Paul Revere's Ride

by David Hackett Fischer

  It was a remarkable performance. The soldiers listened carefully to Paul Revere, increasingly quiet and pensive. Then they withdrew a little way and began to talk among themselves. Suddenly they returned to Revere, and ordered him to mount. Another officer went to the captive Sanderson, who remembered that they “ordered me to untie my horse (which was tied to a little birch) and mount.”

  The party left the pasture, entered the road, and turned east toward Boston. “They kept us in the middle of the road, and rode on each side of us,” Sanderson recalled. “They took all of us, Revere, Loring, Brown and myself.” One of the officers took out his watch and looked at it. Sanderson asked him the time and was told it was a quarter past two. 19

  Paul Revere’s words had worked brilliantly. The Regulars were increasingly tense and nervous. For many hours they had loitered on the road. Now they were in a hurry to ride east, and impatient of every delay. Sanderson was badly mounted on a slow horse. One officer struck the animal with the flat of his sword, and sent it skittering ahead.

  The ten British Regulars and their four or five prisoners rode down toward Lexington. “When we got into the road,” Revere remembered, “they formed a circle and ordered the prisoners in the centre, and to lead me in the front.” The captives remembered that the pace was “prittie smart.” 20

  With Paul Revere, the officers took special measures. He was made to mount with the others, but his reins were taken from him. Revere asked if he might hold the reins himself, and received a rude reply. The polished manners of these English gentlemen were beginning to wear thin. “God damn you, sir!” an officer said to him, “you are not to ride with reins, I assure you!” 21 Major Mitchell in particular was showing the strain. He told Paul Revere, “We are now going towards your friends and if you attempt to run or we are insulted, we will blow your brains out.”

  “You may do as you please,” Revere answered.

  Revere’s reins were given to a sergeant who was ordered to draw his pistol, and use it to “execute the major’s sentence” if the captive tried to bolt. The anger and frustration of the British Regulars were growing dangerously. Revere remembered that “I was often insulted by the officers, calling me damned Rebel &c. &c.”

  They were now about half a mile from Lexington Green. Suddenly they heard a gunshot. Major Mitchell turned in fury to his prisoner and demanded an explanation. Revere told him that it was a signal “to alarm the country.” A few minutes later the riders were startled to hear the heavy crash of an entire volley of musketry, from the direction of Lexington’s meeting house. Probably it came from a party of militiamen who were clearing their weapons before they entered the Buckman Tavern for a bit of cheer. The Regulars were appalled to hear it. Revere remembered that the volley “appeared to alarm them very much.” 22

  At last the officers began to feel the full import of what Paul Revere had been telling them. His words of warning took on stronger meaning when punctuated by gunfire. The sound of a single shot had suggested to them that surprise was lost. The crash of a volley appeared evidence that the country was rising against them. As they came closer to the Common they began to hear Lexington’s town bell clanging rapidly. The captive Loring, picking up Revere’s spirit, turned to the officers and said, “The bell’s a’ringing! The town’s alarmed, and you’re all dead men!” 23

  The officers halted, rode apart from their captives, and once again talked urgently among themselves. They decided that they must gallop back to warn the commanders of the marching column. To travel faster, they resolved to release their captives. 24

  A young subaltern went over to Sanderson, ordered him to dismount, drew a sword, and said apologetically, “I must do you an injury.” As the officer brandished his weapon, Sanderson wondered, what injury? The Regulars had already made him a prisoner, taken his property and threatened his life. What further injury remained? “I asked what he was going to do to me now?” Sanderson later wrote. The officer “made no reply, but with his hanger cut my bridle and girth, and then mounted.” Sanderson, to his amazement, found himself a free man. 25

  Major Mitchell released the other prisoners. He ordered his men to cut their bridles and girths and drive the horses away. Then the major rode over to Paul Revere’s guard, a sergeant of grenadiers, a big man on a little horse. The major asked if the sergeant’s mount was fatigued, then gestured toward Revere and ordered, “Take that man’s horse.” 26 Paul Revere was told to dismount. Brown Beauty was given to the sergeant, who mounted quickly. Then the Regulars turned their horses and rode off to the east at what Sanderson called “a good smart trot.” 27

  The liberated prisoners headed directly for Lexington Green. Paul Revere instantly began to think of capturing the men who had captured him. Sanderson remembered that they waded “through the swamp, through the mud and water, intending to arrive at the meetinghouse before they [the British officers] could pass, to give information to our people.” 28

  But the Regulars were moving too fast to be caught. The former captives watched as they stopped briefly near the meetinghouse, talked among themselves, then started at full gallop toward Cambridge. “We saw no more of them,” Sanderson remembered. 29

  It was also the last that Paul Revere saw of Brown Beauty. Deacon Larkin’s splendid horse had served him nobly that night. He watched her disappear into the night with a sergeant of grenadiers bouncing on her back. The Larkin family were later told that she was driven until she dropped to her knees and died in the night. Whatever happened, Brown Beauty was never seen by her owners again. 30

  The released captives were exhausted by their ordeal. Sanderson headed straight for the beckoning lights of Buckman’s Tavern on Lexington Green. “I went to the tavern,” he recalled later, “the citizens were coming and going; some went down to find whether the British were coming; some came back, and said there was no truth in it. I went into the tavern, and, after a while, went to sleep in my chair by the fire.” 31

  While Sanderson dozed in the warm tavern, Paul Revere remained outside, still on his feet. Suddenly he thought of one more urgent task that needed to be done. Revere turned away from the tavern lights, left the main road, and strode north across the countryside on yet another mission.

  THE ALARM

  Paul Revere and the Other Riders

  It must have been a preconcerted scheme in them.

  —British Colonel Francis Smith

  April 22, 1775

  The men appointed to alarm the country on such occasions … took their different routes,”

  —American leader John Adams,

  April 19, 1775

  IN THE TIME THAT Paul Revere remained a prisoner, his message traveled rapidly across the countryside. To many Americans, the legend of the Lexington alarm conjures up the image of a solitary rider, galloping bravely in the darkness from one lonely farmstead to the next. This romantic idea is etched indelibly upon the national memory, but it is not what actually happened that night. Many other riders helped Paul Revere to carry the alarm. Their participation did not in any way diminish his role, but actually enlarged it. The more we learn about these messengers, the more interesting Paul Revere’s part becomes—not merely as a solitary courier, but as an organizer and promoter of a common effort in the cause of freedom.

  Earlier that evening, while Paul Revere was making ready for his own midnight ride, he and his Whig friends began the work of dispatching other couriers with news of the British march. While he was still in Charlestown, preparing to travel west to Lexington, arrangements were made for another “express” to gallop north with the news that he had brought from Boston. The identity of this other courier is not known. Many people heard him in the dark, but few actually saw him, and nobody recorded his name. He set out from Charlestown at about the same hour as Paul Revere himself. His route took him north, through the present towns of Medford, Winchester, Woburn, and Wilmington. So swiftly did he gallop on dark and dangerous roads that by two o’clock in the morning he was in the town of Tewksb
ury on the Merrimack River, twenty-five miles north of Boston. 1

  Whoever he may have been, this messenger knew exactly where he was going, and what he was to do. When he reached Tewksbury, he spurred his horse through the streets of the sleeping village, and rode directly to the farm of Captain John Trull on Stickney Hill, near the town’s training field.

  Captain Trull was the head of Tewksbury’s militia, and a pivotal figure in the alarm system that Whig leaders had organized during the past few months. He was awakened by the courier who told him, “I have alarmed all the towns from Charlestown to here.” Trull rose from his bed, and took up his musket. Still in his nightdress, he fired three times from his bedroom window. This was a signal previously arranged with the militia commander in the neighboring town of Dracut, north of Tewksbury on the New Hampshire border. 2

  The sharp report of Captain Trull’s alarm gun carried across the Merrimack River, and the militia company of Dracut instantly began to muster. The hour was a little after two o’clock in the morning. At the moment when General Gage’s Regulars were still in the marshes of the East Cambridge, the news of their secret mission had traveled thirty miles from Boston to the New Hampshire line. These were 18th-century distances. Thirty miles was normally a long day’s journey in that era. 3

  The astonishing speed of this communication did not occur by accident. It was the result of careful preparation, and something else as well. Paul Revere and the other messengers did not spread the alarm merely by knocking on individual farmhouse doors. They also awakened the institutions of New England. The midnight riders went systematically about the task of engaging town leaders and military commanders of their region. They enlisted its churches and ministers, its physicians and lawyers, its family networks and voluntary associations. Paul Revere and his fellow Whigs of Massachusetts understood, more clearly than Americans of later generations, that political institutions are instruments of human will, and amplifiers of individual action. They knew from long experience that successful effort requires sustained planning and careful organization. The way they went about their work made a major difference that night.

  While the Tewksbury rider was galloping north, Paul Revere himself was on the road, traveling northeast from Charlestown to Medford. As we have seen, he had not planned to go that way, but once in the village of Medford, he went quickly about the task of awakening that community with remarkable economy of effort. He rode directly to the house of Captain Isaac Hall, commander of Medford’s minutemen, who instantly triggered the town’s alarm system. A townsman remembered that “repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air.” 4

  From Medford, Paul Revere’s friends started yet another express rider galloping to the northeast. He was Doctor Martin Herrick, a young Harvard graduate who studied in Medford and worked in the town of Lynnfield, fifteen miles to the north. Several Whig messengers that night were physicians. In that far-distant era when American physicians made house-calls, a country doctor was apt to own the best saddle horse in town, and be a highly experienced rider. He also tended to be a “high-toned son of liberty,” So it was with Martin Herrick. He carried Paul Revere’s message of alarm northeast from Medford to the village of Stone-ham, then turned east toward Reading, where he roused the militia officers in the south precinct of that town. From Reading he rode to Lynn End, alarmed the militia company and later joined it as a volunteer on the march—a busy night for young Doctor Herrick. 5

  Within a few hours, Doctor Herrick awakened a large area on the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay. He also set other riders in motion. One “express” was in Lynn by “early morn.” 6 Another galloped from Reading fifteen miles east to Danvers. A third rode fourteen miles north to Andover, where militiaman Thomas Boynton noted that “about the sun rising, the Town was alarmed with the News that the Regulars were on their March to Concord.” 7 Another resident of Andover, slower to get the word, wrote in his diary, “About seven o’clock we had alarum that the Reegelers was gon to Conkord we gathered at the meting hous & then started for Concord.” 8

  Along the North Shore of Massachusetts, church bells began to toll and the heavy beat of drums could be heard for many miles in the night air. Some towns responded to these warnings before a courier reached them. North Reading was awakened by alarm guns before sunrise. The first messenger appeared a little later. 9

  While the alarm was spreading rapidly to the north, Paul Revere and his fellow Whigs started yet another courier in a different direction—east from Medford to the town of Maiden. This express rider delivered the alarm to a Whig leader who went to an outcropping called Bell Rock, and rang the town bell. That prearranged signal summoned the men of Maiden with their weapons to a meeting place at Kettell’s Tavern. From Maiden, the alarm was carried east to Chelsea on the Atlantic coast. 10

  Meanwhile, Paul Revere himself was carrying the same message west from Medford to the village of Menotomy. There again he started other messengers in motion. This was the part of his journey of which he later wrote, “I alarmed almost every house, till I got to Lexington.” 11 From some of those houses men rode north and northwest to the precincts above Cambridge and Menotomy. Captain Ebenezer Stedman, a prominent Whig leader, was awakened at an early hour. He sent an express rider to Captain Joshua Walker and Major Loammi Baldwin in Woburn, north of Menotomy. From Woburn village, Captain Walker sent a messenger riding west to Jonathan Proctor in the second parish, now the town of Burlington. The alarm was also carried to the northwest in the same way. All along Paul Revere’s route, town leaders and militia commanders were systematically engaged—a fact of vital importance for the events that followed. 12

  Much of what happened that night was cloaked in secrecy, but repeated evidence indicates that Paul Revere played a unique role. From long association he was acquainted with leaders throughout the province. He knew who they were and where to find them, even in towns that he had not expected to visit. They knew him as well.

  It is instructive in that regard to compare the conduct of Paul Revere and William Dawes, who went about their work in very different ways. Revere’s ride to Lexington covered nearly thirteen miles in less than two hours. His circuit was a broad arc north and west of Boston. In every town along that route Paul Revere met with Whig leaders—Richard Devens in Charlestown, Isaac Hall in Medford, probably Ebenezer Stedman in Cambridge, Benjamin Locke and Solomon Bowman in Menotomy. 13

  William Dawes traveled a longer distance on a slower horse— nearly seventeen miles in about three hours. His route took him in a different direction, south across Boston Neck to Roxbury, then west and north through Brookline, Brighton, Cambridge, Menotomy, and Lexington. No evidence exists that he spoke with anyone before he reached the Clarke house in Lexington. It is difficult to believe that he did not talk with at least a few people on the road, but in many hundreds of accounts of the Lexington alarm, only one person remembered meeting him that night—Lexington’s Sergeant Munroe, who was unable to recollect his name and called him “Mr. Lincoln.” 14

  Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm system. On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, that did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown, or Waltham. Probably he did not know them. As we shall see, Roxbury and Brookline and Watertown would receive the alarm in other ways, long after Dawes had passed. Waltham never received it at all.

  The town of Waltham lay just west of Watertown and south of Lexington. Its northern border was only two miles from Lexington Green, closer than any other community. But the alarm system was not triggered in Waltham until much later the next morning, too late for its militia companies to join the fighting. Only a few farmers in the neighborhood called Waltham Farms, at the north end of town, heard the alarm. Some of these men would see action, but no company of militia from Waltham fought that day.
Several historians have suspected that the community was Tory in its sympathies—which certainly was not the case. Two days later, more than 200 Waltham men were in the field with the New England army. Many would fight bravely at Bunker Hill and on other fields. But on the 19th of April they mustered too late, through no fault of their own. Anyone with experience of military service will understand what happened. In the jargon of another war, Waltham was among the 10 percent who never got the word. 15

  The dogs that did not bark in Waltham and other southern towns were an important clue to the working of the alarm system, and to Paul Revere’s role that night. In North Waltham we find evidence that a knock on a farmhouse door was not enough to set the process in motion. Scattered homes received the warning, but military officers and town fathers were not notified, and the militia failed to muster in time. Here was further proof that Paul Revere and his fellow riders on his northern route succeeded in spreading the alarm by engaging the institutions of these rural communities, in a way that William Dawes did not.

  None of this is meant to deny William Dawes his role in the Lexington alarm. His ride was firmly documented, most of all by Paul Revere himself, who was always careful to give Dawes a share of the credit. On other occasions before and afterward, Dawes proved himself to be a brave and resourceful man who believed deeply in the Whig cause and served it faithfully. He carried his message to Lexington just as Doctor Warren had requested, in the face of many dangers. But Paul Revere did that, and more. 16

  When Dawes and Revere came together in Lexington, they began to work as a team. While they were at the Clarke house and the Buckman Tavern, other messengers were dispatched from Lexington center. Some rode east into parts of Cambridge that Revere had skirted on his detour to Medford. Lexington’s minister remembered that between 12 and 1 o’clock “two persons were sent express to Cambridge.” 17 The houses clustered around Harvard College received the news from the west at about two o’clock in the morning. Hannah Winthrop, who lived near Harvard yard, remembered that she was awakened by “beat of drum and ringing of bell,” a few hours before dawn. These were the drums and bells that the British Regulars themselves had begun to hear with growing concern, as they hurried on their way. 18