Remembering Peggy Stewart by Gary D. Crawford
A few months ago, I noted that Massachusetts seems to have the inside track on publicity about the Revolutionar y War. [See Tench’s Ride, March 2019]. For one thing, it turns out that the account of Paul Revere’s ride as immortalized in Longfellow’s poem was largely fictitious. First, he didn’t get a signal from the old North Church about “one if by land, two if by sea.” Actually, it was his job to make that signal once he got the word. What he did do was set out from Boston for the nearby town of Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming to arrest them. Revere wasn’t the only messenger, however; another fellow, William Dawes, also made the run by a different route. After delivering their warning in Lexington, Paul and Bill hurried off together to alert the militia in Concord that the British intended to attack their arsenal. They were accompanied by Samuel Prescott, a Concord resident who happened to be in Lexington at the time. But Revere didn’t make it to the second town, for not long after leaving Lexington, all three riders were picked up by a British patrol. Dawes and
Prescott were released and continued on to Concord to warn the arsenal, but poor Paul was hauled back to Lexington for questioning. He was released later, though not his horse. (Perhaps he caught a cab?) Revere’s effort, there at the very outset of the Revolutionary War, was a worthy and courageous thing to do, and I do not mean to diminish it. Still, it isn’t exactly the picture Longfellow paints of that dashing Midnight Ride. And it hardly compares with the amazing twentytwo-hour ride from Rock Hall to Philadelphia, at the very end of the war, by Maryland’s Tench Tilghman to deliver the official news of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. Similarly, the “Boston Tea Party” gets huge amounts of publicity ~ even though a much more dramatic tea fracas took place right here in Maryland, over in Annapolis. Every school kid learns about some guys who dressed up as Indians and pitched tea off a ship into Boston harbor. But what was that all about, exactly, and why those Mohawk costumes? Most of us are under the impression that the Boston Tea Party was a demonstration against a new British tax on tea, right? The details were
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