Just the Facts, April 18, 1775, The Real Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

    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…

Although Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” provides the reader with a wonderfully dramatic setting in which our hero rides out of Boston to warn the colonists in Lexington and Concord of the impending British march, there is a disparity between the poetic narrative and the facts of April 18, 1775. History and Longfellow (right) run pretty much parallel until Revere rides into Lexington. Longfellow writes:

    It was one by the village clock
    When he galloped into Lexington.
    He saw the gilded weathercock
    Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
    And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
    Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
    As if they already stood aghast
    At the bloody work they would look upon.

In real life, Paul Revere was then captured by the British. His borrowed horse was taken from him and given to a British officer whose own horse had grown tired.

Not very dramatic?

Certainly not, especially when held in the same light as Longfellow’s poem, wherein Revere is never captured, but rather continues his ride and alerts the denizens of “every Middlesex village and farm.”

    You know the rest. In the books you have read
    How the British Regulars fired and fled,
    How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
    From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
    Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
    Then crossing the fields to emerge again
    Under the trees at the turn of the road,
    And only pausing to fire and load.

If not Paul Revere, then who warned the colonists? Outside of Lexington, Revere met two other riders, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott. And although all three were captured by British patrols, Dawes and Prescott escaped and continued to warn the locals of the British march. Revere returned to Lexington on foot in time to view the bloody aftermath of the American Revolution’s first battle.

So, other than the fictitious account of Paul Revere’s ride handed down to us by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, why do we hold Revere in such acclaim? “Paul Revere is sometimes underestimated,” says Patrick Leehey, research director for the Paul Revere House in Boston.  “He was considered to be ‘bold’ in his day, with that having a slight overtone of recklessness.”

Other than his work as a silversmith, Revere (left) was a captain of industry. Revere’s foundry produced sheet copper for shipbuilding, and he also manufactured cannon and bells. “He was America’s first defense contractor,” says Leehey. The Revere House, incidentally, celebrates its one-hundredth anniversary as a museum today, April 18, 2008, the 233rd anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride.

And even though it was not Paul Revere who completed the mission of warning the colonists in the countryside that April night, thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the patriot’s name always will always be synonymous with those events that began the American fight for independence.

    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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow/George Kendall Warren, c.1870. Albumen silver print, National Portrait Gallery

Paul Revere,/Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Memin, 1801/Engraving on paper/National Portrait Gallery, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon