Paul Revere's Ride

by David Hackett Fischer

  Outraged citizens of Lexington responded by collecting depositions from surviving militiamen in their town, who now testified that the first American shots were fired not at Concord’s North Bridge but on Lexington’s village green, after the Regulars had fired at them. The citizens of Acton joined in, with impassioned testimony that their forebears had fired the first American shots and suffered the first losses at the North Bridge after the militia of Concord had cravenly refused to take the lead. The inhabitants of West Cambridge (later the town of Arlington, earlier the hamlet called Menotomy) offered further evidence that the heaviest fighting of the day occurred neither in Concord or Lexington, but in their village. 11

  These polemics generated much fresh evidence about the battles, and also produced some new material on Paul Revere’s ride. They also helped to transform the prevailing interpretation of those events. The men who actually did the fighting in 1775 had cultivated an image of themselves as innocent and even passive victims of British aggression. The next generation remembered them in a very different way—as bold, active, and defiant defenders of home and hearth.

  The new interpretation most vividly appeared in the changing iconography of the fight at Lexington. The earliest prints of the battle, which had represented it as a slaughter of the innocents, gave way to new images that showed increasing ardor on the American side. In 1830 a lithograph showed some of the militia firing back at the British. By 1855 an engraving by Hammatt Billings for Charles Hudson’s History of Lexington had most of the Americans actively in the fight. In 1886, a painting by Henry Sandham for Lexington’s town hall represented all of the militia standing firm and fighting bravely in heroic postures of defiance. 12

  A parallel transformation also occurred in the image of Paul Revere. Even his own deposition of 1775 (which Whig leaders had thought too candid for publication) represented his own role as that of a peaceable citizen, innocently deprived of his liberty by a party of violent and blasphemous British officers who “stopped me on the highway, and made me a prisoner I knew not by what right.” 13

  In the 19th century, newly published eyewitness accounts portrayed him in a different light as an active and aggressive leader, boldly organizing resistance in Boston, concerting military preparations, shouting his alarm to Sergeant Munroe, and actively hurling defiance at his British captors. 14 This new image of Paul Revere appeared in depositions by Elijah Sanderson and William Munroe, in anniversary orations, and in a book called History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (1849). Its author, Richard Frothingham, was an antiquarian historian of Charlestown. He published fresh material from the papers of Richard Devens, the Whig leader who helped Paul Revere on his way, and was one of the first scholars to recognize in print the range and importance of Paul Revere’s activity in the revolutionary movement. He wrote, “Paul Revere, an ingenious goldsmith, as ready to engrave a lampoon as to rally a caucus, was the great confidential messenger of the patriots and the great leader of the mechanics.” 15

  The Monument at Concord’s North Bridge, a pastoral painting by Fitzhugh Lane. (Concord Free Public Library)

  As this interpretation took hold, the first biographical sketches of Paul Revere began to be published. Chief among them was a long essay published anonymously by Boston editor Joseph Buckingham in his New England Magazine (1832). Buckingham himself had not been born until 1779, but he knew Paul Revere, interviewed his friends, and acquired some of his manuscripts. Informants told him that Revere was “one of the persons who planned and executed one of the most daring projects which characterized the times—the destruction of tea.” Buckingham represented Paul Revere as a major Whig leader, and described his many Revolutionary activities, several for the first time. He also reprinted Revere’s letter to Jeremy Belknap about the midnight ride, commenting that it “contains incident enough to supply a novelist with the basis of a romance.” The figure that emerged from Buckingham’s sketch was a strong and active leader in the forefront of the Revolution. 16

  Ten years later, Alden Bradford included a life of Paul Revere in a volume on distinguished men in New England. These writings began to celebrate Paul Revere not only for what he did but who he was. Daniel Webster described him as “a man of sense and character, and of high public spirit, whom the mechanics of Boston ought never to forget.” Webster himself could not quite remember what Paul Revere did for a living, but he was very clear about the large meaning of his life. 17

  In the mid-19th century, cities and towns throughout Massachusetts began to commemorate Paul Revere in their place names. Boston’s May Street became Revere Street in 1855. Other Revere streets appeared in the towns of Arlington, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Hudson, Hull, Lexington, Maiden, Medford, Milton, Quincy, Sudbury, Weymouth, Winthrop, and Woburn. In 1871, the entire Boston suburb of North Chelsea took the name of Revere. Many other places were so named in New England, but few in the nation at large. Paul Revere was still mainly a regional hero. 18

  The Union in Crisis: Longfellow’s Myth of the Lone Rider

  In the year 1861, Revere’s reputation suddenly expanded beyond his native New England. As the nation moved toward Civil War, many northern writers contributed their pens to the Union cause. Among them was New England’s poet laureate, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who searched for a way to awaken opinion in the North. On April 5, 1860, Longfellow suddenly found what he was looking for. He and his friend George Sumner went walking in the North End, past Copp’s Hill Burying Ground and the Old North Church, while Sumner told him the story of the midnight ride. The next day, April 6, 1860, Longfellow wrote in his diary, “Paul Revere’s Ride begun this day.” Two weeks later he was still hard at work: “April 19, I wrote a few lines in ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ this being the day of his achievement.” Perhaps on that anniversary day he found his opening stanza, which so many American pupils would learn by heart:

  Listen my children, and you shall hear,

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

  On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

  Hardly a man is now alive

  Who remembers that famous day and year.

  Not so well remembered were the lines near the end, that summarized the larger purposes of the poem:

  For, borne on the night-wind of the past,

  Through all our history to the last,

  In the hour of darkness and peril and need,

  The people will waken and listen to hear,

  The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

  And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

  The poem was first published by The Atlantic in January 1861. It had an extraordinary impact. The insistent beat of Longfellow’s meter reverberated through the North like a drum roll. It instantly captured the imagination of the reading public. This was a call to arms for a new American generation, in another moment of peril. It was also an argument from Paul Revere’s example that one man alone could make a difference, by his service to a great and noble cause.

  From an historiographical perspective, Longfellow’s poem contained a curious irony. He appealed to the evidence of history as a source of patriotic inspiration, but was utterly without scruple in his manipulation of historical fact. As an historical description of Paul Revere’s ride, the poem was grossly, systematically, and deliberately inaccurate. Its many errors were not merely careless mistakes. Longfellow did some research on his subject. He consulted amateur scholars such as Sumner, probably knew Frothingham’s Siege of Boston and George Bancroft’s History of the United States, which had sold very briskly only a few years before, and appears to have been familiar with Paul Revere’s account, which had been in print for sixty years. To enlarge his stock of poetic imagery, Longfellow climbed the steeple of the North Church, scattering the pigeons from their roosts in his search for color and detail. Even the pigeons went into the poem for a touch of verisimilitude. 19

  Having done all that, Longfellow proceeded to change the history of
Paul Revere’s ride as radically as his poetic predecessor Eb. Stiles had transformed its geography. His most important revision was not merely in specific details that he so freely altered, but in a new interpretation that had a powerful resonance in American culture.

  For his own interpretative purposes, Longfellow invented an image of Paul Revere as a solitary hero who acted alone in history. He allowed his mythical midnight rider only a single henchman, an anonymous Boston “friend” who appeared in the poem as a Yankee Sancho Panza for this New England knight-errant. Otherwise, Longfellow’s Paul Revere needed no help from anyone. He rowed himself across the Charles River, waited alone for a signal from the Old North Church, made a solitary ride all the way to Concord, and awakened every Middlesex village and farm along the way.

  As a work of history, that interpretation was wildly inaccurate in all its major parts. But as an exercise of poetic imagination it succeeded brilliantly. Longfellow’s verse instantly transformed a regional folk-hero into a national figure of high prominence. Paul Revere entered the pantheon of patriot heroes as an historical loner of the sort that Americans love to celebrate.

  From Captain John Smith to Colonel Charles Lindbergh, many American heroes have been remembered in that way, as solitary actors against the world. This was not entirely an American phenomenon. It was an attitude that belonged to a time as well as a place. Many Romantic writers in the late 19th century—Emerson, Carlyle, Nietzsche—celebrated world-historical leaders as heroic individuals who faced their fate alone. That idea had powerful appeal in a world that was becoming more ordered, and more institution-bound. The genius of Longfellow’s poem was to link this powerful theme to a patriotic purpose. It stamped its image of Paul Revere as an historical loner indelibly upon the national memory.

  New England antiquarians responded to Longfellow’s poem with expressions of high indignation for its gross inaccuracy. Charles Hudson, town historian of Lexington, Massachusetts, wrote angrily in 1868, “We have heard of poetic license, but have always understood that this sort of latitude was to be confined to modes of expression and to the regions of the imagination, and should not extend to historic facts … when poets pervert plain matters of history, to give speed to their Pegasus, they should be restrained, as Revere was in his midnight ride.” 20

  For many years historians in New England labored to correct Longfellow’s errors. They demonstrated exhaustively that Paul Revere did not receive the lantern signals from the Old North Church, but helped to send them. They documented abundantly the fact that he did not row alone across the Charles River, but was transported by others. They proved conclusively that Paul Revere did not reach Concord, and that another messenger succeeded where he failed. Other midnight riders were much discussed: notably Dr. Samuel Prescott, and William Dawes, who began to receive more attention than Paul Revere himself.

  But the scholars never managed to catch up with Longfellow’s galloping hero. Generations of American schoolchildren were required to memorize Longfellow’s poem. Even today many older Americans are still able to recite stanzas they learned in their youth, long after their memory of more recent events has faded. Whatever the failings of the poem as an historical account, it gave new life and symbolic meaning to its subject. It also elevated Paul Revere into figure of high national prominence, and made the midnight ride an important event in American history.

  Longfellow’s interpretation of Paul Revere was taken up by many popular writers who came after him. Several generations of American artists also borrowed Longfellow’s theme of the lone rider. Howard Laskey in 1891 did a drawing called “The Ride,” in which Paul Revere and his galloping horse appeared entirely alone, floating in an empty space with nothing in sight but their own shadow. 21 Grant Wood in 1931 did a striking painting of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” (1931), which gave the same interpretation a different twist. The midnight rider appeared as a dark, faceless, solitary figure, galloping alone through an eery New England townscape that appeared sterile and lifeless in the brilliant moonlight.

  Grant Wood, Paul Revere’s Ride, 1931. The painter gives us a new version of Longfellow’s myth with a 20th-century twist. Paul Revere appears as a lone midnight rider, galloping across a sterile, soulless American landscape. (Courtesy, Metropolitan Museum of Art and VAGA, Inc.)

  Longfellow’s interpretation was given a new form in 1914 by Thomas Edison, who made a silent film called “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Like many autodidacts, Edison was deeply contemptuous of schools and scholars. “I should say,” he wrote, “that on the average we only get about two percent efficiency out of school books as they are written today. The education of the future as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it should be possible to obtain a one hundred percent efficiency.” To that end, Edison made a film of Paul Revere’s ride as a way of teaching American history through the camera. His interpretation closely followed Longfellow’s poem in substance and detail—myths, legends, errors, pigeons and all. 22

  Myths for Imperial America: Colonel Revere as a Man on Horseback

  Thanks largely to Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s stature increased steadily during the late 19th century, and spread throughout the United States. Towns were named after him not merely in New England, but also in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Missouri.

  The centennial celebrations of the American Revolution that began in 1875 also inspired much popular interest in his life and work. Many celebrations were held in that year, when President Ulysses Grant himself came to Lexington and Concord. The Old North Church began to keep the custom of its annual “lantern ceremony.”

  The Paul Revere of the late 19th century began to be given a new persona, that was thought to be more meaningful in a different era of American history. During this period he was commonly called Colonel Revere, the military title that came to him later in the War of Independence. Increasingly he became a militant symbol of American strength, power and martial courage.

  In 1885 the city of Boston decided that this man on horseback needed an appropriate equestrian monument. It sponsored a prize competition that was won by an unknown young artist named Cyrus Dallin, an American sculptor who later came to be widely known for his muscular Puritans, melancholy Indians, heroic pioneers, and courageous soldiers of the Civil War. Dallin’s monumental Paul Revere was the proverbial man on horseback, a militant figure standing straight up in his long stirrup leathers, in a costume that was cut to resemble a Continental uniform. The midnight rider appeared as a strident symbol of American power, with bulging muscles, a military appearance, and a murderous expression. To complete the effect, even the horse was transformed. Deacon Larkin’s mare Brown Beauty suffered the indignity of being changed into a stallion, and given the head of a Greek war horse, and the body of a Renaissance military charger.

  There was an interpretative problem in the first design of Dallin’s sculpture. It was called “Waiting for the Light,” and showed Paul Revere in Charlestown, looking back toward the Old North Church for the lantern signal.” The committee liked the conception, and awarded its prize to Dallin. But critics forcefully pointed out that the interpretation was an error borrowed from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Dallin was sent back to his studio, and produced another version of Paul Revere, as militant as before, but without Longfellow’s errors. The ensuing controversy, however, destroyed the momentum for the project, and the money could not be found to construct a full-scale bronze statue. Dallin’s sculpture remained a plaster model for many years, which he redesigned at least seven times. But even in its unfinished state, it captured the spirit of yet another myth of the midnight rider. In this latest incarnation, Paul Revere became less a man than a military monument. He was made to personify the new union of power and freedom in a Great Republic that was beginning to flex its muscles throughout the world. 23

  The interpretative mood in this era was also captured by a piece of music titled “Paul Revere’s Ride
; a March-Two Step,” published in 1905 by E. T. Paull, a prolific composer of popular music. This musical version of the midnight ride began with the faint hoofbeats of a galloping horse. It advanced through movements that the composer called the “The Cry of Alarm,” “The Patriots Aroused,” “The Call to Arms” (double fortissimo), the Battle of Lexington and Concord (triple fortissimo), and “The Enemy Routed” (quadruple fortissimo). The piece was advertised as “one of E. T. Paull’s greatest marches,” no modest claim for the composer of “The Burning of Rome” and “Napoleon’s Last Charge.” His rendition of the midnight ride was “respectfully inscribed to the Daughters of the American Revolution.” 24

  In Boston, the Daughters of the American Revolution actively promoted the reputation of Paul Revere. They took an active part in the rescue and preservation of Paul Revere’s home, which had become a rundown tenement in Boston’s North End. To preserve it, a voluntary society was founded with the name of the Paul Revere Memorial Association. It acquired title to the house, restored it with high enthusiasm, and opened it to the public in 1908 as a shrine of the Revolution. Today, the Paul Revere House is the only 17th-century building that survives in what was Old Boston. 25

  In 1891, the first full-length biography of Paul Revere was published by Elbridge Henry Goss, a Boston antiquarian. It was a classic specimen of a two-volume Victorian “Life and Letters” biography, mainly a compendium of primary materials in two thick volumes, handsomely embellished with many illustrations and facsimiles. Goss was mostly interested in his subject as Colonel Revere, a political and military figure. Nearly 100 pages (of 622 in the two volumes together) were devoted to the Penobscot Expedition alone. Very little attention was given to Revere’s private life.