Paul Revere's Ride (25 page)

Whoever he may have been, this messenger knew exactly where he was going, and what he was to do. When he reached Tewksbury, he spurred his horse through the streets of the sleeping village, and rode directly to the farm of Captain John Trull on Stickney Hill, near the town’s training field.

Captain Trull was the head of Tewksbury’s militia, and a pivotal figure in the alarm system that Whig leaders had organized during the past few months. He was awakened by the courier who told him, “I have alarmed all the towns from Charlestown to here.” Trull rose from his bed, and took up his musket. Still in his nightdress, he fired three times from his bedroom window. This was a signal previously arranged with the militia commander in the neighboring town of Dracut, north of Tewksbury on the New Hampshire border.
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The sharp report of Captain Trull’s alarm gun carried across the Merrimack River, and the militia company of Dracut instantly began to muster. The hour was a little after two o’clock in the morning. At the moment when General Gage’s Regulars were still in the marshes of the East Cambridge, the news of their secret mission had traveled thirty miles from Boston to the New Hampshire line. These were 18th-century distances. Thirty miles was normally a long day’s journey in that era.
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The astonishing speed of this communication did not occur by accident. It was the result of careful preparation, and something else as well. Paul Revere and the other messengers did not spread the alarm merely by knocking on individual farmhouse doors. They also awakened the institutions of New England. The midnight riders went systematically about the task of engaging town leaders and military commanders of their region. They enlisted its churches and ministers, its physicians and lawyers, its family networks and voluntary associations. Paul Revere and his fellow Whigs of Massachusetts understood, more clearly than Americans of later generations, that political institutions are instruments of human will, and amplifiers of individual action. They knew from long experience that successful effort requires sustained planning and careful organization. The way they went about their work made a major difference that night.

While the Tewksbury rider was galloping north, Paul Revere himself was on the road, traveling northeast from Charlestown to Medford. As we have seen, he had not planned to go that way, but once in the village of Medford, he went quickly about the task of awakening that community with remarkable economy of effort. He rode directly to the house of Captain Isaac Hall, commander of Medford’s minutemen, who instantly triggered the town’s alarm system. A townsman remembered that “repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air.”
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From Medford, Paul Revere’s friends started yet another express rider galloping to the northeast. He was Doctor Martin Herrick, a young Harvard graduate who studied in Medford and worked in the town of Lynnfield, fifteen miles to the north. Several Whig messengers that night were physicians. In that far-distant era when American physicians made house-calls, a country doctor was apt to own the best saddle horse in town, and be a highly experienced rider. He also tended to be a “high-toned son of liberty,” So it was with Martin Herrick. He carried Paul Revere’s message of alarm northeast from Medford to the village of Stone-ham, then turned east toward Reading, where he roused the militia officers in the south precinct of that town. From Reading he rode to Lynn End, alarmed the militia company and later joined it as a volunteer on the march—a busy night for young Doctor Herrick.
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Within a few hours, Doctor Herrick awakened a large area on the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay. He also set other riders in motion. One “express” was in Lynn by “early morn.”
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Another galloped from Reading fifteen miles east to Danvers. A third rode fourteen miles north to Andover, where militiaman Thomas Boynton noted that “about the sun rising, the Town was alarmed with the News that the Regulars were on their March to Concord.”
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Another resident of Andover, slower to get the word, wrote in his diary, “About seven o’clock we had alarum that the Reegelers was gon to Conkord we gathered at the meting hous & then started for Concord.”
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Along the North Shore of Massachusetts, church bells began to toll and the heavy beat of drums could be heard for many miles in the night air. Some towns responded to these warnings before a courier reached them. North Reading was awakened by alarm guns before sunrise. The first messenger appeared a little later.
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While the alarm was spreading rapidly to the north, Paul Revere and his fellow Whigs started yet another courier in a different
direction—east from Medford to the town of Maiden. This express rider delivered the alarm to a Whig leader who went to an outcropping called Bell Rock, and rang the town bell. That prearranged signal summoned the men of Maiden with their weapons to a meeting place at Kettell’s Tavern. From Maiden, the alarm was carried east to Chelsea on the Atlantic coast.
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Meanwhile, Paul Revere himself was carrying the same message west from Medford to the village of Menotomy. There again he started other messengers in motion. This was the part of his journey of which he later wrote, “I alarmed almost every house, till I got to Lexington.”
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From some of those houses men rode north and northwest to the precincts above Cambridge and Menotomy. Captain Ebenezer Stedman, a prominent Whig leader, was awakened at an early hour. He sent an express rider to Captain Joshua Walker and Major Loammi Baldwin in Woburn, north of Menotomy. From Woburn village, Captain Walker sent a messenger riding west to Jonathan Proctor in the second parish, now the town of Burlington. The alarm was also carried to the northwest in the same way. All along Paul Revere’s route, town leaders and militia commanders were systematically engaged—a fact of vital importance for the events that followed.
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Much of what happened that night was cloaked in secrecy, but repeated evidence indicates that Paul Revere played a unique role. From long association he was acquainted with leaders throughout the province. He knew who they were and where to find them, even in towns that he had not expected to visit. They knew him as well.

It is instructive in that regard to compare the conduct of Paul Revere and William Dawes, who went about their work in very different ways. Revere’s ride to Lexington covered nearly thirteen miles in less than two hours. His circuit was a broad arc north and west of Boston. In every town along that route Paul Revere met with Whig leaders—Richard Devens in Charlestown, Isaac Hall in Medford, probably Ebenezer Stedman in Cambridge, Benjamin Locke and Solomon Bowman in Menotomy.
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William Dawes traveled a longer distance on a slower horse— nearly seventeen miles in about three hours. His route took him in a different direction, south across Boston Neck to Roxbury, then west and north through Brookline, Brighton, Cambridge, Menotomy, and Lexington. No evidence exists that he spoke with anyone before he reached the Clarke house in Lexington. It is difficult to believe that he did not talk with at least a few people on the road,
but in many hundreds of accounts of the Lexington alarm, only one person remembered meeting him that night—Lexington’s Sergeant Munroe, who was unable to recollect his name and called him “Mr. Lincoln.”
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Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm system. On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, that did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown, or Waltham. Probably he did not know them. As we shall see, Roxbury and Brookline and Watertown would receive the alarm in other ways, long after Dawes had passed. Waltham never received it at all.

The town of Waltham lay just west of Watertown and south of Lexington. Its northern border was only two miles from Lexington Green, closer than any other community. But the alarm system was not triggered in Waltham until much later the next morning, too late for its militia companies to join the fighting. Only a few farmers in the neighborhood called Waltham Farms, at the north end of town, heard the alarm. Some of these men would see action, but no company of militia from Waltham fought that day. Several historians have suspected that the community was Tory in its sympathies—which certainly was not the case. Two days later, more than 200 Waltham men were in the field with the New England army. Many would fight bravely at Bunker Hill and on other fields. But on the 19th of April they mustered too late, through no fault of their own. Anyone with experience of military service will understand what happened. In the jargon of another war, Waltham was among the 10 percent who never got the word.
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The dogs that did not bark in Waltham and other southern towns were an important clue to the working of the alarm system, and to Paul Revere’s role that night. In North Waltham we find evidence that a knock on a farmhouse door was not enough to set the process in motion. Scattered homes received the warning, but military officers and town fathers were not notified, and the militia failed to muster in time. Here was further proof that Paul 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.

None of this is meant to deny William Dawes his role in the Lexington alarm. His ride was firmly documented, most of all by Paul Revere himself, who was always careful to give Dawes a share
of the credit. On other occasions before and afterward, Dawes proved himself to be a brave and resourceful man who believed deeply in the Whig cause and served it faithfully. He carried his message to Lexington just as Doctor Warren had requested, in the face of many dangers. But Paul Revere did that, and more.
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When Dawes and Revere came together in Lexington, they began to work as a team. While they were at the Clarke house and the Buckman Tavern, other messengers were dispatched from Lexington center. Some rode east into parts of Cambridge that Revere had skirted on his detour to Medford. Lexington’s minister remembered that between 12 and 1 o’clock “two persons were sent express to Cambridge.”
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The houses clustered around Harvard College received the news from the west at about two o’clock in the morning. Hannah Winthrop, who lived near Harvard yard, remembered that she was awakened by “beat of drum and ringing of bell,” a few hours before dawn. These were the drums and bells that the British Regulars themselves had begun to hear with growing concern, as they hurried on their way.
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Two other Lexington men, Nathan Munroe and Benjamin Tidd, rode north from Lexington to warn the town of Bedford. They called at the house of Cornet Nathaniel Page, the color bearer of the Bedford militia, and shouted, “Get up, Nat Page, the Regulars are out!” Then they galloped west as far as Meriam’s Corner in Concord, delivered their news, and trotted back to Lexington by side roads, while Page spread the alarm to his Bedford company.
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By that hour so many couriers were riding from Lexington Common across the countryside that Paul Revere and William Dawes were unable to find fresh horses for their trip to Concord. As they set out on their weary mounts, we have seen how they recruited Dr. Samuel Prescott to help them with his fresh animal. Here again, Revere and Dawes prepared carefully for contingencies, and worked out a plan in case they were captured. That act of individual foresight and collective effort made a vital difference.

Let us pick up Dr. Prescott’s trail. He was well mounted, and master of the ground. When Dawes was stopped and Revere was captured, Prescott put heels to his horse, and disappeared into the countryside that he knew so well. Revere remembered that “the Doctor jumped his horse over a low stone wall” and got away. Prescott picked his way in the darkness through woods and swamps until he had eluded his English pursuers, then returned to
the main road and galloped on alone. As he had promised, Prescott spread the word through Lincoln and Concord, making an effort to awaken ministers, militia officers, and the family networks of outlying hamlets. He also recruited other couriers, in the same way that Revere and Dawes had recruited him.

On the road in North Lincoln, Doctor Prescott came upon a young man named Nathaniel Baker, who like Prescott himself had been out courting his fiancee Elizabeth Taylor at her house near the present Lexington-Lincoln line. A good many travelers that Spring night were young men on errands of love. Nathaniel Baker “received the alarm” from Doctor Prescott, and carried it to his kinsman Amos Baker, who awakened his father, four brothers, and brother-in-law. They in turn went to warn others throughout the town of Lincoln.
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Still in Lincoln, Prescott also stopped at a blacksmith shop close to the road where one or two African slaves lay sleeping. The slaves carried the alarm to their mistress Mary Hartwell, who was in a nearby house with her newborn infant. So urgent did she think the news that she left her baby and ran across the fields to the home of militia captain William Smith and told him what she had heard. While Mary Hartwell hurried home to her baby, Captain Smith began to ring Lincoln’s town bell and mustered his company. The time was about two o’clock in the morning.
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From Lincoln the news was also carried south to Weston. In that country town, Boston Whig leader Samuel Cooper had found refuge with the family of Samuel Savage near Daggett’s Corner in the north part of Weston, near the Lincoln line. He was awakened with the alarm by Mrs. Savage at about 3 o’clock in the morning.
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While the warning was spreading to the south, Doctor Prescott galloped west into Concord center, and arrived there before two o’clock in the morning. He found someone to ring the Concord bell, then rode off to find the town’s minister, William Emerson, and the militia leaders.
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Emerson noted in his diary, “This morning between 1 and
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o’clock we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops to the number of 800, had stole their march from Boston in boats and barges … this intelligence was brought us at first by Samuel Prescott who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from giving us timely information. … He by the help of a very fleet horse crossing several walls and fences arrived at Concord at the time aforementioned.”
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