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Freedom trail

Six Fun Facts About Paul Revere’s Ride

The poem Paul Revere’s Ride took an obscure patriot of the American Revolution and elevated him to American myth.

In 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first asked his children to listen so they shall hear the midnight ride of Paul Revere. He meant it as legend but people took it as historical fact.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

The poem created legions of Paul Revere fans who solidified his fame after the Civil War. They installed an equestrian statue in Boston’s North End, where he had lived for 30 years. His great grandson then bought his house to save it from demolition. The Paul Revere Memorial Association raised the money to buy and restore it. Paul Revere’s house is now an important stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail.

But the backlash had already started in 1896, when a poet named Helen F. Moore wrote a parody of Paul Revere’s Ride called The Midnight Ride of William Dawes. It read, in part,

‘Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear —
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

1. Paul Revere’s Ride

Paul Revere’s Ride was really about fighting slavery, which Longfellow hated. He gave money to fugitive slaves, bought slaves their freedom and supported African-American churches, schools and newspapers. His close friend, U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner, was such an outspoken abolitionist that a southern colleague, Preston Brooks, beat him within an inch of his life on the Senate floor.

Longfellow published Paul Revere’s Ride in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, which appeared on newsstands the day South Carolina seceded. At the time, people viewed it as a call to arms for the North. More recently, historian Jill Lepore has argued the poem is an allegory about slavery itself. Paul Revere’s Ride is “a poem about waking the dead,” wrote Lepore in The American Scholar. “The dead are Northerners, roused to war. But the dead are also the enslaved, entombed in slavery…”

2. Paul Revere Made Lots of Rides

Paul Revere had made the same ride a week and a half earlier. He made lots of rides, in fact. On Dec. 13, 1774, Revere rode all the way to Portsmouth, N.H., to warn the patriots that the King’s troops were on their way to seize gunpowder from Fort William and Mary in New Castle. The redcoats arrived three days late, and they didn’t intend to take the powder in the first place. But a skirmish did result — between 400 New Hampshire volunteers and six British soldiers defending the fort. The redcoats surrendered. Then, 11 days before his midnight ride, Revere rode to Concord to warn that the redcoats would probably come to seize the large cache of military supplies stored there. The patriots moved the supplies.

3. Longfellow and Revere

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a family connection to Paul Revere dating to the American Revolution. His grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, commanded Revere, then a colonel, during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Recrimination followed the worst U.S. naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. And investigation revealed Revere had made enemies because of his arrogance. He demanded a court martial, which exonerated him.

Penobscot Expedition by John Thomas Serres

4. Some Birthday Present

Rose Kennedy made all of her children memorize the poem. John F. Kennedy campaigned for U.S. Congress in 1946 at the base of Paul Revere’s statue in the North End. His brother Edward recited the entire poem during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. When in 1975 Rose Kennedy turned 85, she asked each of her 28 grandchildren to memorize a stanza of the poem as a birthday present.

5. Mistakes Were Made

The poem got a lot of facts wrong about Paul Revere’s ride. For example, Revere – not a friend – ordered the lanterns hung in the belfry of Old North Church. He also had help, which Longfellow omits. The aforementioned William Dawes took a parallel route to the south and met in Lexington. There they encountered a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, while”‘returning from a lady friend’s house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m. (Revere’s words).”

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

6. Obituary Omission

No one outside of the Boston area knew who Paul Revere was until Longfellow wrote Paul Revere’s Ride. Even during his lifetime, Bostonians knew Revere as a successful businessman who had lots of friends. That’s how his obituary read after he died on May 10, 1818. It didn’t even mention the ride.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Places Where a Revolutionary Hero Lived

You didn’t have to show courage in battle to be a revolutionary hero. But if you were, it probably took more than a century for historians and builders to restore your house and turn it into a museum.

Benjamin Edes and his partner, John Gill, did more to stir up revolutionary fervor in the American colonies than any other publisher. On the night of Dec. 16, 1771, Sons of Liberty secretly assembled at Edes’ home in Boston. They disguised themselves as Indians and walked down to the wharves. There a crowd gathered while they chopped open the tea chests on three ships and dumped all the tea into the harbor.

Today, you can visit Benjamin Edes’ old print shop, next to the Old North Church on the Freedom Trail.

Every New England state has a home or an office belonging to a hero of the American Revolution. Here are six of them, one for each state. All but one existed in obscurity for more than a century, their association with a revolutionary hero forgotten. The colonial revival stimulated interest in the old buildings, and historians transformed them into museums.

If you know of a landmark associated with a revolutionary hero, please share it in the comments section.

Nathan Hale Homestead

The Nathan Hale Homestead, which memorializes Connecticut’s most cherished revolutionary hero, in Coventry, Conn.

Every schoolchild knows the story of Nathan Hale, the young schoolmaster turned spy for George Washington. The famous Indian fighter Robert Rogers captured him on Long Island, and the British hanged him without a trial. The State of Connecticut considers him a revolutionary hero for his defiant last words, “I only regret that I have but one life to live for my country.”

When the Hale family hadn’t heard from Nathan in a while, his brother went to Old Saybrook, Conn., to track him down. He learned Nathan was killed and was given a trunk of his belongings.

The Hale family eventually sold the house and it passed through several hands. Then a Connecticut lawyer named George Dudley Seymour got caught up in the Nathan Hale story. He found out the house, sadly in need of repair, was for sale. Seymour bought it, restored it and filled it with Connecticut antiques, including Nathan’s trunk.

Nathan Hale never lived in the Nathan Hale Homestead, but he did live in a house on the same location. His family tore it down during the war to build the bigger house, which survived.

The Hale Homestead grounds are open year round from dawn to dusk, and the house itself is open for tours from May to October.

2299 South St., Coventry, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House, home to a revolutionary hero and a poet.

Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, served in the Continental Army as a brigadier general. His greatest moment in the war came during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. As British warships drove American forces up the Penobscot River, Wadsworth saved his men by leading a retreat by land back to Boston.

The British later captured Wadsworth from his headquarters in Thomaston, Maine, and confined him at Fort George in Castine, Maine. He escaped by cutting a hole in the ceiling and crawling along the joists.

Wadsworth went home to Plymouth, Mass., but he returned to Maine and bought property in what is now Portland. He built the first brick house in the city, now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His son and wife lived in the house, where they raised their children.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s sister owned the house until her death in 1901, when she bequeathed it to the Maine Historical Society. The historical society runs it as a house museum – Maine’s first, as a matter of fact. It’s open May through October.

489 Congress St., Portland, Maine

Printing Office of Edes & Gill

Where Benjamin Edes published the Boston Gazette.

Benjamin Edes, along with his partner John Gill, didn’t fight in the war, but he was nonetheless a revolutionary hero. Edes, more than any other publisher, stoked public indignation over Parliament’s abuse of the American colonies.

Edes and Gill worked out of a print shop in Boston’s North End, near Paul Revere’s house and next to the Old North Church. The Old North Church now owns the building where Edes and Gill ran their printing press.

Edes escaped Boston during the siege and moved to Watertown, Mass., where he continued to publish the Boston Gazette until 1798. The British arrested his 17-year-old son Peter for 3-1/2 months, mostly because they hated his father.

The North End went from a fashionable neighborhood to a slum, then back to fashionable.The Printing Office of Edes & Gill opened as a museum in 2011. Interpreters show how colonial printers worked their trade on the museum’s historic equipment. They also explain how Boston’s patriot press incited the American colonies to rebellion.

21 Unity St., Boston, Mass.

Gen. John Stark House

The home of Indian fighter and revolutionary hero John Stark in Manchester, N.H.

Gen. John Stark gave New Hampshire its motto, which you’ve no doubt seen on its license plates: Live Free or Die.

The old Indian fighter marched his New Hampshire militia to Boston as soon as he heard about the Battles of Lexington and Concord. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, he led his men to a spot where he anticipated the British would attack. He may or may not have said, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Someone did; it just isn’t clear who.

He was an unsung revolutionary hero of the Battle of Saratoga, where he and his men prevented the British from retreating north. His heroics at the Battle of Bennington are more widely remembered. Even today, many New Hampshirites can quote him: “There they are boys! We beat them today or Molly Stark sleeps a widow tonight!”

Stark famously went home to his farm in Derryfield (now Manchester) after the war and died at age 93. The Stark family sold his boyhood home in 1821, and then the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company bought it in 1835 to use as worker housing. In 1937, the company gave the building to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who restored it. They moved it to the original Stark farm in 1968 and turned it into a house museum.

2000 Elm St., Manchester, N.H.

Nathaniel Greene Homestead

The home of Nathanael Greene, revolutionary hero.

Nathanael Greene had asthma, walked with a pronounced limp and belonged to the pacifist Quaker religion.

None of that stopped him from becoming a revolutionary hero doing some of the toughest jobs of the war for independence.

When Americans despaired of ever evicting the British, Nathanael Greene lured Gen. Cornwallis away from his supply lines and into battles that inflicted heavy casualties. Greene took control of most of the South away from British forces and returned to his home in Rhode Island.

Nathanael Greene built the house in 1770, and his family lived there through the war. Greene moved his family to Newport at the war’s end in 1783, but then relocated to Georgia and died soon thereafter.

He had sold the Coventry house to his brother Jacob, and it remained in the Greene family until 1899. The family, though, rented it as a tenement house and neglected to keep it up.

In 1919, the Nathanael Greene Homestead Association formed to restore the former home of Rhode Island’s best known revolutionary hero. Today it’s a house museum, and part of the Anthony Village Historic District. Open for tours from April through October.

20 Taft St., Coventry, R.I.

Ethan Allen Homestead Museum

The Ethan Allen Homestead, home of Vermont’s greatest revolutionary hero.

Ethan Allen could claim stature as a revolutionary hero for capturing Fort Ticonderoga with Benedict Arnold in 1775. But he spent most of the war imprisoned by the British and then, after his release, ferreting out Loyalists in Vermont.

He spent the years after his imprisonment pursuing politics, writing books and speculating in land. He and his family moved to a new house overlooking the Winooski River in Burlington in 1787, but he only lived there until his death in 1789. His survivors sold the house, which passed through several hands. Local people always knew the house had belonged to Ethan Allen, but no one did much about it until a Burlington resident named William J. Van Patten bought it in 1902.

Van Patten donated 12 acres of the property to the Sons of the American Revolution on condition they maintain it as a park and build a tower to Vermont’s revolutionary hero. They did, and Van Patten lived in the house and ran the rest of the property as a dairy farm.

In the late 1980s, a surviving remnant of the farm was turned into The Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. It now functions as a house museum with living history events and lectures on Vermont’s history. Open May through October.

1 Ethan Allen Homestead, Burlington, Vt.

Images: By Sphilbrick – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11802250; Clough House By MLHalsey – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23197901; Gen. John Stark House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19357747; Nathanael Greene Homestead By Camanda at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18112163; Ethan Allen Homestead By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:11, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160603

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Revolutionary African-Americans Who Fought for Freedom

When Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Boston in the fall of 1951, the word “‘freedom” was very much in the air. The Freedom Trail had just been created, an instant and enduring success. Tourists flocked to the path that marked steps taken by such Revolutionary heroes as Paul Revere, Sam Adams and John Hancock.

Plenty of other heroes who fought for freedom and dignity during the Revolutionary era. The New England Historical Society presents six stories about African-Americans who struggled for liberty.

African Americans Seeking Freedom

Black Kings and Governors of Early New England: For a century beginning in 1750, New England African-Americans elected 31 of their own black kings and governors. These early leaders presided over an informal social order, It prepared African-Americans for their role as free civic participants.

Crispus Attucks, a seafaring African-American, led a crowd of mostly white sailors into danger and history by inciting the Boston Massacre.

In New England, African-Americans fought and suffered and died in the American Revolution. As many as one-quarter of the men who served in the war were African-American. Tobias Gilmore won his freedom by fighting in the American Revolution. In his hometown of Raynham, Mass., on every July 4th he fired a cannon 14 times. He fired 13 for each of the original colonies and then one for George Washington.

Elizabeth Freeman couldn’t read but she knew what freedom meant. So she took her case to court in Massachusetts. “If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it,” she said.

Ona Judge Staines outwitted her slavemaster – George Washington. She escaped to freedom in Portsmouth, N.H., and then eluded his attempts to get her back.

Paul Cuffe, a Quaker who lived in Westport, R.I., was the wealthiest African American in the country. He was taken prisoner during the American Revolution, Afterwards he decided the best hope for his people was to return to Africa.

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Take a Freedom Trail Out of Boston

In 1951, Boston Evening Traveler columnist Walter Schofield began campaigning for the city to create a path taking pedestrians past milestones of the American Revolution. By May, Mayor John Hynes bowed to the pressure and agreed to establish the Freedom Trail. Two young men — Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — took note.

Malcolm X in 1964

Malcolm Little was incarcerated in the Norfolk Prison Colony that year. Martin Luther King was just settling in to his St. Botolph Street apartment as he began doctoral studies at Boston University.

The history of Boston’s fight for freedom cannot have been lost on them. Their rhetoric centered on freedom. “I believe in a religion that believes in freedom,” said Malcolm X. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote Martin from Birmingham Jail.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

But religion, not revolution, marked the path of liberation for these two deeply spiritual men. Boston turned Malcolm Little into Malcolm X when he left in the summer of 1952. Boston turned Martin Luther King into Dr. King when he left for Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. There he had a job as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Within 18 months, Martin would rocket to the center of the international stage as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. For Malcolm, fame would take longer. He would attract a large following to the Nation of Islam. But not until 1959 did he attract much attention beyond the black community.

Mrtin Luther King delivering his “I Have a dream” speech.

White people found Martin’s pacifist, integrationist religion far more palatable than Malcolm’s muscular Islam. By 1957, Time put Martin Luther King on the cover of Time and Meet the Press. interviewed him on television. Prime time wasn’t ready for Malcolm’s message of black independence, pride and entrepreneurialism within the African-American community.

Together they would play good cop, bad cop in the struggle to lift up American blacks. They learned how to do it in Boston.

The Cradle of Freedom

Both men immersed themselves in the city’s culture of scholarship and debate, even if for Malcolm that meant the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library and debating society. Martin was cocooned in a white, liberal school of theology that welcomed black scholars. Malcolm studied the literature of slavery in an extraordinary prison library.

Both men acknowledge the influence Boston had on them. Malcolm wrote in his autobiography, “No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.” Martin often referred to Boston as his second home.

Martin at BU

Boston must have been exciting for a young doctoral student from the Deep South. He had never lived in a multicultural, mixed neighborhood like Boston’s South End. That’s what Martin found at 170 St. Botolph St. for his first few months in Boston, and then at 397 Massachusetts Ave., in the middle of this first year at BU. It must have also been a heady experience to debate with world-famous religious philosophers like Edgar Brightman.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, Boston University was a center of liberal theological thought. It welcomed African-American graduate students. Brightman led the school of theology known as Boston Personalism. From Boston Personalism, Martin derived two tenets of his thought: belief in a personal God and belief in the dignity of all mankind.

Marsh Chapel.

In his final year at Boston University, King family friend Howard Thurman became dean of BU’s Marsh Chapel, the first African-American dean of a predominately white university. An internationally known theologian, he knew Gandhi. He became Martin’s spiritual advisor. Martin was said to have carried until his death Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited. The book shows how to use the Gospel as a guide to resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.

The Parkhurst Collection

A very different institution had a profound influence on Malcolm: The Parkhurst collection at the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library. In 1946, Lewis Parkhurst, a successful Unitarian lawmaker and publisher, had bequeathed his books to the prison. The collection had so many books that some were still in crates when Malcolm was transferred to Norfolk in 1948.

The Parkhurst collection included anti-slavery pamphlets and books, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It also had the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted — probably The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. And it included Frances “Fanny” Kemble’s Journal of A Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.

The cruelty of chattel slavery described in Parkhurst’s books horrified Malcolm X. Writes Louis DeCaro in John Brown the Abolitionist – A Biographer’s Blog: “Malcolm went so far as to say that “Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man”.”

Malcolm X Rise to Fame

Upon his release from prison, Malcolm moved to Detroit, where he worked for his brother in a furniture store and in an auto plant. Then he moved to Chicago to live with Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He returned to Boston in 1953 to start Temple Number 11 at 35 Intervale St. in Dorchester. By the next year Elijah Muhammed appointed him minister for Temple Number Seven in New York, but he returned to Boston to build the membership of the Boston temple.

35 Intervale St. today. Photo courtesy of @ 2021 Google.

The Nation of Islam grew rapidly, in part because of Malcolm’s charisma, his tireless speaking and his message. He had little use for Martin’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance – he called it the “philosophy of the fool.” And he saw no good coming from political involvement with white people. He preached that black people must separate from the race he called “white devils,” and he defended African-Americans’ right to fight violence with violence. That resonated with black people who faced vicious white resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. They concluded whites would never grant blacks equality. It made sense to them to build all-black social and economic institutions.

Hate that Hate Produced

In 1955, Malcolm served as minister of Temple Number 12 in Philadelphia. He also founded three successful Nation of Islam temples in Hartford, Atlanta and Springfield, Mass. By 1959, a documentary about the Nation of Islam called, The Hate That Hate Produced made him a national figure.

Malcolm helped elevate Martin’s image with white people. Martin wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He refused to meet with Malcolm or respond personally to his overtures. “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief,” he said.

Malcolm X guards his family home in an Ebony magazine photo.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

When Martin and Coretta Scott King permanently moved to Montgomery in the summer of 1955, a campaign had already begun to end segregation on city buses. In March, before Martin obtained his doctorate, police arrested a 15-year-old black girl. She had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Black activists had started to build around that case to challenge Alabama’s bus segregation laws.

Martin Luther King (left) and Rosa Parks in 1955.

Then they decided to stop riding the buses after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. Martin, not yet 30, found himself in the middle of the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. It ended on Dec. 20, 1956, when a court ruled the state’s segregation laws violated the Constitution.

The bus boycott rocketed him to fame. In 1957 he met with President Eisenhower and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Within the next 10 years he would be arrested in Selma and Birmingham and deliver his “I Have a Dream” Speech before 250,000 people. He would also win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 35 – the youngest ever to do so.

King would also lead marches in the North for better housing, better schools and better jobs. He led one such march in Boston on April 23, 1964, during one of his frequent visits to the city. The march followed a speech to the Massachusetts Legislature the day before. The audience included young lawmakers Michael Dukakis and William Bulger, reported WBUR.

March on Washington

By 1963, two events just a few months apart would indelibly stamp onto history the good-cop, bad-cop images of Martin and Malcolm. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the most famous in history. Malcolm called it the “Farce on Washington.” Three months later, Malcolm would shock the world. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he commented the “chickens [were] coming home to roost.”

But both men were changing. Martin got more aggressive, demanding more than just integration and acceptance. More and more he aligned himself with the militant American labor movement. He once said that when he listened to Malcolm speak, even he got angry.

The March on Washington itself was organized by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The demands of the march went beyond desegregation. They included a $2 minimum wage, a federal jobs program and the expansion of federal labor regulations to more classes of workers such as farmworkers and domestics. Many forget that Martin was assassinated in Memphis while he supported the sanitation workers’ strike.

Malcolm, too, was changing. He would soon renounce the Nation of Islam and embrace traditional Sunni Islam. In February 1965 he said, “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then … pointed in a certain direction and told to march.”

He also recognized that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a stunning success. He realized he had to present a strategy to improve the lives of African-Americans. In doing so, he harkened back to work he’d done with Randolph in 1961 to fight the deterioration of York City’s black communities. Their strategy: raise workers’ wages.

MLK Meets Malcolm X

And once Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1964, he began to pay attention to civil rights issues and to reach out to civil rights leaders – including Martin.

Their only meeting.

On March 26, 1964, they met for the only time. The meeting lasted for about one minute, long enough to shake hands and have their picture taken. They had both come to Washington, D.C., to watch the Senate filibuster the Civil Rights Act. Eight days later Malcolm X made a speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In it, he advised African-Americans to exercise their right to vote wisely. He also announced he would form a political organization.

By then, both men correctly expected to die soon. Gunshots killed each at the age of 39. Malcolm died on Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Martin was then murdered on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

Malcolm X Meets With Coretta Scott King

Just a few weeks before he died, Malcolm X met with Coretta Scott King in Selma, Ala., while her husband served time in the Birmingham Jail. Malcolm told her he came to make Martin’s job easier. “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King,” he said.

To read the first part of this story, click here. We are indebted to several books for this article: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Also, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. Finally, Parting the Waters: America in The King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Images: Marsh Chapel By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17310479. Malcolm X with gun By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3898865. This story was updated in 2022.

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