Paul Revere's Ride
Read Paul Revere's Ride Online
Authors: David Hackett Fischer
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #History, #United States, #Historical, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Art, #Painting, #Techniques
Paul Revere’s Ride
DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1994 by David Hackett Fischer
First published in 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer, David Hackett, 1935–
Paul Revere’s Ride
David Hackett Fischer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-509831-0 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-508847-2 (case)
1. Revere, Paul, 1735-1818.
2. Massachusetts—History—Revolution, 1775-1783.
3. Lexington, Battle of, 1775.
4. Concord, Battle of, 1775.
I. Title.
F69.R43F57 1994
973.’311’092--dc20 93-25739
CLOTH 10 9 8 7 6 5
PAPER 25 24 23 22 21 20
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Susie, with love
The Powder Alarm, September 1, 1774
The Portsmouth Alarm, December 13-19, 1774
The Attack on Fort William and Mary, December 14, 1774
The Salem Alarm, February 26-27, 1775
The British Expedition to Concord, April 18-19, 1775
Gage’s Spies, February-March, 1775
Smith’s Crossing of the Charles River, April 18, 1775
The Middlesex Alarm, April 18-19, 1775
The Fight at Lexington, April 19, 1775
The Fight at Concord, April 19, 1775
The Battle Road: Terrain and Land Use, 1775
The Retreat from Concord to Lexington
The Retreat from Lexington to Charlestown
American and British Tactics on the Battle Road
News of Lexington, April 19-May 10, 1775
Paul Revere, Portrait by John Singleton Copley
Apollos Rivoire, gold buttons, ca. 1730
Apollos Rivoire, silver tankard, ca. 1750
Bell Ringers’ Agreement, ca. 1750
Rachel Walker Revere, miniature by Joseph Dunkerly
Paul Revere’s Sketch of the Boston Massacre
Thomas Gage, Portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1769
Margaret Kemble Gage, Portrait by John Singleton Copley, ca. 1771
Paul Revere, “A Certain Cabinet Junto,”
Paul Revere, “The Able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught,”
Doctor Joseph Warren, oil sketch by John Singleton Copley
Lantern displayed in the Old North Church
An Officer of the 4th Foot, Gainsborough
A Light Infantry Officer of the 10th Foot
Captain W. G. Evelyn, 4th Foot, 1775
Firearms used on April 19, 1775
John Hancock, portrait by John Singleton Copley
Samuel Adams, portrait by John Singleton Copley
Dorothy Quincy, portrait by John Singleton Copley
Lydia Hancock, portrait by John Singleton Copley
Major John Brooks, portrait by Gilbert Stuart
“The Yankey’s Return from Camp,”
The Monument at Concord’s North Bridge
Grant Wood,
Paul Revere’s Ride,
1931
The Debunkers at Work: Paul Revere as a Canary
Paul Revere Remounted
Paul Revere? Ain’t he the Yankee who had to go for help?”
—old Texas joke
OUR BRITISH FRIENDS had never heard of him. “Paul Revere?” one asked incredulously, as we led him captive along Boston’s Freedom Trail, “a midnight ride?… captured by
us?”
Our visitor was a man of learning. We were as surprised by his ignorance, as he was by the story itself. In our mutual astonishment we discovered the enduring strength of national cultures in the modern world.
Nearly everyone who has been raised in the United States knows of Paul Revere. The saga of the midnight ride is one of many shared memories that make Americans one people, diverse as we may be. Even in these days of national amnesia the story of Paul Revere’s ride is firmly embedded in American folklore. His name is so familiar that it has become a general noun in American speech. During the Presidential election of 1992, a Republican journalist ambiguously described a defeated Democratic candidate as “an economic Paul Revere.” Whether that phrase was intended to mean a heroic messenger of alarm, or a messenger who failed to reach his destination, was not immediately clear.
1
Ambiguity is an important part of the legend of Paul Revere, and a key to its continuing vitality. The story has been told so many different ways that when Americans repeat it to their children,
they are not certain which parts of the tale are true, or if any part of it actually happened. They are also divided in how they feel about it. A curious paradox of American culture is the persistence of two parties who might be called the Filiopietists and Iconoclasts. Both have been strongly attracted to the legend of Paul Revere, for opposite reasons. Filiopietists love to celebrate the midnight ride. Iconoclasts delight in debunking it.
Together, these two parties have produced a large literature on an inexhaustible subject—poetry in abundance, fiction, oratory, essays, humor, criticism, and popular biography. One of the earliest films on American history was Thomas Edison’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” in 1914. American composers have given us several musical versions of the event—a march, a suite, and even an operetta. American artists have created many imaginative paintings and prints. American scientists have contributed monographs on the meteorology, astronomy, and geology of Paul Revere’s ride. The most imaginative works are the many children’s books the story has inspired. The most bizarre are the fables concocted by cynical Boston journalists every April 18, in their annual search for a new angle on an old story.
But one genre is strangely missing from this list. Professional historians have shown so little interest in the subject that in two centuries no scholar has published a full-scale history of Paul Revere’s ride. During the 1970s, the event disappeared so completely from academic scholarship that several leading college textbooks in American history made no reference to it at all. One of them could barely bring itself to mention the battles of Lexington and Concord.
2
The cause of this neglect is complex. One factor is a mutual antipathy that has long existed between professional history and popular memory. Another of more recent vintage is a broad prejudice in American universities against patriotic events of every kind, especially since the troubled years of Vietnam and Watergate. A third and fourth are the popular movements called multicultural-ism and political correctness. As this volume goes to press, the only creature less fashionable in academe than the stereotypical “dead white male,” is a dead white male on horseback.
Perhaps the most powerful factor, among professional historians at least, is an abiding hostility against what is contemptuously called
histoire événimentielle
in general. As long ago as 1925, the antiquarian scholar Allen French fairly complained that “modern history burrows so deeply into causes that it scarcely has room for
events.”
3
His judgment applies even more forcefully today. Path-breaking scholarship in the 20th century has dealt mainly with social structures, intellectual systems, and material processes. Much has been gained by this enlargement of the historian’s task, but something important has been lost. An entire generation of academic historiography has tended to lose sense of the causal power of particular actions and contingent events.