{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "NewsArticle",
    "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/paul-revere-british-are-coming-myth/#article",
    "mainEntityOfPage": "https://badiyaa.com/paul-revere-british-are-coming-myth/",
    "headline": "Paul Revere never wrote ‘The British are coming’ in his 1775 or 1798 accounts of the ride",
    "description": "Revere's sworn 1775 deposition and his 1798 letter to Jeremy Belknap both say he 'alarmed' the countryside, and Longfellow's 1860 poem never quotes the famous shout either.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-19T16:36:00+01:00",
    "dateModified": "2026-10-19T16:36:00+01:00",
    "author": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa Editorial Desk",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/author/editorial-desk/"
    },
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
        "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/#organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/",
        "logo": {
            "@type": "ImageObject",
            "url": "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/badiyaa-logo-color-600x60-1.png",
            "width": 600,
            "height": 60
        },
        "email": "badiyaavideo@gmail.com",
        "publishingPrinciples": "https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/",
        "correctionsPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/corrections/",
        "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/contact/",
        "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://badiyaa.com/about/#ownership",
        "sameAs": [
            "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61595518283625",
            "https://www.instagram.com/badiyaa.com.ai/",
            "https://www.threads.net/@badiyaa.com.ai"
        ],
        "parentOrganization": {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "Rezilient Digital",
            "url": "https://www.rezilientdigital.com/",
            "address": {
                "@type": "PostalAddress",
                "streetAddress": "Fl No 3, Nav Shyam Sadan, Plot No 38, Pestom Sagar, Chembur",
                "addressLocality": "Mumbai",
                "addressRegion": "Maharashtra",
                "postalCode": "400089",
                "addressCountry": "IN"
            },
            "sameAs": [
                "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rezilientdigital"
            ]
        }
    },
    "isAccessibleForFree": true,
    "inLanguage": "en-US",
    "wordCount": 861,
    "image": [
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/paul-revere-british-are-coming-myth.webp",
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/paul-revere-british-are-coming-myth-1024x683.webp"
    ],
    "articleSection": "History",
    "keywords": "American Revolution, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Massachusetts history, Misquotations, Paul Revere",
    "articleBody": "Paul Revere put his midnight ride on paper at least twice, and neither account has him shouting “The British are coming.” The line is absent from the sworn deposition he drew up around 1775 and from the eight-page letter he wrote for the historian Jeremy Belknap around 1798. Both manuscripts are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, which publishes full transcriptions of them online. Revere was a Boston silversmith, born on January 1, 1735, who joined the Sons of Liberty in 1765 and carried messages for the Patriot leadership in the tense months before the war. On the night of April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren sent him to Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that troops were leaving Boston. A British patrol stopped him on the road toward Concord a few hours later, questioned him at pistol point and let him go near Lexington before the first shots on the green. The 1775 deposition: “alarmed,” not shouted The earlier document was prepared at the request of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which collected eyewitness statements in 1775 to establish that the king’s troops had fired first at Lexington. It reads like testimony, because it was. Revere says he rode “thro Mistick, and alarmed Mr. Adams and Col. Hancock.” When the patrol’s officer claimed they were only waiting for deserters, Revere answered, by his own account: “I told him I knew better, I knew what they were after; that I had alarmed the country all the way up”. One detail is easy to miss. In this text Revere never uses “British” for the soldiers at all. He writes of “Nine Officers of the Ministeral Army” and, at Lexington, of “the Ministeral Troops.” The 1798 letter to Belknap Belknap was corresponding secretary of the historical society, and Revere wrote to him, as he put it, “Having a little leisure.” Belknap printed the account in the society’s Collections in 1798, dating it January 1 of that year. Revere had signed it, then added “do not print my name” and the pen name “A Son of Liberty of the year 1775”; both phrases are struck through on the manuscript, and his name appeared in print. The ride itself takes up most of pages two to six. The key sentence is plain: “In Medford, I awaked the Captain of the Minute men; & after that, I alarmed almost every House, till I got to Lexington.” There is no slogan. By this date, though, Revere freely calls the soldiers British, writing that the lantern plan applied “if the British went out by Water.” That weakens a popular argument that colonists could never have said “British.” The better reasons are practical ones: the warning went out quietly while army patrols were on the roads, and the people who heard it later recalled the words as “The Regulars are coming out,” regulars being the army’s troops in Boston. Longfellow never wrote the line either The usual suspect is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who climbed the Old North Church tower on April 5, 1860, and began “Paul Revere’s Ride” the next day. The issue that first printed it reached readers on December 20, 1860, as South Carolina seceded. Read the first-published text and the famous shout is missing. Longfellow gives Revere a “cry of alarm” and calls it “A cry of defiance, and not of fear,” then promises “a word that shall echo forevermore” without ever saying what the word was. The poem does take other liberties. It has Revere waiting on the far shore for a lantern signal that he in fact arranged, rowing himself when two friends did the rowing, and reaching “the bridge in Concord town” at two in the morning. He never got to Concord that night; Samuel Prescott did. Before the poem, Revere’s fame was modest: his 1818 obituary did not mention the ride. Laid side by side, the four texts give a clear pattern: Deposition, about 1775: Revere “alarmed” Adams and Hancock; the soldiers are “Ministeral”; no words of the warning are given. Letter to Belknap, about 1798: he “alarmed almost every House”; the soldiers are “British”; again no wording. Longfellow, written 1860: a “cry of alarm” whose words are never quoted. Eyewitness recollections: “The Regulars are coming out.” So the shouted sentence cannot be traced to Revere, to the people he woke, or to the poet who made him famous. It is a later retelling that hardened into a quotation. The real warning was carried by many more people than Revere: by the end of the night, as many as 40 riders were spreading word across Middlesex County, along with church bells and alarm guns. The originals sit in the historical society’s manuscript group “Accounts of his famous ride,” where the two copies of the deposition and the Belknap letter can be read page by page beside their scans. The society also printed all three as Paul Revere’s Three Accounts of His Famous Ride in 1961. The next anniversary of the ride falls on Sunday, April 18, 2027. Further reading Wikipedia: Paul Revere's midnight ride Wikipedia: Paul Revere's Ride (poem) Wikisource: Paul Revere's Ride, first published text (1861) Image: NPS Photo, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
    "markdown": "https://badiyaa.com/paul-revere-british-are-coming-myth.md"
}