LEXINGTON, Mass. — Tens of thousands of people came to Lexington, Massachusetts, just before dawn on Saturday to witness a reenactment of how the American Revolution began 250 years ago, with the blast of gunshot and a trail of colonial flair.

Starting with Saturday’s anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the country will look back to its war of independence and ask where its legacy stands today. Just after dawn on the Lexington Battle Green, militiamen, muskets in hand, took on a much larger contingent of British regulars. The battle ended with eight Americans killed and 10 wounded — the dead scattered on the grounds as the British marched off.

The regulars would head to Concord but not before a horseman, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode toward the North Bridge and warned communities along the way that the British were coming. A lone horseman reenacted that ride Saturday, followed by a parade through town and a ceremony at the bridge.

The day offers an opportunity to reflect on this seminal moment in history but also consider what this fight means today. Organizers estimated that over 100,000 came out for events in the two towns Saturday.

“It’s truly momentous,” said Richard Howell, who portrayed Lexington Minute Man Samuel Tidd in the battle.

“This is one of the most sacred pieces of ground in the country, if not the world, because of what it represents,” he said. “To represent what went on that day, how a small town of Lexington was a vortex of so much.”

Among those watching the Lexington reenactment was Brandon Mace, a lieutenant colonel with the Army Reserve whose ancestor Moses Stone was in the Lexington militia.

He said watching the reenactment was “a little emotional.”

“He made the choice just like I made and my brother made, and my son is in the Army as well,” Mace said. “… He did not know we would be celebrating him today. He did not know that he was participating in the birth of the nation. He just knew his friends and family were in danger.”

The 250th anniversary comes with President Donald Trump, scholars and others divided over whether to have a yearlong party leading up to July 4, 2026, as Trump has called for, or to balance any celebrations with questions about women, the enslaved and Indigenous people and what their stories reveal.

What happened at Lexington and Concord?

Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington’s town green.

Witnesses remembered some British officers yelled, “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels!” and that a shot was heard amid the chaos, followed by “scattered fire” from the British. The battle turned so fierce that the area reeked of burning powder. By day’s end, the fighting had moved to about 7 miles (11 kilometers) west to Concord and some 250 British and 95 colonists were killed or wounded.

But no one knows who fired first, or why. And the revolt itself was initially less a revolution than a demand for better terms.

Woody Holton, a professor of early American history at the University of South Carolina, said most scholars agree that the rebels of April 1775 weren’t looking to leave the empire, but to repair their relationship with King George III and go back to the days before the Stamp Act, the Tea Act and other disputes of the previous decade.

“The colonists only wanted to turn back the clock to 1763,” he said.

Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books include biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, said Lexington and Concord “galvanized opinion precisely as the Massachusetts men hoped it would, though still it would be a long road to a vote for independence, which Adams felt should have been declared on 20 April 1775.”

But at the time, Schiff added, “It did not seem possible that a mother country and her colony had actually come to blows.”

A fight for the ages

The rebels already believed their cause was bigger than a disagreement between subjects and rulers. Well before the turning points of 1776 – before the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine’s boast that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” – they cast themselves in a drama for the ages.

The so-called Suffolk Resolves of 1774, drafted by civic leaders of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, prayed for a life “unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles,” a fight that would determine the “fate of this new world, and of unborn millions.”

The revolution was an ongoing story of surprise and improvisation. Military historian Rick Atkinson, whose book “The Fate of the Day” is the second of a planned trilogy on the war, called Lexington and Concord “a clear win for the home team,” if only because the British hadn’t expected such impassioned resistance from the colony’s militia.

The British, ever underestimating those whom King George regarded as a “deluded and unhappy multitude,” would be knocked back again when the rebels promptly framed and transmitted a narrative blaming the royal forces.

“Once shots were fired in Lexington, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren did all in their power to collect statements from witnesses and to circulate them quickly; it was essential that the colonies, and the world, understand who had fired first,” Schiff said. “Adams was convinced that the Lexington skirmish would be ‘famed in the history of this country.’ He knocked himself out to make clear who the aggressors had been.”

A country still in progress

Neither side imagined a war lasting eight years, or had confidence in what kind of country would be born out of it. The founders united in their quest for self-government but differed how to actually govern, and whether self-government could even last.

Americans have never stopped debating the balance of powers, the rules of enfranchisement or how widely to apply the exhortation, “All men are created equal.”

That debate was very much on display Saturday – though mostly on the fringes and with anti-Trump protesters far outnumbered by flag-waving tourists, locals and history buffs. Many protesters carried signs inspired by the American Revolution including, “Resist Like Its 1775,” and one even brought a puppet featuring an orange-faced Trump.

“It’s a very appropriate place and date to make it clear that, as Americans, we want to take a stand against what we think is an encroaching autocracy,” Glenn Stark, a retired physics professor who was holding a “No Kings” sign and watching the ceremony at the North Bridge.

Massachusetts’ Democratic governor, Maura Healey, who spoke at the North Bridge ceremony, also used the event to remind the cheering crowd that many of the ideals fought for during the Revolutionary War are again at risk.

“We see things that would be familiar to our Revolutionary predecessors – the silencing of critics, the disappearing people from our streets, demands for unquestioned fealty,” she said. “Due process is a foundational right. if it can be discarded for one, it can be lost for all.”

Italie reported from New York.