Where Have American Men Gone?

History - Many years after the bloodshed at Lexington, Mellen Chamberlain, a prominent Massachusetts lawyer-politican-historian-librarian, published the following account of an interview with a veteran participant, Levi Preston. Why did Preston fight? What did his reasons have to do with traditional historical accounts?

When I was about twenty-one and Captain Preston about ninety-one, I interviewed him as to what he did and thought sixty-seven years before, on April 19, 1775. And now, fifty-two years later, I make my report--a little belated perhaps, but not too late, I trust, for the morning papers! With an assurance passing even that of the modern interviewer--if that were possible--I began:

Captain Preston, why did you go to the Concord fight, the 19th of April, 1775?

The old man, bowed beneath the weight of years, raised himself upright, and turning to me said: Why did I go?

Yes, I replied; my histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against intolerable oppressions. What were they?

Oppressions? I didn't feel them.

What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?

I never saw one of those stamps... and I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.

Well, what then about the tea-tax?

Tea-tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.

Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty.

Never heard of 'em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts' Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.

Well, then, what was the matter? and what did you mean in going to the fight?

Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should.