Paul Revere Wasn’t the Only Midnight Rider Who Dashed Through the Darkness to Warn the Patriots That the British Were Coming
Revere, who was later immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, was one of many riders who rode through the countryside, spreading the alarm on April 18, 1775
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/ellen_wexler.png)
:focal(2000x1333:2001x1334)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/6b/d9/6bd93c1c-3ab2-4896-90a1-e596ef047383/gettyimages-482086241.jpg)
Hours before the first shots of the American Revolution rang out, 700 British soldiers stationed in Boston mobilized under cover of darkness, hoping to stop the war in its tracks.
After overpowering a small group of patriots in the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, they marched toward Concord, where they planned to confiscate the local militia’s stash of ammunition. When they arrived around 8 a.m. on April 19, 1775, they found nearly 400 men waiting for them. Someone had warned the rebels that the British were coming.
This warning, as most Americans will tell you, came from Paul Revere, the brave Boston patriot who charged through the night on horseback to spread the alarm. Thanks to the silversmith’s midnight ride, the nascent colonial militia was able to transform into a formidable threat, driving the British into retreat and setting the stage for a new nation.
This narrative is central to America’s founding myth. It also isn’t entirely true.
Friday marks the 250th anniversary of Revere’s ride, which began late on the night of April 18, 1775. But the story many Americans heard growing up dates to 1861, when the Atlantic Monthly published Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” It opens with the famous couplet: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
In Longfellow’s version, Revere directs a fellow rebel to signal information about the British soldiers’ movements by hanging lanterns from Boston’s Old North Church: “one if by land, and two if by sea.” After rowing across the Charles River, Revere waits for the signal. When two lamps appear in the belfry tower, he “springs to the saddle” and rides “to every Middlesex village and farm”—arriving in Medford by 12 a.m., Lexington by 1 a.m. and Concord by 2 a.m.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/83/ad/83ad97f8-0967-471b-b1ed-6d615fb64d5b/revere-cropped-short.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/4a/d9/4ad956f1-5832-4fd2-b650-68ef3ff2cdcc/longfellow_no_border.jpg)
When the British attack, the patriots are ready. Longfellow ends the poem with an assurance that Revere’s defiant warning will forever serve as inspiration in times of trouble:
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
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 hoofbeat of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
“The poem does what Longfellow wanted it to do: It’s memorable. It’s iconic. It stands on its own,” says Nina Zannieri, executive director of the Paul Revere Memorial Association, which cares for several historic buildings in Boston, infcluding the house where Revere lived at the time of his midnight ride. “But when you peel back the layers of the poem, you learn that it’s far more complex than it is on the face of it.”
In reality, Revere was one of many riders who raised the alarm that night. Some of their names have been lost to history, but at least two others feature prominently in historical accounts: William Dawes, who set out from Boston an hour before Revere, and Samuel Prescott, who arrived in Concord alone around 1:30 a.m. Revere’s ride ended around 1 a.m., when he was captured by a British patrol.
When the British started mobilizing, the rebels thought they would first go to Lexington to arrest John Hancock and Samuel Adams, leaders of the Sons of Liberty (though some historians think this intelligence may have been incorrect). After that, the troops were expected to continue to Concord, where they would seize the local militia’s stockpile of weapons.
Around 10 p.m., the patriot leader Joseph Warren, a Boston physician, sent for 40-year-old Revere “in great haste,” as the silversmith later recalled in a letter. Upon arriving at Warren’s house, Revere wrote, “I found he had sent an express by land to Lexington—a Mr. William Dawes.”
Dawes was a 30-year-old tanner who often passed through a British checkpoint on Boston Neck, the thin strip of land connecting the city (practically an island at the time) to the mainland. Unlike Revere, who was known as a fierce revolutionary, Dawes might be able to bypass the checkpoint without raising suspicion. Meanwhile, Warren directed Revere to deliver an identical warning to Lexington via a shorter route across the Charles River. That way, even if one messenger were apprehended, the other would still have a chance.
What if both messengers were captured? Revere had already planned for such a scenario. About a week earlier, he had stopped in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown to devise a signal involving lanterns hung from Old North Church—one lantern if the British were coming by land over Boston Neck, and two lanterns if they were crossing the Charles River.
Unlike in the poem, these signals weren’t intended for Revere. They were a redundancy that allowed for communication with allies outside Boston in the event that Revere (and all other messengers) failed to leave the city undetected. Because Revere and Dawes both made it to Lexington, the system ended up being unnecessary.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/44/18/4418209b-b7d9-41b9-ab1f-72ff15cd5677/gettyimages-1151169893.jpeg)
After two friends rowed him across the Charles River, Revere confirmed that his fellow patriots in Charlestown had seen the lantern signals and dispatched messengers. He was equipped with “a very good horse,” as he later recalled, and he set off for Lexington around 11 p.m. Along the way, he knocked on doors and spread the alarm in “almost every house.”
“Revere’s ride was a progenitor, igniting a network of dozens of riders who coursed through the countryside, rousing people to come to Lexington and Concord,” says Kostya Kennedy, author of the recently released book The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America.
As Revere roused the countryside, Dawes was also making his way toward Lexington. “For whatever reason, Dawes was not effective in sounding the alarm on his ride,” Kennedy explains. “Very few people from the towns and areas Dawes rode through then made it to Lexington and Concord the next morning. He may not have alerted anyone.”
Around midnight, Revere arrived in Lexington, where he found Hancock and Adams. Dawes, who had taken the longer route, joined him about half an hour later. When the two men set out for Concord together, they encountered Prescott, a 23-year-old doctor who was in Lexington visiting a girlfriend. He offered to ride with them, as he lived in Concord and knew the territory. “Prescott had particular value because [he] was known in those parts, and so people were likely to give credit to his alarm,” says Kennedy.
But as the three men rode into the night, they ran into British patrols, who captured Revere and questioned him at gunpoint. He never made it to Concord. When they eventually let him go, without his horse, he made his way on foot back to Lexington.
Legend has it that Dawes escaped the British by riding into the yard of a house and shouting, “I’ve got two of them—surround them!” as if he were addressing a large group of fellow rebels. While the ruse worked in scaring off his pursuers, he also fell off his horse, which ran into the shadows.
Meanwhile, Prescott rode his horse over a stone wall and escaped. Navigating the terrain he knew well, he flew past his own house toward the center of Concord, where the minuteman Amos Melvin was standing guard. By the time the British troops left Boston around 2 a.m., Melvin had already rung the town’s bells, mobilizing the local militia.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ad/36/ad36081a-d84e-413b-abfb-8c15d5ddd87b/gettyimages-517320294.jpeg)
Revere never attempted to claim all the glory for that fateful night. In firsthand accounts, he appropriately credits both Dawes and Prescott. The midnight ride, which wasn’t even mentioned in Revere’s obituary, didn’t come to define his legacy until Longfellow decided to single him out in his poem.
The poet was “not really excluding anyone,” Zannieri says. “He is featuring a lone rider. … I think he had a reason for choosing Revere. We just don’t know what that was.”
One possibility: Unlike Dawes and Prescott, Revere was intimately involved in the revolutionary cause, and he wrote detailed accounts of his experiences. Before the midnight ride, he had been carrying messages for the rebels for several years, even delivering news of the Boston Tea Party to New York and Philadelphia in 1773. “He is the chosen express for those rides, which makes him an obvious choice for Longfellow in some ways,” says Zannieri. “Revere has been doing this regularly. The midnight ride is not his first ride.”
Additionally, while Dawes and Prescott risked their lives that night, “neither had anything close to the impact on the events that Revere had,” says Kennedy. “I believe both Dawes and Prescott are properly understood, known and recognized for their contributions.”
After all, Revere was the man behind the lantern signals, even if the details don’t quite align with Longfellow’s narrative. He also may have spread the warning more efficiently. “Revere and his fellow riders on his northern route succeeded in spreading the alarm by engaging the institutions of these rural communities in a way that William Dawes did not,” writes historian David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell examines this discrepancy in his 2000 best seller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, arguing that Revere, who was well connected to key figures in the revolutionary cause, had a “particular and rare set of social gifts” that Dawes lacked. As the silversmith rode toward Lexington, “he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were,” writes Gladwell. “Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that—like most of us—once he left his hometown, he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on.”
But those very same social gifts made Revere more recognizable to the British. “He was on their enemies list,” says Kennedy. “The British understood Revere’s skill and critical importance as an express rider.” Dawes may have been able to sneak past the British checkpoint because he didn’t have such a reputation.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a0/5a/a05aee45-8939-4a65-824f-b65847a1e3de/img_3249.jpg)
Today, Dawes’ descendants are trying to boost their ancestor’s reputation. The Descendants of William Dawes Who Rode Association, which includes hundreds of families, hosts reunions every few years. In 2018, several dozen attendees met up in Boston, where small tributes to Dawes can be found—if you know where to look. The Paul Revere House describes his role (though there is, of course, no William Dawes House). In nearby Cambridge, a traffic circle called Dawes Island features a trail of bronze hoofprints commemorating the ride.
“So he is given credit,” says Barb Moberg, president of the association. “I just think Paul Revere had more marketing.”
The association hopes to correct that imbalance. Its members have been trying to establish some sort of memorial to honor Dawes at Forest Hills Cemetery, where his body was moved to an unmarked grave in the 19th century.
Why, then, is there no association devoted to Prescott? Zannieri thinks several factors contributed to Prescott’s relative obscurity. Dawes was given the same assignment as Revere; while Prescott was the man who ultimately reached Concord, he didn’t join in until the end. Additionally, nobody is sure what happened to Prescott during the war, though one account suggests that he died in a British prison in 1777. And unlike Dawes, it appears unlikely he had any descendants who would seek to promote his legacy.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/86/2e/862ecc12-d1ea-4bb9-ade2-0368e0173854/4864850464_ff1f2e579e_k.jpg)
The Paul Revere House tries to present a balanced take on the midnight ride, which it examines in a permanent exhibition. Visitors can see maps tracing the routes of the three known riders—though Zannieri emphasizes that many other nameless riders also played vital roles. They also learn about Longfellow, who was an abolitionist. He wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” near the beginning of the Civil War, hoping that it would inspire national unity and remind Americans of their forefathers’ sacrifices.
“He’s using a lone hero to speak about collective action,” Zannieri says. “He’s not saying, ‘Well, we can win the Civil War with one person.’ He’s basically saying, ‘Everybody has a job to do. Everyone should step up.’”
The museum also tries to present a more nuanced view of Revere, exploring his life beyond the midnight ride—including his early revolutionary activities, his “deeply unspectacular” military service and his later legacy as the first American to successfully roll copper into sheets, Zannieri says.
“We try to turn him back into an understandable human being with flaws,” she adds. “In the poem, he is almost a caricature.”
A running joke speculates that Longfellow spotlighted Revere because Dawes’ name doesn’t work as well with the rhyme scheme. Zannieri says she doesn’t buy the “rhyming silliness,” but the notion has persisted, inspiring several parodies, including one by Helen F. Moore published in the Century magazine in 1896, just three decades after the original poem’s publication:
’Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear—
My name was Dawes and his Revere.
