Captain Levi Preston, a minuteman who fought at the Battle of Concord, demonstrated the power of sentiment to spur one to action. Many decades after the battle, historian Mellen Chamberlain asked him, “Why did you go to the Concord fight?” Why did this Massachusetts farmer decide to leave his plow, pick up his musket, and join the fight against the British? Chamberlain suggested possible motivations, each of which Preston denies. Was it “intolerable oppressions”?

“Oppressions?” asked Preston. “I didn’t feel them.”

The Stamp Act? “I never saw one of those stamps.”

The tea tax? “I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” Chamberlain then mentioned the great seventeenth-century philosophers. “I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty.”

Preston’s reply: “Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.”

Perplexed, Chamberlain then asks, “what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

Preston’s answer: “Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

[That’s the Spirit of 1776. And it’s somewhat disheartening to see how far it’s ebbed away 247 years later, but it’s still alive. And it can be fostered back into full bloom, as Papadopoulos urges. Read it all. — Ed]