April 18th, 2025.

Tonight, I had the extraordinary privilege of speaking at the anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns in Boston's Old North Church, which happened 250 years ago tonight.

Here's what I said.

250 years ago, in April 1775, Boston was on edge.

7,000 residents of the town shared these streets with more than 13,000 British soldiers and their families.

The two groups coexisted uneasily.

Two years before, the British government had closed the port of Boston

and flooded the town with soldiers to try to put down what they saw as a rebellion amongst the townspeople.

Ocean trade stopped, businesses failed,

and work in the city got harder and harder to find. As soldiers stepped off ships from England

onto the wharves, half the civilian population moved away. Those who stayed resented the soldiers,

some of whom quit the army and took badly needed jobs away from locals. Boston became increasingly cut off from the surrounding towns,

for it was almost an island lying between the Charles River and Boston Harbor,

and the townspeople were under occupation. Soldiers,

dressed in the red coats that inspired locals to insult them by calling them lobster backs,

monitored their movements and controlled traffic in and out of the town over Boston neck,

which was the only land bridge from Boston to the mainland, and so narrow

at high tide it could accommodate only four horses abreast. Boston was a small town of wooden

buildings crowded together under at least eight towering church steeples, for Boston was still

a religious town. Most of the people who lived there knew

each other at least by sight and many had grown up together. And yet in April 1775

tensions were high. Boston was the heart of colonial resistance to the policies of the

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