ABSTRACT
British regulars and local militiamen shed each others blood in the Massachusetts countryside on April 19, 1775. Something had gone dreadfully wrong: Americans fighting Britons in what was supposed to be a shared transatlantic community, a community that some even characterized as a family. Twenty years before that confrontation, John Adams had contemplated a future where Americans could choose their own destiny, though an Anglo-American war had not been part of his vision. With wealth generated in fertile soil worked by industrious settlers, Franklin predicted, the British-American frontier would become irresistible as a land of opportunity for those in the Old World seeking a better life in the New. Eventually Franklin and Adams were brought together by their shared American dream, though they began as defenders of American rights in the British empire before they became champions of an independent American nation.
