“LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous work begins. Longfellow wrote the poem in 1860 as America hurtled toward civil war, hoping to rally the Union to the cause of the abolitionist struggle.
The country, Longfellow believed, was worth saving, and retelling the story of Revere’s epic ride was his way of connecting the heroism of America’s founding to the perilous times of the present.
But the real-life story of what happened that night on April 18, 1775 (known as Patriots’ Day) and what happened the day after—the Battles of Lexington and Concord—is more compelling than Longfellow’s mythology. And more absolutely American.
It turns out Revere was not the solitary actor Longfellow chronicled in his poem. And his midnight ride didn’t spring out of a vacuum.
“There were other riders out that night and, far from detracting from Revere’s accomplishment, it made his role more important, because he was more than a messenger,” professor David Hackett Fischer, author of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” told C-SPAN. “He was an organizing man, a man who got things done.”
The two men that joined Revere on his ride across the New England countryside were William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. What made their efforts so extraordinary was that ordinary citizens were doing the riding: Revere was a silversmith, Dawes a shoemaker and Prescott a doctor. And it was ordinary citizens doing the fighting the next day—farmers, shopkeepers, ministers and tradesmen.
Seventy-seven brave Americans took a stand in Lexington and 400-plus did the same in Concord against 700 British troops. When the battles ended, America lost 93 soldiers, the British 300. Soon thereafter, thanks to an intricate set of alarms and preparation, 20,000 colonial militia voluntarily converged on Boston.
What compelled those colonists to take up arms against the mighty British Army? It’s important to know a bit about Boston in that time.
“It was a city of 15,000,” Fischer noted, “run by town meeting, and the town meeting was run partly by a group of organizations which were the first we know to be called caucuses.”
In short, Bostonians had been governing their own affairs for a long time, in their own way.
Things weren’t exactly rosy between the colonists and their British rulers in the 1760s and ’70s. But what set the flame of revolution was Parliament’s Coercive Acts, rightly called the Intolerable Acts by Americans, with General Thomas Gage—the first military governor of Massachusetts—serving as the local muscle.
“Gage was trying to shut downtown meetings, so there was a head-on collision over ideas of representative government,” Fischer noted.
Gage also miscalculated on the matter of disarming the colonists.
“He thought the best way to do that was seize their gunpowder,” Fischer said.
Massachusettsans were rightfully horrified.
And then there were the quartering acts. Thomas Jefferson wrote brilliantly about them in the Declaration of Independence two years later. “[The King] has erected a multitude of new offices and set hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
Why did Parliament and King George do what they did?
“The richest nation in the history of man teetered on insolvency,” Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, explained in a speech in Washington. “In 1763, they’d won a big war, and became the great world power and decided they were going to run their colonies, and started passing laws kings had been beheaded for trying to pass in British history to apply to the Americans. And the Americans said ‘Wait, you can’t do this.’ And the king did what kings do—he passed a bunch of taxes and used them to hire a bunch of people to force them to pay.”
Dr. Arnn wasn’t finished.
“In Boston Harbor, these big sailing ships come in, and what comes off them is soldiers with bayonets clanking, and a writ that says, ‘We get to stay in the barracks of your militia, and if that won’t hold us, we get to stay in your public houses, and if that won’t hold us, we get to stay in your homes,’” Dr. Arnn said.
“You see, the government was there to overwhelm the private society. Do you think that didn’t make Americans angry?”
Gage believed the acts would cut off New England from the rest of the colonies, but they had the opposite effect—unifying the colonies and galvanizing leaders in New England.
“Among those leaders was Paul Revere, who organized a kind of intelligence organization, a voluntary association composed mainly of mechanics in Boston, and they tried to keep very close tabs on what General Gage was doing,” Fischer noted, continuing the theme of America’s talent for organizing commercially and noncommercially.
To further complicate matters, Americans were fiercely divided on what next to do.
“It came down to two ideas of freedom,” Fischer said. “On the one hand, the idea of self-rule, and on the other, the idea of rule of law under Parliament. Those were the two ideas we were fighting over internally—our own civil war of sorts. By war’s end, the ideal of self-rule prevailed, with 200,000 Americans—in a nation of 2.5 million—joining the fight.
Those 200,000 patriots weren’t paid or compelled to fight: They chose to. By war’s end, more than 25,000 Americans paid the ultimate price for that choice—many in battle, many from disease and many in ghastly prison ships docked in Brooklyn Harbor.
Their choice—their courage and sacrifice—started a revolution of liberty and self-governance unimagined in world history.
What made them do it? Consider an interview in 1843 between Captain Levi Preston, who fought against the British in Concord in 1775, and Mellon Chamberlain, a Massachusetts historian, captured in Hillsdale College professor Bill McClay’s brilliant book, “Land of Hope.”
“Captain Preston, why did you go to the Concord Fight the 19th of April, 1775?” Chamberlain asked.
The old man, bowed beneath the weight of years, raised himself upright and turning toward me said, “Why did I go?”
“Yes,” I replied. “My histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against ‘intolerable oppressions.’”
“What are they? Oppressions? I didn’t feel them?”
“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”
“I never saw one of those stamps, and I’m certain I never paid a penny for any of them.”
“Well, what about the tea tax?”
“Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard.”
“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”
“Never heard of ’em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”
“Well then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to fight?”
“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”
Captain Preston’s words echo the American spirit so beautifully captured by Jefferson in our birth certificate.
“Those words do not refer merely to theories detached from how we live and act and think,” Dr. Arnn said of the Declaration of Independence. “They live in our hearts, and grow up with us in our homes and families.”
As Americans continue our centuries-old struggle over the meaning of self-governance under law—with a large percentage of the belief that our federal government is the remote power trying to overwhelm our private society—Captain Prescott and Dr. Arnn’s words are worth keeping in our hearts and minds as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Patriots’ Day. And worth sharing with our friends and families.
So, too, is the story of what happened in and near Boston on April 18 and 19 in 1775. It’s an important chapter of the epic story of why, how and by whom America was birthed. And why it still matters.
This essay originally ran in Newsweek and is shared with its approval.
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