What do you know about Paul Revere’s midnight ride? If you are like me, you only have a vague understanding of the history that is overly colored by Henry Wadswoth Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride. But Longfellow’s poem is inaccurate in several respects. For one example, it would have made no sense to the people of Massachusetts for Revere to warn them that “the British are coming.” Why? Because the people of Massachusetts considered themselves to be British. Revere warned them that “the Regulars are coming out.”
In any case, before googling it, my recollection of Revere’s ride was limited to the fact that he rode from Boston out to Lexington warning people along the way that the British soldiers were coming out to the suburbs to start some trouble. I didn’t remember that he met John Hancock and Samuel Adams when he got to Lexington, or even that he was detained on his way to Concord. I remembered the line “one if by land, two if by sea,” but not the details of how he used a lantern system as a backup in case he and the other forgotten rider were captured.
So, basically, I had a cursory knowledge of the event that was accurate as far is it went. What about Sarah Palin’s recollection? Here’s what she said in some off-the-cuff remarks while visiting Boston and the Freedom Trail.
PALIN: [Paul Revere] who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.
Let’s unpack this a little. Paul Revere did not warn the British about anything. He warned the civilians and rebels of Massachusetts that British troops had left the port of Boston and were headed towards Concord and Lexington. He wasn’t firing off any guns. He was attempting to avoid roadblocks and detention. The reference to ‘bells” is probably a confusion about the lanterns (one if by land, two if by crossing the Charles River) that were flashed from a church tower. Church towers usually contain bells. As for the idea that Revere was doing this to protect our not-yet-existent 2nd Amendment rights, Palin isn’t too far off. The rebels had a cache of weapons stored in Concord. The seizure and destruction of that cache was the mission of the British troops when they set out from Boston. So, I’ll give Palin partial credit for that one.
As I myself freely admit, my knowledge of Revere’s ride was pretty basic before I looked up the details. I don’t expect everyone to be walking around with perfect retention of the history they learned in high school. And, in this case, the history we learned was probably inaccurate in several respects. But Palin demonstrates complete confusion.
What probably bothers me the most is the cartoonish nature of her conception of the events. She pictures a man riding his horse through town firing off warning shots and ringing church bells as a warning to the British who are in pursuit. That’s stupid on every level.
Even the part she got vaguely right, that the Battles of Concord and Lexington were about the rebels protecting their arms, is distorted into some kind of gun-fetish understanding of the causes of the conflict between the patriots and the Crown.
