Paul Revere's Midnight Ride

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20th-century depiction of Revere's ride

Paul Revere's Midnight Ride was an alert given to minutemen in the Province of Massachusetts Bay by local Patriots on the night of April 18, 1775, warning them of the approach of British Army troops prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord. In the preceding weeks, Patriots in the region gained wind of a planned crackdown on the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, then based in Concord, by the British occupational authorities in the colony.

Charlestown of the British Army's advance by way of the Charles River. Revere and Dawes then rode to meet John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington, ten miles away, alerting up to 40 other Patriot riders along the way. Revere and Dawes then headed towards Concord with Samuel Prescott.[1]

The trio were intercepted by a British Army patrol in Lincoln. Prescott and Dawes escaped but Revere was returned to Lexington by the patrol and freed after questioning. By giving the minutemen advance warning of the British Army's actions, the ride played a crucial role in the Patriot victory in the subsequent battles at Lexington and Concord. The ride has been commemorated in a range of cultural depictions, most notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1861 poem, "Paul Revere's Ride", which has shaped popular memory of the event, despite its factual inaccuracies.

Background

When British Army activity on April 7, 1775, suggested the possibility of troop movements, Joseph Warren sent Revere to warn the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, then sitting in Concord, the site of one of the larger caches of Patriot military supplies. After receiving the warning, Concord residents began moving the military supplies away from the town.[2]

One week later, on April 14,

secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy... all Military stores.... But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants or hurt private property." Gage did not issue written orders for the arrest of rebel leaders, as he feared doing so might spark an uprising.[5]

Charlestown
waterfront

Between 9 and 10 p.m. on the night of April 18, 1775, Joseph Warren told Revere and William Dawes that the king's troops were about to embark in boats from Boston bound for Cambridge and the road to Lexington and Concord. Warren's intelligence suggested that the most likely objectives of the regulars' movements later that night would be the capture of Adams and Hancock. They did not worry about the possibility of regulars marching to Concord, since the supplies at Concord were safe, but they did think their leaders in Lexington were unaware of the potential danger that night. Paul Revere and William Dawes were sent out to warn them and to alert colonial militias in nearby towns.[6][7]

Events

Preparation

In the days before April 18, Revere had instructed

Charlestown as to the movements of British troops when the information became known. In what is well known today by the phrase "one if by land, two if by sea", one lantern in the steeple would signal the British army's choice of the land route, proceeding southwest from Boston by the peninsula of "Boston Neck", while two lanterns would signal the route "by water" across the Charles River. (In the end, the British indeed chose the water route, and therefore two lanterns were placed in the steeple.)[8] Revere first gave instructions to send the signal to Charlestown. He then crossed the Charles River by rowboat, slipping past the Royal Navy warship HMS Somerset at anchor. Crossings were banned at that hour, but Revere safely landed in Charlestown and rode to Lexington, avoiding a British patrol and later warning almost every house along the route. The Charlestown colonists dispatched additional riders to the north.[7][9]

Ride

Cyrus Dallin
was unveiled on September 22, 1940.

Riding through present-day

English descent)[10] still considered themselves British.[11][12] Revere's warning, according to eyewitness accounts of the ride and Revere's own descriptions, was "The Regulars are coming out."[13] According to his own account, Revere narrowly escaped capture in present-day Somerville near the displayed corpse of a slave, a local landmark.[14]

Revere continued on and arrived in Lexington around midnight, with Dawes, who had ridden from the south, near Boston Neck, arriving about a half-hour later. They met with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were spending the night with Hancock's relatives (in what is now called the Hancock–Clarke House), and they spent a great deal of time discussing plans of action upon receiving the news. They believed that the forces leaving the city were too large for the sole task of arresting two men and that Concord was the main target.[15] The Lexington men dispatched riders to the surrounding towns, and Revere and Dawes continued along the road to Concord accompanied by Samuel Prescott, a doctor who happened to be in Lexington "returning from a lady friend's house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m."[7][16]

The ride of the three men triggered a flexible system of "alarm and muster" that had been carefully developed months before, in reaction to the colonists' impotent response to the Powder Alarm of September 1774. This system was an improved version of an old network of widespread notification and fast deployment of local militia forces in times of emergency. The colonists had periodically used this system all the way back to the early years of Indian wars in the colony, before it fell into disuse in the French and Indian War. For rapid communication from town to town—in addition to other express riders delivering messages—bells, drums, alarm guns, bonfires, and a trumpet were used, notifying the rebels in dozens of eastern Massachusetts villages that they should muster their militias because the regulars in numbers greater than 500 were leaving Boston with possible hostile intentions. This system was so effective that people in towns 25 miles (40 km) from Boston were aware of the army's movements while it was still unloading boats in Cambridge.[17] Unlike in the Powder Alarm, the alarm raised by the three riders successfully allowed the militia to confront the British troops in Concord, and then harry them all the way back to Boston.[18]

Revere, Dawes, and Prescott were detained by a British Army patrol in

Lexington Green unfolded, Revere assisted Hancock and his family in their escape from Lexington, helping to carry a trunk of Hancock's papers.[22]

A National Park Service map showing the route of the initial Patriot messengers.

Legacy

Longfellow's poem

Revere on 1958 U.S. stamp.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow popularized Paul Revere in "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem first published in 1861, over 40 years after Revere's death, and reprinted in 1863 as part of Tales of a Wayside Inn.[23] The poem opens:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year

Longfellow's poem is not historically accurate, but the inaccuracies were deliberate. Longfellow had researched the historical event, using such works as George Bancroft's History of the United States, but he changed the facts for poetic effect.[24] The poem was one of a series in which he sought to create American legends; earlier examples include The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858).[25] Longfellow was successful in creating a legend: Revere's stature rose significantly in the years following the poem's publication.[26]

Parts of the ride route in Massachusetts are now posted with signs marked "Revere's Ride". The route follows Main Street in

Massachusetts Avenue the rest of the way through Lexington and into Lincoln. Revere's ride is reenacted annually.[27]

Contrary to popular belief,[citation needed] Revere and Dawes were not the only riders; however, they were the only two to be noted in poetry. Samuel Prescott and Israel Bissell were also tasked to undertake the mission, Bissell being the person to ride the farthest distance of all.

A short silent film, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (film) [it], directed by Charles Brabin, was released in 1914 by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Paul Revere was played by Augustus Phillips.

Music

American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan references "Paul Revere's horse" in the lyrics of his 1965 song, "Tombstone Blues", the second track on the album Highway 61 Revisited.[28]

The rock group

Paul Revere and the Raiders had considerable popularity from the mid-1960s through the early-1970s. The band's namesake and the organist was born Paul Revere Dick, named after Revere.[29] The song "Me and Paul Revere", written by musician Steve Martin and performed with his bluegrass group Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, was inspired by the tale of Paul Revere's ride and told from the point of view of Revere's horse, Brown Beauty.[30]

American singer-songwriter Noah Kahan references Paul Revere's ride in the title and lyrics of his 2023 song, "Paul Revere".[31]

References

  1. history.com
    . April 16, 2013.
  2. ^ Miller 2010, p. 186.
  3. ^ Fischer 1994, pp. 75–76.
  4. ^ Brooks 1999, pp. 37–38.
  5. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 85.
  6. ^ Brooks 1999, pp. 41–42.
  7. ^ a b c d Boatner 1975, p. 622.
  8. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 99.
  9. ^ Brooks 1999, pp. 42–44.
  10. ^ According to the 1790 census, Massachusetts was 89% English, Scots, and Northern Irish.
  11. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 110.
  12. ^ McDonald & McDonald 1980, p. 180.
  13. ^ Revere 1961.
  14. ^ Revere, Paul (1798). "Letter from Paul Revere to Jeremy Belknap, circa 1798". www.masshist.org. Massachusetts Historical Society. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
  15. ^ Brooks 1999, p. 50.
  16. ^ Murrin 2002, p. 205.
  17. ^ Fischer 1994, pp. 138–145.
  18. ^ Triber 1998, pp. 103–111.
  19. ^ Fischer 1994, pp. 131–132, 144.
  20. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 136.
  21. ^ Fischer 1994, pp. 133–136, 142–148.
  22. ^ Miller 2010, pp. 198–200.
  23. ^ Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (April 19, 1860). "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". Archived from the original on July 16, 2017. Retrieved June 4, 2017.
  24. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 331.
  25. ^ Ruland & Bradbury 1991, p. 109.
  26. ^ Fischer 1994, p. 333.
  27. ^ "Patriot's Day Events". National Lancers Foundation. Retrieved June 8, 2011.
  28. ^ "Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan Songs". bobdylansongs.co.uk. 2023-02-18. Retrieved 2024-02-21.
  29. ^ Bruce Eder. "Paul Revere & the Raiders". AllMusic.
  30. ^ "Steve Martin Talks About His Fourth Of July Song". All Things Considered. NPR. Retrieved June 11, 2018.
  31. ^ "Ride like Paul Revere".

Bibliography