From the early seventeenth century many English settler colonies in North America were granted their own legislative assemblies in which they could work with royally appointed governors to develop their own local laws. These bodies, like Britain’s House of Commons, were elected, but by a relatively larger popular base than in England, Scotland, and Wales. Both Lexington and Concord, and over two hundred other Massachusetts towns, sent delegates every year to their provincial assembly. And all of these legislatures, large and small, in Britain and North America, had the power of the purse. No one could be taxed, and nothing could be funded, neither the British army and navy nor the Massachusetts militia, without the approval of both legislatures and executives, monarchs, or their appointed representatives. Every British soldier who marched into Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, was there because George III and Parliament had paid him to be there. And every Massachusetts militiaman who opposed him was there because his town and his province had funded an organized militia, and paid for some of its weapons and ammunition, that enabled his resistance.
But these sequential and coordinated British and American histories do not quite answer our first question: Why did the minutemen of Lexington and Concord believe they had a right to resist the British redcoats? After all, from the commonly held—but by no means universal—British perspective in 1775, their King and Parliament had followed the rules of constitutional government, passing certain laws for the benefit of the entire British empire, and imposing their rule by force only when certain British North Americans—particularly Bostonians—had resisted those laws in the 1760s and 1770s, culminating in the Boston Tea Party (1773) and Britain’s swift response, the Boston Port Act and the Massachusetts Government Act (1774), which placed Boston, and to a lesser extent the entire province of Massachusetts Bay, under strict Parliamentary authority and, at least for the foreseeable future, military rule. The right upon which the resisting militiamen appealed would be elegantly expressed by the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [securing ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”