary War. I believe that neither of the sources are truly reliable to judge since they were both adapted, meaning that they both we changed in some way. Now since they were changed we do not know what either witnesses from the opposing sides had originally said about what happened on Lexington Green. The reasoning behind this essay is to elaborate on why …show more content…
For comparison, the Baker’s Diary was only written and kept by one person that was most likely swayed in the heat of the moment since they had just out of a battle against an amateur army. Whereas the Minutemen’s Deposition was composed and written by thirty-four different men that all agree on the same exact chain of events that went down at Lexington. One of the few witnesses to the battle, Paul Revere, was present when the British soldiers arrived in Lexington yet did not see who fired the first shot. As he wrote in his personal account of that day, “I heard the report [of the gun], turned my head, and saw the smoke in front of the British troops, they immediately gave a great shout, ran a few paces, and then the whole fired. I could first distinguish irregular firing, which I suppose was the advance guard, and then platoons. At the time, I could not see our Militia, for they were covered from me, by a house at the bottom of the