Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  THE EARLY YEARS

  Before Longfellow, Paul Revere was not regarded as a central player in the Revolutionary saga. He was known for his engravings (especially his depiction of the Boston Massacre), for his work as a silversmith, and for his political organizing in prewar Boston. John Singleton Copley painted his portrait, which showed Revere displaying his silver work—but that was several years before the midnight ride.3 Locally, Revere was also remembered as a patriotic man who climbed on a horse and rode off with a warning—but similar feats had been performed by countless others during the Revolutionary War. Although Revere was certainly respected for the various roles he played, he wasn’t exactly celebrated. Schoolbooks made no mention of Revere or his derring-do.

  Shortly after the fact, Paul Revere offered his own rendition of the ride that would someday make him famous. Three days after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress authorized the collection of firsthand reports from those who were participants or observers. Paul Revere came forward to tell what he knew.4

  Revere’s version—in simple prose, not verse—differed considerably from Longfellow’s. At about 10 o’clock on the evening of April 18, 1775, Revere stated in his deposition, Dr. Joseph Warren requested that he ride to Lexington with a message for Samuel Adams and John Hancock: “a number of Soldiers” appeared to be headed their way. Revere set out immediately. He was “put across” the Charles River to Charlestown, where he “got a Horse.” After being warned that nine British officers had been spotted along the road, he set off toward Lexington. Before he even left Charlestown, he caught sight of two, whom he was able to avoid. “I proceeded to Lexington, thro Mistick,” Revere stated flatly, “and alarmed Mr. Adams and Col. Hancock.”

  That was it—Revere devoted only one short sentence to his now-mythic ride. Additions were to come later. Nowhere in his statement did Revere mention the lantern signals from the Old North Church, a matter that seemed more trivial to him than it did to Longfellow. On the other hand, Revere did include much concrete information that Longfellow would later suppress, such as the fact that Dr. Warren sent a second messenger, a “Mr. Daws” (William Dawes), along an alternate route.

  For Revere, the night featured a harrowing experience that Longfellow, for reasons of his own, saw fit to overlook. After giving his message to Adams and Hancock, Revere and two others set out toward Concord to warn the people there—but he did not get very far before being captured by British officers. For most of the deposition, Revere talked of this capture, of how the officers had threatened to kill him five times, three times promising to “blow your brains out.” Though he had carried messages from town to town many times before, Revere had never encountered such serious danger. In his mind, this was the main event of the story.5

  Revere’s ordeal ended without personal calamity. After taking his horse, the officers released him. On foot, Revere retreated to Lexington, where he heard the first round of fire. Perhaps because he did not state point-blank that the British had fired first, the Provincial Congress thought Revere’s testimony was of little consequence, and they chose not to include it in their official report, A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King’s Troops.

  Seeming to concur with the judgment of the Congress, others granted Revere no more than a place on history’s sidelines. William Gordon, the early historian who conducted his own on-site interviews in the weeks to follow, did not feature Paul Revere’s ride in his detailed account of the events of Lexington and Concord. “Expresses were forwarded to alarm the country, some of whom were secured by the officers on the road”—that was all he bothered to say.6 Gordon expanded his treatment in the full-length history he published thirteen years later, but he still made no mention of any heroic exploits by Paul Revere:

  Dr. Warren, by mere accident, had notice of it [the British mobilization] just in time to send messengers over the neck and across the ferry, on to Lexington, before the orders for preventing every person’s quitting the town were executed. The officers intercepted several, but some being well mounted, escaped their vigilance; and the alarm, being once given, spread apace, by the ringing of bells, and the firing of signal guns and vollies.7

  All the early historians of the Revolution agreed: Revere was not a major player in the outbreak of hostilities. David Ramsay, writing in 1789, said only that “intelligence” was “sent to the country militia, of what was going on.”8 John Marshall (1804) mentioned Warren but not Revere: “The country was alarmed by messengers sent out by Doctor Warren, some of whom eluded the vigilance of the patrols.”9 Mercy Otis Warren (1805) wrote simply that “a report reached the neighboring towns very early.”10 For the four most prominent contemporary historians, the transport of a message from Dr. Warren to Samuel Adams and John Hancock appeared of less lasting import than nearly everything else that happened during the historic events of April 18 and 19, 1775.

  Although Paul Revere’s ride was a nonstarter in the early histories, Revere’s friends, neighbors, and fellow Freemasons knew of it and praised it. Joshua Fowle, who grew up near Revere in post-Revolutionary Boston, had heard of the signal lanterns and the midnight ride in his youth: “I have heard it told over many times and never doubted,” he later recalled. “It was common talk.” Early on, though neglected by formal history, the tale was germinating in folklore, and in 1795, a poet who signed his name “Eb. Stiles” set forth a doggerel prototype:

  He raced his steed through field and wood

  Nor turned to ford the river,

  But faced his horse to the foaming flood

  They swam across together.

  He madly dashed o’er mountain and moor,

  Never slackened spur nor rein

  Until with shout he stood by the door

  Of the Church on Concord green.11

  In Stiles’s poem the story took on a life of its own, richly decorated by nonexistent mountains and moors and foaming flood. Finally, twenty years after the fact, Stiles enabled Revere to reach “the Church on Concord green”—a destination that eluded him on April 19, 1775.

  Perhaps in response to this emerging folklore, Jeremy Belknap, corresponding secretary for the Massachusetts Historical Society, asked Revere to provide a detailed account of his ride. Revere obliged, but he signed his paper “A Son of Liberty of the year 1775,” and then added “do not print my name.” When Belknap published the piece in the society’s Collections, dated January 1, 1798, he contradicted Revere’s wish and set his name in print.

  In this account, delivered nearly a quarter of a century after his initial deposition, Revere abridged the once traumatic saga of his capture but included the story of the signal lanterns, perhaps by popular request. Revere also wrote at length about Benjamin Church’s alleged treachery, unknown at the time of his original deposition. Since Revere’s new account, like its predecessor, was undoubtedly less dramatic than folkloric renditions, it might actually have slowed the growth of the incipient legend.12

  When Revere died in 1818, his obituary in the Boston Intelligencer and Weekly Gazette made no mention of his midnight ride.13 In 1830 Freeman Hunt placed 487 popular tales of the Revolution into two volumes, American Anecdotes: Original and Select, yet he failed to mention Paul Revere. By contrast, Lydia Darrah, who warned George Washington about British maneuvers in 1777, made the grade, one of many heroes and heroines nationally recognized at that time.14

  Still, local history enthusiasts kept the memory alive. Through midcentury, reports of his ride emerged and reemerged. On the fiftieth anniversary of the opening battles of the Revolutionary War, William Munroe, who had guarded the house where Adams and Hancock were staying, cited Paul Revere’s role: “I told him the family had just retired
, and had requested, that they might not be disturbed by any noise about the house. ‘Noise!’ said he, ‘[Y]ou’ll have noise enough before long. The British are coming out.’ ”15 In 1849 Richard Frothingham published the first comprehensive account of the warning of the countryside, and he included Paul Revere’s role. Basing his report on depositions by Revere and other participants, Frothingham demonstrated that at least four different couriers had been sent to Lexington on the evening of April 18, including Paul Revere, and three of these had delivered their messages.16

  With the facts laid out, Revere’s story inched its way into the core narrative of the Revolution. In his 1851 Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, Benson Lossing mentioned both Paul Revere and William Dawes by name, and he included William Munroe’s anecdote.17 In 1854 George Bancroft gave a fairly accurate rendering of the story: both Revere and Dawes delivered their messages to Lexington, he said, but only Samuel Prescott was able to elude the British officers and deliver the warning to Concord.18

  Although the story was beginning to receive attention beyond local boundaries, it was still only one of many. Three-quarters of a century after his ride, Paul Revere had not yet become a household name—and with good reason. Revere did not distinguish himself as a military hero. He was not a famous statesmen—in fact, he was not even one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He delivered no memorable speeches, he swayed no crowds, he made no public pronouncements of lasting significance. In the 1850s, there was no reason to suspect that Paul Revere was about to be initiated into the pantheon of Revolutionary heroes—one of the five or ten most celebrated figures of his generation.

  Even so, Revere had found an appropriate niche in the annals of history. Writers during this period treated history as a series of anecdotes—distinct moments that made the past come alive—and the story of the midnight ride fit right in. Between them, Lossing and Bancroft relayed literally thousands of such tales, isolated moments featuring individual deeds in service of the Revolution.19 That’s where Paul Revere’s ride might stand today—just one short scene in a giant epic—had Henry Wadsworth Longfellow not discovered the Revolutionary bit player and cast him in a leading role.

  POETIC LICENSE

  Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” first appeared in the January 1861 issue of the Atlantic. The poem opened with an endearing invocation:

  Listen, my children, and you shall hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, . . .

  Then, in the galloping cadence of anapestic tetrameter—two slow beats followed by one long, repeated four times—Longfellow created an unforgettable tale that appealed to adults and children alike. Even in those days, nothing could thrill an audience more than an exciting chase:

  A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

  A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,

  And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark

  Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;

  That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,

  The fate of a nation was riding that night;

  And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,

  Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

  For Longfellow, one man alone held “the fate of the nation” in his hands. The notion that an individual hero could generate a “spark” that would “kindle the land into flame” was central to the worldview of nineteenth-century Romanticism. It also conformed to the formula for successful narratives. A storyteller par excellence, Longfellow naturally emphasized the motive force of individual action.20

  Although “Paul Revere’s Ride” has enjoyed more exposure than any other historic poem in American culture, it is riddled with distortions. These are not incidental—they are the very reasons the story has endured for a century and a half. Four historical misrepresentations are particularly significant:

  (1)Strangely, in 130 lines, Longfellow says not a word about the detention by British officers, the major focus of Paul Revere’s own tale. That would reveal a British presence in the vicinity of Lexington and Concord, a presence of which some of the townspeople were already aware—what need then for a messenger? For the story to work, all British soldiers have to be stationed to the rear of Revere and his horse. “The Redcoats are coming” loses its dramatic effect if we know that some Redcoats have already arrived.

  (2)To achieve maximum effect, Longfellow has Revere visit “every Middlesex village and farm.” Although some allowance can be made for hyperbole, Longfellow certainly knew that his protagonist never reached Concord, the destination of the British troops and the town most in need of warning. The real Revere had tried and failed to get that far. Understandably, Longfellow did not wish to burden his story with the sober realization that the hero had been prevented from achieving his final objective.

  (3)Longfellow’s Revere works both ends of the signal lantern ploy, which accounts for more than half the poem. Before crossing the Charles River, Revere tells a “friend” how to work the signal; then, after arriving on the opposite shore, Revere waits to receive it, “impatient to mount and ride.” For sixteen lines Revere pats his horse, gazes across the landscape, and stamps the earth, fretfully passing the time until he finally spots two lights. In reality this is not what happened. We do not know who waited to receive the signal on the opposite shore, but we do know it was not Paul Revere. After being dispatched by Joseph Warren, but before crossing the river, Revere himself arranged for two lanterns to be lit—so that someone else might see them in Charlestown and set off to warn other patriots. Someone else? Again, facts had to be altered to accommodate the story. There could be no other rider in “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

  (4)Except for two bit players—his horse and the friend who lit the lanterns—Longfellow’s Revere acted alone. In fact, there were many others. In 1994 historian David Hackett Fischer reconstructed the event with a full cast of characters, including:

  •A stable boy, a hostler, and at least two other Bostonians who sent word to Revere that British soldiers were readying for an offensive.

  •Someone within General Gage’s closest circle (possibly his own wife, Margaret Kemble Gage) who informed Dr. Joseph Warren of the offensive.

  •Dr. Warren, who, on behalf of the Boston Committee, asked Revere to deliver a warning to Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

  •William Dawes, who carried the same message by a different route, also at the request of Joseph Warren.

  •Three different “friends” who engineered the clandestine lighting of the signal lanterns: John Pulling, Robert Newman, and Thomas Bernard.

  •Two boatmen who rowed Revere across the Charles River.

  •Colonel Conant and other patriots from Charlestown who waited patiently to receive the lantern signal they had arranged with Revere two days earlier.

  •An unidentified messenger who was dispatched from Charlestown as soon as the signal from the lanterns was received. (Since this messenger never reached either Lexington or Concord, the entire signal lantern subplot is never consummated.)

  •Richard Devens of Charlestown, who greeted Revere by the river’s shore and warned him that British officers were patrolling the road to Lexington and Concord.

  •Devens, Abraham Watson, Elbridge Gerry, Charles Lee, and Azor Orne, members of the Provincial Committee of Safety, who sent a note to Hancock in Lexington, warning him that British officers were headed his way.

  •An anonymous courier who successfully delivered this message at about eight o’clock in the evening, three hours before Revere would mount his horse.

  •The innkeeper at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy (now Arlington), who later that night warned Gerry, Lee, and Orne that
British troops had arrived, enabling them to escape out the back door.

  •Solomon Brown of Lexington, who warned William Munroe, a sergeant in the town militia, that British officers were headed toward Lexington, and who later tried to alert the people of Concord to the presence of the officers, but was soon captured.

  •Munroe and eight other militiamen who stood guard through the night at the house of Jonas Clarke, the Lexington minister, where Adams and Hancock were staying.

  •Thirty other Lexington militiamen who gathered at Buckman Tavern at 9:00 p.m. to deal with the crisis, two hours prior to Revere’s departure on his famous ride.

  •Elijah Sanderson and Jonathan Loring of the Lexington militia, who volunteered to keep a watch on the British officers.

  •Josiah Nelson, a farmer who resided on the road to Concord, who had his head slashed by the sword of one of the British officers, then alerted all his neighbors.

  •John Larkin of Charlestown, who lent Revere a horse that belonged to his father, Samuel.

  •Another unidentified messenger from Charlestown who set off at the same time as Revere, heading north. This rider reached Tewksbury, twenty-five miles from Boston, at about the time Revere himself was taken captive by the British officers.

  •Captain John Trull of Tewksbury, who, upon receiving news from the Charlestown rider, fired three shots from his bedroom window—a signal that lacked the finesse of the lanterns in Old North Church but that had a greater impact. The militia commander in Dracut, on the New Hampshire boundary, heard the shots and mustered his militia—several hours before the bloody dawn at Lexington.

  •Samuel Tufts of East Cambridge, who embarked on a ride of his own after his neighbor, Elizabeth Rand, told him she had spotted the British column.

  •Solomon Bowman, lieutenant of the Menotomy militia, who immediately mustered his town’s company after viewing the British soldiers.

  •Isaac Hull, captain of the Medford militia, who received word from Revere, then mustered his company.