From Today I Found Out.

This video is sponsored by the City of Quincy. To discover more about Quincy, check out the link – https://discoverquincy.com And for many more interesting videos in this "Making America" Quincy Documentary series do go check out the full playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsDXzjPbtjM&list=PLR0XuDegDqP09c-64MPmWT8FC9VBev8iz

“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.”

These are the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his famous 1860 poem Paul Revere’s Ride, which is where most of popular history’s perception of this famous event and its purpose came from. But it turns out, a huge percentage of the poem is wildly inaccurate, from Revere seeming to ride alone in the poem, to the lanterns at the church being meant to tell Revere what message to send, rather than it being Revere himself who instructed how many lanterns to hang in case he should fail to get across the river and make his famous ride. Most significantly of all in the inaccuracies, however, is where Revere was initially going and why. It turns out, the primary concern before anything else was to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were lodging in Lexington at the time, that the British soldiers were seemingly coming for them.

As we’ve previously covered in our videos Hancock: Rise of the Merchant Prince, and Hancock: Igniting the Revolution, the oft forgotten Founding Father John Hancock was a lot more prominent in the early going of the American Revolution than just his John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, as is mostly all that’s remembered of him today. But at this point in the story, the British had seemingly decided enough was enough. And it was time to do something about the so-called “King Hancock” and his partner in crime Samuel Adams- a man who was the walking talking epitome of the over 2000 year old general concept of the pen being mightier than the sword.

Here now is the real story of Paul Revere’s ride and the aftermath in part 3 of our series on the oft’ forgotten John Hancock.

Author: Daven Hiskey
Host: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila