The Minutemen and Their World

Chapter Six examines life in wartime Concord. While many were expecting a short, easy war, the opposite was true, and the war effort weighed heavy on the citizens of Concord. Just one way in which the war forced Concordians to change their way of life was the order by the Provincial Congress to take in and support nearly a hundred poor refugees from Boston, and then from Charlestown. Concord also served as the wartime location for Harvard College when its Cambridge facilities were being used as barracks. These developments and others changed the character of the town significantly: “By mid-March of 1776, some nineteen hundred persons were concentrated in Concord, representing an increase of over 25 percent in little more than a year” (134).

The economic cost of the war is difficult to overstate. Revolutionary-era America was a monetary mess: Continental Congress had been issuing paper money since the beginning of the war, as were the governments of each colony, and many transactions were conducted on credit. By 1777, prices were rising rapidly as paper money lost value. During this period, more and more Americans began to wear textiles produced on their side of the Atlantic, and other trades developed to fill the gap that English goods had left.