Last night was the anniversary of Paul Revere's famous ride, which called the Minutemen to order to resist gun seizures by the British government. The above link provides both the famous poem, and some historical corrections to it.
4 comments:
Douglas2
said...
I was just reading of the December 1774 capture of Fort William and Mary in New Hampshire, an earlier occasion where Revere -- as a messenger of the Committees of Safety -- did a ride to warn the people that British forces were coming to secure an arsenal.
The hastily assembled revolutionaries marched on the fort before the British reinforcements could arrive, overcame the small caretaker force, and made off with all of the gunpowder and shot. The next night they returned for the cannon as well.
Armed action against the British colonial rulers. a full 5 months before Lexington & Concord. And by largely the same bunch of patriots, including Revere and other notables such as Wentworth Cheswell.
As a boy I used to march on this day with my dad and the Companies of Minute and Militia from our town to Concord, MA, to re-enact the battle at the North Bridge with the lobsterbacks. We would attend a breakfast at 02:00 at the local school, then set off for the 7 mile march. The last year I marched was 1975, the bi-centennial.
Most of the towns surrounding Concord mustered their own Companies, all decked out in pristine identical uniforms, nice professional-sounding fife & drum, and so on. Merchant-burgher types. Our town was always dressed like period farmers, rag-tag, and always the rowdiest - blue-collar, lots of cops and firemen, always roaring drunk with grog by the time we got to Concord, stuffing double charges down the throats of their muskets to let rip, so forth. Anyway, firing off a double charge while going across the bridge was their custom. But for the bi-centennial, the SS read the riot act.
The Secret Service had come around to each town's planning meetings of the Companies, to warn against un-shouldering our muskets when coming across the bridge, as the POTUS was to be there, at a reviewing stand. Sure enough: Someone from our town did it anyway, and the SS made him flat out disappear for about 6 hours, only to show up later on a Concord street, white-faced and chastened, dis-armed, and now thoroughly sober.
4 comments:
I was just reading of the December 1774 capture of Fort William and Mary in New Hampshire, an earlier occasion where Revere -- as a messenger of the Committees of Safety -- did a ride to warn the people that British forces were coming to secure an arsenal.
The hastily assembled revolutionaries marched on the fort before the British reinforcements could arrive, overcame the small caretaker force, and made off with all of the gunpowder and shot. The next night they returned for the cannon as well.
Armed action against the British colonial rulers. a full 5 months before Lexington & Concord. And by largely the same bunch of patriots, including Revere and other notables such as Wentworth Cheswell.
Very nice. Thank you.
As a boy I used to march on this day with my dad and the Companies of Minute and Militia from our town to Concord, MA, to re-enact the battle at the North Bridge with the lobsterbacks. We would attend a breakfast at 02:00 at the local school, then set off for the 7 mile march. The last year I marched was 1975, the bi-centennial.
Most of the towns surrounding Concord mustered their own Companies, all decked out in pristine identical uniforms, nice professional-sounding fife & drum, and so on. Merchant-burgher types. Our town was always dressed like period farmers, rag-tag, and always the rowdiest - blue-collar, lots of cops and firemen, always roaring drunk with grog by the time we got to Concord, stuffing double charges down the throats of their muskets to let rip, so forth. Anyway, firing off a double charge while going across the bridge was their custom. But for the bi-centennial, the SS read the riot act.
The Secret Service had come around to each town's planning meetings of the Companies, to warn against un-shouldering our muskets when coming across the bridge, as the POTUS was to be there, at a reviewing stand. Sure enough: Someone from our town did it anyway, and the SS made him flat out disappear for about 6 hours, only to show up later on a Concord street, white-faced and chastened, dis-armed, and now thoroughly sober.
All that for Gerald Ford? Pity he didn’t appreciate the tradition enough to embrace it.
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