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.”

The poem was Longfellow’s embodiment of Revere as the courage and determination of the ordinary citizens in the Revolutionary War. Overall, Paul Revere was just a cog in an elaborate warning system.

In 1774 and 1775, the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety employed Paul Revere as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of important documents as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

On the evening of April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren summoned Paul Revere and gave him the task of riding to Lexington, Massachusetts with the news that British soldiers stationed in Boston were about to march into the countryside northwest of the town.

At the time it was thought that the troops planned to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, two leaders of the Sons of Liberty. Then the troops would then continue on to Concord, to capture or destroy military stores, gunpowder, ammunition, and several cannons that had been stockpiled there. In reality the British troops had no orders to arrest anyone.

Revere contacted a friend and instructed him to hold two lit lanterns in the tower of Christ Church (now called the Old North Church) as a signal to fellow Sons of Liberty across the Charles River in case Revere was unable to leave town.

The two lanterns were a predetermined signal stating that the British troops planned to row “by sea” across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than march “by land” out Boston Neck.

After informing Colonel Conant and other local Sons of Liberty about recent events in Boston and verifying that they had seen his signals in the North Church tower, Revere borrowed a horse from John Larkin, a Charlestown merchant and a patriot sympathizer. A member of the Committee of Safety named Richard Devens warned Revere that there were a number of British patrols in the area who might try to intercept him.

At about eleven o’clock Revere set off on horseback. After narrowly avoiding capture just outside of Charlestown, Revere changed his planned route and rode through Medford, where he alarmed Isaac Hall, the captain of the local militia, and informed him of the British movements. He then alarmed almost all the houses from Medford, through Menotomy (today’s Arlington) and arrived in Lexington sometime after midnight.

In Lexington he delivered the message that the regulars were coming. Later that night William Dawes, who had traveled the longer land route out of Boston Neck, arrived in Lexington carrying the same message. Both continued on to Concord to verify that the military stores were properly dispersed and hidden away.

Outside of Lexington, they were overtaken by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a fellow “high Son of Liberty.” A short time later, the British intercepted all three. Prescott and Dawes escaped. Revere was held and questioned but let go. However, his horse was confiscated to replace the tired mount of a British sergeant. Revere returned to Lexington on foot in time to witness the latter part of the battle on Lexington Green.

The opening lines of “Paul Revere’s Ride” are perhaps the best-known words today of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem takes the reader through Paul Revere’s urgent ride on the eve of the battle of Lexington and Concord with its galloping measure and steady rhyme.

Longfellow worked on the poem over several months. It was published in the Boston Evening Transcript and Atlantic Monthly in December 1860. Three years later it was included in Longfellow’s book Tales of a Wayside Inn.

Longfellow’s poem took significant poetic license with the historic facts. The triggering event of writing the poem seems to have been a tour of Boston on April 5, 1860, when he recorded in his journal: “Go with [George] Sumner to Mr. Having, of the North End, who acts as our guide to the “Little Britian” of Boston. Go to the Copp’s Hill burial ground and see the tomb of Cotton Mather, his father and his son; then to the old North Church, which looks like a parish church in London. Climb the tower to the Chime of Bells, now the home of innumerable pigeons. From this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord.”

Longfellow began writing the poem the next day. The signal lanterns were immortalized in his phrase, “One, if by land, and two, if by sea.” He used his trip up the Old North Church tower to paint a vivid picture of Revere’s friend preparing to hold up the lanterns.

The poem should be read as a tale, not as a historical account. The lanterns were a fall-back plan in case he could not get out of Boston. Revere never arrived in Concord. Revere did not ride alone that night. He was one of two riders to leave Boston, and one of many messengers spreading the alarm.

The omission of other riders was a particularly sore point for some. Henry Ware Holland, a descendant of William Dawes, self-published a history in 1878 titled ‘William Dawes and His Ride with Paul Revere’. He sent a copy to Longfellow, “who wryly remarked that it was “a very handsome book… in which he convicts me of high historic crimes and misdemeanors.”

Longfellow wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1860, in the midst of a national crisis that broke out into war a year later. He was a pacifist and an abolitionist. In earlier decades, Longfellow used his poetry to speak out against slavery in seven “Poems on Slavery”, against war in “The Arsenal at Springfield”, and for the strength of the union in “The Building of the Ship”.

In March 1861, only three months after the poem’s publication, Abraham Lincoln made a similar appeal in his inaugural address: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

“Because of Longfellow’s portrayal, Paul Revere and his ride became icons of patriotism and the American Revolution. Even Longfellow’s critic Holland admitted that the scene of Revere waiting for the signal lights was “one of the finest in our colonial annals,” though he added that it “is pure fiction.”

The poem’s fame led to the preservation of the Paul Revere House in 1901 and the erection of an equestrian statue of Revere in the shadow of the Old North Church. In 1967, Martin Luther King summoned Longfellow’s iconic messenger, saying, “We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.” Thus, the “midnight message” of Paul Revere and Henry Longfellow echoes to this day.

“So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm,— A cry of defiance, and not of fear,

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo forevermore! … 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.