Crowds gather peacefully at 250th anniversary celebrations despite divided political climate - The Boston Globe (2025)

Lexington resident Lena Singh was one of the few protesters, sitting astride the yellow metal fencing, holding a sign that read “Patriots don’t tolerate tyranny.” Singh, in her mid 50s, said she wanted to remind people why the country was founded.

“The first order of business is for people, the citizenry, to get the message that power is with the people,” she said. “The president, our elected representatives, they all answer to the people. Citizens need to realize their own power.”

Governor Maura Healey made the connection even more directly in a speech at the reenactment in nearby Concord.

“We live in a moment when our freedoms are once again under attack from the highest office in the land,” Healey said, without mentioning President Trump by name. “We see things that would be familiar to our revolutionary predecessors: the silencing of critics, the disappearing of people from our streets, demands for unquestioning fealty.”

The current president, as well as the living former presidents, were invited to Lexington on Saturday, but none attended.

That the governor and residents of deep blue Massachusetts made a connection between Colonial-era controversies and the current situation under a Republican president may not be surprising. But, as 250th anniversary celebrations to mark events later in the Revolutionary War shift the focus to Southern states and rural areas, pro-Trump crowds may emphasize other aspects of liberties regained.

But historians of the war also heard echoes of the conflict in recent times.

Retired Northeastern history professor William Fowler saw a parallel to Colonial times amid the constant stream of threats from the central government in Washington D.C., and the defiance from those officials out in the hinterlands.

“There is some similarity,” said Fowler, who also was the director of the Massachusetts Historical Society. “It’s certainly not as serious as 1775. We, with our Constitution, do have the mechanism to adjust and to accommodate disputes amongst our citizens and government.”

Indeed, just hours after the reenactment, thousands of protesters were exercising those rights in a series of organized demonstrations around Massachusetts and across the country against the Trump administration that featured signs such as “USA, no kings.”

Hiller Zobel, a former associate justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts and author of a book on the Boston Massacre, said he had been thinking about Trump’s tariffs and the British taxes imposed on the colonies that contributed to the original protests against the crown.

“There isn’t any question that a tariff is a tax,” the 93-year-old retired jurist said. In both eras, the duties may raise funds needed to pay off debts. But Zobel said he did not see tariffs improving trade practices, and, as important then as now, unifying the populace, either.

“Tariffs are not the way to do it,” he said.

The reenactment in Lexington Saturday included a pre-battle escape with confidential papers of John Hancock, who was present the night before conflict and would go on to preside over the Continental Congress and sign the Declaration of Independence enumerating King George’s offenses against the colony.

Trump has hung a copy of the founding document in the Oval Office. But some of his actions echo those of the British monarch, UCLA historian Carla Pestana said.

The declaration charges the king with obstructing immigration and naturalizations, cutting off trade and imposing tariffs, depriving the right of trial by jury, and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences,” Pestana noted.

“The declaration’s list of accusations resonates,” she said.

That resonance may have carried over to some of the judges assessing Trump’s actions, particularly in the language some used to assess the current state of constitutional liberties.

For example, there were echoes of the sonorous tones of the framers in the decision Thursday from a federal appeals court panel reaffirming the Trump administration must return a man it acknowledged has been mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador.

Where the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the truth that all men are created equal was “self evident,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson in the appeals court decision appealed to “the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

But, while the elevated language in the Declaration concluded with a pledge of unity to the ideals behind the founding document, Wilkinson warned of the risk of continued division.

“The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”

He then concluded his seven-page decision: “We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

At the old North Bridge in Concord on Saturday morning, Conan Walter, a 65-year-old retiree, was holding a sign that read “Stop fascism now” and “We the people.” His shirt had another message: “No one votes for Elon Musk.”

One woman approached and him and said, “Fascism stopped on Jan. 20.”

“You think so?” replied Walter.

“I do.”

“Well, we have a difference of opinion, and that’s what I’m fighting to keep,” said Walter.

Minutes later, a different woman approached Walter and his sign on that bridge, fist-bumped him and said “Hell yeah, brother.”

Walter shrugged.

“Every interaction is going to be different,” he said.

Fowler, the historian, was a park ranger at Minute Man National Historical Park in the 1960s and values the reenactments as an opportunity to meditate on conflict and disagreement.

“It is a moment of meditation for many people to really think, really think for a minute, that people actually died here,” he said. “And before this was over, many thousands of people would die. That’s something to meditate about. That is something to think about.”

Sean Cotter and Danny McDonald of the Globe staff contributed to this story.

Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.