Paul Revere’s Ride, 250 Years Later
Paul Revere’s ride, April 18–19, 1775
(Detail from the front cover of Kostya Kennedy’s The Ride)
By David Hein
The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America
by Kostya Kennedy (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)
On the night of April 18, 1775—250 years ago this week—Paul Revere set off on his ride to alert American colonists that British troops were marching from Boston to Lexington and Concord. Revere’s feat remains so famous that we can take for granted the importance of his effort and the risks involved.
Author Kostya Kennedy captures the stakes in his new account of Revere’s ride. Kennedy opens his book, The Ride, by asking: “What if the militiamen had not been waiting at dawn on that April day in 1775, to test and slow the British? What if they had not then been in Concord a few hours later, 220 strong, ready and resolute on the high ground?” In other words, what if the engraver Revere—along with his fellow riders, the tanner William Dawes and the physician Samuel Prescott—had failed to alert the Minutemen and villagers?
The answer is that British soldiers probably would have taken the rebels’ military stores in Concord. And the American Revolution might have died aborning.
As for the risks, Kennedy notes that Revere felt “the heavy sense of the severity and danger of what the Patriots were engaged in—rising treasonously against Royal governance.” Revere narrowly escaped capture while getting out of Boston. The British had positioned HMS Somerset in the channel separating Boston and Charlestown—“to watch,” Kennedy writes, “for any provincial who might attempt to cross the channel and escape the locked-down city.” Revere made it past the Somerset in his rowboat, but once in Charlestown, he encountered two British soldiers, who chased him on horseback. Only his skilled riding and knowledge of the terrain allowed him to get away.
Revere could not evade capture hours later. British soldiers snared him and other riders near Lexington, holding them at gunpoint. Eventually, Revere talked his captors into releasing him—even though he was “among the threescore Patriots whose name appeared on the Crown’s expressed list of ‘enemies.’” But Revere’s ride was over: they took his horse.
Stopping the Unstoppable Narrative
Kennedy, a former sportswriter who has published biographies of Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, and Pete Rose, provides a solid account of the personnel involved, of leading figures such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and of Boston civic life and the larger social context.
But Kennedy confronts some narrative problems. One is that the essential story is familiar, as well as pretty simple and straightforward. Another challenge relates to the fact that Revere was a man of action—an artisan, an entrepreneur, an active husband and father, a joiner of groups and causes, an outstanding horseman, a courageous express rider for the Patriot side—and not someone who left behind political, theological, ethical, or literary works.
Had the author provided the “dramatic, unstoppable narrative” that the publisher promises on the book’s front flap, he might have overcome these difficulties. Yet Kennedy’s effort is surprisingly tedious. We have drama frequently stopped by potted history and biography.
One entire chapter, “Mark in Chains,” interrupts the account of Revere’s ride with the story of the public hanging of a Black man in 1755. An enslaved worker at various jobs in and around Boston, Mark had been convicted of poisoning his master, hanged, gibbeted, and left alongside a road outside Charlestown. Revere encountered Mark’s physical remains—his skeleton—during his ride to Lexington in 1775.
Mark’s biography is significant and undoubtedly worth an article unto itself, but this section and similar digressions make the narrative flow anything but “unstoppable.” The author thwarts the reader’s efforts to keep in mind a golden thread running through the book. A potentially exciting story loses some of its savor.
The author’s style can also work against enjoyment when it keeps overegging the pudding. Kennedy’s sentence fragments become wearing. A reader often encounters not a short phrase—the customary length of a judiciously employed fragment—but several lines of text and thus expects to find a sentence. To take only one example, Kennedy writes of the riders who spread Revere’s message, “Organized in a fashion, but loosely so, an outgrowth, in both spirit and practical measure, of the network of express riders organized by Samuel Adams and elevated by Paul Revere.”
Leaving the Reader Wanting
The publisher touts a narrative “informed by fresh primary and secondary source research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more.” But despite a substantial bibliography, Kennedy’s book gives the reader almost no indication of what sources are being relied on or which of its claims or interpretations are new.
Moreover, the author opts for description over argument, so the reader is never confronted with a challenge and drawn into an inquiry. A thesis would have fortified the narrative, giving the reader a sense that the parts were moving toward a satisfying conclusion.
Kennedy also leaves the reader wanting when he skips past consequential points. For example, he writes that Revere’s father, who, as Apollos Rivoire, had immigrated to Boston from France in 1715, was a Congregationalist and that young Paul was baptized in Boston’s New Brick Congregational Church. But Paul became a bell ringer, or “change ringer,” at the Old North Church, which was Anglican (Church of England). Kennedy indicates that young Paul took up his job with the bells to earn money. He asserts that Paul’s father “did not subscribe to the religious perspective and structure of the Old North Church,” but what precisely does the author mean by “perspective” and “structure”? Did Paul continue in the Anglican church, and were his family Anglicans and, after 1789, Episcopalians?
Such questions take on significance given that Anglicans were associated with reviled bishops from Great Britain and thus with the king. The Revolution cost them dearly, and many Loyalist clergy and laypeople fled to Nova Scotia. But Kennedy provides no answers.
The Path to Independence
After 250 years, Paul Revere’s ride remains “so rooted in the American psyche, so much a part of America’s self-told story,” Kennedy writes. Revere’s daring feat set America on its path to independence, so this is a tale well worth revisiting. Still, given the shortcomings of Kennedy’s account, a reader might benefit more from earlier treatments, such as David Hackett Fischer’s fair-minded and readable 1994 book, Paul Revere’s Ride.
David Hein is Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and the author, most recently, of Teaching the Virtues (Mecosta House).