“Paul Revere’s Ride” is a quasi-historical account that fuses fact and fiction. Months before composing the poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited sites in Boston critical to its colonial history, including the Old North Church. Longfellow wrote in his journal, after climbing the church’s tower, that “[f]rom this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord” (“Paul Revere’s Ride.” National Park Service. 2020). Longfellow then studied the historical accounts of the battles at Lexington and Concord. However, he found bare mention of the Boston silversmith.

Yet the poem is no paean to a forgotten colonial hero. Longfellow knew there was no dramatic hoisting of signal lamps in the tower to alert a waiting Paul Revere, that Revere was just one of many colonial freedom fighters spreading the warning that night, and that Revere had been arrested during that night by British troops. What compels Longfellow in his free recreation of the historical figure of Paul Revere is identical to what compels his fictional character: the need to awaken a slumbering population about an imminent threat to their freedom. As Paul Revere rides through the night stirring colonists from a literal sleep, Longfellow addresses a nation now 75 years past the war for independence, a nation lulled into a symbolic sleep, a false security that was to be shattered by Southern secession.