(HOST) "Listen my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere." Today is Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord and the day after Paul Revere’s ride. Here’s commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive Director Peter Gilbert to tell you more.
(GILBERT) Longfellow’s memorable poem isn’t necessarily good history. What you know about "…that famous day and year" in April 1775 may not be accurate. Historian David Hackett Fischer’s wonderful book Paul Revere’s Ride separates Paul Revere myth from fact. Vermonters may know David Hackett Fischer as the author of Champlain’s Dream.
First of all, no one cried, "The British are coming, the British are coming!" At that time, the colonials thought of themselves as British. What Paul Revere, William Dawes, and others cried was, "The Regulars are coming!"
Moreover, the colonialists weren’t passive innocents who leapt up spontaneously to defend their homes. They were well-organized and well-prepared, and they were keenly aware of how important it was to be seen as the aggrieved party; they knew they should not fire the first shot.
You may think that silversmith Paul Revere just volunteered to spread the alarm. In fact, Revere played a major role in the revolutionary movement; Fischer shows how Revere was the one person whom almost everyone in the movement knew. He wasn’t the key person, but he was an integral link in New England’s network of revolutionaries.
Revere and William Dawes were not solitary heroes. They were parts of a complex network of people who passed the alarm to ministers, officers, and other local leaders who, in turn, spread the word. For example, Abel Benson, a slave in Needham, Massachusetts sounded a trumpet to awaken the town. That’s right: amidst all those freedom-loving patriots around Boston, there were also slaves.
Revere made not one but many long rides on horseback — to New York, Philadelphia, and Hartford, and numerous times to Exeter and Portsmouth, New Hampshire – to explain the Boston Tea Party and to spread news of the Intolerable Acts, for example.
You may have thought that Revere’s warning gave the Lexington militia time to prepare. It did, but then the head of the militia decided that Revere’s was a false alarm and dismissed the men, only to have to muster them again on the Lexington Green just as the British arrived. And so, despite Revere’s warning, Lexington was caught off guard.
Revere hurried to warn John Adams and John Hancock that the British were planning to arrest them. But for three hours, hot-headed Hancock could not be persuaded to flee. When he finally fled, he left a massive chest of incriminating papers in his room. Fortunately, Revere learned of this potential disaster, returned to Lexington, and, with another man’s help, lugged the heavy trunk out of the Inn and across the Lexington Green, exactly when the militia was lining up there. They got the trunk into the woods only seconds before the British arrived.
Finally, the surviving British Regulars didn’t make it all the way back to their barracks in Boston that night. They slept out in the open — on Bunker Hill, where they would fight again just two months later.