Paul Revere's Ride

by David Hackett Fischer

  Revere’s skilled boatmen set him safely ashore at Charles-town’s ferry landing. Another group of his many friends was waiting there. Later he remembered, “I met Colonel Conant, and several others; they said they had seen our signals. I told them what was acting.”

  Revere talked briefly with Richard Devens, the Charlestown Whig who was a member of the Committee of Supplies. As they walked from ferry landing into the town, Devens warned him to take care on the road, and to stay alert for British officers who were patrolling the highway to Lexington. Devens added that he himself had met them earlier in the evening, “nine officers of the ministerial army, mounted on good horses, and armed, going towards Concord.” Revere listened carefully. Then, he later wrote in his laconic Yankee way, “I went to git me a horse.” 37

  This sinister cathead embellished an anchor-boom on the bow of HMS Somerset. Paul Revere’s boat passed beneath it, as the great ship strained at her mooring against the incoming tide. In 1777, the cathead was salvaged from the wreck of the Somerset on Cape Cod, and survives today at the Pilgrim Monument and Province-town Museum.

  The Charlestown Whigs had already given thought to the horse. One of the fleetest animals in town belonged to the family of John Larkin, a deacon of the Congregational church, who agreed to help. The Larkin horse was a fine great mare named Brown Beauty, according to family tradition. She was neither a racer nor a pulling animal, but an excellent specimen of a New England saddlehorse—big, strong, and very fast. 38

  Many years ago, equestrian historians concluded from their research that Brown Beauty was probably the collateral descendant of an East Anglian animal, distantly related to the modern draft horse known as the “Suffolk Punch.” The horses of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like the Puritans who rode them, came mainly from the east of England. In the new world these sturdy animals were bred with Spanish riding stock to create a distinctive American riding horse that can still be found in remote towns of rural Massachusetts. New England’s saddle horses were bred for alertness and agility on Yankee ice and granite. At their best they were (and are) superb mounts—strong, big-boned, sure-footed, and responsive. Such an animal was Deacon Larkin’s mare Brown Beauty, who was lent to Paul Revere that night. 39

  The horse was led out of the Larkin barn, and handed to Paul Revere by Richard Devens. The rider took the reins, put a booted foot into the stirrup, and sprang into the saddle. He said a last word to his friends, and urged the animal forward.

  Brown Beauty proved a joy to ride. “I set off upon a very good horse,” Paul Revere wrote later, “it was then about 11 o’clock, and very pleasant.” The night was mild and clear. After a long New England winter, the first welcome signs of spring were in the air. The heavy musk of damp soil and the sweet scent of new growth rose around him in the soft night air.

  Paul Revere headed north across Charlestown Neck, past the grim place where the rotting remains of the slave Mark still hung in rusty chains. Then he turned west on the road to Lexington, and kicked his horse into an easy canter on the moonlit road. He always savored that moment—a feeling that any horseman will understand. Psychologists of exercise tell us that there is a third stage of running, which brings euphoria in its train. There is also a third stage of riding, called the canter. After the tedium of the walk and the bone-jarring bounce of the trot, the animal surges forward in an easy rolling rhythm. Horse and rider become one being, more nearly so than in any other gait. The horse moves gracefully over the ground with fluent ease, and the rider experiences a feeling of completeness, serenity, and calm. Paul Revere’s language tells us that such a feeling came to him as he cantered along the Lexington Road. Even at the vortex of violent events that were swirling dangerously around him, he experienced a sensation of quiet and inner peace. 40

  Paul Revere’s leather saddlebags are in the collections of the Paul Revere Memorial Association, Boston.

  Suddenly the mood was shattered. It would have been the horse that noticed first, as horses often do. A rider as experienced as Paul Revere would instantly have seen the animal’s head come up, and her ears prick forward, and her high-arched neck twist slightly from side to side as she came alert to danger. He would have felt a momentary break in the rhythm of the canter, a change in the tension of the reins, and a subtle shift of pressure beneath his seat.

  Paul Revere searched the road ahead. Suddenly he saw two horsemen in the distance, almost invisible, waiting silent and motionless in the moonshadow of a great tree by the edge of the highway. As Revere rode closer, he made out the blur of military cockades on their hats, and the bulge of heavy holsters at their hips.

  Regulars!

  He pulled sharply on his reins, and Deacon Larkin’s horse responded instantly. Even before she had stopped, Revere yanked her head around, and spurred her savagely in the opposite direction. The two officers gave chase. One tried to cut off Paul Revere by riding crosscountry, and galloped straight into an open claypit, miring his horse in the wet and heavy ground. The other kept to the road, but was soon left far behind by the long stride of Deacon Larkin’s splendid mare.

  As his pursuers disappeared in the darkness behind him, Paul Revere later recalled that he “rid upon full gallop for the Mistick road.” His route took him to a small village north of Charlestown which is now the Boston suburb of Medford. It was commonly called Mystic in 1775, after the river of the same name. He had not planned to go that way. This road was a long detour for him, and added many northern miles to his westward journey. He must have cursed his luck. But as Prince Otto von Bismarck liked to observe, there is a special Providence for children, fools, drunkards—and the United States of America! Paul Revere’s unwelcome detour took him safely around the roving British patrols that might have intercepted him.

  Revere followed the Mystic Road over a wooden bridge, and clattered into the quiet village. From there he rode through north Cambridge to the little hamlet of Menotomy, now the town of Arlington. At the Cooper Tavern in Menotomy he met the King’s Highway or Great Road, as it was variously called, and turned west toward Lexington. He continued along the road through rising hills to the town’s meetinghouse at Lexington Common. There he came to the Buckman Tavern with its traditional bright red door. Perhaps still burning in the window was a small metal lantern with four candle stubs that signaled the availability of food, drink, lodging, and livery. 41

  At the Buckman Tavern, Paul Revere turned right into the Bedford Road. He traveled a few hundred yards past a fifty-acre tract of the minister’s farmland to the parsonage that was the home of Lexington’s clergyman, Jonas Clarke, his wife and many children. 42

  Inside the crowded house that night were at least ten Clarkes, and Sam Adams and John Hancock. With them were Hancock’s “slight and sprightly” fiancee Dorothy Quincy, and his aged aunt Lydia Hancock. The Clarkes and Hancocks were kin. They were both old clerical families, deeply rooted in the extended cousinage of New England Congregationalism. John Hancock and his ladies had been there since April 7; Sam Adams since April 10. 43

  Everyone in the parsonage had retired for the night. Adams and Hancock were sleeping in the downstairs parlor-bedroom. Aunt Lydia and Miss Dolly had the best chamber upstairs. Jonas Clarke and his wife were in another bedroom, and eight of their twelve children were in various trundle beds and backrooms. The old house was dark and silent. Outside, the faithful Sergeant William Munroe stood guard in the moonlight with ten or twelve Lexington militiamen. 44

  It was midnight when Paul Revere arrived, his horse probably flecked with foam and streaked with blood from the sharp rowels of his old-fashioned silver spurs. The scene that followed was not the heavy melodrama that one expects of great events, but a touch of low comedy that often incongruously happens in moments of high historical tension.

  When Paul Revere came riding up to the parsonage, he met Sergeant William Munroe and called out to him in a loud voice. Sergeant Munroe did not know Paul Revere, and was not impressed by the appearance of this midnight messenger. In the
eternal manner of sergeants in every army, he ordered Revere not to make so much noise—people were trying to sleep!

  “Noise!” Paul Revere answered, “You’ll have noise enough before long! The Regulars are coming out!”

  The alert reader will note what Paul Revere did not say. He did not cry, “The British are coming,” Many New England express riders that night would speak of Regulars, Redcoats, the King’s men, and even the “Ministerial Troops,” if they had been to college. But no messenger is known on good authority to have cried, “The British are coming,” until the grandfathers’ tales began to be recorded long after American Independence. In 1775, the people of Massachusetts still thought that they were British. One of them, as we shall see, when asked why he was preparing to defend his house, explained, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” The revolution in national identity was not yet complete. 45

  In American museums, Paul Revere spurs are as numerous as fragments of the True Cross. This one may be authentic. It is made of silver, bears the mark of Paul Revere, and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. There is no evidence that Revere actually wore it, but he is known to have used spurs on his midnight ride, probably a pair of his own manufacture such as this one. Its sharp rowls would have left the flanks of his horse raw and bloody.

  On the other side, the Regulars did not usually refer to the New England militia as Americans, but as “country people,” “provincials,” “Yankeys,” “peasants,” “rebels,” or “villains” in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “a low-born, base-minded rustic,” or “boors” in the archaic sense of farmer (as Dutch boer).

  As late as 1775, people on both sides in this great struggle still thought of themselves as of the same stock. They commonly spoke of their conflict not as the American Revolution, but as a “Civil War” or “Rebellion” that divided English-speaking people from one another. This was the way that Paul Revere was thinking on April 18, 1775, when he told Sergeant Munroe that the “Regulars are coming out.” 46

  After exchanging a few choice words with the sergeant, Paul Revere went past him and banged heavily on the door of the parsonage. Up flew the sash of a bedroom window, and out popped the leonine head of the Reverend Jonas Clarke, perhaps wearing a long New England night cap. Other heads appeared from different windows—as many as ten Clarke heads in various assorted sizes. From yet another downstairs window emerged the heads of Sam Adams and John Hancock, who instantly recognized their midnight caller. “Come in, Revere,” Hancock called in his irritating way, “we’re not afraid of you.” 47

  Paul Revere entered the Clarke house in his spurs and heavy riding boots, his long mud-spattered surtout swirling around him. He delivered his message to Hancock and Adams. The hour was a little past midnight. The men began to talk urgently among themselves. Revere asked if Dawes had arrived, and was concerned to hear that nobody had seen him. “I related the story of the two officers,” Revere later recalled, “and supposed he must have been stopped, as he ought to have been there before me,” Half an hour later, to everyone’s relief, Dawes appeared with a duplicate of the message from Boston.

  The two expresses remained in Lexington for another hour. “We refreshed ourselves,” Revere wrote simply. Dorothy Quincy remembered later that John Hancock left the parsonage and walked down the Bedford Road to the tavern on the Common, where some of the Lexington militia had been staying the night. Sam Adams went along, as did the minister Jonas Clarke. Probably Revere and Dawes also went to the tavern to find “refreshment” for themselves, and their exhausted horses.

  The Hancock-Clarke Parsonage was built in 1738 for Lexington’s minister John Hancock. In 1775, it was occupied by his successor Jonas Clarke, whose silhouette still hangs in the house. Samuel Adams and John Hancock (grandson of the builder) were staying here when Paul Revere arrived with news that the "Regulars are out." The house was moved across the street in 1896, and returned to its original location in 1974,

  The men talked with members of Lexington’s militia company. Jonas Clarke remembered that the conversation centered on the purpose of the British mission. They agreed on reflection that Doctor Joseph Warren must have been mistaken in thinking that the purpose of General Gage was the arrest of Hancock and Adams. It was true, as Jonas Clarke observed, that “these gentlemen had been frequently and publickly threatened.” But the arrest of Hancock and Adams alone could not be the primary object of so large an expedition. “It was shrewdly suspected,” Clarke later recalled, “that they were ordered to seize and destroy the stores belonging to the colony, then deposited at Concord.” 48

  It was clear that Concord must be warned, and that the messengers from Boston were the men to do it. Once again, Paul Revere and William Dawes climbed into their saddles, probably a bit more slowly than before. They said farewell to Adams and Hancock, and turned the heads of their weary horses westward toward the Concord Road. Behind them, Lexington’s town bell began to ring in the night.

  THE MARCH

  The Ordeal of the British Infantry

  This expedition … from beginning to end was as ill-planned and ill-executed as it was possible to be.

  —Lieutenant John Barker, 4th (King’s Own) Foot, 1775

  EARLIER THAT EVENING, while Paul Revere and William Dawes were preparing to leave Boston, General Gage set his army in motion. Many precautions were taken to prevent discovery. The soldiers were awakened in their beds, “sergeants putting their hands on them, and whispering gently to them.” 1 The men dressed quietly, strapped on their full cartridge boxes, and picked up their heavy muskets. They were ordered to leave their knapsacks behind, and to carry one day’s provisions in their haversacks. One soldier remembered that he was told to bring 36 rounds of powder and ball. 2

  The British soldiers were “conducted by a back-way out of their barracks, without the knowledge of their comrades, and without the observation of the sentries.” The men were ordered to move in small parties, so as not to alarm the town. They “walked through the street with the utmost silence. It being about 10 o’clock, no sound was heard but of their feet. A dog that happened to bark, was instantly killed with a bayonet.” 3

  The Regulars made their way to a rendezvous chosen for its remoteness—an empty beach on the edge of the Back Bay, near Boston’s new powder house in “the most unfrequented part of town.” When challenged by the sentries, they answered with the evening’s countersign, “Patrole.” 4

  First to arrive were the flank companies of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Their regimental adjutant Frederick Mackenzie regarded punctuality as a point of honor. Next came the King’s Own, who bivouacked near Boston Common, close by the beach. Other companies came in from Fort Hill, and some from Boston Neck, and a few from the Warehouse Barracks near Long Wharf. Several companies arrived from the North End after forming up near the North Church. They were the troops who had nearly intercepted Robert Newman and Captain Pulling. Altogether, the expedition numbered between 800 and 900 Regulars in twenty-one companies, plus a few volunteers and Loyalist guides. 5

  These were picked men, the flower of General Gage’s army. In that era most regiments of British infantry had two elite units: a grenadier company and a light infantry company. The grenadiers were big men, chosen for size and strength. In the earlier 18th century their special task had been to hurl heavy hand grenades at the enemy, hence their name and stature. By 1775 they had lost that role and gained another, as shock troops whose mission was to lead the bloody assaults that shattered an enemy line, or captured a fortification by a coup de main.

  The light infantry companies were a different elite—the most agile and active men, selected for fitness, energy and enterprise. They had been added to every British regiment in 1771 to serve as skirmishers and flank guards, partly at the urging of General Gage. In some regiments these men carried long-barreled muskets, which were more accurate at longer distances than the standard issue Tower musket. Some were equipped with hatchets modeled on American tomahawks.
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  In the French and Indian War, British commanders had sometimes collected their light infantry and grenadier companies into provisional units for special service. General Gage followed this common procedure. His Concord expedition consisted of eleven companies of grenadiers and ten of light infantry. That practice had the advantage of bringing together the best soldiers in the army. But it also had a major weakness. Officers and men of different regiments were not used to working with one another. They found themselves commanded by strangers, and compelled to fight alongside other units whom they did not know or trust. The regimental spirit that was carefully cultivated in the British army worked against the cohesion of ad hoc units. Further, the normal chain of command was broken above the company level, and the complex evolutions of 18th-century warfare sometimes dissolved in confusion.

  That confusion began to appear in the first moments of the Concord expedition, when the companies came together on Boston’s Back Bay. The 23rd’s regimental adjutant, Frederick Mackenzie, was appalled by the disorder he met on the beach. He found no officer of high rank firmly in command of the embarkation, and separate companies straggling aimlessly. The junior officers had been told nothing about where they were going or what they were to do. Lieutenant Barker of the 4th (King’s Own) wrote, “Few but the commanding officers knew what expedition we were going upon.” 6

  The navy was there in good time, but Mackenzie counted only twenty ships’ boats, not nearly enough to carry the entire force in a single crossing. Two trips were needed to move everyone across the water. Mackenzie peered across the dark river toward the opposite shore, and discovered still another problem that had not been anticipated. General Gage’s staff had selected the crossing point mainly for secrecy. It ran from the most secluded spot in Boston across the Back Bay to a lonely beach on Lechmere Point in Cambridge, inhabited only by a single isolated farmstead known as the Phips farm. 7