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April 18, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” to alarm the towns around Boston that the “Regulars” were marching out to capture artillery and ammunition at Concord, or perhaps to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock. This was but the last of a series of crises that rocked New England in the months before the midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day. This episode explores those crises, known as the “Powder Alarms,” and Paul Revere’s central role in the resistance movement among Boston Whigs – including the famous Sons of Liberty – during those fraught years before the shooting began.
[Errata: I implied that Dr. Benjamin Church’s betrayal of the Patriot cause wouldn’t be understood “for years,” but in fact it was uncovered during the summer of 1775, after the shooting had begun, when one of his letters to the British was intercepted. He was permitted to leave the country in lieu of imprisonment, and sailed for the West Indies. His ship disappeared at sea and Church was never seen again.]
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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)
David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride
Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
Not surprisingly, I’m delighted by this sidebar. I just finished reading Esther Forbes’ Pulitzer Prize winning Paul Revere and his World (1940). There are plenty of canards related to the Revolutionary era that seem to continue despite evidence to the contrary, but Forbes’ narrative is remarkably free of them. The alleged assertion that Margaret Gage was a Patriot mole still persists. You handled that deftly.
Fischer is pretty complimentary of Forbes, FWIW. As I recall he sort of dismisses the complaints of other historians about her.