Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  28.Joy Hakim, A History of US (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3: 71–73. Although Hakim does include Dawes and Prescott, she passes on the signal-light tale precisely as Longfellow conjured it: “Someone had to get a warning to those towns—and fast. It would help to know which way the redcoats would march. Would they go by the land route over the Boston Neck? Or would they take the shorter route—by boat across the water to Charlestown and then on foot from there? . . . Paul Revere sent someone to spy on the British. ‘Find out which way the redcoats will march,’ the spy was told. ‘Then climb into the high bell tower of the North Church and send a signal. Light one lantern if they go by land. Hang two lanterns if they go by sea.’ Revere got in a boat and quietly rowed out into the Charles River. A horse was ready for him on the Charlestown shore. He waited—silently.” At this point, Hakim shifts to Longfellow himself: “And lo! As he looks, on the belfry’s height / A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! / He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, / But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight / A second lamp in the belfry burns!” Hakim then continues: “Now he knew! The redcoats would take the water route across the Charles River, just as Paul Revere was doing.”

  29.Michael J. Berson, ed., United States History: Beginnings (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), 291.

  30.Jesus Garcia et al., Creating America: A History of the United States, Beginnings through Reconstruction (Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell, 2002), 156–157.

  31.Three is the upper limit, never a hint of any more. “Three men rode and gave warning of a British attack. One man was William Dawes. Who were the other two?” asks an online quiz. The choices: Dr. Samuel Prescott, Major John Pitcairn, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere. (Softschools.com: http://www.softschools.com/quizzes/social_studies/revolutionary_war/quiz414.html)

  32.Thirteen texts displayed at the 2002 annual conference of the National Council for Social Studies in Phoenix, Arizona, all told the story. These included six elementary and middle-school texts: Sterling Stuckey and Linda Kerrigan Salvucci, Call to Freedom (Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003); Joyce Appleby et al., The American Republic to 1877 (New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2003); Berson, United States History: Beginnings; James West Davidson, The American Nation: Beginnings through 1877 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); Garcia, Creating America: A History of the United States; and Hakim, A History of US. The seven secondary-school texts are: Joyce Appleby et al., The American Vision (New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2003); Gerald A. Danzer et al., The Americans (Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell, 2003); Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, A History of the United States (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002); David Goodfield et al., The American Journey: A History of the United States (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001); John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); Robert A. Divine et al., America: Past and Present (New York: Longman, 2003); and Paul Boyer, American Nation (Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003). Newer editions incorporating versions of the Revere story include Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner, Peter B. Levy, Randy Roberts, Alan Taylor, United States History, Survey Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2013); James West Davidson and Michael B. Stoff, America: History of Our Nation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2014); Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, Albert S. Broussard, James M. McPherson, and Donald A. Ritchie, The American Journey (Columbus, OH: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2012); Michael J. Berson, Tyrone C. Howard, and Cinthia Salinas, Harcourt Social Studies—United States: Making a New Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012); William Deverell and Deborah Gray White, Holt McDougal United States History: Beginnings to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012); Gerald A. Danzer, J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Larry S. Krieger, Louis E. Wilson, and Nancy Woloch, The Americans (Geneva, IL: Holt McDougal, 2012).

  33.Lapsansky-Werner et al., United States History, 108. One recent secondary text comes closer to getting the story right. On April 18 Dr. Joseph Warren, upon receiving intelligence that British soldiers were preparing to march to Lexington and Concord, immediately sent for Revere, who “began to organize a network of riders who would spread the alarm.” Then Revere, Dawes, and Prescott went forth and “the darkened countryside rang with church bells and gunshots—prearranged signals to warn the population that the Regulars were coming.” This captures some of the truth but not all of it. Revere did not wait until the day the British were set to march to organize a network of riders; he and others had been doing this since early April, when they received news of British reinforcements. (Danzer et al., The Americans, 100–101.)

  34.Jacqueline Jones, Peter H. Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyler May, Vicki L. Ruiz, Created Equal: A History of the United States, vol. 1, Third Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Longman, 2009), 195.

  35.Davidson and Stoff, America: History of Our Nation, 153. See also a magazine-format college text by the same authors: “On the night of April 18 the sexton of Boston’s Christ Church hung two lamps from its steeple. It was a signal the British troops had moved out of Boston and were marching toward the arms and ammunition stored by the provincial Congress in Concord. As the lamps flashed the signal, Revere and a comrade, William Dawes, rode out to arouse the countryside.” (James West Davidson, Brian Delay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, U.S.: A Narrative History, Volume 1 [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012)], 116–17).

  36.Deverell and White, United States History, 114.

  37.Appleby et al., American Journey, 135.

  38.Berson et al., United States: Making a New Nation, 288–91, 314–15.

  39.Howard H. Peckham, The Toll of Independence: Engagements and Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 3.

  40.For a list specifying the locations, dates, and purposes of Revere’s various rides, including others I have not mentioned, see Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 299–300.

  2: Sam Adams’s Mob

  1.A.J. Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 35, 57, 63, 89, 93.

  2.Thomas Fleming, Liberty! The American Revolution (New York: Viking, 1997), 83.

  3.Dennis B. Fradin, The Signers: The Fifty-Six Stories Behind the Declaration of Independence (New York: Walker and Company, 2002), 2.

  4.Quoted in Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 7.

  5.For a wide assortment of contemporaneous comments on Samuel Adams, see John P. Kaminski, ed., The Founders on the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 61–80. The only use of “Sam” in these numerous selections are from Peter Oliver’s diatribe against Adams in Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (see note 6), a hearsay quote from Lord North, and informal “notes” taken by a third party on a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster in 1824.

  6.Peter Oliver, Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 65, 75.

  7.Oliver, Origin and Progress, 28.

  8.Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936; first published, 1828), 3: 63.

  9.Oliver, Origin and Progress, 39–41. Again, Hutchinson had a similar view of Adams, but he expressed this view less flamboyantly (see Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, 3: 212).

  10.John Andrews to William Barrell, August 11, 1774, in Massachusetts Historical Society, “Letters of John Andrews of Boston, 1772–1776,” Proceedings 8 (1864–1865), 340.

  11.Sylvester’s affidavit, with its flamboyant accusations, is reprinted in James
K. Hosmer, Samuel Adams (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 117–119, and Mary Caroline Crawford, Old Boston Days and Ways (Boston: Little, Brown, 1913), 253–255.

  12.Stewart Beach, Samuel Adams: The Fateful Years, 1764–1776 (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1965), 171–172. We do not know exactly why the charges were dismissed, but the attempt to frame Samuel Adams does not ring true: Adams’s tone is uncharacteristic of his tone elsewhere; there is no evidence that he knew anyone named Sylvester; and it is implausible to think that Adams would have been visiting such a man frequently at his home. Sylvester attributed identical words to Benjamin Church, whom he was also trying to implicate as treasonous, and who would have been even less likely to say anything of the kind; at least later on, Church was an informer for the British.

  13.George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1879; first published, 1834–1874), 4: 109–110.

  14.See, for example, William Deverell and Deborah Gray White, Holt McDougal United States History: Beginnings to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 101. A Google search (May 1, 2013) reveals 1,680 hits for “I look upon them as foreign enemies.”

  15.William Hallahan, The Day the American Revolution Began (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 65.

  16.Samuel Adams to John Smith, December 20, 1765, in Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 1: 60. Even college texts sometimes fail to distinguish between the two events: “In a carefully orchestrated series of mob action, Bostonians made certain that the Stamp Act would not be enforced. . . . Over a series of several days, the mob systematically vandalized the homes of several wealthy governmental loyalists, including Hutchinson. Although the mob consisted mostly of artisans and poor people, it had the support of Boston’s merchant elite, for no one was ever punished.” (James Oakes, Michael McGerr, Jan Ellen Lewis, Nick Cullather, and Jeanne Boydston, Of the People: A History of the United States, vol. 1, Concise Edition [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], 170.)

  17.Louis Birnbaum, Red Dawn at Lexington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 25.

  18.James West Davidson, Brian Delay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, U.S.: A Narrative History, Volume 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 113.

  19.Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, 3: 198–199.

  20.John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 83; Michael Burgan, Samuel Adams: Patriot and Statesman (Minneapolis: Compass Point, 2005), 55.

  21.Birnbaum, Red Dawn at Lexington, 29. See also Langguth, Patriots, 179.

  22.Although the author remains unknown, a manuscript from the Sewall papers in Ottawa is accepted by scholars as the most detailed authentic rendition of the meeting at Old South. After Rotch, one of the shipowners, reported that the governor would not let him return the tea to England, “Mr. Adams said that he could think of nothing further to be done,” the account states. “About 10 or 15 minutes later,” it continues, “I heard a hideous yelling in the Street at the S. West Corner of the Meeting House and in the Porch, as of an Hundred People, some imitating the Powaws of Indians and other the Whistle of a Boatswain, which was answered by some few in the House; on which Numbers hastened out as fast as possible while Mr. Adams, Mr. Hancock, Dr. Young with several others called out to the People to stay, for they said they had not quite done. . . . Mr. Adams addressed the Moderator in these Words, ‘Mr. Moderator, I move that Dr. Young make (or be desired to make) a Speech’—which being approved of, Dr. Young made one accordingly of about 15 or 20 Minutes Length. . . . [W]hen he had done, the Audience paid him the usual Tribute of Bursts of Applause, Clapping, etc. and immediately Mr. Savage (the Moderator) dissolved the Meeting.” (L.F.S. Upton, ed., “Proceeding of Ye Body Respecting the Tea,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 22 [1965]: 297–298.) According to another firsthand account, “Mr. Samuel Adams cried out that it was a trick of their enemies to disturb the meeting, and requested the people to keep their places.” (Francis S. Drake, ed., Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents relating to the Subject of Tea to the American Colonies in the year 1773 [Boston: A.O. Crane, 1884], LXX.) “An Impartial Observer” reported in both the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette of December 20 that after the first “war-whoop” from the doorway, “silence was commanded, and a prudent and peaceable deportment again enjoined.” A similar report appeared in the December 23 issue of the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter.

  23.Bancroft, History of the United States, 4: 280.

  24.William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969; first published, 1865–1888), 2: iv, and 2: 122. The idea of a “signal” was first suggested by William Gordon in 1788. Writing in the present tense to bring his readers closer to the action, Gordon wrote that upon Rotch’s announcement “there is a great deal of disputing, when a person disguised like an Indian, gives the war-whoop in the front gallery, where there are few if any besides himself. Upon this signal it is moved and voted that the meeting be immediately dissolved. The people crowd out and run in numbers to Griffin’s wharf.” (The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America [Reprint edition: Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969], 1: 341.) In this rendition, it was not Adams who gave the alleged “signal” but an unnamed person with a war-whoop. While Gordon’s timing, like Bancroft’s and Wells’s, is inconsistent with firsthand testimony, if there was some sort of “signal,” a war-whoop seems a more plausible candidate than Adams’s alleged coded message.

  25.Sources suggesting that Adams advocated independence long before anyone else need to be examined critically. The most direct “evidence” comes from Joseph Galloway, a moderate at the First Continental Congress who turned Tory when his views did not prevail. According to Galloway, when independence was declared, Adams boasted that “he had laboured upwards of twenty years to accomplish the measure.” (Galloway, Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Revolution [London: G. Wilkie, 1780], 109–110. Cited in Ralph V. Harlow, Samuel Adams: Promoter of the American Revolution [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975; first published in 1923], 288.) Galloway, who blamed his defeat on Adams, claimed also that Adams directed the “faction” at the Continental Congress as well as in Boston. (Historical and Political Reflections, 67.) Undoubtedly, declaring independence caused Samuel Adams to rejoice—just as it caused all ardent patriots to rejoice. Adams probably claimed some credit for the historic event, as did others; fueled by hindsight, he might have uttered some sort of “I-told-you-so,” which Galloway naturally embellished. But even if Adams himself, glancing backward, saw his prior activities in a different light, we don’t read history backward; what counts is what happened at the time. However Adams felt in 1776, we have no contemporaneous evidence from the 1760s that he preached the merits of independence at that time.

  An Internet reference site, ABC-CLIO, www.abc-clio.com, includes in its list of famous quotations, “The country shall be independent, and we shall be satisfied with nothing short of it.” These words, attributed to Samuel Adams on March 9, 1774, will doubtless be repeated in countless student papers, complete with name and date. The oft-cited quotation comes from William Gordon’s early history, written in 1788. As a stylistic device, Gordon wrote in the present tense to simulate a contemporary narrative, and this passage appears under a conjured “entry” for March 9, 1774: “But there are a few in this colony who hanker after independency, and will be likely to bend their whole influence for
the obtaining of it, whenever there is the least opening to encourage their efforts. At the head of these we must place Mr. Samuel Adams, who has long since said in small confidential companies—‘the country shall be independent, and we will be satisfied with nothing short of it.’ ” (Gordon, Rise, Progress, and Establishment of Independence, 1: 347.) This artistic fabrication, combined with after-the-fact folklore, now passes for historical authenticity. In 1788 William Gordon said that other people had said in 1774 that Adams had said these words in private, at some undisclosed time in the past. There is no possible way of verifying Gordon’s reporting of private conversations supposedly held “long since,” presumably back in the 1760s—two decades before Gordon set them to paper. Although Adams himself left no writings dated March 9, 1774, this “source” has been accepted as valid simply because it is seen as “contemporary.”

  26.Maier, Old Revolutionaries, 21–26. Maier’s entry for Samuel Adams in the updated (1999) American National Biography serves as a corrective for many of the traditional myths.

  27.Adams to Reverend G.W., November 11, 1765, and Adams to John Smith, December 19, 1765, Cushing, Writings, 1: 28, 45. These sentiments are echoed in all his writings from 1765.

  28.Adams, under the name of “Vindex,” Boston Gazette, December 5, 1768, in Cushing, Writings, 1: 259.

  29.Adams to Dennys De Berdt, October 3, 1768, in Cushing, Writings, 1: 249. Emphasis in original.

  30.Adams, under the name of “Valerius Poplicola,” Boston Gazette, October 28, 1771, in Cushing, Writings, 2: 262. By this time it was true that Samuel Adams was beginning to wonder: Will the rights of colonists ever be granted? In despair, he envisaged that “in some hereafter,” when all appeals to reason had failed, “America herself under God must finally work out her own Salvations.” (Adams to Arthur Lee, October 31, 1771, and Adams to Henry Merchant, January 7, 1772, in Cushing, Writings, 2: 267 and 309.) But in the words of historian Pauline Maier, this apocalyptic prediction, born of frustration, “fell short of advocacy.” (Maier, Old Revolutionaries, 23.)