Militia, Minutemen, and the Contest for Powder

The quarrel moved from statutes to gunpowder. On 1 September 1774, British soldiers removed powder from the provincial magazine in Charlestown, outside Boston. The Powder Alarm followed the same day. Militia from many towns marched toward Cambridge before the report was corrected. No battle was fought. The march showed how fast the towns could move when they thought the powder was being taken.

On 26 October 1774 a Massachusetts provincial congress created a Committee of Safety and ordered that a portion of each militia company be ready to march at a minute's notice. Those were the minute companies. On 14 December 1774 a crowd took the gunpowder from Fort William and Mary by day; on the night of 15 December men returned and took cannon and small arms. On 26 February 1775, Colonel Alexander Leslie led a detachment to Salem to seize cannon. Townsmen raised a drawbridge and held him until the guns were moved. He left without them. That standoff is called Leslie's Retreat.

On 23 March 1775, Patrick Henry spoke to the Virginia convention at St. John's Church in Richmond. The familiar speech, ending in liberty or death, is not a transcript taken that day. William Wirt reconstructed it for a biography published in 1817, from memories collected years later. A page that prints the speech is printing that later text, not a 1775 manuscript.