"What the British marched into was a trap. No matter the precise details, the outcome was virtually guaranteed:

"The militia standing in battle formation guaranteed the redcoats would confront it.
Firing shot after shot at the British guaranteed that at some point a threshold would be reached, and the redcoats would fire reciprocally – very parallel to the “Boston Massacre,” where soldiers were pelted and clubbed to the point of shooting in self-defense.

"Firing but deliberately missing guaranteed the British would experience few if any casualties; there would be high colonist casualties by comparison. Thus statistics would corroborate the “Lexington massacre” story.

"Perhaps John Adams’s comment on the Boston Massacre bears repeating here: “I suspected that this was the explosion which had been intentionally wrought up by designing men who knew what they were aiming at, better than the instruments employed.”

"For John Hancock, the battle of Lexington, like the Boston Tea Party, was profitable; with the outbreak of war, some 500 smuggling indictments, pending against him in the courts, vanished. But for Sam Adams, the picture was much broader. Upon hearing the distant Lexington gunfire, he turned to Hancock and famously said, “What a glorious morning is this!” As historian William Hallahan put it, “For the price of a few dead farmers, Adams could buy his war.”