...Two if by Sea: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere's clandestine ride is legendary. Every school child now knows the story of how he rode from Boston to Concord calling out "The British are coming..." to warn his fellow Patriots.

But Longfellow's poem wasn't written until almost a century after the event. It was the first major literary work about the events that night and people assumed it was historically accurate, but it was in fact part art, part PR, meant inspire Americans in the build up of the Civil War. So how much of it is fact and how much is artistic license?*

The first thing the poem leaves out is that Paul Revere didn’t ride alone.

Revere was master silversmith. His shop produced over 5000 pieces** in his day, (including once a chain for a pet squirrel, and an ostrich egg snuffbox.)  Paul also had a dentistry prosthetics & implant side hustle, as many metallurgy men did at that time, and produced engravings (his engraving of the Boston Massacre was so detailed it was used during the Boston Massacre trial.) 

More importantly, though, he was a staunch Patriot. He had participated in the Boston Tea Party dressed as Mohawk and was the leader of an Intelligence organization of about 30 Boston merchants,  who worked with the Boston Correspondence Committee, (a Patriot group organizing protest, boycotts and collecting intelligence of British troop movements.) The CIA actually credits Paul Revere for creating the first Patriot intelligence network of record! 

Revere’s men took shifts night and day watching the movements of British troops as well as loyalist in Boston. They called themselves “The Mechanics Group.” (Being new to the spy game they were a bit careless with their spy craft though, always meeting to discuss their findings in the same tavern, The Green Dragon, so it’s no real surprise, in hindsight, that one of their leaders, Dr. Benjamin Church, turned out to be a British agent. ) 

In April of 1775 Revere’s mechanics noticed that English vessels in the Boston harbor were preparing for action, and suspected it would be against Concord in retaliation for the resistance Colonists & the Correspondence Committee had been orchestrating, largely under the leadership of Samual Adams & John Hancock. (Concord housed guns, ammunition and supplies for the local area militias. )  

On April 16th,  two days before the midnight ride, Dr. Joseph Warren, the temporary leader of the MA Provincial Congress sent Paul Revere to Lexington inform Adams & Hancock about the possibility of an imminent attack on Concord and warn them that they might be arrested shortly.  It was at this time that Warren and Revere made plans for the midnight ride, knowing they'd need a way to let the patriots in Concord know quickly when the British made their move. 

At 10pm on the night of the April 18th Warren alerted Revere that the troops were moving out that night. He had already sent an express messenger by land, William Dawes, a local shoemaker, to Lexington and Revere was dispatched to cross the Charles River by boat, taking separate routes incase either was captured. Worried that the boat oars would make too much noise on the silent river and alert the British, Revere borrowed the petticoats of a boatman’s girlfriend to wrap and muffle the oars - so American Independence was eventually won with the help of undergarments of an anonymous patriotic sailor’s lass. 

The Longfellow poem also portrays Paul Revere as waiting for the infamous lantern signal to know what to tell the patriots in Lexington, “one if by land, two if by sea” - but in fact the lanterns in the church steeple were the back up plan in the event the messengers got arrested on their way. Paul didn’t need to wait for the signal to know the message, he was the one that told Colonel Conant to set out the lantern at the Old North Church that night for the benefit of those in Charlestown, before he crossed the river. (The Episcopal church was chosen because of the height of its steeple, the tallest in Boston at the time - Paul was not a member there, as he was a congregationalist. ) 

The lantern currently on display at the church is not one of the original, it’s a replica created for a commemorative ceremony held annually on the anniversary of the ride. An original lantern is held at the Museum of Concord.

After his crossing Paul Revere was met on far bank by his horse at the  Battery and was nearly captured at Charlestown Commons, but managed to escape the British Patrols. He was able to find Adams & Hancock tucked away at the home of Jonas Clack and delivered Dr. Warren’s letter.

Unlike in the poem where Revere rides all the way to Concord, in real life Lexington was as far as Paul got that night. Dawes soon arrived and he, Revere and third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, set off to warn the Militia, but of the three riders only Prescott made it to Concord. The British had set up roadblocks outside of town which stopped the men. Prescott escaped, Dawes ran but was captured soon after and Paul was arrested, so he definitely didn’t go house to house in Concord announcing “The British are Coming”.   

Under interrogation Paul told his captors that 500 militiamen were in Concord with 1500 more on the way. Later near Concord, the small patrol with Paul as a prisoner heard shots being fired and they assumed that the Militia reserves Paul spoke of had arrived. Believing they were greatly outnumbered and fearing for their lives, they let Revere go to retreat (but only after stealing his good horse and giving him a worn out one in return.)

Revere managed to meet up with Adams and Hancock, outside of town fleeing to avoid arrest, just as more shots could be heard fired from Lexington Green. However he was promptly sent back to Buckman’s tavern in Lexington because Hancock had left important papers there in their rush to escape!  So he just missed witnessing the first battle of the Revolutionary War.

By this point Paul had been away from home for sometime. On the brink of war and unsure of her husband’s fate, his wife Rachael began to worry he had been captured. She contacted a member of the Sons of Liberty and asked him to find her husband, giving him 125 pounds, presumably so Paul could bribe his captors. It ended up being unnecessary as Paul returned shortly after, which was fortunate because the man Rachel had approached was Benjamin Church, the (undercover) British agent, and there is no telling if he would have actually assisted Paul’s escape. 

None of the men involved in the Midnight Ride got much, if any, credit for their bravery that night during their lifetime. The story, along with the sacrifices of many others, no doubt, was a bit lost in the chaos of war and business of building a new country.  Revere’s is the only one of the men with any real name recognition today. It’s not obvious why Longfellow chose to include just him in the poem, especially when Prescott was the one who actually warned Concord, but a few years after Longfellow’s poem, Dawes at least was honored by his own, lesser known poem “The Midnight Ride of William Dawes” by  Helen F. Moore. 

Dr. Warren is perhaps best remembered for telling his mother after a with death;

He went on to fight and die in the battle of Bunker Hill (at only 34 years old.) He was a Major General at the time, but he chose to let others command from a safe distance, bec

ause of their greater field experience. Instead he led the troops into the battle and a British officer recognized and shot him on the field. He was buried anonymously by the British but later exhumed and Revere was the one to identify this body (by the artificial tooth Revere had once implanted.) Warren was reburied in the Boston Granary Burial Ground, though was later moved again to a family vault in Forest Hills Cemetery. 

 * We are able to distinguish between fact and legend mostly based on Paul Revere’s own accounts of the night in first in the draft and the final depositions he was requested to write for the Massachusetts Provisional Congress in 1775. These memos were written as part of the investigation to prove that the British Soldiers had fired the first shot at Lexington Green.  Then again in a 1798 letter Paul wrote to Jeremy Belknap, the Corresponding Secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society recounting the events of the night in full for the sake of their being preserved.

** His work was (and still is) highly prized for its clean, elegant style and immaculate craftsmanship. It's considered to be some of the last great hand-made pieces made worldwide before the age of mass production, which is ironic as Revere and the company he founded, Copper Products, Inc, actively participated in establishing machine production facilities like the first Boston copper rolling mills, in order to produce, among other works, sheathing for the USS Constitution and the dome of the Massachusetts statehouse.  (The company still operates today.) Later during the war, he also designed the first Massachusetts gun powder mill, essentially replicated the one in Philadelphia after having only been able to observe it for a single day.)