Books: "The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America," By Kostya Kennedy

 

The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America

By Kostya Kennedy

St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 304 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, March 25th

Kostya Kennedy has written landmark biographies of the biggest figures in American sports, including the New York Times bestselling 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports; Pete Rose: An American Dilemma; and True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, which we reviewed in April 2022. All three books were honored with the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year, and Kennedy, a former Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated, is currently an editor as Dotdash Meredith.

With the riveting new book, The Ride, Kennedy has taken his biographical lens to Paul Revere, and through his extensive research, has uncovered more information on the most famous horse ride in American history, on April 18, 1775.

Revere, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver, and staunch anti-British political operative, was the Patriots' best and most trusted "express rider" for the revolution. To this point, Revere already completed at least 18 rides throughout New England, informing people of the intelligence they had on British movements. One of those rides was in December 1773, when he rode hundreds of miles south to New York and Philadelphia to deliver news of the Boston Tea Party, or as he termed it, " an account of the destruction of the tea."

Kennedy presents a new narrative of the events surrounding when Revere set out on that night in April 1775. It was a coordinated ride of some 40 men that included near-disasters, possible capture by British forces, and, ultimately, 

This is a story that is deeper than has been chronicled, and Kennedy reveals the role of women who were involved, as well as African-Americans in Boston. A lot of what is unearthed here is informed by new primary and secondary research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more.

What was found are events that have never or rarely been discussed before and after the ride. To start with, Revere was on a borrowed horse that was then taken from him by British officers, and he never saw it again. He intentionally did not carry his pistol on the night of the ride, and that might have saved his life. 

Revere never actually said the most-known line credited to this moment in history, "The British are coming!" during the ride. In the other renowned phrase, "one of by land, two if by sea," Revere used "sea" to refer to the Charles River. At the start of the ride, Revere was rowed quietly over the Charles from Boston to Charleston, along the way evading lookouts that were stationed on a British warship.

In this excerpt, Kennedy examines the significance of this operation and how it was the start of America's independence: What if the militiamen had not been waiting at the Lexington Green at dawn on that April day in 1775, to test and slow the British? What if they had not then been at Concord a few hours later, 220 strong, ready and resolute on the high ground?

Those Patriot soldiers arrived by the hundreds that morning, then by the thousands, armed and keen and strengthened in their numbers. They mustered on the damp, open fields and on the forest edges along the Old Concord Road. Farmers and tradesmen, with their muskets and fowling pieces in hand. They turned back the redcoats and then fired on them in their retreat, routing them out of town and back off the land that the Patriots knew now as their own. Villagers from the highlands and the low, ministers and deists and nonbelievers, men dressed in whatever clothes they had - their patched and varied breeches, their worn straight-last boots - a hodge-podge of an earnest crew transformed by necessity and determination into American soldiers who that morning showed the will that would drive them in the weeks and months ahead, the will that would win the Revolutionary War. 

Suppose they had not come that morning after all, suppose they had not been so timely in their arrival, not been so committed to their call?

Suppose instead the seasoned British soldiers, in their fine cocked hats and under their generals' command, had in their ransacking of Concord's Barrett Farm found and taken the stores of gunpowder and ammunition they had come to seize. Imagine if the British had caught the Americans by surprise, as they'd intended. Imagine if, in Lexington, they had killed or captured Samuel Adams or John Hancock, delivering on the bounty that had been put on those men by the king. What would have happened to the path of the American Revolution then?

If not for that first morning of battle - of impudent, plucky, stunning, and world-shifting Patriot success - would the rebelling American army have continued to mobilize so confidently? Would it have stayed so unified in the face of defeat and death, have remained do emboldened to succeed? Would the army have fared so well (even in defeat) in the Battle of Bunker Hill, eight weeks later? Would the Revolution have unfolded so quickly as it did? Would we have July 4, 1776, as our Day of Independence? Or how much longer might the British have held their grip? Into the 1780s, the 1790s, the 1800s, and beyond? And if they had held that longer grip, what might then have been the implications for the establishment and growth of the American democracy in the years and decades that followed? What would be the implications today?

When we ask these things, when we consider the plausible alternatives to the chain of events that occurred on April 18 and April 19, 1775, and we are asking this: What might have happened, how might the much-documented and much-deconstructed birth of our nation have unfolded, and with what repercussions, had not Paul Revere mounted his borrowed horse and set out to ride those critical miles in those critical hours across the simmering moonlit land, to rouse the countryside and deliver the news? What would have become of the Revolution, of its crucial early days? What would have become of the whole hard, taxing, extraordinary journey to independence, if not for Paul Revere and his midnight ride?