Why Paul Revere’s Ride Mattered

A little after 10 p.m. on the night of April 18, 1775, the Patriots’ best express rider, Paul Revere, set out from Boston by rowboat, then horseback, to warn the countryside that Royal soldiers were marching toward the towns of Lexington and Concord. By dawn on April 19, those soldiers, the Regulars, had reached Lexington, where they met resistance from provincial forces. The battles of the American Revolution had begun.

The following is excerpted from The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America, written by Kostya Kennedy.

He saddled the horse in Charlestown, and the new knowledge that British officers riding good horses covered the roads ahead, and that these officers might corner him or fire at him, did not diminish Revere’s resolve. As a rider and as a message bearer in a time of extreme duress, he was in a singular class. “Steady, vigorous, sensible, and persevering,” Thomas Young said of Revere. Soon, other riders, alerted by Revere, would be spread out on routes that ran like so many veins through the body of land and people. It was Revere’s natural reward to go the most direct and dangerous road to Lexington—an artery, as it were, to the heart of it all—alone.

At Medford Square, Revere came upon a mounted Patriot, Martin Herrick, and Revere told Herrick of the Regulars advancing. Herrick took the news back to where he lived, riding northward away from the road and the side roads where the British patrol might have been, to the vaster farmland of Lynnfield and to the town of Reading, stopping at the tavern to spread the news. He brought word as well to the young captain of the Reading minutemen, a doctor named John Brooks. So that now, as the night deepened, the men in those more northern towns, Lynn and Lynnfield and Reading, were assembling and soon setting off toward Lexington on horseback, their fowling pieces locked and belted to their sides, fixing to meet the Regulars where they were.

Revere rode on along High Street, passing the old school and then, a quarter mile beyond, passing the wide, newly built Medford Meeting House. High Street began to slope upward, and the terrain became stonier around the sides of the road as Revere and his horse, Brown Beauty, ascended Rock Hill. The Mystic River lay below them, to their left.

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The road descended off the rise and came into flatland, fenced and tended, and Revere followed the road as it neared and then veered farther away from the Mystic River, the earth wet and sometimes sodden beneath Brown Beauty’s hooves. Along the way, small pools of water pocked the road, and mud splattered up from Brown Beauty’s forelegs against her sides and against Revere’s boots and buckskin pants.

Revere again crossed the Mystic River by bridge. High Street became Medford Street, and Revere rode into the town of Menotomy, past where the Meeting House stood and the Russell Store, and beyond that Cutler’s Tavern and the wooden houses set just back into the fields. Here the road was known to those who lived alongside it as the Concord Road.

Revere was now more than three miles, closer to four, from where he had left the rider Martin Herrick in Medford. All through those miles, Revere spread word of the Regulars’ advance. He passed the homes of Gibson and Swan and Caldwell and Smith and Johnson and Cutter and Hill—such names and many others that he would never reveal, would keep always protected. In remembrance of the night, Revere would say simply, “I alarmed almost every house til I got to Lexington.”

There may have been 800 people living in Medford then, and maybe as many in Menotomy. Delivering the alarm did not in each case take much time, didn’t much slow Revere on his intended path. He spoke directly and firmly, and his words came as tinder to a wanting flame. The Patriots he met were ready to act. “We are determined in a firm, virtuous, manly and joint way,” the leaders of Chelmsford had resolved in the months before Revere’s ride, “to secure and defend our liberties, those liberties purchased for us by our ancestors, at the expense of so much blood and treasure. Before they are wrenched from us we will struggle hard, very hard for them, considering ourselves as the guardians of unborn millions…. In freedom we’re born and in freedom we’ll die.”

With Revere their progenitor, mounted messengers would over the next hours course across Middlesex County and into Essex County and Norfolk County, into the counties of Bristol and Worcester. All that night and into the day, they would ride to rally the locals throughout Massachusetts Bay and soon after would ride further still, heading south and north into the neighboring colonies so that everyone might know that the time had arrived.

They fanned out hot that night and early morning. Some messengers had been alerted by Revere, and others had been alerted by someone who had in their turn been alerted by Revere. Some messengers had heard about the lanterns shown in the Old North Church. They rode short essays and longer journeys. They took the regular roads, and they galloped through open fields, and they crossed river bridges, and they found wooded paths. They stopped once or twice or several times to give the news.

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Messengers arrived at houses and farms in the moonlit early morning hours and in the predawn and as the day began to break. Sometimes one mounted messenger gave way to another who continued on, and sometimes two horsemen rode in tandem. Some messengers were experienced riders—post riders or express riders or militia men—but many simply took the assignment impromptu, chosen by random force. Together these riders formed the face and voice of the start of the American Revolution. Organized in a fashion, but loosely so, an outgrowth, in both spirit and practical measure, of the network of express riders devised by Samuel Adams and elevated by Paul Revere. In Worcester, which lay more than 40 miles from the Charlestown line, a parched and dusty rider arrived at the square in front of the church, where his horse collapsed in exhaustion.

Riders reached town after town that night, but they did not reach everywhere. Not every farm and dwelling across those sprawling counties got the news in its early stage, not everyone would know in time. News traveled fast, but not in every case fast enough. The course of the alarm, every rider knew, could die in the emptiness of open land.

And even where the messages were received, would enough of the minutemen and the militia indeed respond quickly enough? And then would they respond again when the moment came to fight? To feel the force and menace of a hostile enemy? So many of the Patriot militia were young. So many of them were untested by the heat and danger, the din and violence and fear, of the battlefield. Traveling through the countryside delivering the news and then moving on, there was no way for Revere, or any other rider, to know how successful the errand would or would not be.