By Gary Topping–
The poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has not fared well at the hands of the literary critics. My dad, who was not a literary critic, got onto their bandwagon anyway with a parody of “The Song of Hiawatha,” whose moccasins had “the fur side on the inside and the skin side on the outside.” For the most part, I agree with their judgment, except that I really like “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” I do have to admit that it’s very bad history, and Longfellow’s omission of the concurrent ride of Israel Bissell, which Mike O’Brien told us about yesterday, is only one way in which he shortchanged us.
But look at this menacing imagery of the warship past which Revere rows across the harbor “with muffled oar”: “A phantom ship, with each mast and spar/ Across the moon like a prison bar/ And a huge black hulk, that was magnified/ By its own reflection in the tide.” And once on the other side, how about this for nervous urgency: “Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,/ Booted and spurred with a heavy stride/ On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere./ Now he patted his horse’s side,/ Now gazed at the landscape far and near,/ Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, / And turned and tightened his saddle girth.” When the first light appears, he springs into the saddle and, as he turns the horse down the road, he glimpses, almost over his shoulder, the second light. Aha! He has his signal and he’s off! I don’t know about you, but that gets my pulse pounding!
Historically, though, the whole scene is complete baloney. Revere was the one in Boston who was ordering the church sexton to expose the lanterns (very quickly, so the soldiers would not figure out it was a signal) to let his buddy in Charlestown, William Conant, know the army’s route so he could alert the people on the other side of the bay.
Further, Revere was anything but alone in his ride to alert the people of Lexington and Concord of the soldiers’ departure. (By the way, he never said, “The British are coming.” The United States of America would not yet exist for another year, so all parties involved were “British.” The distinction to be made was between soldiers and civilians. What he actually told the militia in Lexington was “The regulars are coming out.”) In fact, there were so many scouts riding around the Massachusetts countryside at three o’clock in the morning alerting various communities of the soldiers’ movements that the effect is almost comical. “At times it appeared that there more riders abroad than soldiers,” says historian Arthur Tourtellot; “many of them were meeting each other, dodging each other, or capturing each other.”
Moreover, Revere and William Daws, his companion whom he met up with in Lexington, never made it to Concord at all; they were both arrested a short ways out of Lexington. Daws broke away and eluded the soldiers by running through a swamp, while the soldiers confiscated Revere’s horse (which he had borrowed in Charlestown and the hapless owner of which would never see again) and sent him trudging back to Lexington on foot. The expedition ended ingloriously for him as he wound up being a baggage toter for John Hancock, who was visiting his fiancée in Lexington. The alarm was actually carried on to Concord by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a young Concord physician who was riding back home after a visit with his girlfriend and who overtook Revere and Daws just before their arrest. Prescott, in a truly heroic move, escaped arrest by jumping his horse over a fence and galloping the rest of the way home.
Historian Daniel Boorstin observes a humorous irony about Revere. “When a Paul Revere enters the history books,” he points out, “strange things happen to him. He suddenly becomes the conscious agent of world-wide events. He is forced onto a stage which he never knew and which exists only in retrospect.” Much better, Boorstin thinks, if we “try to rediscover him as an energetic, enterprising, public-spirited, anxious, hopeful, and provincial Bostonian.” If we aspire to that end, Longfellow hasn’t helped us much. As we approach our nation’s birthday this year, let me suggest, as a descendent of no fewer than two Revolutionary War veterans, that we continue to enjoy Longfellow’s stirring poem, but that we make some effort to get our facts straight as well.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
