The iconic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” begins, “Listen, my children …”
And, sure enough, we have long told our kids and ourselves of the cinematic events in April 1775, when the famous silversmith warned the countryside of approaching British troops and the American Revolution kicked off in earnest.
Like all legendary events, Paul Revere’s Ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord have been encrusted with myth: It’s almost certainly not the case that Revere yelled, “The British are coming!” (we still considered ourselves British); Revere didn’t ride alone, and he didn’t even make it to Concord (the British briefly captured him); and the role of the celebrated Minutemen, the best of the militia units, tends to be exaggerated in the popular understanding (most of the Colonial forces were regular militia).
Such minutiae aside, that day 250 years ago, April 19, 1775, still deserves to be celebrated in prose and poetry and is every bit as extraordinary as you might have learned when you were a child before we decided we didn’t like our own history and heroes so much anymore.
Hoping to maintain operational secrecy, the British sent a contingent out at night from Boston to capture reputed stores of weapons in Concord. They were immediately noticed — the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns in the Old North Church were a real thing — and the race was on.
It is really one of the most dramatic episodes in American history: Paul Revere and others rushing to warn the countryside, and the British troops marching through the night, not briefed on their mission, hearing guns and bells sounding the alarm all around them.
Lexington was on the way. The militia mustered as a show of force, not seeking a fight. No one knows who fired “the shot heard around the world”; it may have been an inadvertent discharge. But the British then fired volleys and charged with bayonets, killing eight.
Concord was now fully on alert. Again, there was a wary standoff. Again, someone fired. During this confrontation at North Bridge, the British got off a volley, then the Colonials returned fire with deadly effect and — shockingly — the British ran.
Their ranks swelling, the Colonials harried the Regulars along the narrow Battle Road as they retreated back to Lexington, with the places where the fighting was especially intense known by names such as the Bloody Angle and Parker’s Revenge.
Members of the militia didn’t, as popular imagination believes, largely act on their own inspired initiative; they were well-led. The Americans repeatedly stood in formation against the British regulars during the course of the day. “It was an extraordinary display of courage, resolve and discipline by citizen soldiers against regular troops,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes.
The more dispersed fighting along the Battle Road later on was itself the product of a Colonial plan — to avoid direct confrontation with a now-reinforced, much larger British force. By the time they made it back to Boston, the British had suffered a true mauling, experiencing roughly 300 casualties to 100 for the Colonials.
The Americans ensured that the word spread far and wide, and the effect was electric. Thomas Paine, who had only recently come to America, felt that “the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears.” John Adams said that Lexington “changed the instruments of war from the pen to the sword.”
If Lexington and Concord were small-scale engagements in the scheme of things, the reverberations were enormous. They sent a message that a defiant American population wouldn’t be easily subdued.
Wadsworth concluded his poem with the lines:
“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 hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”
May it be so.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.