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Both the late Paul Revere Jr. ’53 and his daughter, Avery ’82, the third great-grandson and fourth great-granddaughter respectively, are alumni. Their efforts as past and current president of the Revere Memorial Association have been at the center of bringing a more nuanced story of the legendary patriot to new generations, a task particularly significant in 2025, as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Revere’s iconic midnight ride.

They are not, though, the College’s only connection to this tale. Revere’s obituary in 1818, for example, made no mention of the role he played in warning the residents of Lexington and Concord that the British Regulars were marching their way in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775. Were it not for ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ’s own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Revere’s story might only be a footnote in history.

It was the specter of the Civil War that resuscitated Revere’s story and emblazoned it onto our national memory. According to historian Jill Lepore H’15, Longfellow’s commitment to the abolitionist cause inspired him to write his most famous poem, Paul Revere’s Ride. Longfellow hoped that recounting the dramatic tale of a Revolutionary War hero would waken his slumbering contemporaries to face the challenges of their time.

Lepore suggests that the story begins in the aftermath of Longfellow’s teaching career at ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ when, in 1837, he accepted a position at Harvard and met Charles Sumner, then a professor at the law school. Longfellow and Sumner became close friends and lifelong confidantes despite mismatched temperaments. Lepore describes Sumner as a “dogmatic and abrasive” politician. Longfellow, she suggests, was “a famously nice man … gentle and retiring and contented.” Personalities aside, one issue that united them was their opposition to slavery.

In 1842, when Charles Dickens visited Boston, Longfellow took him on a tour of the city’s historic sites, including the North Church from which the famed lanterns were hung. Soon after, Longfellow visited Dickens in London, where he was chastened by the British novelist’s sharp critique of slavery in the United States—the slave trade having been outlawed in Great Britain in 1833.

After Charles Sumner sent him a letter in England suggesting he “write some stirring words that shall move the whole land,” Longfellow wrote his Poems on Slavery about the plight of the enslaved. Many took note, but Longfellow had not yet made his mark.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionist cause remained of great interest to him. His account ledgers during this time indicate that he gave generously to Black newspapers, schools, and churches—and to fugitive slaves themselves, using a portion of his wealth to emancipate formerly enslaved men, women, and children.

The day John Brown was hanged, Longfellow wrote in his diary: “The second of December, 1859. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution—quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”

Writes Lepore: “This is Longfellow, an almost maddeningly restrained and genteel man, at his most ardent. Was there a way he could do his part, in his timid manner? John Brown had started ‘a new Revolution.’ Longfellow, writing poems about history, got to thinking about the old one.”

“I long to say some vibrant word, that should have vitality in it, and force,” Longfellow wrote to Sumner, now a United States senator.

On April 5, 1860, Longfellow visited the North End again, later writing in his diary about the North Church, “from this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord.”

The next day, April 6, he recorded “‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ began this day.” On April 19, “I wrote a few lines in ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’; this being the day of that achievement.”

In his biography of Paul Revere, David Hacket Fischer conjectures: “Perhaps on that anniversary day he found his opening stanza, which so many American pupils would learn by heart”:

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.

Longfellow continued working on the poem throughout the fall, penning the last words on October 13, 1860—just weeks before the presidential election in which he voted for Abraham Lincoln. The Atlantic Monthly published Paul Revere’s Ride in its January 1861 issue, which arrived in Boston on December 20, 1860—the very day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

The poem was rightly read by Longfellow’s contemporaries as a call to arms, appealing to Northerners’ conscience and rousing them to war. But Longfellow has been critiqued for the wide license he took in telling this dramatic tale. Revere, for example, was not “on the opposite shore” when the signal lights were hung. He directed them to be cast in case he did not make it across the Charles River to Charlestown where his horse was waiting. In the poem, Revere makes his way to Concord, but in reality, he and fellow rider William Dawes were captured by the British that night between Lexington and Concord. It was their compatriot, Samuel Prescott, who lived in Concord and happened to be in Lexington for a rendezvous with his fiancé, who managed to make it to Concord to alert militia leaders.

Some critics argue that Longfellow was justified in embellishing this exceptionally engaging tale. The more serious critique, however, may be the mistaken impression the poem imparts of Revere as a lone rider. Historians have since clearly documented that, while the events of April 19, 1775, turned on the contingency of many individual heroic actions, what is even more remarkable is how well this defensive effort had been planned and coordinated. Local militia leaders had meticulously trained companies of Minutemen volunteers to defend themselves, and a complex communications apparatus had been clandestinely organized involving scores of other “midnight riders” who passed the word from town to town after receiving the news from Dawes and Revere.

But, in the aftermath of the battles, that collective effort was concealed, Hacket Fischer explains, as it did not fit with the Revolutionaries’ claim that the British had led “an unprovoked attack upon an unresisting people.”

To move the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen—and to sway the opinion of other nations—Revolutionary leaders “actively propagated,” Hacket Fischer says, “the myth of an injured American innocence … as an instrument of their cause.”

To maintain that interpretation, the earliest written accounts of Revere’s ride and his own deposition were suppressed. To Revere’s credit, in his affidavit he refused to testify unequivocally that the British had fired the first shot in the exchange of fire on the Lexington Common. To this day, it remains unclear who shot first.

Revere’s deposition was returned to him and remained unpublished among his private papers until 1891. Through his lifetime, his story remained concealed, which helps explain why his obituary made no mention of the ride for which he became so famous.

Since Longfellow’s time, historians have uncovered the real story, but the myth of Revere singlehandedly rousing his neighbors to action endures. As Hacket Fischer observes, “the scholars never managed to catch up with Longfellow’s galloping hero.”

While many can still recite the famous first stanza, it may be the concluding words of his poem that Longfellow would most wish for us to recall:

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

What is that message, and why did readers in Longfellow’s era read the poem as a call to oppose slavery? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. summed it up this way, “We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.”

If it is true that “revolution is still at hand,” and if we agree that the ideals of our founding remain unfulfilled, Revere’s story is an interesting prism to consider how revolutionary reform efforts are sparked and how societal change occurs.

One school suggests, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, that “no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about.”

Anthropologist Margaret Mead offered a slightly different view when she observed: “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Paul Revere’s example supports both views.

In the introductory chapter to his Revere biography, David Hacket Fischer includes this old Texas joke: “Paul Revere? Ain’t he the Yankee who had to go for help?” Hacket Fischer then explains that “Revere was much more than a midnight messenger. He was also an organizer of a unique collective effort that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. … His actions made a difference most of all mobilizing the acts of many others. The old Texas canard…. when shorn of its pejoratives, is closer to the mark than the mythical image of the solitary rider.”

The upcoming 250th anniversaries offer an opportunity to be stirred again by “the night winds of the past.” But let us hope, in our new hour “of darkness and peril and need,” that those winds will also inspire individual and collective actions by a recommitted citizenry to solve the unprecedented challenges of our time.

Every generation needs its emissaries, like Revere on horseback and Longfellow in verse, to waken its slumbering populace to hear, and heed, that call.

Tom Putnam ’84 is the former director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the Concord Museum.

This story first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Magazine website.