Founding Myths

Founding Myths Page 3

by Ray Raphael

  •Dr. Martin Herrick, who left Medford to alarm Stoneham, Reading, and Lynn. These towns, in turn, sent out their own riders; by dawn, the entire North Shore of Massachusetts Bay was aroused and in the process of mustering.

  •Another messenger from Medford who headed east to Malden, and from there to Chelsea.

  •Yet another messenger from Medford who journeyed to Woburn, and still another from Woburn to the parish above it, now Burlington, and so on, ad infinitum, until almost every “Middlesex village and farm” had been warned by a vast network of messengers and signals—all in the wee hours of the morning on April 19, 1775.

  •Finally, Samuel Prescott, a doctor from Concord, who managed to get the message to the people of his hometown that hundreds of British troops were coming their way to seize their military stores. Although Revere, Dawes, and Prescott had all been captured on the road between Lexington and Concord, Prescott alone staged a successful escape and completed the mission.21

  Paul Revere was not so alone after all. When the main British column approached Lexington, bells and signal shots echoed from front and rear. The entire countryside was aroused and ready. This wasn’t the work of one man but of an intricate web of patriotic activists who had been communicating with each other for years. Ever since the overthrow of British authority late in the summer of 1774 (see chapter 4), they had prepared for military confrontation. Anticipating just such an event as the British assault on Lexington and Concord, they had rehearsed their response. Each man within each town knew whom to contact and where to go once the time came—and now the time had come. Like Paul Revere, myriad patriots sounded their local alarms and readied themselves for action.

  AN ENDURING TALE

  Facts matter little when a good story is at stake. From the time of its first publication, “Paul Revere’s Ride” was a national classic, and readers assumed it signified actual events. Schoolbooks confidently reiterated Longfellow’s distortions. According to an 1888 text, A History of the United States and Its People, for the Use of Schools, Revere “waited at Charlestown until he saw a light hung in a church-steeple, which was a signal to him that the British were moving.” It dutifully cited a source, referring students to “Longfellow’s famous poem on the subject.”22 Although some texts noted that the poem was “not strictly historical,” others blithely accepted Longfellow’s altered plotline. A 1923 text, History of Our Country, for Higher Grades, stated fancifully, “On that night there was at Charlestown, across the river from Boston, an American of Huguenot descent holding a horse by the bridle, while he watched for a lantern signal from a church tower. His name was Paul Revere, and he is known as ‘the courier of the Revolution.’ ”23 Texts in 1935 and 1946 also had Revere waiting for the lantern signal—accompanied for a change by William Dawes, who in fact never went through Charlestown.24

  Fiction, in conscientious hands, often follows history, but here history unquestionably followed fiction. Even serious scholars fell into line behind the poet. In 1891 John Fiske, one of the most prominent historians of his generation, told how Paul Revere crossed “the broad river in a little boat,” then waited “on the farther bank until he learned, from a lantern suspended in the belfry of the North Church, which way the troops had gone.”25

  Starting in the 1920s, iconoclastic “debunkers” poked fun at Longfellow’s Revere. William Dawes, one of the other riders, enjoyed something of a renaissance when his descendent Charles Dawes became vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. Traditionalists fought back: in 1922 an army captain, E.B. Lyon, dropped patriotic pamphlets from a military aircraft following the trail of Paul Revere’s ride.26

  The most serious challenge came not from debunkers or Progressive historians, however, but from Progressive educators, who opposed rote memorization. But as recitations of Longfellow’s poem began to fade from the standard curricula, Esther Forbes breathed new life into the Revere story with her Pulitzer Prize–winning Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Resuscitated, her Revere is a simple artisan who leads an everyday life. Although Forbes used Revere to celebrate the common man, she reiterated the traditional view that Revere served as the “lone horseman” who saved the day for the patriots.27

  Not until 1994 were Longfellow’s errors laid to rest in David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, a masterful work of historical detection that influenced the writing of textbooks in the years that followed. No longer was Revere portrayed as the lonely messenger who rowed himself across the river, waited to receive the lantern signals, and alerted the countryside all by himself. (One notable exception was Joy Hakim’s A History of US, which still followed Longfellow word for word.28) Others were involved, most revised texts stated—but they didn’t say it very forcefully. “Paul Revere, a member of the Sons of Liberty, rode his horse to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams,” said one text—then, almost as an afterthought, it added, “Revere was joined by William Dawes and Samuel Prescott.”29 The visual accompaniment, of course, featured a statue of Revere, not Dawes or Prescott. According to another, “Paul Revere [emphasis in original], a Boston silversmith, and a second messenger, William Dawes, were charged with spreading the news about British troop movements. . . . When the British moved, so did Revere and Dawes. They galloped over the countryside on their ‘midnight ride,’ spreading the news.”30 In these watered-down versions, one rider turned into two or three, with Revere always in the lead.31 The romance was gone, yet there was no hint of the elaborate web of communication that was activated on that momentous night.

  Ever since Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s ride has been part of America’s heritage, and no history of our nation’s beginnings would dare ignore it. All United States history textbooks at the elementary, middle school, and secondary levels, and the vast majority of college texts as well, still mention Paul Revere’s ride, and this includes surveys that undertake no more than a cursory review of the American Revolution.32 Even texts that evidence no particular desire to pass on the legend must figure a way to mention Revere somehow. According to one current secondary text, “Tipped off by men, including Paul Revere, who had ridden into the countryside to warn of the approaching British troops, the local Patriots rallied to drive the troops back to Boston.” Although Longfellow’s influence is reduced to a bare minimum, “including Revere” still must make an appearance.33

  In the last few years, with memory of Fischer’s work receding, there has even been a bit of backsliding. One otherwise excellent college text, while trying to broaden the story, inadvertently reverts to the signal lantern ploy, Longfellow’s signature distortion: “Alerted by signal lanterns, express riders Paul Revere and William Dawes eluded British patrols and spurred their horses toward Lexington along separate routes to warn Hancock and Adams. Bells and alarm guns spread the word that the British were coming.” In fact, neither Revere nor Dawes was alerted by signal lanterns, and most modern texts have long since abandoned “the British were coming” in favor of “the Regulars were coming,” since even the rebels still considered themselves British at that point.34

  Authors of a middle-school text pass on the legend while technically avoiding a falsehood: “As the troops set out, a signal sent by the Patriots appeared in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church. Two men, Paul Revere and William Dawes, then rode through the night to warn the minutemen.” Students reading this passage will of course assume that the two sentences are causally linked and that Revere and Dawes, having seen the signals, set off on their mission. This version, by pulling Dawes into the signal lantern legend, actually magnifies rather that alleviates the error.35 Another middle-school text, also intent on featuring Dawes, garbles the story entirely: “When Revere and
fellow patriot William Dawes saw two lights shine, they set off on horseback. Using two different routes out of Boston, they sounded the alert.”36 Here, both patriots are receiving the signal within Boston, undermining the whole purpose of the lanterns, which was to get the news across the Charles River.

  Elementary- and middle-school texts still depict Revere on horseback, even if he is not always the only one: “Revere galloped across the moonlit countryside, shouting, ‘The regulars are out!’ to people along the way.”37 That image excites children and will not die. One current fifth-grade text presents Longfellow’s poem in its entirety, then reinforces the basic premise with a question: “CAUSE AND EFFECT—What signal caused Paul Revere to begin his ride?” Then comes a map of Revere’s route—no Dawes, no Prescott—and a picture of a statue depicting Revere on his horse, with the steeple of Old North Church rising in the background. “Two lanterns were hung in the church tower to signal British plans to cross the Charles River by boat,” the caption says. No fifth grader could possibly doubt, after all this, that Paul Revere and his horse waited impatiently on the opposite shore, just as Longfellow said.38

  THE FULL PICTURE

  The story of “Paul Revere’s ride” needs not only correction or disingenuous hedging but also perspective. One hundred twenty-two people lost their lives within hours of Revere’s heroics, and almost twice that number were wounded.39 Revere’s ride was not the major event that day, nor was Revere’s warning so critical in triggering the bloodbath. Patriotic farmers had been preparing to oppose the British for the better part of a year. Paul Revere himself had contributed to those preparations with other important rides. After the Boston Tea Party, he rode to other seaport cities to spread the news. In May 1774, in response to the Boston Port Act, he rode to Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia to drum up support for his hometown, and that summer he spread the call for a Continental Congress. In September 1774, seven months before his most noted journey, he traveled from Boston to Philadelphia, bearing news that the Massachusetts countryside had erupted in rebellion, and the First Continental Congress, after hearing from Revere, offered its stamp of approval. That December, four months before the shots at Lexington, he instigated the first military offensive of the Revolution by riding to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On April 7, 1775, eleven days before his most celebrated ride, he rode to Concord (which he reached that time) to warn local patriots to conceal or move their stockpiled military stores because additional troops had arrived in Boston and would soon be making their move. On April 16, with just two days to go, he traveled to Charlestown and Lexington to fine-tune preparations with local leaders, who expected the Regulars to march any day. The ride to Lexington that Longfellow chose to celebrate continued this tradition, but, as in previous rides, it took on meaning only because numerous other political activists had, like Revere, dedicated themselves to the cause.40

  Paul Revere was one among tens of thousands of patriots from Massachusetts who rose to fight the British. Most of those people lived outside of Boston, and, contrary to the traditional telling, these people were not country cousins to their urban counterparts. They were rebels in their own right, although their story is rarely told. We have neglected them, in part, because Paul Revere’s ride has achieved such fame; one man from Boston, the story goes, roused the sleeping farmers, and only then did farmers see the danger and fight back.

  In truth, the country folk had aroused themselves, and they had even staged their own revolution more than half a year before (see chapter 4). The story of Paul Revere’s ride marks the end, not the beginning, of that inspiring tale. It bridges the gap between two momentous events: the political upheaval that unseated British authority in 1774 and the outbreak of formal hostilities on April 19, 1775. But ironically, in its romanticized form, the tale has helped obscure the revolution of the people that was going on both before and after. The true story of patriotic resistance is deeper and richer than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with his emphasis on individual heroics, ever dared to imagine.

  2

  SAM ADAMS’S MOB

  In A. J. Langguth’s popular book Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution, one patriot stands out from the rest. Samuel Adams is the instigator of every revolutionary event in Boston, while all the other patriots are merely his “recruits,” his “legions,” his “roster,” his “band.”1 Liberty!—the companion volume to a PBS series on the American Revolution—proudly proclaims, “Without Boston’s Sam Adams, there might never have been an American Revolution.”2 Children’s book author Dennis Fradin makes this point even more emphatically: “During the decade before the war began, Samuel Adams was basically a one-man revolution.”3

  Samuel Adams was not always the hero we make him out to be today. “If the American Revolution was a blessing, and not a curse,” wrote John Adams, Samuel’s cousin, in 1819, “the name and character of Samuel Adams ought to be preserved. A systematic course has been pursued for thirty years to run him down.”4 From Revolutionary times to the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston’s most celebrated idol was not Samuel Adams but his close friend and colleague Dr. Joseph Warren, the nation’s first martyr. John Trumbull’s 1786 painting currently known as The Battle of Bunker Hill was in fact titled The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill. These days the eminent Dr. Warren is rarely celebrated, while we take considerable pride in our most famous mischief maker, the troublesome Mr. Adams. One modern biography is affectionately titled Samuel Adams’s Revolution, 1765–1776: With the Assistance of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George III, and the People of Boston.

  “Without Boston’s Sam Adams, there might never have been an American Revolution.”

  Samuel Adams. Engraving based on

  John Singleton Copley’s portrait, 1772.

  Why the shift? In the aftermath of the War for Independence, Americans were embarrassed by any radical taint, so they did not talk kindly about notorious political activists. But with the passage of time, radicals, like gangsters, can turn into heroes. Contemporary Americans, settled and secure, need not feel threatened by stories of illegal, outlandish activities such as the destruction of shiploads of tea. Indeed, we are titillated by tales of our nation’s errant youth. The Boston Tea Party elicits knowing smiles, and Sam Adams, our Revolutionary bad boy and favorite rabble-rouser, brings forth fond feelings.

  Ironically, this troublemaker imbues the American Revolution with design and purpose. There are two key components to his mythic story: he advocated independence many years before anybody else dared entertain the notion, and he worked the people of Boston into a frenzy to achieve his goal. These are not incidental to our telling of the American Revolution; our view of the nation’s conception leans heavily upon them. Because Adams supposedly had the foresight to envision independence, we are able to perceive the tumultuous crowd actions in pre-Revolutionary Boston as connected, coherent events pointing toward an ultimate break from England. Without this element of personal intent, the rebellion would be a mindless muddle, purely reactive, with no sense of mission. Without an author, the script becomes unwieldy; without a director, the crowd becomes unruly—but Sam Adams, mastermind of independence, keeps the Revolution on cue. He wrote the script, directed the cast, and staged a masterful performance.

  The beauty of the story is that Adams was not some autocrat, remote and aloof from the people he directed. He was one of the crowd—one of us. Perhaps that is why we like to call Samuel “Sam,” although only his enemies called him that during his lifetime. Even John Adams referred to his cousin as “Mr. Samuel Adams,” “Mr. Adams,” or by way of abbreviation, “Mr. S. Adams” or “Mr. Sam. Adams,” following the custom of
the times, as in “Wm.” for “William.”5 (In this book, “Sam” denotes the legend, “Samuel” the historical person.) Unlike many a Revolutionary patriarch, he was supposedly at home on the streets, mixing with the people, raising toasts in the taverns. How fitting that his face now adorns no coins or bills—only a bottle of beer.

  Sam Adams, who both represents and controls the crowd, allows us to celebrate “the people.” Or so it would seem. In fact, while the Sam Adams story appears to celebrate the people, it does not take them seriously. That’s why the story was first invented by Adams’s Tory adversaries, who wrote “the people” out of the script by placing Adams—a single, diabolical villain—in charge of all popular unrest. To understand the damaging implications of the Sam Adams story, and to see how it distorts what really happened in Revolutionary Boston, we have to examine its genesis.

  THE TORIES’ TALE

  Not wanting to grant legitimacy to any form of protest, conservatives in the 1760s and 1770s maintained that all the troubles in Boston were the machinations of a single individual. In the words of Peter Oliver, the Crown-appointed chief justice who was later exiled, the people themselves “were like the Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch.” Mindless and incapable of acting on their own, they needed a director who could “fabricate the Structure of Rebellion from a single straw.”6

  According to this mechanistic view, one man led and everyone else followed. At the outset, that master of manipulation was not Samuel Adams but James Otis Jr. According to Oliver, the mentally deranged Otis had vowed in 1761 “that if his Father was not appointed a Justice of the superior Court, he would set the Province in a Flame.” This he proceeded to do, using the unruly yet pliable Boston rabble to fight his battle.7 Thomas Hutchinson, the man who was chosen over James Otis Sr., told a similar tale, although less bombastically than Oliver.8

 

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