Amos Doolittle's Plate I, The Battle of Lexington, Engraved in 1775
The first of Amos Doolittle's four plates, published in December 1775. Doolittle walked the ground within weeks of 19 April and questioned militiamen who had stood on it, which makes this the earliest visual account of the morning — and a partisan one, showing the British firing on a dispersing militia.
Nobody knows who fired first at Lexington. British officers reported a shot from behind a wall or a hedge; militiamen swore the regulars fired on men already turning away; the depositions taken by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress within days were collected to prove a case rather than to settle a question. Doolittle's engraving belongs to that effort. It is evidence of what one side wanted believed in 1775, which is a different and more answerable thing than what happened. The impression photographed here is a 1903 reprint in the Concord Museum. See the unsolved mystery at Lexington Green.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
