David Hackett Fischer strips myth from history in Paul Revere's Ride. All sorts of fables, poems, and stories have been written about the event, which has become embedded in American culture. Any school child can tell at least something of the midnight ride and the lanterns. Fischer's book is the first scholarly treatment in two hundred years. He has discovered all sorts of information that make Revere a much more seminal participant in the Revolution than had previously been suspected.One reason for historians', neglect of Paul Revere may be that the only creature less fashionable in academe than "a dead white male is a dead white male on a horse." Less jocularly, Fischer suspects it has to do with historians' emphasis on monographic treatises and reluctance to study any event that can't be graphed or put in a table. Fortunately for us, Fischer has eschewed this tradition and returned to the narrative form of historical reporting that was in vogue during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when history was alive and well and enjoyed. His book covers the eight-month period from September 1774 through April 1 775, beginning with the powder alarms through the first battles at Lexington and Concord up to the bloody events of 1775.
Paul Revere was the son of a French immigrant silversmith. He grew up in Boston, at that time a town of 15,000 that more resembled a medieval village. Virtually an island at high tide, Boston greeted strangers crossing the "neck" of land to enter town with the unsettling vision of a gallows. Strangers were not generally welcome; certainly they were regarded with great suspicion. It was also a major seaport, and sailors reported that "no town of its size could turn out more whores than this town could."
Revere had lots of children (16) his first was born shortly after his first marriage, a common event in the eighteenth century, when perhaps 35% of couples were expecting at the time of their formal marriage. His first wife died shortly after their eighth child was born, and he married his second wife shortly thereafter.
The principles of working together were pounded into the children from a young age. Cotton Mather, a famous preacher of the day, used the metaphor of rowing a boat with two oars. Pull on one oar only and the boat will simply go around in circles. Both oars together make great progress.
Revere was a genius at collective action. It turns out there were more than sixty riders out that night. He was a major organizer and instigator. He helped organize the Sons of Liberty, a terrorist group that included many Freemasons and used numerous secret signs and cryptic codes to communicate. They were organized into "cells" where the members only knew the leader, not each other, a structure copied by many underground and terrorist organizations later on. Their violence was tempered and organized, however. During the famous Tea Party, the locks on the tea chests were carefully replaced after the tea was dumped into the harbor, and one of the participants was severely chastised for stealing some of the tea rather than dumping it. Their careful symbolism was lost to the British, however.
It's important to remember that the Americans considered themselves British. This was really a civil war at the beginning. The riders did not cry out "the British are coming," which would have been like saying, "We are coming" but rather, "the Regulars are coming," meaning the regular British troops.
Revere became the "messenger" for the rebels. He made numerous rides of several hundred miles each to carry messages between the Bostonians and the Continental Congress meeting in New York. These were difficult rides at a time when roads were rough, if they existed at all, yet he made them with extraordinary speed.
He was not the leader of the revolutionary movement, rather a doer and actor. He was able to get things done, partly because he knew so many people and his trustworthiness crossed many class boundaries.
General Gage was not a simpleton - unlucky perhaps as had been most of his ancestors - but he was handicapped in his plans for the attack on Concord by having his most intimate plans ferreted out by the Whigs almost as soon as he made them. Only Dr. Joseph Warren, who was respected by both sides, knew this secret spy and ally to the Americans. He never revealed who the spy was, but Fischer suspects it was Gage's wife, an American very sympathetic to the American cause. Gage himself had cause to suspect her, and after the Concord fiasco, sent her to England.
The army's march on Concord is told in fascinating detail. The regulars wore the most impractical clothes: snow white breeches that had to be kept immaculate upon pain of flogging; tall frir hats that were intended to make the men seem taller, but required additional caps to protect them from the weather; coats worn very tight, that were supposed to be preshrunk, but which continued to get smaller in the rain and often became so tight men could barely move their arms; and shoes not made for right or left, but square toed so they could be worn on either foot and were switched from right to left every day so as not to get overworn on one side. Officers' coats were scarlet, (unlike the red of the men) dyed from the dried bodies of female cochineal insects. That meant they did not fade (unlike the uniforms of the soldiers) and they made outstanding targets. They also wore a highly polished gorget just below the neck that provided an excellent bullseye.
Fischer has appended a most interesting historiographical section at the end of the book that discusses how the various Revere myths became cemented into American folklore. Much of it stems from the Whigs themselves, who wished to reveal as little as possible of their complicity in antagonizing the British to act. It was very important that the British fire the first shot and that the Americans be seen as innocent victims in order to garner as much support as possible. In fact, Revere's first written account was suppressed by the Whigs as he refused to acknowledge it was the British who fired first, and his report of all their activities prior to the event made it obvious how the conspirators had orchestrated many of the events. His deposition was not found until 1891 among his private papers. But it was Longfellow's poem that solidified Revere's ride as a solitary event. Great poem but short on historical verity Fischer notes in several short essays how the crosscurrents of American political thought have tempered the Revere legend and myth and used it to reflect their own perspective of American history. Fascinating.
