Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read and most beloved
American poet, was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807, and
died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had long resided, March
24, 1882.
Paul Revere, who was a self-taught engraver upon copperplate, and who at
the time of the Revolution was one of the four engravers in America,
rendered his first important service as a messenger in connection with
the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor. Before he took his
most famous ride he had traveled several thousand miles in the interest
of the “patriot” cause, and after
“the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five,”
continued to act as a bearer of dispatches. He was one of the committee
of upwards of thirty formed in Boston to watch the movements of the
British soldiers. On the memorable evening of April 18th, troops were
observed marching toward the bottom of the Common. About ten o’clock
Revere was apprised of this fact, whereupon he at once repaired to the
house of Dr. Joseph Warren (afterward General Warren), one of the
committee. There he discovered that an “express,” one William Dawes, had
already been sent by land to Lexington. Hurriedly seeking his friend,
Robert Newman, the sexton of the “Old North Church” (Christ Church,
Salem Street), and arranging for the display of the signal previously
agreed upon, Revere set out. He succeeded in reaching Lexington before
Dawes, who joined him about half an hour after his arrival. The two,
together with Dr. Prescott, “a high Son of Liberty,” started in company
for Concord, but were intercepted at Lincoln by a party of British.
Revere and Dawes were captured, but Prescott managed to escape by
jumping his horse over a stone wall. It was he who rode on to Concord,
alarming the countryside as he went.
Of Dawes’s part in the enterprise of the night, Helen F. More wrote thus
humorously in the _Century Magazine_ for February, 1896: