Moving against the possibility of armed violence by the colonists, the mother country sent around 2,000 soldiers from Boston on the night of April 18-19, 1775, to confiscate munitions that the colonists were storing at Concord -- twenty-six miles northeast of Boston, as the crow flies. During the night, Paul Revere and fellow riders went from house to house, quietly giving warning to people who belonged to a group called Minutemen -- an organization that had been organized in response to the crisis with the mother country.