Untold Stories: Revere’s First Ride and the Revolution’s First Clash

When did the American Revolution REALLY begin? The 1774 fighting between the British and the Americans in New Hampshire “truly [marked] the first blows of the American Revolution, four months before the battles of Lexington and Concord,” according to historian David Hackett Fischer.

Fort William and Mary, c.1705, in the background with images of Revolutionary reenactors from Mt. Vernon

There are so many inspiring, beautiful stories about the great heroes of American history which are scarcely ever told. One happens on them accidentally—buried in a thick, out-of-print biography, in small print on a museum sign, casually and fleetingly mentioned in an obscure educational video. America cannot return to greatness in the future if we do not truly understand the greatness of our past. That is why I am writing an article series to tell a few of these little-known but moving or illustrative “untold stories” of American greatness. Previous articles in this series have included how one Marine stood against thousands of Japanese at Guadalcanal; the American Revolution and Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow; U.S. heroes from the Vietnam War; how Jesse Owens smashed Hitler’s racist Olympics expectations; and Fr. Capodanno, the “Grunt Padre” and Marine hero.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midday ride of Paul Revere…to New Hampshire. Yes, the Boston silversmith who immortalized himself by warning the American colonists in Lexington and Concord in 1775 that the British were coming had previously taken a likewise important but nearly forgotten gallop in 1774 to warn Patriots to grab their weapons and face down the British. And since today is the anniversary of the Patriots’ subsequent successful attack on a British-held fort, let us remember their bravery as we do that of the men who fired the shots heard ’round the world.

Today’s story is about the New Hampshire militia who attacked and captured Fort William and Mary months before the battle that is often cited now as the start of the Revolution.

On December 13, 1774, Paul Revere rode hard and long some 60 miles from his home in Boston, Massachusetts, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The colonists had been increasingly angered for years by taxes they did not vote for, soldiers they did not wish to board, and violations of rights by the British government. When King George III and his ministers imposed a ban in 1774 on exporting arms and ammunitions to the North American colonies (gun control is always a tool of tyrants), and those stashes already in the colonies were ordered secured, that heated up the tensions even more. The British troops even conducted warrantless searches for arms and ammunition.

Boston Patriots got wind of the fact that British vessels—and possibly more than one regiment of British regulars—were headed to Fort William and Mary to get a hold of the stores of arms and ammunitions there before the rebellious colonists did. Paul Revere, in spite of having a new son only six days’ old and facing a ride on roads that were half-frozen and half-slushy from unsavory winter weather, agreed to take the warning from Boston to the Portsmouth Committee of Correspondence. He set off on December 13. Tara Ross explains what happened next:

By the end of the day, he was in New Hampshire, reporting his news to the Portsmouth Committee of Correspondence. A fife and drum paraded through the town early on December 14, calling the militia to action. By mid-day, 400 militia had gathered, prepared to attack Fort William and Mary before the British Regulars arrived.

That garrison was guarded by only 6 men. Unsurprisingly then, it fell quickly, and the colonists carried away about 100 barrels of gunpowder. “The logistics of overtaking a woefully undermanned fort were not daunting,” historian Christopher Klein says of the attack, “but the sheer brazenness of the mission, and its dire consequences, should have given the men some pause. . . . storming the fort ‘was the highest act of treason and rebellion they could possibly commit.’”

But it seems they had not yet had enough.

Word had been spreading around the New Hampshire countryside. By the morning of December 15, more than 1,000 colonists were gathered, prepared to assault the fort—again. This time, they secured the fort’s muskets and some of the cannon.

British reinforcements did eventually arrive, but too late to secure the valuable weapons stores. Governor Wentworth seized on Paul Revere as his scapegoat, furiously writing that before the Boston Patriot arrived with his warning, “all was perfectly quiet and peaceable here.”

The fire of Revolution was already smoldering and would soon burst into roaring flames.