“After darkness fell on April 18, 1775, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver and anti-British political operative named Paul Revere set out on a borrowed horse to fulfill a dangerous but crucial mission: to alert American colonists of advancing British troops which would seek to crush their nascent revolt.” —The Ride, Paul Revere and the Night that Saved America, by Kostya Kennedy.
Author Kostya Kennedy spent more than two years researching and writing “The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night that Saved America,” to bring new life and detail to the historical figures and cascade of events that transformed a British colony’s thirst for independence into a revolution that birthed a nation. LexObserver caught up with Kennedy to learn more about the book and what inspired him to write it. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity).
LexObserver: You’ve previously written about some legendary sports figures. What drew you to write about Paul Revere?
Kostya Kennedy: The ballplayers that I have written about — Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and Pete Rose — are all figures who have slipped the boundaries of the game. It wasn’t only about baseball, it was about their social impact.
Paul Revere was a person who knew what time it was — in his life and in the world around him. And at a very particular moment, over the course of relatively few hours, he shaped his whole legacy and the American future in many ways.
Not many historical figures are known for one event. Revere had a broad life and did many other things, like rolling copper for the War of 1812, but this is his moment, and it’s not easy to meet the moment in your life, right? And it’s one of those times, so that was a big thing!
I remember being nine or ten years old, well old enough to read, and my mother reading the poem Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Longfellow to me, “Listen my children, and you shall Hear…”, which had no pictures in it. It was left for my little mind to imagine, and as I got older, I always thought about it. So, Revere — and the ride in particular —stayed with me.
LO: You make a distinct case for why you believe Revere’s ride is more significant than the other Patriots who rode that night. Can you elaborate on why?
KK: So, there were two riders who actually went out from Boston with the information. One was Revere, and one was William Dawes — and the only reason we really even know about William Dawes is from Revere’s own account, describing how he’d sent out Dawes and figured he’d meet him in Lexington. Dawes had just as much bravery and courage to try to get through the British guard that night; his life was at risk, too! But it doesn’t seem as if he really alerted people or that they responded to his alert. You don’t see people from those towns who were at the rolls in Lexington and Concord the next morning. So, the impact of his actual ride is certainly questionable.
Revere, through lighting the lanterns — which was his idea to put them up in North End Church so they saw that in Charlestown and maybe some areas nearby — then his ride, really set all the other riders in motion, and you can imagine this sort of neural network spreading out across the land.
There’s no question that Revere was the principal rider, and he had been beforehand. This was the guy. He’s the guy who rode down to Philadelphia to tell them about the Boston Tea Party, and to Portsmouth in December for a critical alert that the British were trying to take weaponry there. He brought the Suffolk Resolves to Philadelphia. So he was certainly the principal person.
Revere was going out on a night when the city was locked down, not wanting people to get out — and specifically not wanting Paul Revere to get out. Dawes and Prescott certainly had lots of bravery, and they encountered the soldiers, too, on the road to Concord and are very integral parts of the mission. Things might have been different without them.
LO: Much has been written about Revere already, so was there anything you uncovered that was surprising to you?
KK: He got really close to the corridors of power, meaning John Hancock, Samuel and John Adams, Joseph Warren, William Dawes. Those guys who ran the revolution, really the brains of its operation, the money — they’d gone through Roxbury Latin, they’d gone to Harvard, and Warren was a successful doctor. Dawes’ family had been here since the 1630s, he was a man of wealth and stature. They were of a certain class. Revere was born the son of an immigrant. He certainly doesn’t go to a fancy school; he went, essentially, to a trade school and definitely didn’t go to college. But through his hard work and intelligence, his reliability, [and] his adaptability, he brought himself to be this figure who was so close to the actual decision-making and where the whole thing happened. So it’s just interesting to me, realizing and understanding the company that he kept and how he got to keep that company through his own sort of will and discipline.
LO: You write evocatively about treading the same paths that Revere rode. How do you think personally visiting those locations impacted how you approached his story?
KK: History, especially if something has been romanticized in a poem, can seem almost like a fairy tale. It’s a story. But this was an actual man, and these were actual men and women who lived in this time, and this happened. I’m saying something so obvious, yet that realization can still hit you anew at the right time and place. And I remember being at the end of where his ride was, which is left pretty much intact, and there are plaques on boulders there that say, ‘Here lie soldiers from the Royal Army who were killed on April 19, 1775’ – this is where it happened. Somebody just like me was on this road. So, it gave me a sense of immediacy and belief in reconstructing the world.
LO: You framed Revere in excellent biographical detail, but chose to focus on the Ride. Why not write a broader biography of him?
KK: You can have a little more sense of purpose when you narrow it a little bit and focus a little bit. I wanted to write something for people who really know nothing about Revere and make it accessible to them. But also, I’ve been doing meetings with Sons and Daughters of the Revolution who know a lot, and I want it to work for them too, so it’s that balance. When I tried to describe the neighborhood, it came from diaries from other people or accounts from other people that had nothing to do with the rider. Even the incipient Rebellion at that point, it’s just life going on and people did keep diaries and write letters about it. Some facts are more beautiful and enriching than anything you could make up.
LO: How do you see his legacy carrying forward in a culture that’s saturated and drowning in messages?
KK: Revere is a very graspable symbol, and it’s graspable in today’s context by the left, by the right, by religious groups, by non-religious groups — you can use it as sort of an inspiring message, or an inspiring metaphor, in many different ways. But it also had a certain viral quality — we were talking before about the riders spreading out. It’s not just you showing up at somebody’s doors saying, ‘Hey, go get your gun and a horse, the Royal Army is coming!’ There was already a system and an appetite in place, and I think that for the right call, whatever that is, the right call for the right reason to get people to respond, it can still be done.
You also have to have people willing to — and this is certainly not unique to Revere, it’s true of so many people who put themselves in harm’s way — he didn’t need to do it! He had a perfectly comfortable life. So this is a great personal risk and he is doing something really for an ideal and a principal. That was true, of course, of the Adams’ and Warren and true of all the soldiers, who probably have descendants living in Lexington and Cambridge who went out to fight when they probably would have been okay even if the British had kept taxing them.
So what are the ideals that we — you, me, somebody next door — would be willing to really risk yourself for today?
LO: Was there one particular source that was a goldmine for your research?
KK: It really depended on the section of the book. But the Lexington Historical Society was absolutely critical, Revere Papers …You get little nerdish thrills like an archaeologist when you’re holding a newspaper that people were looking at on the streets in February of 1775! Really just a one sheet of tiny little writing, you wonder how people could have even seen it! No pictures! It was like piecing it together — the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Lexington Historical Society, the Concord Museum, Buckman Tavern — all these different places, which all have their own little stash of stuff.
LO: What do you hope readers take away from “The Ride”?
KK: I hope it’s somewhat inspiring. It’s a reminder that a principled action in one’s life, taking a risk for something you believe in, can make a difference.
LO: Or as you put it so deftly in “The Ride,” “The bravery needed, the danger that lurked, and the impact of the mission’s success are all implicit. He rose to the moment, putting an ideal, and a people, ahead of himself… Proof that a single conscious act can change the world, and one’s place within it.”