Paul Revere: Three Riders and the Midnight That History Forgot
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in 1861, eighty-six years after the fact. The poem is historic. It is also, in several ways, wrong. The truth is more remarkable than the legend.
On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere did ride from Charlestown to Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British regulars were marching. He did not ride alone. He was one of at least 30 riders dispatched by the Sons of Liberty that night, organized through a network established by Dr. Joseph Warren. Two riders in particular, Revere and William Dawes, set out on separate routes to ensure the message got through if one was captured.
Revere made it to Lexington, warned Adams and Hancock, then rode on toward Concord. He was stopped by a British patrol on the Lexington-Concord road and taken into custody. He was eventually released but his horse was confiscated. Paul Revere did not complete his ride to Concord.
The man who did complete the warning was a young Concord physician named Samuel Prescott, who had joined Revere and Dawes by chance on the road that night. When the British patrol arrived, Prescott jumped his horse over a stone wall and escaped into the fields, reaching Concord in the early hours of April 19 with the warning intact. It was Prescott's alarm that sent the Minutemen to Concord's North Bridge.
As for Longfellow's poem, it was written during the Civil War as a rallying cry for the Union, not as biography. Longfellow took a lot of artistic liberty in writing it. The lanterns in the Old North Church (“one if by land, two if by sea”) were a real signal, but it was meant to alert Charlestown observers, not Revere himself. Revere was already across the river when the lanterns were hung and arranged the signal for others.
What Revere actually accomplished was incredible regardless of how accurate the poem was. He was the brain behind Boston's revolutionary intelligence network for years before that famous night. He authored some of the most effective political propaganda of the era, including his famous depiction of the Boston Massacre. He later designed and printed the first official seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the first Continental money.
The real Paul Revere was more useful to the revolution as a networker, craftsman, and political writer than as a midnight horseman. History gave him a poem. He deserved a chapter.
Sources
Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere's Ride. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 'Paul Revere's Ride.' The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861.
Forbes, Esther. Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942.
Revere, Paul. Memorandum on Events of April 18, 1775. Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org
Triber, Jayne. A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
