For you history buffs out there:
Paul Revere Wasn’t the Only Midnight Rider Who Dashed Through the Darkness to Warn the Patriots That the British Were Coming
Friday marks the 250th anniversary of Revere’s ride, which began late on the night of April 18, 1775. But the story many Americans heard growing up dates to 1861, when the Atlantic Monthly published Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” It opens with the famous couplet: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
In Longfellow’s version, Revere directs a fellow rebel to signal information about the British soldiers’ movements by hanging lanterns from Boston’s Old North Church: “one if by land, and two if by sea.” After rowing across the Charles River, Revere waits for the signal. When two lamps appear in the belfry tower, he “springs to the saddle” and rides “to every Middlesex village and farm”—arriving in Medford by 12 a.m., Lexington by 1 a.m. and Concord by 2 a.m.
When the British attack, the patriots are ready. …
In reality, Revere was one of many riders who raised the alarm that night. Some of their names have been lost to history, but at least two others feature prominently in historical accounts: William Dawes, who set out from Boston an hour before Revere, and Samuel Prescott, who arrived in Concord alone around 1:30 a.m. Revere’s ride ended around 1 a.m., when he was captured by a British patrol.
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Around 10 p.m., the patriot leader Joseph Warren, a Boston physician, sent for 40-year-old Revere “in great haste,” as the silversmith later recalled in a letter. Upon arriving at Warren’s house, Revere wrote, “I found he had sent an express by land to Lexington—a Mr. William Dawes.”
Dawes was a 30-year-old tanner who often passed through a British checkpoint on Boston Neck, the thin strip of land connecting the city (practically an island at the time) to the mainland. Unlike Revere, who was known as a fierce revolutionary, Dawes might be able to bypass the checkpoint without raising suspicion. Meanwhile, Warren directed Revere to deliver an identical warning to Lexington via a shorter route across the Charles River. That way, even if one messenger were apprehended, the other would still have a chance.
What if both messengers were captured? Revere had already planned for such a scenario. About a week earlier, he had stopped in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown to devise a signal involving lanterns hung from Old North Church—one lantern if the British were coming by land over Boston Neck, and two lanterns if they were crossing the Charles River.
Unlike in the poem, these signals weren’t intended for Revere. They were a redundancy that allowed for communication with allies outside Boston in the event that Revere (and all other messengers) failed to leave the city undetected. Because Revere and Dawes both made it to Lexington, the system ended up being unnecessary.
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“Revere’s ride was a progenitor, igniting a network of dozens of riders who coursed through the countryside, rousing people to come to Lexington and Concord,” says Kostya Kennedy, author of the recently released book The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America.
As Revere roused the countryside, Dawes was also making his way toward Lexington. “For whatever reason, Dawes was not effective in sounding the alarm on his ride,” Kennedy explains….
Around midnight, Revere arrived in Lexington, where he found Hancock and Adams. Dawes, who had taken the longer route, joined him about half an hour later. When the two men set out for Concord together, they encountered Prescott, a 23-year-old doctor who was in Lexington visiting a girlfriend. He offered to ride with them, as he lived in Concord and knew the territory. “Prescott had particular value because [he] was known in those parts, and so people were likely to give credit to his alarm,” says Kennedy.
But as the three men rode into the night, they ran into British patrols, who captured Revere…
Legend has it that Dawes escaped the British …
Meanwhile, Prescott rode his horse over a stone wall and escaped. Navigating the terrain he knew well, he flew past his own house toward the center of Concord, where the minuteman Amos Melvin was standing guard. By the time the British troops left Boston around 2 a.m., Melvin had already rung the town’s bells, mobilizing the local militia.
Revere never attempted to claim all the glory for that fateful night. In firsthand accounts, he appropriately credits both Dawes and Prescott….
After all, Revere was the man behind the lantern signals, even if the details don’t quite align with Longfellow’s narrative. He also may have spread the warning more efficiently. “Revere and his fellow riders on his northern route succeeded in spreading the alarm by engaging the institutions of these rural communities in a way that William Dawes did not,” writes historian David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell examines this discrepancy in his 2000 best seller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, arguing that Revere, who was well connected to key figures in the revolutionary cause, had a “particular and rare set of social gifts” that Dawes lacked. As the silversmith rode toward Lexington, “he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were,” writes Gladwell. “Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that—like most of us—once he left his hometown, he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on.”
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