The Sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me. …
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose.
Assured loss, before the match be played. 9
Margaret Gage made no secret of her deep distress. In 1775, she told a gentleman that “she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen.” 10
Her loyalty came to be suspected by both sides. The well-informed Roxbury clergyman William Gordon wrote that Dr. Warren’s spy was “a daughter of liberty unequally yoked in the point of politics.” 11 Many British officers, including Lord Percy and General Henry Clinton, believed that General Gage was “betrayed on this occasion” by someone very near to him. Some strongly suspected his wife. 12
Even Gage himself appears to have formed his own suspicions. Earlier that same evening, he had summoned Lord Percy and told him that he was sending an expedition to Concord “to seize the stores,” Percy was admonished tell nobody—the mission was to remain a “profound secret.” As he left the meeting and walked toward his quarters, he saw a knot of eight or ten Boston men talking earnestly together on the Common. Percy approached them to learn what they were discussing. One man said:
“The British troops have marched, but will miss their aim,”
“What aim?” Lord Percy demanded.
“Why, the cannon at Concord.”
Percy was shocked. He hastened back to the general, and told him that the mission had been compromised. Gage cried out in anguish that “his confidence had been betrayed, for he had communicated his design to one person only,” besides Percy himself. 13
Before this fatal day, Gage had been devoted to his beautiful and caring wife. But after the Regulars returned from Concord, he ordered her away from him. Margaret was packed aboard a ship called Charming Nancy and sent to Britain, while the General remained in America for another long and painful year. An estrangement followed after Gage’s return. All of this circumstantial evidence suggests that it is highly probable, though far from certain, that Doctor Warren’s informer was indeed Margaret Kemble Gage—a lady of divided loyalties to both her husband and her native land. 14
After hearing from his secret source, Dr. Warren sent an urgent message to Paul Revere, asking him to come at once. The time was between 9 and 10 o’clock when Paul Revere hurried across town. “Doctor Warren sent in great haste for me,” Revere later recalled, “and begged that I would immediately set off for Lexington, where Messrs Hancock and Adams were, and acquaint them of the movement, and that it was thought they were the objects.” 15
Paul Revere’s primary mission was not to alarm the countryside. His specific purpose was to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were thought to be the objects of the expedition. Concord and its military stores were also mentioned to Revere, but only in a secondary way. 16
Warren appears to have known or suspected that British officers were patrolling the roads west of Boston. To be sure that the message got through, he told Revere that he was sending duplicate dispatches by different routes. One message had been entrusted to William Dawes, a Boston tanner. Dawes was not a leader as prominent as Revere, but he was a loyal Whig, whose business often took him through the British checkpoint on Boston Neck. As a consequence the guard knew him. He was already on his way when Revere reached Doctor Warren’s surgery. Another copy of the same dispatch may have been carried by a third man. 17
Dawes and Revere carried written messages, which Lexington’s Congregational minister later copied into his records: “A large body of the King’s troops (supposed to be a brigade of about 12, or 1500) were embarked in boats from Boston, and gone to land at Lechmere’s point.” Warren’s estimate exaggerated the strength of the British expedition, but was accurate in every other detail. 18
The messengers took different routes. William Dawes left town across Boston Neck—no small feat. He had to pass a narrow gate, closely guarded by British sentries who stopped all suspicious travelers. Dawes was remembered to have been “mounted on a slow-jogging horse, with saddle-bags behind him, and a large flapped hat upon his head to resemble a countryman on a journey.” 19
William Dawes, Jr. (1745-99), was one of many Whig “expresses” who carried the Lexington Alarm. A Boston tanner of old Puritan and East Anglian stock, he was asked to be a courier on April 18, perhaps because his work often took him through the British “lines” on Boston Neck, and he knew many of the guard. (Evanston Historical Society)
Some say he attached himself to another party; others, that he knew the sergeant of the guard and managed to talk his way through. According to one account, a few moments after he passed the British sentries, orders arrived at the guardhouse, stopping all movement out of town. Once safely across the Neck, William Dawes eluded the British patrols in Roxbury, and rode west through Brookline to the Great Bridge that spanned the Charles River at Cambridge. 20
Paul Revere made ready to leave in a different direction, by boat to Charlestown. His journey was not a solitary act. Many people in Boston helped him on his way—so many that Paul Revere’s ride was truly a collective effort. He would be very much surprised by his modern image as the lone rider of the Revolution.
Revere had anticipated that the Regulars might try to stop all communications between Boston and the countryside. He would have remembered keenly his failure to warn the people of Salem in February, when Colonel Leslie’s men held three of his fellow mechanics prisoner in Boston harbor until the expedition was on its way. The problem had been percolating in his mind for several weeks. Only the Sunday before, on his way home from Concord, Paul Revere had stopped at Charlestown and discussed the matter at length with Colonel William Conant and the Whig leaders of that town. Together they worked out a set of contingency plans for warning the country of any British expedition, even if no courier was able to leave town. 21
Later Paul Revere recalled, “I agreed with a Colonel Conant and some other gentlemen, that if the British went out by water, we would shew two lanthorns in the North Church steeple, and if by land, one, as a signal, for we were apprehensive it would be difficult to cross the Charles River, or git over Boston neck.” 22
Revere called his signal lights “lanthorns,” an archaic expression in England by 1775, but still widely used in Massachusetts, where translucent lantern-sides continued to be made in the old-fashioned way from paper-thin slices of cow-horn. These primitive devices emitted a dim, uncertain light. The problem was to make them visible from Boston to Charlestown, more than a quarter-mile distant across the water. 23
Paul Revere and his friends agreed that the best place to display such a signal was in the steeple of Christ Church, commonly called the Old North Church. In 1775 it was Boston’s tallest building. Its location in the North End made it clearly visible in Charlestown across the water. 24 But there was a problem. Christ Church was Anglican. Its rector was an outspoken Loyalist, so unpopular with his congregation that his salary had been stopped and the Church closed. As always, Paul Revere had several friends who could help. He was acquainted with a vestryman of Christ Church named Captain John Pulling, a staunch Whig and a member of the North End Caucus. Pulling agreed to help. 25
Revere also knew the sexton of Christ Church, a young artisan named Robert Newman, who came from a prominent North End family that was down on its luck in 1775. Like many Boston families, the Newmans were a transatlantic cousinage, with branches in East Anglia and Massachusetts. Robert Newman’s uncle was Sir Thomas Newman, Lord Mayor of Norwich. His father had been a prosperous Boston merchant, who built a big three-story brick house in the North End, with massive chimney stacks and a cupola that looked out upon his ships in the harbor. When Robert Newman was two years old, the family’s fortunes were shattered by his father’s death. His mother was forced
to convert their handsome home into a boarding house, and Robert was apprenticed to a maker of leather breeches. Like many others in Boston, the Newman family was hard-pressed in 1775. They earned a few shillings by renting rooms to British officers, whom they disliked and resented. Robert Newman was unable to find work in his trade and could get employment only as a church sexton, a job that he despised. When Paul Revere asked him to help, he was happy to agree. Revere had chosen well. Robert Newman was known in the town as “a man of few words,” but “prompt and active, capable of doing whatever Paul Revere wished to have done.” 26
On the afternoon of April 18, Revere alerted Newman and Pulling, and also another friend and neighbor, Thomas Bernard, and asked them to help with the lanterns. They were warned to be ready that night. 27
It was about 10 o’clock in the evening when Paul Revere left Dr. Warren’s surgery. He went quickly to the Newman house at the corner of Salem and Sheafe streets. As he approached the building, he peered through the windows and was startled to see a party of British officers who boarded with Mrs. Newman playing cards at a parlor table and laughing boisterously among themselves. Revere hesitated for a moment, then went round to the back of the house, and slipped through an iron gate into a dark garden, wondering what to do next.
Suddenly, Newman stepped out of the shadows. The young man explained that when the officers sat down to their cards, he pretended to go to bed early. The agile young sexton retired upstairs to his chamber, opened a window, climbed outside, and dropped as silently as a cat to the garden below. There he met Pulling and Bernard, and waited for Revere to arrive. 28
Revere told his friends to go into the church and hang two lanterns in the steeple window on the north side facing Charlestown. He did not stay with them, but hurried away toward his own home. The men left him and walked across the street to the Old North Church. Robert Newman tugged his great sexton’s key out of his pocket and unlocked the heavy door. He and Captain Pulling slipped inside, while Thomas Bernard stood guard.
Newman had found two square metal lanterns with clear glass lenses, so small that they could barely hold the stump of a small candle. Earlier that day he had carefully prepared the lanterns, and hidden them in a church closet. Newman took them from their hiding place. The men hung the lanterns round their necks by leather thongs, and stuffed flint and steel and tinder boxes into their pockets. They climbed the creaking stairs, 154 of them, high into the church tower. At the top of the stairs they drew out their flints, and with a few practised strokes sent a stream of sparks into a nest of dry tinder. Gently they blew the glowing tinder into a flame, and lighted the candles.
At the Newman House, on the corner of Salem and Sheafe streets, Paul Reveremet Robert Newman and John Pulling and asked them to hang the lanterns in the Old North Church. The building was a boarding house in 1575, occupied by British offficers. The storefront was a later addition. The building no longer stands. This old photograph by Wilfred French is in the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
Then they went to a narrow ladder above the stairs and climbed higher, rung after rung, past the open beams and great silent bells. At last they reached the topmost window in the steeple. They threw open the sash, and held the two lanterns out of the northwest window in the direction of Charlestown. 29
The Old North Church from Hull Street, from an old photograph. To the left is Copp’s Hill burying ground. To the right are houses that were occupied by British troops in 1775. The steeple window showing here faces north toward Charlestown. From it Newman and Pulling displayed two lanterns, one of which survives today in the Concord Museum. (Bostonian Society)
Across the river, the Charlestown Whigs were keeping careful watch on the steeple. In the night it appeared to them as a slim black spire, silhouetted against the starry southern sky. Suddenly they saw a flicker, and then a flash of light. They looked again, and two faint yellow lights were burning close together high in the tower of the church. It was the signal that Revere had promised to send if British troops were leaving Boston by boat across the Back Bay to Cambridge.
The lights were visible only for a moment. Then Newman and Pulling extinguished the candles, closed the window, descended the steeple stairs, and returned the lanterns to their closet. As they prepared to leave the church, they saw a detachment of troops in the street near the door. The two men ran back into the sanctuary of the church, searching for another way out. They climbed a bench near the altar, and escaped through a window, their mission completed. 30
The men of Charlestown acted quickly on the signal. Some went down to the water’s edge to look for Paul Revere. Others hastened to find him a horse. While waiting for his arrival they dispatched their own express rider to the Committee of Safety in Cambridge. One of them wrote later, “This messenger was also instructed to ride on to Messrs Hancock and Adams who I knew were at the Rev. Mr. [Clarke’s ] at Lexington …” 31
This anonymous Charlestown courier never reached his destination. Probably he was stopped by the British officers who lay in wait on the Lexington Road. General Gage’s meticulous precautions were beginning to take effect. His roving patrols intercepted many travelers that night, and may have captured this first messenger who threatened to reveal his plans.
While the Charlestown Whigs were acting on the lantern signal, Paul Revere went to his own home in North Square, a few short blocks from the church. His family helped him to collect his heavy boots and long riding surtout. Perhaps he thought about taking his pistol, but decided to go unarmed, a decision that may have saved his life.
The time was about 10:15 when Revere left his house. Later he remembered, “I … went to the north part of the town, where I had kept a boat.” Here again, Revere enlisted another group of friends to assist him. He sought the aid of two experienced Boston watermen to help him cross the Charles River. One was Joshua Bentley, a boat builder. The other was Thomas Richardson. 32
Both men met Paul Revere by his boat, hidden beneath a wharf on the waterfront, in the North End. The folklore of old Boston cherishes many memories of that moment. It is said that Paul Revere absent-mindedly forgot his spurs and sent his faithful dog trotting home with a note pinned to his collar. A few minutes later the dog returned. The note was gone, and a pair of spurs was in its place. The reader may judge the truth of this legend. 33
Another folktale has it that as Bentley and Richardson prepared to launch the boat, they discovered that they had forgotten a cloth to muffle their oars. The two men knocked softly at a nearby house. A woman came to an upper window, and they whispered an urgent request. There was a quick rustle of petticoats in the darkness, and a set of woolen underwear came floating down to the street. The lady’s undergarments, still warm from the body that had worn them, were wrapped snugly round the oars. 34
The three men balanced themselves in Paul Revere’s little boat and pushed off into the harbor, rowing north from Boston toward Charlestown’s ferry landing. Suddenly, another danger loomed in their path. The dark bulk of HMS Somerset was anchored squarely in their way. Four days earlier she had been moored between Boston and Charlestown to interrupt the nocturnal traffic between the towns. At 9 o’clock that night, the ferries that plied between the towns had been seized, and secured alongside the British ship, with all “boats, mud-scows, and canoes” in town. No crossings were allowed after that hour. 35
Paul Revere looked up from his little rowboat at the great warship. She was a ship of the line, rated for 64 guns. He could expect the men of her watch to be alert, and armed sentries to be posted fore and aft. Probably he heard across the water the ship’s bell chime twice in quick succession, then twice more, and once again as the midshipman of the watch marked the time at five bells in the evening watch, or 10:30 to a landsman.
Paul Revere sat quietly in the boat while his friends bent over their muffled oars. All his senses were alive, sharpened by the danger that surrounded him. Artist that he was, in that moment of mortal peril he noticed with spec
ial intensity the haunting beauty of the scene. Many years later the memory was still fresh in his mind. “It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising,” he wrote in the haunting cadence of the old New England dialect. The great warship must have seemed a thing alive as she moved restlessly about her mooring, swinging slowly to the west on the incoming tide. In the fresh east wind, she pulled hard against her great hemp anchor cable that creaked and groaned like an animal in the night.
The moon was coming up behind Boston, a huge orb of light in the clear night sky. To Paul Revere it must have seemed impossible to pass the ship without detection. Then, miraculously, it was the moon that saved him. The moon was nearly full, a large pale yellow globe that was just beginning to rise in the southern sky.
Normally, Paul Revere’s boat would have been caught in the bright reflection of the moonbeam on the water as he passed close by HMS Somerset. But there was something odd about the moon that night. Often it rose farther to the east, but that night it had a southern declination. A lunar anomaly caused it to remain well to the south on the evening of April 18, 1775, and to hang low on the horizon, partly hidden behind the buildings of Boston. The sky was very bright, and Paul Revere’s boat was miraculously shrouded in a dark moonshadow that was all the more obscure because of the light that surrounded it. He passed safely “a little to the eastward” of the great ship’s massive bowsprit that pointed downstream toward the incoming tide. 36
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