David M. Shribman
It’s the middle of April in twenty-five, and hardly a man or woman is now alive who knows by heart the opening of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that once was memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.
But listen, my children, and you shall hear of the 250th anniversary of the days of gunfire and glory that opened the American Revolution. This landmark moment, coming on April 19, arrives as the country — once a revolutionary vanguard that began when 80 militiamen at Lexington and around 500 more at Concord fought to sever their relationship with Colonial masters — is engaged in an altogether different revolution.
This new American revolution is a civic, bloodless one, testing citizens’ relationship with the federal government; the relationship of the executive branch with the legislative and judicial branches; the relationship between a superpower military and trade behemoth and its allies and rivals; the relationship between the country’s ancient revolutionary past and its contemporary reactionary impulses; and, most of all, the relationship between its historic adherence to Enlightenment values of truth-seeking and its current experiment with stubborn defiance of the truth.
Now, when American history is in danger of being wiped clean of conflict, there is a cleansing element to our recollection of what happened 2 1/2 centuries ago, when Paul Revere was ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm, and then, with a muffled oar, he silently rowed to the Charlestown shore. His was — to cadge the title of a Union ballad celebrating another great American cause, abolitionism — a battle cry of freedom.
The story is, ironically enough, poetry in motion: Growing impatience with Colonial rule. Increasing demands for self-government. The emergence of a gilded generation of pamphleteers, pop-politics philosophers and cultural visionaries. The eventual hurry of hooves in a village street, in an hour of darkness and peril and need, producing words that shall echo forevermore.
“It is important to know where we come from, and that applies to all Americans, not just the Continental soldiers of 1775,” said Ted Widmer, a historian who teaches at the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. “This is a country that still honors the promise that was made by the combatants at Lexington and Concord. The better we know our history, the better citizens we are. I cling to a hope, a little bit unrealistic at the moment, that a better understanding of our history will help us understand our present.”
The 1770s were, of course, a time far different from our own. Then links of trade, kin and history connected Boston and the farmlands beyond; the divide between urban and rural areas that rules our politics was far in the future. The British troops marching through farmlands were striding into hostile grounds, where support for the rebels and supplies were strong.
“The British, for all their military prowess, were operating in enemy country,” said Jason Opal, an Ohio State University expert on early American history. “Ultimately, what defined the patriots was their conviction that they didn’t deserve to be treated like second-class subjects of the Crown. And once the shooting started, the moral authority of the Empire — its claims to rightful authority — collapsed in New England.”
Donald Trump has often spoken of the semiquincentennial anniversary of the country, and as far back as his first speech before a joint session of Congress, in 2017, he described it as “one of the great milestones in the history of the world.” Now, returned to the White House, he will be the nation’s leader at this landmark.
History reminds us of our ideals even as it is riddled with irony. We mark these days of passion at a time when we are engaged in one of the great debates in the history of the world — over the meaning of what happened 250 years ago this week with the skirmishing at Lexington and Concord and over what is happening now in the capital, a city named for the man who would become the commanding general of the American Revolutionary forces and, eventually, a president of modest mien but extravagant elegance and far-reaching vision. He was known for always telling the truth.
Americans would experience moments of unity (World War II, for example), but its distinction has been its ability to withstand division (the conflicts of 1812, the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq; the tariff wars of 1812, 1890 and 1930; the cultural struggles of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement).
At this time of division, it is important to recall how united were the men and women who would, in a half-dozen years, become the citizens of the United States. There were, to be sure, dissenters, supporters of the Crown who fled into Canada, a country that today is experiencing a burst of defiance of its own — but those dissenters, known as Tories, were few in number and small in influence.
There is poetic justice, or at least resonance, in “Paul Revere’s Ride.” The Harvard historian Jill Lepore pointed out that Longfellow finished the poem only weeks before Abraham Lincoln was elected. It became available for Atlantic Monthly readers the day that the Civil War went from dire possibility to sober reality, when South Carolina voted to leave the country the patriot rebels fought to create.
Longfellow’s message echoed throughout the decades, reaching Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.” That was in 1967, with Detroit convulsed in riots, the Supreme Court striking down Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage, and protests against Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies growing more prevalent and more urgent.
Now, as then, the battles of Lexington and Concord are both example and metaphor.
“They represent how, against all odds, a committed citizenry can defeat tyrannical leaders and their more powerful armies,” said Tom Putnam, who was director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum before leading the Concord Museum. “So it was in 1775. So it was with the British, our former foes turned allies, in World War II. So it was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. And so, I hope it will continue to be, in our present age, because every generation needs its emissaries, like Revere on horseback and Longfellow in verse, to waken its slumbering populace to hear, and heed, that call.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
