On this day 250 years ago, the Cambridge, Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence issued a letter asserting:

If we cease to assert Our rights we shall dwindle into supineness and the chains of slavery shall be fast rivetted upon us …

The late act of the British Parliament impowering the East India Company to export tea … is a recent proof of the determination of the Ministry to persue their Diabolical Plan to inslave the Americans.

One of the Members of the Cambridge Committee who signed the letter was an elderly farmer from nearby Menotomy named Samuel Whittemore. Little more than a year later, then 78-year old Captain Samuel Whittemore of the Cambridge militia shot retreating British soldiers after the Battle of Concord from behind a stone wall near his home. He was bayonetted six times and clubbed in the head, losing half his face, yet somehow survived to live to age 96.

Source: https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/06/bayonetting-untold-story-capt-samuel-whittemore/