The Midnight Fear of Paul Revere

Ah, Independence Day. A time for all USians to come together and remember the heroes of our country’s founding, and the heroic acts they performed heroically.

Today I’m tackling the ride of Paul Revere. If you’re from the US, you’ve probably heard the poem about him. It starts off like this:

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.

This was written in 1860, 85 years after the actual ride. I’m pretty sure it was safe to say that “no man who is now alive.” A couple of women might have remembered it though.

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, c. 1768–70 

Did you know Revere's day job was being a silversmith AND a dentist?

Few people know all 13 verses of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”, but most people raised in the US school system know the basics:

1) Paul Revere warned everyone that the British were coming by bravely riding through the night warning everyone singlehandedly.

2) He knew if they were coming by land or by sea because lamps in a lighthouse told him so.

3) He yelled “"The British are Coming!" as he rode along, to warn all of the Americans.

4) He completed his ride Revere rode triumphantly into Concord, having safely completed his journey.

Sounds about like I was taught, and my school couldn't have gotten it that wrong, right?

Ha.

1) Paul Revere warned everyone that the British were coming by bravely riding through the night warning everyone singlehandedly.

Paul Revere rode with two other men, Williams Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. 

Why were they neglected? Sadly, it’s because it’s a lot easier to rhyme “Revere” than “Dawes” or “Prescott.” Dawes finally got a poem of his own, years later. It’s shorter than Revere’s (but longer than I want to stick in here) and quite clever. 

Poor Prescott kind of got the short stick on this one, I’m afraid. He went on to be a surgeon in the Continental Army, and then vanishes from the record.

Also, Revere took a rowboat, not a horse, for the start of of his trip. And to keep the oars quiet, he wrapped them in cloth – but the only cloth quickly available was the petticoat of a girlfriend of one of the boatmen. So it’s “The Midnight Row with Some Young Lady’s Underwear then Ride of Paul Revere.”

Which sounds a lot cooler than what I learned in school, honestly.

Incidentally, the Old North Church Steeple you see today isn’t the one the lanterns were hung in. That steeple was destroyed in 1954.

2) He knew if they were coming by land or by sea because lamps in a church steeple told him so.

  

The famous “one if by land, two if by sea” is indeed tied to Paul Revere, but he was the one who put up the lanterns in the first place. Technically, he didn’t even do that. He simply told someone else how to hang the lanterns, two days before the actual event.  The act of hanging the lanterns was done by Robert Newman, the sexton of the church. 


The lanterns weren’t to tell Revere anything, but were placed to inform Colonel Conant, one of the militia leaders about the movement of the British. Conant lived in Charlestown, the next town over, and the steeple of the church was visible from his house. The lanterns were a convenient way of telling the Colonel while he was in the next town over what was happening in a pre-telephone era.

Incidentally, if you’ve ever been to Lexington and/or Concord, (remember? That place the British were invading?) you might have noticed that it’s not anywhere near the sea. Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. The British were never going to invade Lexington or Concord by sea. The proper meaning of the lanterns was “one if by over the Boston Neck and the Great Bridge, two if by the Charles river and landing near the Phips farm.”

You can see how that’s harder to fit into a poem stanza.

3) He yelled “"The British are Coming!" as he rode along, to warn all of the Americans.

No. No he didn’t. He spent most of the time hiding from the British, which is most certainly not something you can do when you’re screaming at the top of your lungs. Also, at the time, most Americans considered themselves to be “British” so yelling that the British were coming would simply have confused everyone. He did warn the militia that "The regulars are coming out!"

Yeah, way less cool, I know.

4) He completed his ride Revere rode triumphantly into Concord, having safely completed his journey.

Revere got as far as Lexington, where he was able to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British were coming to arrest them. He met up there with Williams Dawes and Samuel Prescott and was supposed to ride on to Concord with them to tell the militia there that the British were coming to disarm them, but they were caught at a British roadblock near Lincoln, Massachusetts. Revere was caught immediately. Prescott and Dawes managed to escape, but Dawes fell off of his horse as they rode through the woods at night, and wasn’t able to finish the trip.

Samuel Prescott managed to ride through the woods safely to Concord and alert everyone to the impending British forces. That’s right, Mr. “History totally forgot about and we don’t even know what happened to him” saved the day.

For the record, he wasn’t even supposed to be one of the Night Riders. He was only there because he was in Lexington visiting his fiancée, and had been "returning from a lady friend's house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m." [*] when he ran into Revere and Dawes.

Yep. We were saved by a guy who was coming home from a lady’s house at a suspiciously late hour of the night who felt like he should just go along for the ride.

Which, let’s face it, would make a way cooler poem.