“LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous work begins. Longfellow wrote the poem in 1860 as America hurtled toward civil war, hoping to rally the Union to the cause of the abolitionist struggle.
The country, Longfellow believed, was worth saving, and retelling the story of Revere’s epic ride was his way of connecting the heroism of America’s founding to the perilous times of the present.
But the real-life story of what happened that night on April 18, 1775 (known as Patriots’ Day) and what happened the day after—the Battles of Lexington and Concord—is more compelling than Longfellow’s mythology. And more absolutely American.
It turns out Revere was not the solitary actor Longfellow chronicled in his poem. And his midnight ride didn’t spring out of a vacuum.
“There were…
