This April marks the 250th anniversary of the famous shots fired at Concord, Massachusetts, that set off the American Revolution.

Capt. Levi Preston, who fought there, later captured the principles at stake during an interview decades later in 1843. When pressed on various grievances, he replied, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”

Self-government remains a fundamental American principle that admits no qualification or compromise. A commitment to republicanism underpinned the American Revolution in ways that demand a second look 250 years later.

As new regulations enforced by appointed officials aimed to transform communities into provinces of an imperial realm governed from London, preserving self-government became the fundamental object that drove the colonists. Who decided mattered more than the decision itself.

As historians like Bernard Bailyn and David Hackett Fischer have pointed out, Americans carried opinions, assumptions, and ways of living, along with laws and institutions, from the British Isles to the New World. Though the colonists retained cultural, political, and economic ties with the mother country, they largely managed their own affairs.

They looked to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as their tradition, which resolved tensions between king and Parliament and set Britain on a path to limited constitutional monarchy. Sovereignty now rested with the “crown-in-Parliament,” where the king, lords, and commons shared it under law. That balanced constitution, which ensured liberty and public order, took hold in Britain as the empire grew.

The 1688 clash had an American parallel. The colonists overthrew James II’s project to unite New England and New York into a single royal colony. Their triumph confirmed self-government in the colonies, especially as Britain focused on affairs at home or elsewhere in Europe.

What became known as “salutary neglect” — where British ministers essentially left the colonists to govern themselves — fostered an intense localism in early 18th-century America. The situation changed, however, when European wars made the American colonies a focus of rivalry.

British regulars crossed the Atlantic to defend against French expansion from Canada. The French had long backed Indian raids along the frontier from New England to Georgia. Indeed, a clash in the Ohio Valley between the Virginia militia under George Washington and French regulars from Quebec contributed to the Seven Years War. It was a global struggle that inflamed Europe and India along with North America.

The colonists shared the triumph of Britain’s victory in 1763. Americans like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin celebrated a struggle that a historian aptly describes as their Glorious Revolution and welcomed George III as a patriot king. But two developments raised looming shadows. Fought on an unprecedented scale, the Seven Years War brought unprecedented debt that would have to be paid. Solving this problem entailed reorganizing the British Empire into a coherent system to cover these costs. Commercial regulations would need to be enforced, and established colonies would have to be brought under Parliament’s control — and levied with new taxes — to cover the wartime debts. American colonies would yield their autonomy to become provinces within a larger British Atlantic World.

The Stamp Act Crisis and later disputes sparked a growing conflict. Franklin and other Americans urged that colonial legislatures should instead vote to make contributions to shared imperial expenses. Allegiance to the crown did not mean subordination to Parliament, a governing body the American colonists insisted had no authority over the internal governance of the colonies.

Collecting taxes and enforcing reforms upset the established constitutional balance, where Americans governed themselves while owing allegiance to the crown.

While some in Britain sided with colonists, British ministers backed by the wider public insisted otherwise. George III correctly described himself as fighting the battle of the legislature in upholding a position on parliamentary authority that his American subjects rejected.

Soon, the colonists would reject the king as well by declaring independence on July 4, 1776.

Could specific points have been compromised or adjusted? Perhaps, but Americans would not compromise on the self-government they had long enjoyed. The struggle for independence and the work of founding a republic only reinforced the principle. Elected government at the federal, state, and local levels, along with a dense network of volunteer bodies that formed civil society, made self-government a firmly established practice. Challenging it, even today, sparks resistance.

Americans believed themselves to be citizens, not subjects or clients of some distant authority, whatever its nature or intentions — and they have acted accordingly ever since.

(William Anthony Hay is professor and associate director of Public Programs at the School of Civic and Economic Thought, Arizona State University, and is a fellow with the Jack Miller Center.)