The battle of Lexington was begun, but it was not yet finished.
Pushing on to Concord, the thousand disciplined British regulars
captured and destroyed the military stores collected there. This
was easily done; but the return from Concord to Lexington, and
from Lexington to Cambridge, proved a disastrous retreat. The
British found indeed no minutemen drawn up in military array to
block their path; but they found themselves subject to the deadly
fire of men concealed behind the trees and rocks and clumps of
shrubs that everywhere conveniently lined the open road. With
this method of warfare, not learned in books, the British were
unfamiliar. Discipline was but a handicap; and the fifteen
hundred soldiers that General Gage sent out to Lexington to
rescue Colonel Smith served only to make the disaster greater in
the end. When the retreating army finally reached the shelter of
Cambridge, it had lost, in killed and wounded, 247 men; while the
Americans, of whom it had been confidently asserted in England
that they would not stand against British regulars, had lost but
88.
The courier announcing the news of Lexington passed through New
York on the 23d of April. Twenty-four hours later, during the
height of the excitement occasioned by that event, intelligence
arrived from England that Parliament had approved Lord North's
Resolution on Conciliation.
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