Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
So begins a famous poem to celebrate the heroic actions of one of the better known participants in the American Revolution. The following are some of the details surrounding the event that was immortalized in that poem...................PEACE...............Scott
REVERE AND DAWES RIDE:
April 18, 1775
In Massachusetts, British troops march out of Boston on a mission to confiscate
the Patriot arsenal at Concord and to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and
John Hancock, known to be hiding at Lexington. As the British departed, Boston
Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on horseback from the city to
warn Adams and Hancock and rouse the Patriot minutemen.By 1775, tensions between
the American colonies and the British government approached the breaking point,
especially in Massachusetts, where Patriot leaders formed a shadow revolutionary
government and trained militias to prepare for armed conflict with the British
troops occupying Boston. In the spring of 1775, General Thomas Gage, the British
governor of Massachusetts, received instructions from England to seize all
stores of weapons and gunpowder accessible to the American insurgents. On April
18, he ordered British troops to march against Concord and Lexington.The Boston
Patriots had been preparing for such a British military action for some time,
and upon learning of the British plan Revere and Dawes set off across the
Massachusetts countryside. Taking separate routes in case one of them were
captured, Dawes left Boston by the Boston Neck peninsula, and Revere crossed the
Charles River to Charlestown by boat. As the two couriers made their way,
Patriots in Charlestown waited for a signal from Boston informing them of the
British troop movement. As previously agreed, one lantern would be hung in the
steeple of Boston's Old North Church, the highest point in the city, if the
British were marching out of the city by Boston Neck, and two if they were
crossing the Charles River to Cambridge. Two lanterns were hung, and the armed
Patriots set out for Lexington and Concord accordingly. Along the way, Revere
and Dawes roused hundreds of minutemen, who armed themselves and set out to
oppose the British. Revere arrived in Lexington shortly before Dawes, but
together they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. Along the
way, they were joined by Samuel Prescott, a young Patriot who had been riding
home after visiting a friend. Early in the morning of April 19, a British patrol
captured Revere, and Dawes lost his horse, forcing him to walk back to Lexington
on foot. However, Prescott escaped and rode on to Concord to warn the Patriots
there. After being roughly questioned for an hour or two, Revere was released
when the patrol heard minutemen alarm guns being fired on their approach to
Lexington.Around 5 a.m., 700 British troops under Major John Pitcairn arrived at
the town to find a 77-man-strong colonial militia under Captain John Parker
waiting for them on Lexington's common green. Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered
Patriots to disperse, and after a moment's hesitation the Americans began to
drift off the green. Suddenly, the "shot heard around the world" was fired from
an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When
the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead and 10 others were
wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had
begun.
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