Original subtitles

A ragtag band of brothers takes on the largest empire in history.

Among them are not just founding fathers and future presidents,

but also the unsung heroes of America's revolution.

Men and women who will risk everything to fight for independence,

seize their destiny,

and forge a nation.

Boston, 1770.

A divided city.

Every day new clashes erupt between those who are loyal to the king

and others who see the ruling British empire as the enemy.

But today we'll see the first death in America's fight for independence.

Loyalist Ebenezer Richardson has been defending his

neighbor's shop against a mob of colonial rebels.

Now they've turned their anger on him.

Boston is the tinderbox where the American Revolution will get its start.

It's there that all the resentments and anger between

the British and the colonists is beginning to gather,

but it's also there where anger between Americans,

those who want to remain loyal to the king and those who want to break free,

will finally strike the spark that starts the revolution.

Richardson's bullet strikes 11-year-old Christopher Cider.

Get Dr.

Ward! Someone please!

Quickly, get Dr.

Ward! Dr. Joseph Warren may not be a familiar name today,

but he will play as pivotal a role in helping to

shape America's future as any founding father.

The American Revolution has thousands of heroes,

many of whom we've never heard of.

These are everyday people.

These are common people that have done unbelievable things.

Joseph Warren is the founding father that nobody's

ever heard of, and that's a huge injustice.

Without him, there might not have even been a revolution.

Born in Massachusetts and a Harvard graduate,

Warren is the most popular and successful doctor in Boston.

At just 28 years of age, he's become a passionate advocate

for the rights of the American colonists and a fierce critic of British rule.

In spite of Warren's efforts,

Christopher Cider dies of his wounds.

And with his death, the growing hostility between the king

and his American subjects reaches fever pitch.

But this violence is a recent development.

The relationship between Britain and the

American colonies had been a relatively happy one

since the founding of Jamestown more than 150 years earlier.

American colonies produced tobacco, cotton and sugar,

which were shipped to England for manufacture

before being exported back to America for sale.

In exchange, British soldiers offered the colonists security and protection.

But when it came to the rule of law,

the king largely left his American subjects to govern

themselves through their colonial legislatures.

The striking thing about the relationship between the

American colonies and the British government in England

was the loose rein that the British held over the Americans.

Americans could live most of their daily lives,

not even aware of the British government.

But in 1754, this relationship became more complicated

when the French, assisted by their Indian allies,

tried to secure a territory of their own within North America.

After nine years of war,

the British and colonists defeated the French and their allies.

But the victory cost a staggering $22 billion in today's currency.

With Britain teetering on the edge of bankruptcy,

Parliament decided it was only fair for the

colonists to pay their fair share of the war debt.

In 1764, they passed the first law imposing taxes directly

on the two million colonists and set off a firestorm of protests.

The American colonists felt independent without knowing that they felt independent.

And the reins of the British government rested very lightly on them.

The problem was going to rise when the British government

tried to tighten the reins a little bit and then the Americans would start screaming

because they hadn't felt the reins before now.

All of a sudden they did.

Year after year, Parliament imposed new taxes to pay for the cost of the war.

Leaders like John Hancock, John Adams and Joseph Warren

believed that the colonists should have the same

rights as their fellow countrymen back in England.

But with no say in the new taxes, they felt exploited by their mother country.

Dr. Joseph Warren senses this deeply.

Especially after watching young Christopher

Cider become a casualty of the growing conflict.

The father of four is willing to risk arrest,

imprisonment and even death as he becomes one of America's most vocal agitators.

Who is with me?

Who is with me?

Who is with me?

Stand today, my friends.

He was extremely warm, extremely likable.

He was able to cross between political camps even though he was an extremist.

Warren wins the support of Boston's most radical voices

an alliance of local street gangs that call themselves the Sons of Liberty.

Royal officials regard them as traitors and thugs,

but the men they accuse insist their cause is just.

The Sons of Liberty consider themselves loyal Englishmen.

They spoke continuously that all they were doing

was defending the rights of free-born Englishmen.

So the Sons of Liberty didn't think of themselves as traitors,

they thought of themselves as English patriots.

And now it's the Crown and it's tyranny.

Never!

With hostilities in Boston mounting daily,

the Sons of Liberty and their supporters

lash out at the Crown's tax collectors and customs officials.

Boston is soon at war with itself.

A third of its citizens are loyal to the King

while the majority are neutral, wanting no part of the fight.

But a growing number are calling for open rebellion against the Crown.

The American Revolution was a war not only between nations,

it was a war between neighbors.

The most bitter of the fighting took place not between Americans and British,

but between Americans and Americans.

When does a King's reign become tyranny?

Now!

As the Sons of Liberty and their supporters become more aggressive,

Britain responds by sending 4,000 additional troops to Boston.

By 1770, one in five inhabitants of the city is

a redcoat and Boston feels like a garrison town.

This show of military muscle is designed to

intimidate the rebels and deter a rebellion.

But the new wave of soldiers only serves to infuriate Bostonians

and persuade more of them to join the rebels' patriotic cause.

To found the flames of Boston's outrage,

the Sons of Liberty stage one of the city's

largest funerals for 11-year-old Christopher Cider.

But even though tempers are running high,

most patriots still consider the idea of taking

up arms against their mother country unthinkable.

But over the next few months,

a chain of events will trigger a fresh wave of hostility and violence,

bringing the British and the Americans to the brink of open war.

Two weeks after an 11-year-old boy was killed

in a standoff between colonists and British officials,

the soaring tensions in Boston threatened to

explode into open violence at the slightest spark.

On the 5th of March 1770,

an angry mob gathers to hurl snowballs at

nervous sentries guarding the customs house.

Suddenly, the blast of a musket rings out.

More shots follow.

As the smoke clears, five colonists lie dead.

In what the Sons of Liberty will dub, the Boston Massacre.

With the Boston Massacre, tensions escalated dramatically.

Because until this point,

it still had been largely a political argument.

Now, it's a matter of a show of force.

Now, people have died.

There is much more at stake than there had been before.

Boston's colonial leaders put the Redcoat soldiers on trial for murder.

The lawyer defending the soldiers is a surprising choice.

John Adams, one of the leading voices of discontent.

These men, loyal servants of the Crown.

He thought that it was critical to uphold the rights of

the accused as a sacred, traditional British liberty.

And also to prove to the mother country

that the American people was not one big lynch mob.

Besides seeing their acquittal as a matter of justice,

it's hoped it will also calm the friction in Boston.

John Adams made a very plausible argument

that the British soldiers who fired in the crowd were firing in self-defense.

Adams tips the odds in his favour by packing the jury with loyalists.

The verdict is handed down.

Grace, we find the defendants not guilty.

The verdict enrages many patriots,

but it does the trick of pacifying British officials.

Parliament even repeals some of the new taxes

and America and Britain step back from the brink of the escalating conflict.

But British authority continues to collide with colonial protests.

In Narragansett Bay, the British customs vessel, the Gaspay,

is in pursuit of a colonial ship suspected of smuggling.

The Gaspay's commander is Lieutenant William Dud Kingston.

His job is to enforce Britain's commerce laws,

making him Rhode Island's most detested imperial agent.

William Dud Kingston is a great object lesson in overreach in law enforcement.

He decided to stop just about any ship for any reason.

Americans were offended by this, in particular Rhode Islanders.

Before Parliament started levying their slew of new taxes,

Rhode Island's merchants had been importing many goods duty-free

and Lieutenant Dud Kingston had made it his personal crusade to stop them.

But he's about to make a crucial mistake.

In his zeal to capture another smuggler for the Crown,

he runs the Gaspay aground off the coast of Rhode Island.

The crew now face a nine-hour wait for the tide to come in and free the ship.

That evening, the news reaches wealthy merchant John Brown,

who sees an opportunity to even the score.

He has a fleet of ships.

The British are infringing upon his right to trade.

Dud Kingston has made it his crusade to go after Brown,

and he's hurting Brown's business. Brown's looking for a little payback.

He knew that high tide wasn't until about three in the morning.

They had an opportunity to take matters into their own hands

and stop the Gaspay from causing any more trouble in Narragansett Bay.

Brown leads 65 men in eight whaling boats on a daring raid.

The person who pulled the trigger was a young man named Joseph Buckland.

He certainly didn't have orders to shoot the commander of a British navy ship,

but he did so in the spur of the moment.

Brown's raiders capture the Gaspay's crew.

A Patriot doctor stops Dud Kingston's bleeding, saving his life.

But after evacuating the sailors, Brown torches the ship.

And as the fire reaches the powder magazine, the Gaspay blows it.

It's the closest any colonist has come to an act of open rebellion.

If you seize a navy ship,

kidnap the entire crew, shoot and wound the

commanding officer, and then destroy the ship,

that's probably going to get the government's attention.

They looked on it as an act of treason, as an act of war against His Majesty.

The British Parliament demands that Brown and his crew are captured and punished.

Rumours reach the colonies that the people responsible

for sinking the Gaspay will be tried in England.

The colonists are furious.

This is outrageous!

They belong and deserve a fair trial here with their peers.

They will be found guilty otherwise!

This is a colonial government.

We've had self-rule for over a hundred years.

All of a sudden you think you can take men away and try them in a foreign country?

In the end, neither Brown nor any of the crew who attacked the Gaspay were caught.

But the very idea of trying colonial men back

in England adds fuel to the Patriots' fire

and inspires them to find new ways to provoke the Empire.

In 1773, the British pass a new law cutting the price of imported British tea.

It's a serious blow for American tea sellers whose profits will be hit.

The Patriots seize this as an opportunity for a wave of protests

staging tea parties in Boston, New York and other harbours.

The Sons of Liberty, the folks behind the Boston Tea Party,

realised that they were going to provoke the British

government into doing something really harsh.

That was precisely the point.

What they hoped to do and what they succeeded in doing was to convince more Americans

that those British government officials really are bad guys.

More than a hundred rebels board three ships and throw 45 tons of tea overboard.

The ploy works.

A furious British parliament clamps down on Boston.

New laws strip the citizens of their right to elect their own officials,

ban town meetings unless approved by the royal

governor and close Boston's economic lifeline.

It's harbour.

That actually means that all merchants are going to go out of business

and what the king is doing is putting a stranglehold on the economy.

The whole point from the British standpoint was to show those Americans who was boss.

To ram the point home, 4,000 more troops are sent to Boston

to join the thousands already there and act as imperial enforcers.

Think about that.

All of a sudden, you've got about 6 or 7,000 soldiers

in a town where the population is 14 or 15,000 people.

So this is sending a very strong message to us.

You're now under full military rule.

The British tactics play right into the hands

of Joseph Warren and the Sons of Liberty,

who want the colonists to see the British as tyrannical foreign rulers

rather than their fellow countrymen.

As long as the Americans thought of themselves as Englishmen,

then there was no fundamental problem between the two sides.

And then there came a critical point at which they

realized were not really Englishmen, were Americans.

And once the Americans began thinking themselves as Americans

rather than English, then the die was cast and the revolution became another.

In less than a year, what began as a dispute over taxes will erupt into all-out war.

Nine months after the Boston Tea Party,

a courier races from Boston to Philadelphia

to a meeting of the First Continental Congress,

an assembly of America's colonial leaders

who are committed to resisting Britain's increasingly autocratic rule.

The rider is Paul Revere, a silversmith by trade

and what he's carrying will take hostilities to a new level.

It's a document known as the Suffolk Resolves

and it demands a boycott of all British goods,

a refusal to pay taxes and for each colony to raise its own militia.

In other words, it's a call to arms.

The representatives from the other 12 colonies

are well aware of the military occupation of Boston.

They had the capacity to blow up the whole town in an afternoon,

so it's absolutely terrifying.

It's a time of dread and fear and at the same time determination and anger.

The Continental Congress realizes that the only way

to fight Britain's oppressive new laws is to unite

the colonies and they adopt the Suffolk Resolves.

It was really a political tour de force

for the pro-revolutionary group, for the anti-British group,

to get the other colonies to believe

that their cause was also the cause of Massachusetts.

Because what they said was,

if the British can do this in Massachusetts,

they can do it to New York, they can do it to

Philadelphia, they can do it to Charlestown.

There's no end to this British tyranny.

The author of this radical call to action

is none other than Boston revolutionary Dr. Joseph Warren.

His rebellious rhetoric has now become colonial policy.

To liberty and freedom.

To liberty and freedom.

But Warren knows the British are in no mood to back down.

And to challenge the authority of the Empire means spoiling for a fight.

Warren is probably as important to revolutionary

theorists as Jefferson or Adams or Franklin,

but more than that he's willing to put his theories into action,

getting down into the trenches and getting his hands dirty.

Warren helps to create a force of militia fighters

trained to respond rapidly to any British threat.

They become known as the Minutemen.

He also organizes a vast spy network

to gather a steady supply of intelligence about British troop movements.

When did he start complaining?

About two weeks ago.

By being a prominent physician in Boston, he just had connections all over the city,

so we know that he definitely was taking advantage of that.

There's some names in his medical books of shadowy

characters that he doesn't record by their first name,

and they very likely could have been visits of people providing information.

Are we sitting out tonight?

No, we won't dispatch our regiment until daybreak.

On April the 18th, 1775,

Warren's spies uncover a secret plan by the British army to attack a rebel position,

an operation that would strike a devastating blow to the rebellion.

The British command in Boston got word that the

Massachusetts militia was gathering weapons outside the city

in the western suburbs of Lexington and Concord.

So British soldiers began marching out

where they heard the weapons were being stockpiled.

Warren learns that the hundreds of redcoats

headed for Concord are not only intending to seize the arms,

but also to find and capture patriot leaders Sam Adams

and John Hancock who are hiding in Lexington.

The atrocities have grown and grown.

If we do not act now, we are slaves forever.

We have to act.

Warren realizes the patriot militia outside

Boston must be ready to confront the British,

an act of defiance that could finally trigger a full-scale war.

But the British army has Boston sealed off and raising the alarm is risky,

so he deploys his secret network of messengers.

Warren decides to just send a couple of men on horseback

so he can be sure that the message gets through

and the militia is raised to defend those two towns.

Among Warren's messengers are William Dawes and Paul Revere.

The reason they sent two riders out is the likelihood

of either or both of them being captured was very high.

There's redcoats everywhere and they're armed.

The riders travel in opposite directions

to increase their chances of reaching Lexington and Concord.

Revere crosses the Charles River to begin his historic ride,

while Dawes loops south and takes the land route to Lexington.

But as they spread the word of the redcoats' advance,

Revere and Dawes will be joined by a third rider,

a man who didn't set out that night to become a hero of the revolution,

Dr Samuel Prescott.

Prescott is in Lexington to visit his fiancé, Lydia.

So conquered, and more importantly,

the fate of the entire revolution is suddenly in the hands of this young,

24-year-old doctor that's just out on a hot date.

At one o'clock that morning, Prescott bids Lydia goodnight.

But as he rides home to Concord,

he runs into Revere and Dawes,

who have already delivered their message to Lexington.

He's from Concord, he's a part of the militia, and so he thinks,

oh, we'll be able to spread the word a lot faster if

I'm with you, because everyone knows me, it's my home.

So he joins the trio, and then they take off.

But within minutes, they gallop into serious trouble.

Paul Revere's a little bit ahead,

and he sees two men,

and realizes that they're British sentries.

And then as he tries to alert his friends,

the two men become four men,

and then all of a sudden they're circled.

Revere is captured.

Dawes and Prescott break free.

But Dawes is thrown from his horse,

forcing him to limp home.

The only rider to make it to Concord to deliver the

message about the British plan is Samuel Prescott.

The regulars are out!

Two arms!

Alerted to the British advance,

the colonists seize their weapons and prepare for their first direct confrontation.

While Patriot leaders John Hancock and Sam Adams make good their escape.

If the British had gotten to Lexington without any advance warning,

they could have captured a couple of key members

of Congress, Samuel Adams and John Hancock,

and if they had gotten to Concord,

they would have been able to capture the ammunition

and powder that the Americans so desperately needed.

In the early hours of April 19, 1775,

dozens of colonial militia stand ready to confront the Redcoats.

As the British army advances,

a showdown is brewing that could see the movement

for independence explode into full-blown war.

Their route takes them through the town of Monotamy

and past the home of 78-year-old retired soldier Samuel Whitmore.

Twice married and the father of eight,

Whitmore served for five decades as a soldier in the King's Army,

fighting in several colonial wars.

His French saber is testament to his 40 years of service.

People would ask Whitmore, how did you get this French saber?

He would respond by saying,

the gentleman that had it died suddenly.

Now, like most of Massachusetts colonists,

Whitmore opposes Britain's heavy-handed tactics and growing military presence.

But when he sees the British regulars marching through the town,

he knows that the inexperienced patriot militia could find themselves in trouble.

British leaders think the American soldiers are weak.

This dates back to the French and Indian War,

when the Americans would line up in the thick of battle,

the Americans would turn and run.

The colonial soldiers are about to meet their first test.

In a field outside Lexington,

77 militiamen have gathered to block the Redcoat advance towards Concord.

John Parker, leader of the Minutemen,

knows the British outnumber his forces ten to one.

He doesn't expect to defeat them,

he just wants to send a message,

we're here, we have guns,

and we're going to resist.

The commander of the British troops, Major John Pitcairn,

doesn't want to be distracted by a fight in Lexington.

Running behind schedule, his goal is to secure a bridge further west in Concord.

But Pitcairn is forced to respond to the Minutemen's blockade.

Neither side wanted a war to start,

and so they stand there face to face for a while.

Hundreds of professional soldiers confront dozens of

militiamen armed with squirrel rifles and buckshot.

Both Parker and Pitcairn issue orders not to shoot.

And...

somebody fired.

And to this day, nobody knows exactly who fired.

Was it a British soldier? Was it an American soldier?

Was it a bystander who knew?

The shot triggers a hail of British bullets.

The militiamen are overwhelmed and quickly retreat,

some racing into the nearby woods.

It takes just 15 minutes for the redcoats to rout the colonists.

When the smoke clears, eight patriots lie dead

and the British soldiers continue on their way to Concord.

The Battle of Lexington seems to confirm to the

British that Americans had no appetite for battle.

But when they reach Concord, it's suddenly a very different story.

Two thousand Minutemen from 40 different towns

are waiting to confront the 700 army regulars.

And this time, it's the colonists who control the field.

Among the most common and deadly weapons at their disposal was the musket.

Not terribly accurate, but effective.

Musket balls are slow and heavy,

and so if you got hit by a musket ball,

it was not a clean wound.

And so if it hit bone,

that means you're going to have an amputation.

The musket ball did horrific damage.

If it hit an arm or a leg,

amputation would surely follow.

If it hit your torso, you're a goner.

The British are forced to abandon their position.

They first withdraw to the center of Concord

and then begin a hasty retreat back to Boston.

But their escape route is lined by 1,600 patriot militia.

The Americans fought dirty.

They hid in houses, they hid in trees, they hid behind walls,

and they were also circling around the British

column the entire way from Concord back to Boston.

As the Redcoats break rank and race for safety in Boston,

they once again pass Samuel Whitmore's farm.

Whitmore's military experience served the British

well when he fought for them against the French.

But he now turns his warrior spirit against

the Empire and towards the cause of revolution.

Whitmore waits until the British are right on top of him.

Then he whips out his dueling pistols

and drops two more.

The Redcoats come at him

and he grabs his old French saber and starts hacking at them.

One of them shoots him at point-blank range.

Then they bayonet him more than a dozen times.

How dare this old man attack them?

The Redcoats leave Whitmore for dead.

Only he doesn't die.

He recovers and he lives to be well into his

nineties before he actually finally passes away.

The Day of Bloodshed leaves 73 British soldiers dead and 174 wounded.

The Americans have lost 49 men.

America and Great Britain are now officially at war.

And though Concord is not a decisive military victory,

the military governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage,

who sent the troops to Concord,

receives a very clear message.

The lesson that Gage came away from is that we were a lot more determined

and a lot more effective fighters than he thought we were.

When the fighting began, both sides had the

misconception that both sides had them near every war.

They thought it was going to be short.

They kind of stumbled their way into it,

and then they thought, okay, a couple of good victories,

we win, we go home.

That's not the way it turned out.

By the end of April 1775,

20,000 militia fighters from across New England surround Boston.

The stage is now set for the bloodiest battle of the American Revolution.

Enraged by the Patriots' aggression at Lexington and Concord,

Britain vows to crush the rebellious Americans once and for all.

Boston has become a city under siege.

9,000 British troops occupy the town,

which is surrounded by 20,000 rebel militiamen

stationed in nearby Roxbury and Cambridge.

Both sides know a deadly battle could soon erupt.

It looks worse than it is.

Sound doesn't pound.

Patriot figurehead Joseph Warren

is now president of the Massachusetts Provincial

Congress and Major General of the militia.

Dr. Warren, you're needed, sir.

On June 16, 1775,

word reaches Warren that 2,000 British soldiers

are preparing to come ashore in Charlestown near Bunker Hill just north of Boston.

That night, Warren sends 1,000 men to dig fortifications into the hill.

But instead of Bunker Hill,

they build them on nearby Breeds Hill,

which looks out over the harbor and the city.

Colonel Prescott, one of the commanders of the operation,

claims that he got the order to set up on Breeds Hill.

That put the American and British cannons within range of each other.

The artillery on Breeds Hill is a huge threat to the British.

From Breeds Hill, they could easily bombard the ships from their position.

This is really an act of aggression,

and the British respond.

As dawn breaks, the British are astonished to see the

extensive defenses the colonists have built overnight.

But it doesn't deter them from landing their forces,

and by early afternoon, 3,000 British troops have arrived in Charlestown,

which they've burned to the ground.

The Americans have orders to hold their fire

until the enemy has closed to within 50 yards.

The close-packed British troops fall in clumps.

Driven back, they are forced down the hill to regroup.

But the Americans' gunpowder is running out fast.

Bunker Hill is the first full-scale battle of the Revolution, and the bloodiest.

Among the colonial fighters is a little-known hero of the Revolution,

named Salem Poor.

A former New England slave who purchased his freedom in 1769 for £27,

now he was fighting to keep it.

Salem Poor's remarkable performance on the battlefield

clearly demonstrated to the British that even men who were born into slavery

understood that this was an opportunity to fight for liberty.

They want blood?

The children, they're old!

Poor is married with an infant son,

but he's still prepared to rally with the Minutemen at Concord

and to fight for the Patriot cause at Bunker Hill.

He is one of about 100 African Americans at this battle

and one of 5,000 who will take up arms against Britain in the course of the war.

After the battle, he's commended by 14 officers

to the Provincial Congress for the way that he

fought that he fought with exceptional valor.

Leading the Patriot defence,

Doctor, now Major General Joseph Warren,

leaps into the teeth of battle.

Give him hell!

Right there on the front line saying,

I am a private and the service of American rights is Dr.

Joseph Warren.

So we need to build up there as much as here.

He famously said, speaking of the British,

these fellows say we won't fight.

By heaven, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood.

During the first two assaults on Green's Hill,

Warren helps hold the line,

rallying the Patriots to stand their ground.

Reload! Reload!

But the British Army's third wave overwhelms them.

Redcoats by the hundreds swarm across their defences.

Many Patriots scatter when their gunpowder runs out.

At that moment, the young revolution receives its heaviest blow yet.

According to legend, Dr. Warren's last words were,

it is sweet and fitting to die for your country.

In the first great conflict of the revolution he helped to launch,

the 34-year-old Patriot becomes a martyr for American independence.

Warren is one of 115 Americans killed at Bunker Hill.

But the British victory has been ten times as costly.

1,054 soldiers, half their fighting force,

have been killed or wounded.

This was a devastating blow for the British forces.

It was a complete slaughter.

Two days after the battle, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner,

George Washington, becomes commander in chief of America's new Continental Army.

There was no possible way of turning back,

and what the outcome of that was going to be really was unknown.

The only certainty is that the struggle ahead

will be full of sacrifice for both sides

and that the fate of America now hangs in the balance.