The Midnight Ride

Marsha comes into Whit's End with a book of poems and recites the opening of her favorite: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere." Whit calls Longfellow's poem one of the epics of American literature - too bad it is not very accurate. There are a couple of big mistakes in it, he says, and a whole lot more to the story. What follows is the real history, dramatized as Whit tells it and punctuated by Marsha's protests whenever the facts collide with the verses.

Whit begins before the famous ride: Revere at the Boston Tea Party in 1773, where the patriots dumped the tea, swept the decks clean behind them, and rowed quietly home. By April 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren has word that British troops are preparing a march, almost certainly to seize the arms hidden at Concord - with John Hancock and Sam Adams at Lexington along the way. Revere proposes lantern signals from the tower of Christ Church: one if by land, two if by sea. Marsha stops him right there; the poem says North Church. That, Whit tells her, was Longfellow's first mistake.

Newt, a stable boy who feigns sleep while British officers talk over his head, brings Warren the night and the route, and the plan goes into motion. It nearly founders on small things. Revere forgets his spurs and the cloth to muffle the rowboat's oars; his friend Thomas Richardson coaxes a petticoat from a young woman he insists is just a friend, and Revere sends his dog home with a note in its collar to fetch the spurs - the story, Whit admits, that Revere told his own children. The boat slips past the warship Somerset, Colonel Conant has a horse waiting in Charlestown, and Revere rides, crying the alarm from village to farm. Marsha catches the poem's biggest fallacy herself: the lanterns were never meant to alert Revere waiting on the opposite shore - they were his own warning to Charlestown.

At the Clark House in Lexington, a sergeant asks Revere to stop making noise; the ladies and gentlemen within have gone to bed. "Noise? You'll have enough noise before long. The regulars are out!" Hancock bellows for his sword while Adams argues him out of going into battle. On the road to Concord a British patrol captures Revere, then releases him when pealing bells prove the countryside already warned - though they take his horse. Back in Lexington at dawn, Revere and Hancock's clerk Lowell are carrying a trunk of Hancock's papers across the green, between seventy minutemen under Captain Jonas Parker and six hundred regulars under Major Pitcairn. Parker orders his men to hold: "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." A single shot rings out - no one sees who fired - and the volleys begin. "And so," says Revere, "the war begins."

He witnessed the shot heard around the world, Whit tells Marsha, and he was a brave man - but no braver than we are. He simply had a task to do, and he did it. Ours is to make sure his midnight ride is remembered, and that what he rode for, liberty, is preserved.