There's More to That
A Smithsonian magazine special report
Dive Into the Deeper Story of the American Revolution on How New England and Virginia United Against the British
Inside the steeple of Old North Church and among the Southern Colonies, less familiar stories of the events from 250 years ago emerge
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Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, silversmith Paul Revere took to his horse on a midnight ride to warn American rebels that British troops were approaching. The famous ride and an ensuing battle at Lexington and Concord touched off the American Revolution.
But there are other stories involving the role that enslaved Africans and Southern colonists played in launching and sustaining the rebellion that led to the founding of the United States of America. Host Ari Daniel speaks with Nikki Stewart of Old North Illuminated and Smithsonian writer Andrew Lawler about these lesser-known histories.
A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes about a baseball field resurrected in a World War II-era Japanese internment camp, a recently solved mystery surrounding the burial of John F. Kennedy and how artificial intelligence is making ancient scrolls readable again, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ari Daniel: I’m standing in the North End, Boston’s famous Italian neighborhood.
Nikki Stewart: The North End definitely has a pretty European vibe, brick houses, narrow streets, lots of storefront shops and restaurants. It’s a pretty vibrant neighborhood.
Daniel: This is Nikki Stewart. She’s the executive director of Old North Illuminated.
Stewart: We are the nonprofit that manages tourism, research and preservation at Old North Church & Historic Site.
Daniel: Wow. So we just stepped into the Old North Church.
I’ve lived in Boston for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever been inside Old North. The church itself is pretty simple. A large white interior, box seats instead of pews. But this place has stories, including the one the church is known for.
Stewart: What we consider to be literally one moment in history.
Daniel: That moment occurred on the eve of the American Revolution at a time when tensions between the colonists and the crown were at a breaking point. And it has to do with the church’s steeple.
We can’t go up to the steeple, can we?
Stewart: Are you afraid of heights?
Daniel: No.
Stewart: Then we can go up.
Daniel: Oh, we can? Great. That’s exciting.
Nikki leads me up narrow stairwell after narrow winding staircase behind the organ. Here’s another door. Through the bell-ringing chamber.
Stewart: And here we have a copy of the first Bell Ringers Guild agreement. And you can see on the bottom here that Paul Revere was one of the first bell ringers.
Daniel: Paul Revere, who on the night of April 18, 1775, was tasked with a critical mission.
Stewart: At that time, patriot leaders in the city know that the revolution is really about to spark. And so there are two ways that British troops could leave Boston to Lexington and Concord to try to capture munitions. They could leave on a land route along Boston Neck, or they could leave by boat by crossing the Charles River. And so the plan is that when people know how the troops are going to leave Boston, that Revere is going to communicate that as far and wide as he can.
Daniel: To try to head them off.
Stewart: Exactly.
Daniel: Revere’s assignment is to get on a horse and spread the word, but he’s worried about getting caught before he can do so. So he devises an insurance policy.
Stewart: He arranges with a trusted friend of his to hang the signal in the steeple of the church. And so that’s where this idea of “One if by land, two if by sea” comes from. It’ll be one lantern if the troops are leaving by land and two lanterns if they’re going to be leaving by boat across the Charles River. So a lot of folks think that the signal is to Revere, but the signal is actually from Revere so that if he is captured, that message still makes it to Charlestown.
Daniel: This is why Nikki and I are climbing this steeple—to see where those two lanterns were hung. But waiting for us at the top is a complicated story of both liberation and hardship.
From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More To That,” the podcast that time-travels to critical turning points in human history. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War, we consider some of the lesser-known perspectives of the fight for American independence. Stay tuned.
Stewart: Now I’m going to open the trap door.
Daniel: This doesn’t look ADA compliant.
Stewart: No.
Daniel: We keep going up and up. Oh, here’s the bell. Sometimes there are railings, sometimes there aren’t. Is this also part of the tour?
Stewart: No, we are above the tour now.
Daniel: I count eight flights of stairs. You’re a good sport, Nikki.
Stewart: I haven’t been up here in a while.
Daniel: Oh, how beautiful. At last, we’re standing in the steeple. Four windows, one on each side, look out onto Boston. There’s the Financial District. The North End. I see Logan Airport. What a view. So then, this is where they hung the lanterns.
Stewart: So, imagine doing what we just did in the middle of the night in the dark, right? Your knees are shaking. You’re probably pretty scared.
Daniel: But this lantern signal, which cues others to ride along with Paul Revere, allows them to spread the message to the patriots to mobilize in Lexington and Concord before the British troops arrive.
Stewart: The battles of Lexington and Concord take place the next day. That really is a crossing of the Rubicon.
Daniel: Lexington and Concord being when the first British soldiers clashed with the patriot militia, the start of the American War for Independence.
Stewart: We can’t go back after that. And so I think the lantern signal for so many people symbolizes Revere’s ride and symbolizes that real turning point.
Daniel: Ever since that night, the steeple of this church, the one you just heard me climb, has served as a beacon of freedom. But the story of this steeple is more complicated than that.
Stewart: I think that Old North Church, when you look at the full scope of its now over 300 years, it’s really a microcosm of the American story. It is this icon of liberty and independence. And yet where we are standing right now is funded from the proceeds of enslaved labor. And I think it’s OK to ask ourselves, what does that mean? How does that impact how we got to where we are today?
Daniel: Nikki and I make our way into the sanctuary of Old North, and we find a place in the balcony overlooking the ground floor to sit and talk about that critical night in American history.
Stewart: Old North Church is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the most significant churches in U.S. history. This building was constructed in 1723. It’s built as a Church of England parish. And at that time, Boston is very much a Puritan city. So Old North, while it is a very wealthy congregation from the start, it’s also a little bit of a religious minority. One of the things that I think is really significant about the early congregation at Old North, it’s very racially diverse.
Daniel: This is no accident, though. Many of the people who worshiped here, who funded its operations and who led its services either owned slaves or profited off of enslavement. The church’s rector, also a slaveholder, was very concerned with converting Black and Indigenous Bostonians.
Stewart: It’s not a place of equality. We have a lot of questions about why these folks chose to worship at Old North. And we recognize that particularly for those who were enslaved, it likely wasn’t a choice. And right now, we’re sitting in the North Gallery of the church, which is where Black and Indigenous congregants worshiped. And so I think when people look up from the ground floor, they think, “Oh, what the view must be. Those are the best seats in the house.” But now that we’re up here, you can see like, well, you can’t really see anything. From most of these seats, you can’t see the altar. The columns block the view of the pulpit. And I can tell you that in the dead of winter and in the heat of the summer, it’s not a comfortable place to be.
Daniel: Nikki did say, however, that there may have been potential for community here.
Stewart: If you were an enslaved person who was separated from your spouse because they were enslaved in another household, then you could have come to church here together potentially, and that would have been a place where you connected with your family members on a weekly basis as well.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I think it’s really an opportunity to look at history in a more critical way. As a historian, I’m really a fan of analytical patriotism where we can look at the messiness of our history and still find things to be proud of and things to be inspired by. But I think the American Revolution is very much a paradox. It does not bring freedom and liberty to all people. In fact, lots of people are left behind. And I think Old North Church is a really great example of that paradox.
Daniel: I went to Old North Church to learn about the start of the Revolutionary War, but Paul Revere and his band of Bostonians are just part of the story.
Lawler: There would be no United States today without the decision by the Southern Colonies to join what began as a Northern rebellion.
Daniel: This is Andrew Lawler. He’s a Smithsonian magazine contributor and author of the book A Perfect Frenzy, about how the Revolutionary War took hold in the American South.
Lawler: Most of us know the story of how the American Revolution began in the North, because we all know about the Boston Tea Party. So at the end of 1773, a group of Bostonians tossed the tea overboard into the harbor. And that led to a series of events which exploded almost exactly 250 years ago on the greens at Lexington and then at Concord in April 1775.
Daniel: Andrew explained that as Bostonian militias start forming in Massachusetts over taxes on tea and other imports, the South remains largely unperturbed.
Lawler: New England in that day was a land primarily of trade. In the South, it was different because in the South, you primarily had an economy based on agriculture. So in Virginia, for example, they’re growing tobacco. In South Carolina, they’re growing rice and indigo. And they’re shipping these products to Britain for sale.
Daniel: They also have different attachments to slavery than colonists in the North.
Lawler: While there were enslaved people in the North, most of them served as domestic servants in the cities, whereas in the South it was the other way around. Most of the enslaved people worked out on the land and were really the key to the economic success of the region. In Virginia, for example, four out of ten Virginians were enslaved. So you had these huge numbers of people who were required in order to keep the economy functioning. And, of course, they were at the bottom of that social ladder, very different from the North where the percentage of enslaved Africans overall was quite small. New York being an exception, I think maybe one in five New Yorkers in that time were enslaved people of color.
Daniel: So, what was going on in the South at the time of Lexington and Concord? Did the Southern colonies immediately decide to take up arms?
Lawler: No. The Southern colonies were actually quite attached to the crown and did not have the same kind of antipathy toward Britain over this issue of taxes and tariffs, largely because they weren’t moving these goods, but they did have their own particular grievances.
Daniel: These grievances revolve around westward expansion.
Lawler: So, in the early 1760s, the British won the French and Indian War. And when they won that war, suddenly Britain attained all of the land that was west of the Appalachians as far as Mississippi. This territory primarily, of course, was made up of Indigenous peoples who lived there and most of whom probably had never heard of the British king. King George III was determined not to have to fight another very expensive war. So to do that, he drew a line down the Appalachian Mountains. He said, “The white people, the colonists, they’ll stay to the east, and the Indigenous people stay to the west. And that way we’ll keep these two groups apart, prevent them from going to war, and everybody will be happy.”
Well, by the 1770s, a lot of white Virginians were not happy at all, including important people like George Washington. George Washington was a member of the elite. He was a still fairly young up-and-coming planter who had married one of Virginia’s wealthiest widows. So he had a lot to lose. He was climbing the social ladder. And the next stage in his expansion of wealth was to obtain land in the Ohio Valley that is on the west side of the Appalachians, because in Virginia, land equaled wealth. He was eager to move west, and he was unfortunately unable to do that because the king had put a ban on legal sales.
Daniel: George Washington isn’t the only Southern colonist who opposed the British monarchy on this issue.
Lawler: This was really upsetting to many white Virginians who saw the Ohio Valley as their natural right. It was kind of an early sense of Manifest Destiny, and they viewed the British crown as an obstacle.
Daniel: Still, Washington feels it would be a risky move to take up arms against the British Empire, at least at first.
Lawler: Washington was not among the first to call for a revolution. In fact, in April of 1775, which is arguably the most important month in American history, when it was clear that the colonies were willing to fight for what they viewed as their liberty, George Washington remained silent. And I think the reason is clear. He was friends with the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore. And Lord Dunmore had been his key to trying to unlock the land that he wanted to the west. So for George Washington to go against the British Empire meant he had to go against the governor who was the potential source of his future wealth.
Daniel: Tell me more about this Lord Dunmore. Who was he and why was he so important at the time?
Lawler: Lord Dunmore was one of the most fascinating characters in the American Revolution. He’s also considered by many historians to be the first villain, the first person who was villainized by the patriots in a major way. Lord Dunmore was a small-time Scottish aristocrat. His wife’s sister married well, and he was able to obtain a job as the governor of New York, appointed by King George III. And then when the governor of Virginia suddenly died, the king told Dunmore to go to Virginia.
So in 1771, Dunmore arrives in Virginia against his will. He really liked New York. He liked the city. He wasn’t really keen to go into a place where there wasn’t much in the way of what he calls society and where people tended to die quite often of fever. Nevertheless, he was forced to go to Virginia. He goes to the capital of Williamsburg, where he lives in a grand mansion, and then he becomes quite wealthy. He bought enslaved Africans. He bought plantations. He became Thomas Jefferson’s first patron for architecture and really settles in as the top of the pyramid of the Virginia gentry.
Now, that all began to change in 1774 when the conflict between the colonists and Britain began to heat up. And it was in 1775 that Dunmore had to make a fateful choice. He had to choose whether or not to side with the patriots, who didn’t have much in the way of weapons or ammunition, but who potentially, if they won, would control vast tracts of land that would make the white gentry even richer. On the other hand, he could stay with the British. And if he stayed with the British, he would have to find a way to fight the patriots. So he was in a very difficult position in the spring of 1775.
Daniel: So, what was his plan, eventually?
Lawler: So, King George III sent a message to all his royal governors saying: Do not allow the patriots to import any weapons or ammunition from Britain. And basically keep an eye on the weapons and ammunition that they have in the public magazines.
Daniel: It just so happens that patriots in Virginia have recently taken control of a public magazine in Williamsburg.
Lawler: And this is where the colony kept arms and ammunition in case of a slave rebellion, or if they needed to fight Indigenous peoples to the west.
Daniel: Patrick Henry has just given his famous “Give me liberty or give me death speech” in Richmond, and it spurs a movement to keep a magazine out of the reach of British control.
Lawler: So, a few weeks after Patrick Henry has given his famous speech, Lord Dunmore knows he has to act. The first thing he does is to get the key to the magazine.
Daniel: Dunmore quickly orchestrates a successful gunpowder heist.
Lawler: But as they’re leaving, an early riser there in Williamsburg hears them and sounds the alarm. And an angry crowd gathers in front of the palace to demand that Dunmore return the gunpowder to the colonists.
Daniel: The leaders of the patriot movement in Williamsburg end up talking to Lord Dunmore, and Dunmore sells them a lie.
Lawler: Dunmore says, “Well, I took the powder because it was a danger of a slave insurrection, and we didn’t want the powder to fall into the hands of insurrectionists. Therefore, I have simply protected the powder by putting it on a ship nearby.” Now, you laugh, and we today would laugh at that, but the patriots didn’t laugh. Why? Because there actually was a rumor that the enslaved Africans were going to rise up and fight their owners. So, the patriots simply said, “OK, well, thank you very much.” And they left, and they went outside. And I’m sure as Dunmore is watching anxiously through the window, [having] convinced the mob to go home and to not worry about it.
And the situation might have remained calm had it not been for a visit the next day by a local doctor who paid a house call on somebody in the palace. And he ran into Dunmore as he was leaving. And Dunmore told this doctor, “I understand that some of my British officers were insulted yesterday in the street. And I just want to let you know that if I am harmed or my family or any British officers are insulted or harmed, that I will burn this town to the ground, and I will free the enslaved people.” And the doctor then promptly went and reported that to the patriots, who were stunned and shocked. When a group of thousands or more patriots gathered in a nearby town of Fredericksburg planning to march on Williamsburg, Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, sent them a letter saying, “Please don’t.”
Daniel: Peyton Randolph is one of the patriot leaders who had been present at the meeting with Lord Dunmore.
Lawler: The head of the patriot movement is terrified that a civil war is about to break out in Williamsburg that could pit British troops and enslaved people against the patriots. So, this was the crisis that engulfed Virginia at the end of April in 1775.
Daniel: But Patrick Henry, that other patriot leader, sees this whole affair as an opportunity. Maybe it could galvanize the people of Virginia who haven’t yet joined the patriot cause.
Lawler: He realized that you can talk to them about abstract notions. But if you tell them that the king is going to take their guns and ammunition, then they will rise to the cause. And why were guns important? Guns were not important in Colonial Virginia in that day because people needed to hunt to make a living. Most people had a gun so they could protect themselves from the enslaved people that they owned. So, to threaten to take away someone’s guns and ammunition was indeed a threat that white Virginians took very seriously. And as soon as Patrick Henry made this connection, then suddenly the numbers of people who joined the militia began to skyrocket. And the revolution in Virginia really began to take shape.
Daniel: So, did white Virginians fear an insurrection from people who were enslaved?
Lawler: White Virginians lived in constant anxiety for a century and a half that the people that they enslaved would rise up. Many, many people who were enslaved were tortured or executed because of suspicions that they wanted to revolt against their owners. And these rumors had become even more rife after 1772 and 1773 when news reached Virginia that a British court had freed a slave who had traveled with his owner to London. The court declared that this man was free and could not be held in bondage. And many Virginians who owned enslaved people were terrified that the British were going to emancipate their enslaved labor. This was yet another reason to consider breaking with the British Empire that had nothing to do with tea or taxes.
Daniel: Lord Dunmore wields emancipation of enslaved people as a threat, and it works. The conflict in the South goes dormant for a while, but when Dunmore hears rumors of a plot to kidnap him, he flees to Norfolk, a city more friendly to the British crown.
Lawler: So, by the fall of 1775, the patriots are controlling Williamsburg, and they are creating a very large army with the intention of marching to Norfolk to destroy Lord Dunmore and his small force of British regulars. When Dunmore got word that this was happening, he realized that his only hope was to try and raise a force of local people to make up an army to fight the patriots. And he really had two groups of people in mind. Those were indentured servants—that is, people who were forced to work long periods of time to pay off their passage from Britain and enslaved people. Here was a huge pool of people disaffected from white society who might be willing to take up arms to fight for the king and defeat the patriots.
Daniel: So, what did people who were enslaved do in response? What happened?
Lawler: Long before Lord Dunmore promised emancipation to those enslaved, those in bondage already were fleeing to British lines. Now remember, if you were to run away from your owner, you were guilty of a serious crime that would certainly entail torture, imprisonment and possibly execution. Nevertheless, many, many enslaved people, we don’t know exactly how many, but certainly hundreds, left during the spring and summer and fall of 1775 to go to Norfolk and to seek protection from the British led by Lord Dunmore. And by November of 1775, we know that Lord Dunmore had provided some of them with arms. We know that on November 15, 1775, there was a battle between patriots and Lord Dunmore, in which an enslaved man actually captured his former owner who was the patriot militia leader. This really impressed the governor, and he finally understood that these Black men were good fighters, they were loyal, and they most of all were motivated to seek freedom by supporting the king. So, shortly after that battle at Kemp’s Landing, Lord Dunmore released what is arguably the most radical document ever published in North America prior to the Declaration of Independence. And that was his emancipation proclamation, which promised freedom to anybody who was owned by a patriot who was willing to fight for the king.
Daniel: So, how did this whole affair propel the Revolutionary War effort forward?
Lawler: Dunmore’s proclamation had huge effects on what happened next. First of all, you had hundreds and hundreds of people leaving homes around the country, not simply in Virginia, but as far away as Massachusetts. People were on the move to get to Norfolk in order to obtain freedom. At the same time, whites in the colonies panicked. They feared a mass slave insurrection that would undermine and potentially crush the revolution that had just gotten started. In fact, George Washington, who had opposed the use of Black men in the Continental Army when he assumed control in 1775, reversed himself when he got news of Dunmore’s proclamation. Washington decided that, in fact, it would be better to convince Black men to join the patriot army than it would to allow them to join the British Army. And this had an enormous effect on the outcome of the war, because it provided large numbers of motivated people to fight against the British. So there were enormous implications to what Dunmore did.
Daniel: What happened in the end?
Lawler: Lord Dunmore immediately created what he called the Ethiopian Regiment. Now, Ethiopian was a rare term of respect used by Europeans when talking about Africans. So he created the first British unit that was Black and armed in the history of the British Empire, a very radical move. They were sent into the Battle of Great Bridge, in which an army that was overseen by Patrick Henry clashed with the army overseen by Lord Dunmore. In the end, the patriots overwhelmed the British and the British loyalists, including the Ethiopian Regiment. Subsequently, these angry patriots, when they arrived in Norfolk, burned the city to the ground in order to prevent the British from controlling the port.
Daniel: And then, what comes next in the American Revolution? How did the South ally itself with the North?
Lawler: So, in the wake of the destruction of Norfolk in 1776 and Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775, many white Americans decided that it probably was best to join the patriots. These were two key events that pushed a lot of people to support full independence, not simply some kind of negotiation with Britain, but actually separating from an empire that they considered to be intent on liberating their slaves, wreaking havoc on their societies and even burning their towns. As a result, Virginia’s patriots voted unanimously in May of 1776 for independence, and they asked the Continental Congress to do the same, and this broke the deadlock. Until that time, many Colonies—New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware—were really on the fence about whether to go the route of independence. And Virginia’s unanimous vote really changed everything. Without Virginia, the largest, wealthiest, most populous of the colonies, and the oldest, there was little chance that a rebellion could have succeeded or that a new country could have been successfully birthed.
Daniel: Thank you so much. It was a delight talking to you and really having you bring that to life for us.
Lawler: Thanks, Ari.
Daniel: To read more reporting about the start of the Revolutionary War from Andrew Lawler and other Smithsonian magazine contributors, check out the links in our show notes. And while you’re there, please consider leaving us a rating and review. It really helps other people find our show.
“There’s More To That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music. I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.
Stewart: So, next time, you’ll have to come back, and we’ll go down to the crypt.
Daniel: Crypt? There’s even more.
