The midnight ride of Paul Revere, 250 years later

The power of collective action

Apr 18, 2025

Paul Revere statue, with Old North Church. (Photo by TanRo)

Paul Revere had already ridden through the countryside, warning of the hundreds of redcoats marching west from Boston.

The Minute Men had already confronted the “regulars” at Lexington and suffered grievous losses at their hands.

The colonial militia at Concord had already fired on the king’s light infantry, who turned around and ran away.

British General Thomas Gage’s forces had already begun retreating to Boston, suffering dozens of casualties from militia snipers taking advantage of high ground along the route of nearly 20 miles.

It was April 19, 1775, a clear, blustery New England spring day — the one we now know as the beginning of the American Revolution.

But then something happened that, perhaps more than anything else, revealed why the colonists’ cause was likely to defeat the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

Today, 250 years later, the “Battle of Lexington and Concord” carries many lessons. But perhaps the most salient is that it demonstrated the power of collective action, the strength of a group sharing a common goal.

America at 250: An occasional “Now It’s History” series

The old men of Menotomy

On April 18 of that year, General Gage sent a force of as many as 900 troops to seize munitions held by the rebellious militia of Concord. In case of widespread resistance, Gage followed up hours later by deploying an elite brigade commanded by Lord Hugh Percy.

But these reinforcements lacked enough ammunition for a sustained battle. So Gage sent two wagons of ammunition, with more than a dozen troops, as historian David Hackett Fischer wrote in Paul Revere’s Ride.

In the town of Menotomy, now known as Arlington, a group of men, too old to serve in the militia, heard about the approach of the ammunition wagons. “These gray-headed soldiers did not make a formidable appearance,” Fischer wrote, “but they were hardened veterans who made up in experience what they lacked in youth, and were brilliantly led by David Lamson, described as a ‘mulatto’ in the records.” (Other sources say he was of African and Native American descent.)

With patience and skill these men laid a cunning ambush for the British ammunition wagons, waited until they approached, and demanded their surrender. The British drivers were not impressed by these superannuated warriors, and responded by whipping their teams forward. The old men opened fire. With careful economy of effort, they systematically shot the lead horses in their traces, killed two sergeants, and wounded the officer in command.
The surviving British soldiers took another look at these old men, and fled for their lives. They ran down the road, threw their weapons into a pond, and started running again. They came upon an old woman named Mother Batherick, so impoverished that she was digging a few weeds from a vacant field for something green to eat. The panic-stricken British troops surrendered to her, and begged her protection.

She brought them to the home of a militia captain and said, “If you ever live to get back, you tell King George that an old woman took six of his grenadiers prisoner.”

In England, the incident didn’t go unnoticed, according to Samuel Abbot Smith, writing in 1864. Opponents of the British government reasoned, “If one old Yankee woman can take 6 grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

The Mother Batherick part of this story may be too good to be true, since Smith’s account, written many decades after the fact, appears to be the only source. But the larger takeaway still stands.

The colonists who rebelled, even those considered too old to fight, were unified, well-organized and determined, despite the long odds against them.

Some of the colonists were awed by the sight of the British army, viewed from Concord. “It was a breathtaking spectacle,” Fischer observed. “A long flowing ribbon of scarlet and white and sparkling steel that stretched a quarter mile along the road, and was moving relentlessly in their direction. Militiaman Thaddeus Blood, aged nineteen, wrote, ‘The sun was rising and shined on their arms, and they made a noble appearance in their red coats and glistening arms.’"

But on that day, the entire Massachusetts countryside was energized, not intimidated, by the assault of the British regulars. Almost every town contributed militia members and arms to the battle. Their fierce devotion to the cause of self-governance against an imperious, far-away Parliament gave them the moral strength to stand up to a much superior professional army.

General Gage knew what he was up against in trying to put down the rebellion against the king’s government. Before Lexington and Concord, he had pleaded for more troops, writing to the secretary of war, “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty; if one million is thought enough, give two; you save both blood and treasure in the end."

“In London,” noted Fischer, “those numbers were thought to be absurd, even hysterical. At the moment when Gage was asking for 20,000 reinforcements, only 12,000 regular infantry existed in all of Britain.”

It would take the colonies eight years and much bigger battles to win independence from Britain, but the germ of their victory was present on the day of the “shot heard round the world.”

Paul Revere

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

The famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is full of embellishments about the ride of Paul Revere (Fischer calls it “grossly, systematically and deliberately inaccurate”), but it correctly placed the Boston silversmith at the center of the events of April 18 and 19.

The son of a French-speaking Huguenot immigrant to the Massachusetts colony, Revere learned metalworking from his father. As an adult, he was what the British call “clubbable” — he was chosen, or volunteered himself, for a wide range of roles in colonial Boston, including health officer, coroner, head of a fire insurance company, foreman of a jury in a controversial trial and member of the Sons of Liberty.

“He held no high offices, wrote none of the great papers, joined few of the large deliberative assemblies, commanded no army, and did not advertise his acts,” David Hackett Fischer wrote. “But in another way he was a figure of very high importance. The historical Paul Revere was much more than merely a midnight messenger. He was also an organizer of collective effort in the American Revolution.”

“During the pivotal period from the Fall of 1774 to the Spring of 1775, he had an uncanny genius for being at the center of events. His actions made a difference, most of all in mobilizing the acts of many others.”

Revere was central to the emerging network of colonists who demanded self-government and opposed rule from Westminster. He made numerous rides into the country and to cities like New York and Philadelphia in the years leading up to the battle of Lexington and Concord.

Revere played an integral part in the planning and preparation the colonists made for the day when they would have to take up arms against the king’s troops. But even on April 18, 1775, he wasn’t a solitary figure. There were other riders who also spread the alarm.

Lexington

When Scottish historian Niall Ferguson watched the annual reenactment of the battle at Lexington Green, he saw the patch of land as more appropriate for a cricket game than for the outbreak of a revolution.

In his book Empire, he expressed a bit of perplexity at the uprising. After all, the colonists were arguably the wealthiest people in the world, better situated than their counterparts in England; they had benefited greatly from the protection of the Royal Navy.

“The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better education than the Old Englanders back home,” Ferguson wrote. “And, crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763, the average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling. To say that being British subjects had been good for these people would be an understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured labourers of Virginia or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of imperial authority.”

The tea that Revere and others dumped into the harbor in the Boston Tea Party in December, 1773 was cheap and carried a tax of only three pence a pound.

But as Ferguson pointed out, the real quarrel wasn’t about money but power: the colonies saw themselves as their own self-governing entities, not as appendages of the British empire. They demanded the right to set their own taxes.

Many in England were sympathetic to the rebel cause, favoring some form of confederation that would satisfy the colonists’ grievances. But the governing Tories never seized the opportunity for that kind of compromise.

The problem for London was that while it had the resources to battle the colonies for years, it also had to contend with France, which actively supported the American revolution. And like other big powers who have fought insurgencies, the British lacked the will to fight the kind of all-out war it might have won.

Ferguson cites Edmund Burke: “The use of force alone ... may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; And a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.”

The battle of April 19, 1775 took a greater toll on the British regulars than on the colonists, according to Fischer. General Gage reported 65 dead and 180 wounded among his troops. The colonists saw 50 of their number killed and 39 wounded.

“In short,” noted Ferguson, “London lacked the stomach to impose British rule on white colonists who were determined to resist it.”

Caught in the middle were the colonists who remained loyal to the crown. Many of them suffered greatly for opposing the revolution. After the British defeat, 100,000 loyalists fled to Canada, as Ferguson noted.

Hanging together

“We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

That famous remark, attributed to Benjamin Franklin on the occasion of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, probably wasn’t said by him, and was a commonly used witticism before the revolution. But it certainly did apply to the risk taken by the signers of the Declaration, since they put their names on a document that amounted to treason against the rule of King George III.

(Only one signer was actually imprisoned for the declaration: Richard Stockton of New Jersey: “‘dragged from his bed by night’ by local Tories after he had evacuated his family from New Jersey, and imprisoned in New York City's infamous Provost Jail like a common criminal,” according to David Mikkelson. He was paroled two months later.)

Collective action is powerful, but difficult to create and sustain. Take the universities under fire from the Trump administration. Or the elite law firms, or major media companies, or White House correspondents. If they band together, they have a greater capacity to resist. But individually, they can be picked off and even set off against each other.

There is also the phenomenon of the “free rider,” the member who benefits from a group’s effort without contributing anything to it. Economist Mancur Olson wrote in his book The Logic of Collective Action: “Any group or organization, large or small, works for some collective benefit … Though all of the members of the group therefore have a common interest in obtaining this collective benefit, they have no common interest in paying the cost of providing that collective good. Each would prefer that the others pay the entire cost, and ordinarily would get any benefit provided whether he had borne part of the cost or not.”

On April 18 and 19, 1775, Paul Revere and his fellow colonists chose to ride, not to free ride. They risked everything to fight for self-government.

As the signers of the Declaration of Independence declared, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”