07/04/2026
Imagine yourself in East Windsor in the 1770’s. Only a few years before, a costly war between England and France (the French and Indian War) had left England with war debt and no clear way to repay it.
To address that, the English Parliament – some 3,000 miles across the Atlantic – began levying a series of taxes on the American colonies. Colonists believed that these Intolerable Acts, as they were known, were unjust for several reasons: the colonies hadn’t encouraged the war between England and France, and colonists didn’t have a voice in deciding what taxes would be levied on their own lives. From paper to tea to glass to pepper to oil, colonists were taxed on everything parliament could find.
Tensions were high, and revolution was in the air. All that was needed was a catalyst or two and the world would be turned upside down. And then, in 1770 came the Boston Massacre, where a former slave named Crispus Attix was killed by British soldiers during a mob uprising, becoming the first casualty of the American Revolution. Three years later, the Boston Tea Party saw colonists disguise themselves as Native Americans as they dumped 342 chests of tea overboard in protest of those Intolerable Acts. Two years after that, the Battles of Lexington and Concord marked the first major hostilities of the Revolution, and to this day no one knows whether it was the red coats or the colonists who fired the infamous “shot heard round the world”.
Once the fight was joined, the world would never be the same again. A revolutionary spirit had taken hold, at least in pockets of the American colonies, and they fought for a number of reasons: to express their disdain for taxation without representation, to advance the notion of self-governance, to exert independence from a disconnected monarchical system headed by an even more disconnected king thousands of miles away.
Most likely East Windsor’s most famous participant in the Revolution was Israel Bissel, who was a post rider who carried news of British hostilities much farther than Paul Revere. Bissell rode from Watertown, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston to Worchester, Putnam, Plainfield, Norwich and New London.
The British were coming.
East Windsor had its part to play during the turmoil of the 1770s and 1780s. Shortly after Lexington and Concord, town leaders from East Windsor shipped grain to Bostonians living under a port blockade imposed by the British. Shortly after the battle, East Windsor furthered its reputation as a “provisions town,” collecting lead to be melted into shot, armaments, clothing, fresh meats and flour.
Men from East Windsor answered the call at the Battle of Trenton, and wintered in encampments with General Washington in Morristown, New Jersey. They fought in White Plains, Ticonderoga, and Lake Champlain. All told, and with incomplete records, more than four hundred people from East Windsor are known to have served in the Revolutionary War. And in our town, only three citizens were known to be Tory sympathizers.
(An interesting side note: the Governor of New Jersey, William Franklin (the loyalist son of Benjamin Franklin) was held captive in East Windsor until being returned to the British in a prisoner exchange.)
Confronted with the reasons and the spirit that led to the Revolution, there was a continuous goal reflected in another of the country’s founding documents:
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
In order to form a more perfect union. This prevailing phrase is powerful. It specifically seeks to correct the past mistakes of the Articles of Confederation, under which we were really just a collection of states without a central government. It also acknowledges a truth that the founders understood: that a flawless society is unattainable, but that we must always seek to improve our nation in ways that are perpetual, inclusive, because our work can never truly be finished. America is and always has been a work in progress.
Since our earliest days, we have journeyed toward becoming better versions of ourselves. At first, only white, property-owning men could vote. That eased after a few decades and expanded to allow white men to vote, regardless of their property holdings. Then, after the Civil War (which was fought in part to test the notion that one human being cannot own another), the vote was expanded to include allowing black men to vote (although the practical reality of that was that it would take many more decades before that promise was kept.) And then, not until a quarter of the way into the last century did we allow women the right to vote.
We are still working to become more perfect, and we have more work to do. There are and will always be ways in which we can help the least of us more than we are. There are and will always be ways in which we can build more of a sense of community. There are and will always be ways in which we can set our children up for opportunities, experiences and successes beyond what we ourselves have had.
“To form a more perfect union” acknowledges that the American experiment will never be done, and that there will always be more work to do. And “We the People” tell us who it is that is tasked with trying to form that more perfect union.
So, as we celebrate the American experience over the last two hundred and fifty years, let’s also look ahead for what still needs to be done, and how we can each be a part of that work.
