Plate I. The Battle of Lexington, April 19th, 1775

Engraving on copper; colored. First advertised for sale in New Haven, Connecticut, on 13 December 1775. New York Public Library, New York, NY.

The four famous engravings executed by Amos Doolittle are the best documentary evidence we have of the Battle of Lexington / Concord. Doolittle, a Connecticut militia man, was not present during the battle, but he went there two weeks later and interviewed people who were present at the successive skirmishes.

Ralph Earl, a painter just starting his career and interested in landscape views, also visited Lexington and Concord. He probably created the preparatory drawings and may have colored some of the prints. Where Earl leaves off and Doolittle takes over can only be surmised — but Doolittle certainly created the engravings himself since that was his expertise.

For all their artistic and philosophical brilliance, the Greeks were failures at politics; Hamilton, in the Federalist, expressed horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were agitated. The Romans captured the American imagination because they had done what the Americans themselves hoped to do — sustain an extensive republic over a course of centuries. So the society of Revolutionary War officers called themselves Cincinnati; president, congress, and senate were all Roman terms. But the Roman example was also cautionary, for when they lost their virture, they slid into empire. When Franklin said, in response to a question from Eliza Powel, that the constitutional convention had produced a republic, if you can keep it, he and she would have remembered that the Romans had failed to keep theirs.

— Richard Brookhiser

Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996)