Paul Revere's Ride

by David Hackett Fischer

  The Filiopietists in Full Cry. This musical version of the militant Paul Revere had a grand crescendo scored quadruple fortissimo. (Brandeis University Library)

  The major contribution of the work was to assemble and reprint primary evidence of Revere’s public life. Goss was given access to Revere manuscripts by the family. He published for the first time many letters and documents, including Revere’s deposition on the midnight ride, and also collected much colorful testimony from Boston families who preserved the folklore of the event. Every subsequent student of Revere’s life is heavily in Goss’s debt for the materials that he collected. Wherever possible, the author allowed Paul Revere to speak for himself. His chapter on the midnight ride consisted entirely of a transcription of Revere’s fullest account, with explanatory footnotes. 26

  The larger purpose of the book was to celebrate Paul Revere’s qualities of character, as one of Boston’s “truest, most noble and patriotic sons.” In 1891, Elbridge Goss expressed a complete confidence that Revere’s reputation would continue to grow. “As time goes on,” he wrote, “such lives as his will be studied, honored, cherished and remembered with still greater reverence.” 27

  U.S. v. The Spirit of ‘76: Paul Revere and the American Anglophiles

  Goss’s prediction proved to be right in one way, but wrong in another. Revere continued to be studied, but not always with “greater reverence.” In the 20th century, strong countervailing tendencies also began to appear. One of them was a new sympathy in the United States for the British side of the American Revolution. The late 19th century was a moment of Anglo-American rapprochement, when writers on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly discovered a sense of solidarity among the “Anglo-Saxon” nations. One result in academic scholarship was the “imperial school” of George Louis Beer and Charles Maclean Andrews, who rewrote early American history from the perspective of London and the Empire. Another was a circle of antiquarians who included Elizabeth Ellery Dana, Charles Knowles Bolton, and especially William Clements (1861-1934), a wealthy Michigan industrialist, and Harold Murdock (1862-1934), a prominent Boston banker.

  This circle of American Anglophiles studied the outbreak of the Revolution as an Anglo-Saxon Civil War. They searched British homes and archives and unearthed many new primary sources on the Revolution, which they purchased from their impoverished owners and carried home in triumph to the United States. At the same time they also contributed many secondary studies, laboring to explode the patriot myths of American innocence on the one hand and British oppression on the other. 28

  They showed no animus against the more conservative American revolutionaries, who were regarded as Anglo-Saxons too (even one who was half Huguenot), but they were strongly hostile to America’s Revolutionary myths. Paul Revere continued to be celebrated by these authors, but more for his character than his cause. One called him a “man of solid substance,” who was “quite unconscious of the heroic figure which he was to make in history.” At the same time Longfellow’s legend of the midnight ride was derided, and the patriot myths were furiously attacked. Behind this work lay a dream of Anglo-Saxon solidarity that was as romantic in its own way as Longfellow’s myth of the lone rider. 29

  The American Anglophiles produced a large crop of monographs on the battles of Lexington and Concord. Among them was Frank Coburn’s study, The Battle of April 19, 1775, privately published in 1912. Coburn reconstructed the details of the battle with great care, and traced on his bicycle the routes of the midnight riders and the marching armies, calculating distances on his bicycle speedometer, calibrated in eighty-eighths of a statute mile. The result was an interpretation that mediated not only between Britain and the United States, but also between Lexington and Concord, and even between the partisans of Paul Revere and William Dawes. Coburn summarized his theme in a sentence: “I am glad to add,” he wrote, “that the bitterness and hatred, so much in evidence on that long ago battle day, no longer exist between children of the great British nation.” 30

  Anglophile interpretations acquired a new urgency during the First World War. In 1917, an American film about Paul Revere’s ride was ordered to be seized under the Espionage Act, on the ground that it promoted discord between the United States and Britain. The case was heard in the Federal District Court of Southern California, and called United States v. The Spirit of Seventy Six. 31

  An Age of Disbelief: The Myths of the American Debunkers

  At the same time, another line of interpretation was also developing—a school of historical skepticism that was hostile to the myth of the midnight ride for different reasons. Early expressions of this attitude appeared in an unexpected place—the writings of the Adams family. They had a score to settle with Paul Revere. In the early republic Revere had become a high Federalist, in company with many merchants and manufacturers in New England who had little liking for the presidency of John Adams, and even less for what Boston regarded as the “apostasy” of John Quincy Adams. That hostility was reciprocated by the Adams family toward Boston in general, State Street in particular, and Paul Revere among the rest. The Adamses expressed strong resentment against what they regarded as the absurd inflation of Paul Revere’s reputation. In 1909, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., expressed his outrage “in the matter of Mr. Longfellow, and the strange perversion he has given to historical facts as respects Paul Revere and his famous ride.” Adams wrote that the duty of the historian was to “exorcise, so to speak, a popularly accepted legend.” Adams’s strongest resentment was against Longfellow, but there was no love lost for Paul Revere. 32

  Others were happy to take up this task of historical “exorcism.” As early as 1896, Helen More contributed a sarcastic scrap of light verse called “What’s in a Name?” which suggested that William Dawes did the work and Paul Revere got the credit.

  Tis all very well for the children to hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;

  But why should my name be quite forgot

  Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?

  Why, should I ask? The reason is clear—

  My name was Dawes and his Revere. 33

  The prominence of William Dawes increased when his descendant Charles Dawes became Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. Several accounts asserted (with as much inaccuracy as Stiles and Longfellow) that Dawes had succeeded in reaching Concord when Paul Revere was arrested. There was no truth in this idea, but it was widely repeated.

  In the popular press, Paul Revere became increasingly an object of good-humored derision. The Boston Globe on April 19, 1914, marked the anniversary of the midnight ride by publishing an irreverent satire called “The Ride of the Ghost of Paul Revere, by Two Long Fellows.”

  It was two by the village clock

  When his inner tube gave a hiss.

  He felt the car come down with a shock,

  He jacked, and pried, and pumped, and said,

  “I wish I’d come on a horse instead.”

  This mood grew stronger in the era that followed the First World War, when patriotic symbols everywhere came to be regarded with increasing suspicion. The word “debunk” was first recorded in 1923 to describe this new school of historical criticism. The legend of Paul Revere’s ride instantly became a favorite target. There was little anger or hostility in this literature, but much good-natured contempt, and sophomoric humor that rings strangely in the ear of another generation. 34

  Even Paul Revere’s horse was debunked. Patriotic engravers in the 19th century had represented Brown Beauty as a fine-boned thoroughbred. Debunkers in the 20th century took pleasure in proclaiming that Paul Revere was actually mounted on a plodding plough horse. That revision was as mistaken as the image it was meant to correct, but it came to be widely repeated in the 1920s, and has crept into the historical literature.

  In 1923, one exceptionally bold debunker went so far as to assert that the midnight ride never happened at all. At that point, the President of the United States felt compelled
to intervene. “Only a few days ago,” Warren Harding declared with high indignation, “an iconoclastic American said there never was a ride by Paul Revere.” The President was shaky in his facts, but rock-solid in support of Paul Revere. “Somebody made the ride,” he reasoned, “and stirred the minutemen in the colonies to fight the battle of Lexington, which was the beginning of independence in the new Republic in America. I love the story of Paul Revere, whether he rode or not.” 35

  Through the 1920s, debunkers were strongly resisted by filiopietists who defended the patriot myths with high enthusiasm, sometimes in surprising ways. In 1922, Captain E. B. Lyon of the U.S. Army followed the path of Paul Revere’s midnight ride in a military aircraft, dropping “patriotic pamphlets” along the way. 36

  The debunkers were undeterred by flying filiopietists and presidential reprimands. With the growing antiwar movement of the 1930s they also turned their attentions to the myth of the minutemen, who were increasingly represented as cowardly country bumpkins, and bad shots to boot. 37 In the late 1930s an army officer was detailed to make a study of the battles of Lexington and Concord. He concluded that there was nothing of professional interest to be learned from the event. 38

  On the midnight ride, both debunkers and filiopietists continued to be very active through the 1930s, much to the bewilderment of the reading public. H. L. Mencken’s irreverent magazine The American Mercury was publishing iconoclastic attacks on the legend of Paul Revere as late as 1938. 39 When Esther Forbes brought out her biography of Paul Revere in 1942, she reported in amazement, “Since I have begun on this book I have been asked several times if it is true that Paul Revere never took that ride at all.” 40

  Crusade for Democracy: The Myth of the Common Man

  The age of the debunker ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War II. As fascist and communist dictatorships gained strength throughout the world, and free institutions were increasingly under violent attack, Americans began to think again about their national heritage of liberal values and democratic purposes.

  Once again the reputation of Paul Revere was a sensitive indicator of cultural change. The reputation of the midnight rider began to be refurbished to meet the changing needs of a new generation. In 1940, the city of Boston finally got around to erecting Cyrus Dallin’s equestrian statue of Paul Revere as a symbol of resistance to tyranny and aggression.

  One might have expected that the militant Paul Revere of Dallin’s monument would have returned to fashion in a world at war. But something else happened. Paul Revere was suddenly given a new image, different from all that came before, and yet perfectly matched to the needs of a democratic crusade against fascism and militarism.

  The architect of this new interpretation was Esther Forbes, a New England novelist who turned her hand to the writing of history with high success. It was one of the more improbable pairings of subject and author—a masculine figure whose life had been absorbed in the hurly-burly of politics, war and business; and a New England spinster who worked beside her aged mother in a quiet alcove of the American Antiquarian Society.

  In that setting, Esther Forbes wrote a book called Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It was published in 1942, the year of Corregidor and Midway, and gave the midnight rider a new identity suitable to the nation’s great crusade for freedom and democra:y. Esther Forbes interpreted her hero as an ordinary American, a peace-loving common man who rose to the challenge of great events. In a letter to her editor, she summarized her idea of Paul Revere in two sentences. “He represents a typical and important type of man about which very little is written,” she wrote; “I mean the simple artizan [sic].” 41

  To make her case for Paul Revere as a “simple artizan,” Forbes gave much attention to his commmunity, and especially to his domestic life. She had little interest in the details of politics, or military career, or business affairs, beyond an evocation of Revere’s colonial silver shop and intimate vignettes of his bell foundry. Her idea of the American Revolution was a hierarchical movement in which Sam Adams appeared as the “mastermind” and Paul Revere as a “lone horseman” who acted as “courier” for his social superiors. The midnight ride was given merely twelve pages out of five hundred in the book, and interpreted as an event of minor consequence, except for its status as a myth and symbol. Most of the book was about the social world of a “simple artizan” in colonial Boston.

  Esther Forbes celebrated the everyday life of an ordinary man with grace, verve, deep feeling for her democratic theme, and high good humor. She was less enthusiastic about Paul Revere himself, whose personality tended to disappear into the social background. The organizing idea of Paul Revere as a “simple artizan” was very far off the mark—as romantic and inaccurate in its own way as Longfellow’s solitary rider. 42

  Academic historians have also tended to criticize the scholarship of the work in another way, complaining that it “lacks citations” and “uses significant literary license.” 43 This criticism is unfair. It is true that the book is not well documented, and it has been corrected in detail by subsequent research. But Forbes made excellent use of the materials assembled by Goss and also of the Revere Family Papers. The book is beautifully crafted as a work of popular biography and still very fresh and lively. Its sustained interest in social history was far in advance of academic scholarship. For its timely expression of the new national mood, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. 44

  Esther Forbes’s interpretation of Paul Revere as a “simple artizan” was taken up by many other American writers in the mid-20th century. It lent itself perfectly to a new generation of children’s books by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jean Fritz, and especially Robert Lawson’s Mr. Revere and I (Boston, 1953), a charming fable told by Paul Revere’s horse, whom the author renamed Scheherazade. Lawson’s witty drawings showed Paul Revere as an ordinary American who reluctantly left his domestic hearth and rose heroically to keep his rendezvous with destiny—an interpretation very close to that of Esther Forbes. 45

  The Cold War: The Myth of the Capitalist Democrat

  In 1949, a symbolic event occurred in Boston. Paul Revere’s “patriotic bowl,” commissioned by the Sons of Liberty in 1768 to commemorate the courage of ninety-two members of the Massachusetts legislature, was returned to the Commonwealth with high ceremony. The bowl had passed into the hands of private collector, Mrs. Marsden Perry. It was purchased from her estate for $56,000, raised partly from schoolchildren in Boston, in a campaign sponsored by Yankee social leaders, Jewish businessmen, and Irish politicians led by Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., then speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Paul Revere’s bowl with its libertarian inscriptions was placed in the Museum of Fine Arts as an icon of American freedom, and a symbol of a new society which was open to people of diverse origins.

  With the beginning of the Cold War, Paul Revere began to appear as a personification of the linkage between capitalism and democracy, and the symbol of an open pluralist society in the “free world.” On the anniversary of the ride in 1950, the Boston Herald warned that “tyranny of Red Coats takes a new form—Communism. In saluting the patriots of Concord and Lexington we sound the alarm once again. The enemy is now in our midst.” 46

  Much popular writing in this era stressed the connection between Paul Revere’s activities as a Son of Liberty and his career as a “businessman” and an archetype of “free enterprise.” The image of Paul Revere became increasingly prominent in commercial advertising. The Paul Revere Insurance Company reached its public with the slogan, “Revere, a name you can trust.” The Revere Sugar Corporation used the silhouette of the midnight rider as its advertising logo. The Revere Copper and Brass Company, which had grown from Paul Revere’s business, stamped a profile of its founder’s head on the bottom of each of its copper-clad saucepans, which it sold by the millions to American housewives.

  The most widely read work in this period was a lively piece of popular history by Arthur B. Tourtellot, fir
st published in 1959 as William Diamond’s Drum and reissued as Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (1963). Tourtellot was a specialist in public relations for Time, Inc., and director of its television productions from 1950 to 1952. He drew heavily on the British materials found by American Anglophiles to celebrate the minutemen and the midnight riders as defenders of a free society.

  Another expression of this interpretative mood was an important and highly original work by John R. Galvin, a graduate of West Point in the class of 1954, who served in Latin America, Vietnam, and ended a distinguished career as Commanding General of NATO. Galvin was also a trained historian of high ability, with a master’s degree in history from Columbia University. During the early 1960s, while a junior officer stationed at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, he wrote a book, later published under the misleading title of The Minute Men: A Compact History of the Defenders of the American Colonies, 1645—1775. Of the twenty-nine chapters in this work, twenty-three were devoted to events of 1774 and 1775, seventeen of them to the battles of Lexington and Concord.

  Galvin’s interpretation was conceived in the context of the new military thinking about “unconventional warfare” that developed in the early 1960s. He found the battles of Lexington and Concord deeply interesting in that respect. At the same time, he studied the minutemen and the midnight riders as products of a deeply rooted American tradition, and in general celebrated their conduct on April 19 as a model of military preparedness and unconventional warfare, from which soldiers and civilians in the 20th century had much to learn. In the process, Galvin offered a revisionist account of the fighting, that corrected many myths. The book also gave new meaning to Paul Revere’s role as an active and highly effective leader who had a major impact on events, including the fighting itself. 47