Paul Revere's Ride, April 18-19, 1775

On the night of April 18–19, 1775, a silversmith and colonial activist named Paul Revere mounted a horse in Boston and rode northward through the darkened countryside of Middlesex County, alerting militia commanders and townspeople that British Regulars were marching toward the colonial arsenal at Concord. That single night of hard riding would become the most celebrated act of political warning in American history, immortalized nearly a century later in verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and commemorated by the people of Boston and the nation ever since. The events of April 18–19, 1775, set in motion a chain of confrontations — at Lexington and then at Concord — that marked the opening volleys of the American Revolutionary War. No single episode in Boston's history has been retold, reinterpreted, or more keenly contested for its meaning than the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

Background and Context

By the spring of 1775, Boston had become the focal point of colonial resistance to British authority. British troops garrisoned the city, and tensions between the Crown's military commanders and the colonial population had been building for years. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had been quietly stockpiling arms and ammunition at Concord, roughly eighteen miles from the city, in anticipation of open conflict. British General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, received intelligence that these supplies were vulnerable to seizure, and he resolved to send a column of Regulars to confiscate them before hostilities could formally begin.

The colonial intelligence network in Boston — an informal but effective web of artisans, merchants, and committed activists — learned of Gage's intentions. Revere, already an experienced courier for the colonial cause, had earlier helped establish a system of signals using the steeple of the Old North Church on Salem Street. The arrangement called for lanterns to be hung in the steeple: one if the Regulars were moving out by land across Boston Neck, two if they were crossing by water over the Charles River. On the night of April 18, two lanterns were displayed — the British column was moving by boat across the river to Cambridge before marching overland toward Lexington and Concord.

The Ride Begins: April 18, 1775

The mobilization of that night involved more than one rider. William Dawes, a tanner by trade, was dispatched first, riding slowly and carefully past British sentries on Boston Neck — the narrow strip of land that was, at that time, the only overland route out of Boston — at approximately 9:30 in the evening. Dawes's route took him south and then west, looping around to reach Lexington by a longer road. His task was to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying in Lexington, that the British were coming.

Paul Revere's departure was more dramatic. He was rowed across the Charles River in a small boat, passing under the bow of a moored British warship with muffled oars, and then set off on horseback from Charlestown. His route carried him north through Somerville, Medford, and on toward Lexington. Along the way, he stopped at farmhouses and taverns, rousing the local militia captains and ordinary farmers alike. He reached Lexington — and Hancock and Adams — in the early hours of the morning, having successfully evaded British patrols. Shortly afterward, he was joined by Dawes, and the two rode together toward Concord. A third rider, Samuel Prescott, joined them en route. Revere was actually captured by a British patrol before reaching Concord; it was Prescott who completed the final leg of the warning mission into Concord itself.

The Boston Globe has noted that Revere did indeed "spread the alarm" through the Middlesex countryside on the night of April 18–19, though the full picture is more complicated than Longfellow's famous poem suggests.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord

The alarm Revere, Dawes, and Prescott carried that night produced results. Militia companies assembled on the Lexington Green in the pre-dawn darkness of April 19. When the British column arrived at Lexington, a confrontation erupted — the famous "shot heard round the world," as Ralph Waldo Emerson would later describe it. The Regulars dispersed the colonial militia at Lexington and pressed on to Concord, where they encountered stiffer resistance at the North Bridge. As the British column withdrew toward Boston that afternoon, militia fighters harassed them along the road from Concord back to Charlestown, inflicting significant casualties. The Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, are understood as the first military engagements of the American Revolution.

The mobilization of April 18–19 has been described as precisely that — a mobilization — and scholars have situated the midnight ride within the broader context of the colonial alarm system rather than treating it as the solitary heroic act of a single man.

Longfellow's Poem and the Making of a Legend

The ride might have faded into a historical footnote had Henry Wadsworth Longfellow not published his poem "Paul Revere's Ride" in 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War. The poem transformed Revere into a lone heroic messenger whose warning had single-handedly ignited the Revolution, compressing and dramatizing events in ways that did not always conform to the documentary record. Longfellow did not mention Dawes or Prescott. He altered the mechanics of the signal lanterns. He sent Revere all the way to Concord, when in fact Revere never reached that town.

Nevertheless, the poem succeeded in fixing an image of the ride in the American popular imagination that has proven remarkably durable. The New York Times has described "Paul Revere's Ride" as a "self-conscious exercise" that set "in motion" the American mobilization of April 18–19, 1775, in the literary and cultural sense — meaning that the poem constructed the event's meaning for future generations as much as the event itself did.

Commemoration in Boston

Boston has marked the anniversary of the midnight ride repeatedly and with considerable ceremony. On April 18, 1925, a gathering at the Old North Church commemorated the 150th anniversary of the ride, with radio broadcasts carrying the exercises to four stations across the country. The event underscored how the ride had become not merely local history but a national touchstone, with Boston positioned as the steward of a story that belonged to all Americans.

By the time of the 200th anniversary in 1975, the commemorations had taken on a more contested character. The New York Times reported that mid-April of that year saw Boston engaged in a "real struggle for the American past" over the meaning and ownership of the 200th anniversary of the midnight ride, reflecting the cultural and political tensions of the bicentennial era in the United States.

In more recent decades, Boston has continued to mark Patriots' Day — the Massachusetts state holiday observed on the third Monday in April — with a reenactment of the midnight ride. A costumed rider on horseback retraces Revere's historic route from Boston to Lexington, following the path taken on April 18–19, 1775, as part of the broader Patriots' Day festivities. The annual reenactment draws residents, students, and visitors who gather along the route to witness a living recreation of the colonial alarm that opened the Revolution.

The 250th Anniversary

The 250th anniversary of the midnight ride — falling in April 2025 — prompted renewed scholarly and public attention to the events of April 18–19, 1775. Writing in the Coolidge Review, David Hein examined the ride in light of two and a half centuries of interpretation, situating it within the long arc of how Americans have understood their revolutionary origins. The milestone offered an occasion not only for celebration but for historical reassessment — examining who rode, what they said, whom they warned, and what the alarm actually achieved on the ground.

The 250th anniversary underscored a pattern that has held across two and a half centuries: Boston returns, at regular intervals, to the night of April 18–19, 1775, as a founding moment that continues to generate questions about memory, heroism, collective action, and the stories a city and a nation choose to tell about themselves.

Legacy and Historical Significance

The midnight ride of Paul Revere holds a distinctive place in Boston's identity. The Paul Revere House in the North End — the oldest remaining structure in downtown Boston — stands as a physical link to the man who rode that night. The Old North Church, from whose steeple the signal lanterns were hung, remains an active landmark drawing visitors from around the world. Revere, Massachusetts, the city immediately north of Boston, bears his name.

Historians have long noted that the ride was a collective effort, involving Dawes, Prescott, and dozens of other riders who fanned out across the Middlesex countryside once the initial alarm was sounded. Yet it is Revere's name — shaped by Longfellow's verse and reinforced through generations of commemoration in Boston and beyond — that has endured as the symbol of that night. Whether examined as a military intelligence operation, a feat of horsemanship, a piece of community organizing, or a cultural myth, the events of April 18–19, 1775, remain inseparable from Boston's story and from the story of how the American Revolution began.

See Also

• Paul Revere
• Old North Church
• Patriots' Day
• Battles of Lexington and Concord
• William Dawes
• North End, Boston