Paul Revere's Ride Read online

  While the Massachusetts legislature acted and resolved against the Townshend duties, Paul Revere organized resistance in another way. The taxes were to be enforced by new customs officers. Many were corrupt and rapacious placemen. When these hated men appeared in Boston, the Sons of Liberty turned out on moonless nights with blackened faces and white nightcaps pulled low around their heads. More than a few customs commissioners fled for their lives. On one occasion a Boston merchant noted in his diary, “Two commissioners were very much abused yesterday when they came out from the Publick dinner at Concert Hall. … Paul Revere and several others were the principal Actors.” 50

  The British government answered Boston’s defiance with a massive show of force. On September 30, 1768, a British fleet sailed into Boston harbor, and anchored in a great ring around the waterfront, their decks cleared for action and cannon trained on the town. Paul Revere watched with mounting anger as two regiments of Regulars landed on Long Wharf with weapons loaded, and marched into the heart of his community. Afterward he went back to his shop, got out a sheet of copper, and made an engraving of that “insolent parade,” as he called it. 51

  Immediately after the Boston Massacre in 1770, Paul Revere reissued this print of an event that had happened two years before. It represents the landing of the Regulars with loaded weapons, while ships of the Royal Navy trained their guns on the town. He wished to portray a tyrannical government in the act making war upon its own people. The town of Boston, with its many exaggerated steeples and wharves is meant to appear pious, industrious and entirely innocent. (American Antiquarian Society)

  The coming of the Regulars increased the violence in Boston. The soldiers were sometimes the aggressors, but more often they were the victims of assaults by angry townsmen. Finally on the cold winter night of March 5, 1770, the soldiers fired back at their tormentors. Five people were killed. The ancestral cry of “Town born! Turn out!” echoed once again through narrow streets, and Boston came close to revolution. 52 Paul Revere did another engraving of a drawing by Henry Pelham titled “Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street,” The print helped to create an image of British tyranny and American innocence that still shapes our memory of the event. 53

  Revere and his fellow Whigs did not hesitate to use violence to promote their ends, but they did so in a very careful way. The Boston Massacre threatened to alienate moderates from their cause. Instantly they took counter measures. They made certain that the British soldiers received a fair trial and Paul Revere helped to supply the evidence. In 1771 they prudently organized a movement in town meeting to build a more secure powder magazine away from the docks and in a safer part of town. The petition was signed by John Hancock, Sam Adams, and Paul Revere. 54

  The best known of Paul Revere’s engravings was his print of the Boston Massacre (1770). Like most of his projects, many people had a hand in it. The drawing was by Henry Pelham (who was not happy that Revere beat him to the market). It was printed by Benjamin Edes, colored by Christian Remick, and widely copied in America and Europe. Of the many impressions that survive, half are in original frames that were also made by Paul Revere. (American Antiquarian Society)

  For the trials that followed, he drew another pen-and-ink diagram of the Massacre, showing more accurately than the print the positions of the soldiers and the townspeople who were killed. (Boston Public Library)

  The Boston Massacre was accompanied by other acts of violence which the Whig leaders channeled toward their own ends. Paul Revere was increasingly prominent in this effort. In 1770 a frightened customs officer fired into a mob that had gathered before his house, and killed a boy named Christopher Seider. 55 The town made the child into a martyr. On the anniversary of his death a huge crowd gathered in a silent demonstration. The chosen place was the home of Paul Revere, which was specially illuminated for the occasion. Every window in his house showed a brightly lighted scene—on one side the Boston Massacre; on the other, the ghost of the murdered boy; in the center an allegorical female figure of America with a liberty cap on her head, grinding a British grenadier beneath her heel. The Boston Gazette reported, “In the evening, there was a very striking exhibition at the dwelling house of Mr. Paul Revere, fronting old North Square … the spectators, which amounted to many thousands, were struck with solemn silence and their faces covered with melancholy gloom.” 56

  After the Boston Massacre, Parliament retreated yet again. The Regulars were withdrawn from Boston, and the Townshend duties were repealed, except for a symbolic tax on tea so small that British ministers believed even Boston might be willing to swallow it. It was a fatal miscalculation. When the tea ships reached America in 1773, the response was an explosion of anger throughout the colonies. Boston was not the first American town to refuse the tea, or the most violent, but it acted with its usual panache. Paul Revere and his mechanics staged a brilliant piece of political theater. They covered their faces with lamp black and red ochre, dressed themselves as Indians (the symbol of American freedom in the 18th century), and emptied the East Indian tea chests into Boston harbor. The Tea Party was organized in a highly sophisticated way. The men were divided into different groups, and told the names only of their own section commanders—a classic example of cellular organization that would be used in other movements of a very different nature. 57 Immediately afterward a Boston street ballad called “The Rallying of the Tea Party” identified only two leaders by name: Dr. Joseph Warren and “bold” Paul Revere:

  Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes,

  And tell King George we’ll pay no taxes

  On his foreign tea …

  Our Warren’s there, and bold Revere

  With hands to do and words to cheer

  For Liberty and laws.

  These men carefully controlled their acts of violence in defense of what they called “Liberty and laws,” Even as they hurled the tea into Boston harbor, they replaced a broken lock to demonstrate that their quarrel was not against property or order. One man who stole a small amount of tea for his own use was made to run the gauntlet, and his coat was nailed to the whipping post. Those symbolic gestures were lost on British leaders. 58

  After the Tea Party, Boston took the lead in creating a network of committees and congresses throughout the colonies. Here again Paul Revere played a prominent role. On December 17 1773, he had made one of the first of many revolutionary rides. Boston’s town meeting issued a formal justification of the Tea Party, and appointed a committee of leading citizens to visit towns throughout New England. It asked Paul Revere to travel on the same errand to the Whigs of New York and Philadelphia. From late 1773 to 1775, he made at least five journeys to those cities. Each trip was a major expedition on 18th-century highways. Sometimes he rode his own large gray saddle horse. On one occasion he traveled in a small carriage. 59

  As great events followed rapidly, he was on the road again and again. Parliament responded to the Tea Party with statutes that closed the port of Boston, abrogated the charter of Massachusetts, curtailed most town meetings, created a new system of courts in the colony, and authorized Imperial officers to send Americans to Britain for trial. London called these punitive measures Coercive Laws; America knew them as the Intolerable Acts. When news of their passage reached Boston in early 1774, Paul Revere made a ride to New York and Philadelphia, to help concert methods of resistance. 60

  In the summer, representatives from towns in Suffolk County, met together, and agreed to a set of resolutions drafted by Dr. Joseph Warren. These “Suffolk Resolves” proclaimed the Intolerable Acts to be unconstitutional and recommended sanctions against Britain. They also urged the people of Massachusetts to form their own government, and prepare to fight in its defense.

  After the vote, Paul Revere saddled his horse and carried the Suffolk Resolves to Philadelphia. His mission was urgent. The Continental Congress was in session and waiting for news from New England. Revere left Boston on September 11, 1774, and reached Philadelphia
on September 16, nearly 350 miles on rough and winding 18th-century roads in the unprecedented time of five days. The next day, Congress agreed to a ringing endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves—a decisive step on the road to revolution. Paul Revere started home again on September 18, and was in Boston on the 23rd, with news that greatly encouraged resistance in New England. He had only a few days with his new bride. Then he was off again to visit leaders in New York and Philadelphia on September 29, and was back by October 19. Perhaps a bit saddle-sore, he traveled in a sulky. 61

  There were other short trips in New England. These journeys were reported in the Gazettes, and noticed with alarm by Imperial leaders. In January, 1775, when Paul Revere rode from Boston to a gathering of Whigs in Exeter, New Hampshire, Royal Governor John Wentworth wrote, “Paul Revere went express thither yesterday noon. It portends a storm rather than peace.” 62

  For two years, Paul Revere became the Mercury of the American Revolution. Often he was called a “messenger,” “courier,” or “express,” which understated his role. A Tory writer described him grandly as “Paul Revere, silversmith, ambassador from the Committee of Correspondence in Boston to the Congress in Philadelphia,” which exaggerated his function. 63 He was less than an ambassador, but more than merely a messenger. His importance as a leader had grown steadily with the revolutionary movement.

  Other men were more prominent in the public eye—Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren. But none was truly in charge. There were no controlling figures in Boston’s revolutionary movement, which was an open alliance of many different groups. 64 Here was the source of Paul Revere’s importance. He knew everyone and moved in many different circles. In Boston this great joiner helped to link one group to another, and was supremely good at getting things done.

  An indicator of his importance, and a clue to the much-misunderstood structure of the revolutionary movement, may be found in a comparison of seven groups of Boston Whigs (Appendix D). Altogether they included 255 men. The great majority (82%) were on only one list. Nobody appeared on all seven of them, or even six. Two men, and only two, were on as many as five. One was Joseph Warren. The other was Paul Revere.

  The revolutionary movement in Boston was not small, tightly controlled, and hierarchical. It was large, open, diverse, complex and pluralistic, a world of many circles. Paul Revere and Joseph Warren moved in more of these circles than any of the other Boston leaders. This gave them their special roles as linchpins of the revolutionary movement. They were not the people who pulled the strings (nobody did that), but they became leading communicators, coordinators and organizers of collective effort in the cause of freedom. 65

  There was a limit to how high Paul Revere could rise in public life. He never had a classical education, and could not write the great papers or deliver the polished speeches. Another Whig leader, Dr. Thomas Young, wrote condescendingly of Revere, “No man of his rank and opportunities in life deserves better of the community,” a biting Boston phrase that suggested something of the social constraints in his world. 66 After independence, Revere sometimes complained that he was not promoted to high public office. But behind the scenes, and among his many friends, Paul Revere became a major leader by 1774, more so than is recognized by academic historians, who understandably tend to be more interested in talkers and writers. Paul Revere was an actor and a doer. His leading role came to him because he was a man who other men could trust to keep his word and get things done, and also because he was deeply committed to the common cause of liberty.

  Paul Revere did not think of that cause as we do today—not as the beginning of a new era. He regarded British Imperial measures as “newfangled” innovations, and believed that he was defending the inherited folk rights of New England: its ancient custom of self-government, its sacred idea of the covenant, and its traditional way of life. 67

  We misunderstand Paul Revere’s revolutionary thinking if we identify it with our modern ideas of individual freedom and tolerance that later spread through the world. Bostonians had very different attitudes in 1775. Samuel Adams often spoke of what he called the “publick liberty,” or the “liberty of America,” or sometimes the “liberty of Boston.” Their idea of liberty was both a corporate and an individual possession. It had a double meaning in New England, akin to the Puritan idea of a special and general calling and Cotton Mather’s two oars. It referred not only to the autonomy of each person’s rights, but also to the integrity of the group, and especially to the responsibility of a people to regulate their own affairs. We remember the individual rights and forget the collective responsibilities. We tend to interpret Thomas Jefferson’s ambiguous reference to the “pursuit of happiness” as an individual quest, but in 1774 Paul Revere’s town meeting spoke of “social happiness” as its goal.” 68

  Also distinctive to this culture was its idea of equality. The motto of Boston’s Sons of Liberty was “Equality Before the Law.” They did not believe in equality of possessions, or even equality of esteem, but they thought that all people had an equal right to be judged according to their worth. Paul Revere’s business associate Nathaniel Ames wrote:

  All men are by Nature equal

  But differ greatly in the sequel. 69

  For Paul Revere and “town-born” Boston these principles did not derive from abstract premises, but from tradition and historical experience. In America it has always been so. Milan Kundera has recently reminded us that “the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This was Paul Revere’s road to revolution. It was also his message for our time. 70

  GENERAL GAGE’S DILEMMA

  The Agony of an Imperial Whig

  An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

  —Edmund Burke, 1775

  ON THE HOT SUMMER AFTERNOON of August 27, 1774, while Paul Revere was preparing for yet another ride to Philadelphia, a senior British officer sat at his desk in Danvers, Massachusetts, seething with anger and frustration. Lieutenant-General the Honourable Thomas Gage was commander in chief of British forces in the New World. Mighty powers were his to command. A single stroke of his fine quill pen could start regiments marching from the Arctic to the Antipodes. The merest nod of his powdered head could cause fortresses to rise on the far frontier, and make roads appear in the trackless wilderness. In the late summer of 1774, General Thomas Gage was the most powerful man in North America.

  And yet as he toiled over his endless correspondence in a borrowed country mansion on this sweltering August day, his letters overflowed with impotent rage. The source of his frustration was a political office that he had recently been given. In addition to his military duties, the King had appointed him Royal Governor of Massachusetts, with orders to reduce that restless province to obedience and peace. Parliament had armed him for that task with special powers such as no Royal Governor had possessed before. For months he had tried to act with firmness and restraint, but the people of New England had stubbornly set all his efforts at defiance.

  Thomas Gage thought of himself as a fair-minded and moderate man, a friend of liberty and a defender of what he was pleased to call the “common rights of mankind.” He rather liked Americans—at least, some Americans. He had married an American, and loved her dearly—his beautiful, headstrong Margaret. But even his wife was being difficult these days. She was away from him for long periods, and when they were together she lectured him about liberty and justice in that self-righteous American way. 1

  What was it, he wondered, about these impossible people? Was it something in the soil, or the American air? General Gage reminded himself that most of these infuriating provincials were British too—blood of his blood, flesh of his own freeborn nation. They had been allowed more liberties than any people on the face of the globe, yet they complained that he was trying to enslave them. They were taxed more lightly than the subjects of any European state, but refused even the trivial sums that Parliament had levied upon them. They professed
loyalty to their rightful Sovereign, but tarred and feathered his Royal officers, and burned His Majesty’s ships to the water’s edge.

  Now, on top of every other outrage, General Gage had just been told that some of these New England people were making threats against his own person. His Captain of Engineers John Montresor, an able but irritating officer, had informed him that he was no longer safe in the country and must move to Boston, under the guns of the British garrison. 2

  Boston! Thomas Gage had come to hate that town. A few months later he would write, “I wish this cursed place was burned.” 3 Of all the Yankee race, General Gage believed that Bostonians were the worst. In 1770 he had written, “America is a mere bully, from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.” 4 Many British soldiers shared that same opinion. Gage’s able subordinate, Lord Percy, had arrived in the New World thinking well of America. A few weeks among the Bostonians had changed his mind, and persuaded him that they were “a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel, and cowards.” 5 One of the most sly and artful of them all, in the opinion of these angry men, was a Boston silversmith who had become so familiar to them that he was identified in General Gage’s correspondence merely by his initials: “P. &--- R:---. & 6

  In origins and attitudes, Thomas Gage and Paul Revere were as far apart as two self-styled gentlemen could be, and still remain within the English-speaking world of the 18th century. Gage was the older of the two, having been born about the year 1720. He was the younger son of an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic family with its seat at Firle Place, Sussex, in the south of England. 7