The Powder Alarm and the British arms embargo that came before Lexington

Ask most Americans how the Revolution started and they will say Lexington and Concord, a green, a bridge, a shot heard round the world. Ask what the soldiers were marching to do, and the answer is shorter: they were going to take the colonists' powder and guns. That detail is no footnote. It is the reason the war began where it did, and the reason the Founders wrote what they wrote.

But the soldiers did not wake up on April 19, 1775 with that idea. They were carrying out a policy that had been months in the making. The policy had a name, which nobody used, and a sequence of steps, which the colonists watched with growing alarm. Take the powder. Stop the supply. Keep the people quiet. This post follows the steps, because the history of the months before Lexington explains the Second Amendment better than any single battle.

What was the political situation in the autumn of 1774?

Start with the setting. In 1774 Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which the colonists called the Intolerable Acts, as punishment for the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor. One of them, the Massachusetts Government Act, rewrote the colony's charter and placed the province under tighter royal control. General Thomas Gage, commander of British forces in North America, became the governor of Massachusetts and took up residence in Boston, backed by troops.

The colonists were not united in rebellion. They were furious but divided, and most still hoped for a settlement. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from September 5 to October 26, 1774, to coordinate a response. What changed the mood in a matter of weeks, and moved many hesitant people to prepare for the worst, were three events. One was a rumor. One was a royal order. One was a raid.

The Powder Alarm: September 1774

On September 1, 1774, Gage sent a force of roughly 260 British regulars up the Mystic River to the provincial powder house in what is now Somerville. They took away the gunpowder stored there, the largest supply in Massachusetts, and a separate party carried two field cannon from Cambridge to Boston. No one was shot. Gage's reasoning was ordinary enough from a governor's point of view: the powder belonged to the colony, the colony was restless, and a restless colony should not hold a stockpile.

News of the raid traveled faster than the facts. Within a day the story had grown, in the telling, into a rumor that people had been killed and that British ships had bombarded Boston. Riders carried the alarm across New England. Militia companies assembled and began marching toward Boston, and thousands of men were on the road, though no one counted precisely. The rumor turned out to be false, and the crowds dispersed. But something real had happened. Americans had learned how quickly the countryside would turn out, and Gage had learned the same.

It also frightened the royal government's friends in Massachusetts, some of whom fled to the protection of British troops. The lesson for observers was not that a rumor had misled the militia. It was that the militia could assemble by the thousands within a day when told that the army was coming for their arms.

Why the seizure mattered

A government that takes the stored powder of a province is making a point about who may hold the means of resistance. Gage was not confiscating personal property from households. He was removing the public stockpile. But colonists read it as the first move in a larger plan, and events seemed to confirm that reading. If the governor could remove the powder from the magazine, what stopped him from searching the farms and the militia storehouses next? In late 1774 and early 1775 the colonists put that question to themselves many times, and acted accordingly.

The Crown's embargo: October 1774

The second event was less dramatic and more far-reaching. On October 19, 1774, the King in Council issued an order prohibiting the export of gunpowder, arms and ammunition from Great Britain. The aim was to stop the supply of military goods to the colonies, where, the government feared, they might be used against the Crown. Colonial merchants had imported much of their powder and arms from Britain. A ban on export took away a large share of the supply in a single stroke.

Notice what kind of act this was. It was not a ban on owning guns. It was a squeeze on the means of keeping them useful. A militia with muskets and no powder is a militia in name only. The order reached the colonies over the following weeks, and with it came a conclusion that the Founders would later write into their constitutions: whoever controls the supply of arms controls the people who rely on them.

Colonists responded in two ways. They looked for other sources. Some imported powder from other countries, quietly, and some set about making it at home. And they organized. Some weeks before the order, the Suffolk Resolves, adopted in Massachusetts on September 9, 1774 and endorsed by the Continental Congress on September 17, had urged the colonies to raise militia of their own people. The Congress's Association, signed on October 20, joined a trade boycott with a program of local enforcement.

The raid on Fort William and Mary: December 1774

The third event is the one history teachers skip, and it is the most revealing. In December 1774 New Hampshire patriots feared that royal troops would reinforce the colony's defenses and take its powder. Paul Revere rode from Boston to Portsmouth on December 13 with a warning that British troops were on their way to reinforce the small fort at the mouth of the harbor, Fort William and Mary, at New Castle.

On December 14, a crowd of colonists, led by John Sullivan and John Langdon, both of whom would later be prominent in the Revolution, seized the fort. The garrison was tiny, six men under Captain John Cochran, and was overpowered. The raiders took roughly a hundred barrels of gunpowder, and Sullivan returned the next day to seize the fort's cannon. The powder was scattered among the towns of the region, hidden away and later put to use.

Think about the date. This was four months before Lexington. The colonists had already, in effect, taken the first step of the war. They had seized a royal fort, and they did so in response to the fear that their means of defense were about to be removed. It was an act of rebellion, no question. But the rebels explained it as a response to an act of aggression: the movement of troops against the colony's defenses. Other communities moved to secure their own stores. In Rhode Island that December, the colony's authorities had the cannon from a fort at Newport sent inland to Providence.

How did this lead to Lexington?

By the spring of 1775 the pattern was set. The colonists were gathering powder and arms in secret depots in towns like Concord. Gage knew it and ordered an expedition to seize those supplies. In April 1775 he sent a column from Boston toward Concord. On Lexington green, the first shots were fired, and at Concord the regulars searched for the colonists' stores. The militia that turned out was the militia of the powder alarm: men who had been taught by the events of the preceding months that disarmament was the first step.

The same lesson was learned in Virginia. In the night of April 20, 1775, the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had gunpowder removed from the magazine at Williamsburg. Patrick Henry led militia toward the capital, and the dispute ended with Dunmore's offer of £330 for the powder. Another colony, another seizure, another reaction. By then the pattern needed no explanation.

The disarmament of Boston

One more episode belongs in the story. After the fighting at Lexington and Concord, British troops were besieged in Boston, and the residents of the town were caught between the armies. Gage negotiated an arrangement under which townspeople would turn in their arms in return for permission to leave. The inhabitants lodged more than 1,700 firearms with the selectmen, and the arrangement was then not carried out as agreed: permission to leave came slowly, and by May 21 a contemporary statement complained that Gage had broken his engagement after the people delivered up their arms. Historians attribute the slowdown largely to British fear of an assault on the town. Americans later cited it as a case of the danger of surrendering arms to an authority you cannot hold to its word.

What the Founders took from it

Here is the constitutional point, and I will state it directly. The Second Amendment was not written in the abstract. It was written by men who remembered the Powder Alarm, the embargo and the raid. They had seen what it looked like when a government decided to keep the people from the means of resistance. The complaint that makes this explicit appears in the Declaration of Independence:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

That is one grievance in the long list. Another was the placement of troops in the colonies and the closing of the port of Boston. The sequence of events from September 1774 to April 1775 gave concrete meaning to the abstract fear of standing armies. The Founders drew from the experience a principle, that a free people must hold arms of their own and that the right to do so must be written down.

The Supreme Court recognized this in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). Justice Scalia's majority opinion observed that in the 1760s and 1770s "the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas," and that this provoked reactions from Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. The Court has repeatedly reminded readers that the amendment did not create the right but protected one that already existed, a point developed in The 1689 English Bill of Rights and the arms clause Americans refused to copy.

The strongest objection

Fairness requires the other side's argument. It says that these episodes were about public stockpiles and government magazines, not about individual rights. Gage took the province's powder, not a family's musket. The royal order restricted exports, not ownership. The raid on Fort William and Mary was an act of insurrection against a lawful garrison. And the colonists were at that time practically members of the militia system, which was a public institution, so it tells you about collective arms rather than about individuals.

There is truth in that account, and I will not wave it away. Here are four answers.

1. The colonists did not make the distinction. Their writings in 1774 and 1775 treat the public magazine and the private armory as parts of one problem. A government that may remove the common powder may remove the private store, and they said so.
2. The militia was the people. The colonial militia was composed of ordinary men who supplied their own arms, as Every able-bodied man must own a musket, the Militia Act of 1792 and its heirs shows from the later federal law. Taking the militia's powder was taking the people's powder.
3. The embargo hit private buyers. The order on exports cut off merchants and individuals who bought arms and powder privately. It was a measure aimed at the whole colonial population.
4. The ratification record confirms the reading. The conventions that approved the Constitution asked for protection of arms in language that speaks of individuals, which What the ratifying conventions demanded before Madison drafted an arms right documents.

For earlier state declarations that took the same view, see What Pennsylvania and Vermont wrote about arms before the Second Amendment.

A word on coverage and memory

I will allow myself one complaint about the way this history is taught. The Revolution is told as a story about taxes and tea, and the arms question is a footnote. That is backward. Taxes could be argued about for years, and in fact were. Arms could not. Once the government moved to control powder, the choice was to submit or to resist. The people who say that the Second Amendment is about an outdated fear of redcoats have the history upside down: it was about a very specific, very recent and very vivid fear, that a government with a monopoly on force would use it.

And there is some comedy in how the officials of the day explained themselves. A governor who removes a province's powder in the dead of night and then professes surprise that thousands of armed men turn up the following morning has not understood what the powder was for. The lesson for officials is old and still good: do not be astonished when people react to being disarmed.

The case in brief

1. On September 1, 1774, General Gage's troops removed the province's powder, which set off the Powder Alarm and showed how quickly the militia could muster.
2. On October 19, 1774, the Crown ordered a ban on the export of arms and powder to the colonies, squeezing the supply that a militia depended on.
3. In December 1774, colonists in New Hampshire seized Fort William and Mary and carried off about a hundred barrels of powder, four months before Lexington.
4. The pattern of seizures from September 1774 to April 1775 taught Americans that disarmament precedes subjugation, and the lesson is reflected in the Declaration and the Second Amendment.
5. The objection that these were only public stockpiles fails because the colonists, the militia system and the ratifying conventions all treated the arms of the people and the arms of the militia as the same thing.

What you can do: visit a historical society or museum near you that holds colonial militia records, and ask what its collection says about the winter of 1774 to 1775.