1775 Paul Revere was a Boston engraver and silversmith (his work is so highly prized now that it’s found mainly in museums and very wealthy families) who had been involved in revolutionary politics from the 1760s. After the British closed the port of Boston in 1774 and quartered large numbers of their troops there, he began to work as an intelligencer and messenger for the patriot cause.
In April 1775, it became clear that the British were planning a move, probably to seize a cache of rebel arms in Concord. If so, the colonial militias and irregulars would have to be warned. When the British marched westwards, how would they go – directly across the Charles River or via the longer land route south, then west? When it was clear that they were going via the river, Revere and William Dawes rode off at speed for Lexington and (if possible) Concord. In case they were captured, Revere had instructed the sexton of the Old North Church, Boston to hang one lantern in the steeple if the occupying army were going by land, two if over the water.
Thus alerted, patriot militias from Charlestown westwards were ready for the British regulars, ambushing them at Lexington and finally repulsing them at the old North Bridge, Concord, where the ‘shot heard round the world’ began the Revolutionary War.
Though overtaken by the urgent events of the revolution, Revere’s adventure came back into prominence 60 years later, when America’s most popular poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of ‘Evangeline’ and The Song of Hiawatha – not to mention reams of translations and shorter occasional lyrics – made it the subject of his ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’:
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.
Generations of American schoolchildren had to learn these lines by heart. Although they could almost have been a source for William McGonagall’s immortal tribute to the Tay Bridge disaster nineteen years later (see 28 December), the poem improves after this, even if it credits Revere alone with the midnight gallop and has him getting all the way to Concord, which he didn’t reach because the British caught him at Lexington and took away his horse.