“I told them what was acting and then I went to git me a horse”.
That would be Paul Revere’s own explanation of the fabled midnight ride. Even though it lacks the meter and poetics of the classic Longfellow verse so many of us memorized as schoolchildren, it does have plainspoken virtue. It is said that Revere often used the verb “acting” in the eighteenth century way, acknowledging events happening around him. There was nothing theatrical about it.
He was not a man of letters, but he could certainly ride a horse. He never attended college, for he was obliged to take over the family’s silversmith business at the ripe age of 19 when his father died. But this was the New World, and Revere, who was born of both French Huguenot and fourth-generation colonial Puritan parents, traveled in many streams of the New England community. He quite comfortably and simultaneously considered himself a businessman, an “artizan”, and a gentleman. Circumstance made him a patriot.
As for the horse he went to ‘git’, her name was Brown Beauty and was given over to the cause ‘acting’ it itself out that night by a man named Larkin. She was considered a magnificent animal and Revere said so in his memoirs. Upon our valiant messenger’s capture, she was confiscated by a plundering large British sergeant who had grown weary of the small mount he had been given to ride. Brown Beauty, a heroine of the American Revolution, was never accounted for after that, her fate unknown, but she already had endured a strenuous bloody night under the silver spurs of Revere’s well-motivated haste.
So the horse has a place in history too, although she is only spoken of by musty historians babbling into their beloved minutia. As David Hackett Fisher recounts in his own book about Revere’s ride, many a self-appointed historian brings his own agenda with him to his task. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is particularly vulnerable to this bending of the light through a distorted lens because it is at once both an American fable and something that really did happen on a very significant moonlit night.
Hackett divides the commentators into two camps: First we have the ‘filiopiests’—a seldom-used word that denotes a person who excessively venerates his ancestors. That it more often than not is used pejoratively says a lot about the kind of dubious world we currently inhabit. The second camp would be the “iconoclasts”—literally ‘destroyers of an image’—or as we renamed them in the 20th century ‘the debunkers.’ These are the cynical wry skeptics of the ‘dead white men’ narrative to our history, the apologists, the multiculturalists, the revisionists, the critics of fame itself. The fact that they are much more likely to make a living in the modern realm of punditry also says something about our contemporary mindscape. As Fisher dryly observes, the only thing more reviled than a dead white man would be a dead white man on a horse.
But if we would, as Professor Fisher does in his book, step back and look at things as things really are, or in the specific case of understanding a history, were—it is only then that we can gain what we came after in the first place—those abstract aspirations of ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight.’ Fisher concludes that without a good story (what historians call a ‘narrative’) we will all too soon lose interest, but without rigid adherence to facts, to the degree that we can retrieve them, we will lose any connection with necessary truths.
As someone who has been both bored and bamboozled during his quests for understanding, I can only concur. History told without what Fisher calls “contingency” is of little merit or usefulness. In this case what ‘contingency’ requires is an acknowledgement that the players of the past were faced with choices, and that each choice made provoked the course events then took. Once you come to understand this dynamic you will also embrace that seamless connection between our collective pasts and imminent futures.
Which brings us back to the horse. The ‘fliopiests’ have mounted Paul Revere on a noble stallion with a Roman head. They even came to build a monument in bronze portraying such. The ‘iconoclasts’ set him on a slow and bedraggled plow horse. The truth, in this case, wasn’t even in between things. Brown Beauty was simply a fine mare.
Then there is the vice I am guilty of in this column, namely ‘big words.’ To which I direct: William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Writers make choices too.
That would be Paul Revere’s own explanation of the fabled midnight ride. Even though it lacks the meter and poetics of the classic Longfellow verse so many of us memorized as schoolchildren, it does have plainspoken virtue. It is said that Revere often used the verb “acting” in the eighteenth century way, acknowledging events happening around him. There was nothing theatrical about it.
He was not a man of letters, but he could certainly ride a horse. He never attended college, for he was obliged to take over the family’s silversmith business at the ripe age of 19 when his father died. But this was the New World, and Revere, who was born of both French Huguenot and fourth-generation colonial Puritan parents, traveled in many streams of the New England community. He quite comfortably and simultaneously considered himself a businessman, an “artizan”, and a gentleman. Circumstance made him a patriot.
As for the horse he went to ‘git’, her name was Brown Beauty and was given over to the cause ‘acting’ it itself out that night by a man named Larkin. She was considered a magnificent animal and Revere said so in his memoirs. Upon our valiant messenger’s capture, she was confiscated by a plundering large British sergeant who had grown weary of the small mount he had been given to ride. Brown Beauty, a heroine of the American Revolution, was never accounted for after that, her fate unknown, but she already had endured a strenuous bloody night under the silver spurs of Revere’s well-motivated haste.
So the horse has a place in history too, although she is only spoken of by musty historians babbling into their beloved minutia. As David Hackett Fisher recounts in his own book about Revere’s ride, many a self-appointed historian brings his own agenda with him to his task. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is particularly vulnerable to this bending of the light through a distorted lens because it is at once both an American fable and something that really did happen on a very significant moonlit night.
Hackett divides the commentators into two camps: First we have the ‘filiopiests’—a seldom-used word that denotes a person who excessively venerates his ancestors. That it more often than not is used pejoratively says a lot about the kind of dubious world we currently inhabit. The second camp would be the “iconoclasts”—literally ‘destroyers of an image’—or as we renamed them in the 20th century ‘the debunkers.’ These are the cynical wry skeptics of the ‘dead white men’ narrative to our history, the apologists, the multiculturalists, the revisionists, the critics of fame itself. The fact that they are much more likely to make a living in the modern realm of punditry also says something about our contemporary mindscape. As Fisher dryly observes, the only thing more reviled than a dead white man would be a dead white man on a horse.
But if we would, as Professor Fisher does in his book, step back and look at things as things really are, or in the specific case of understanding a history, were—it is only then that we can gain what we came after in the first place—those abstract aspirations of ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight.’ Fisher concludes that without a good story (what historians call a ‘narrative’) we will all too soon lose interest, but without rigid adherence to facts, to the degree that we can retrieve them, we will lose any connection with necessary truths.
As someone who has been both bored and bamboozled during his quests for understanding, I can only concur. History told without what Fisher calls “contingency” is of little merit or usefulness. In this case what ‘contingency’ requires is an acknowledgement that the players of the past were faced with choices, and that each choice made provoked the course events then took. Once you come to understand this dynamic you will also embrace that seamless connection between our collective pasts and imminent futures.
Which brings us back to the horse. The ‘fliopiests’ have mounted Paul Revere on a noble stallion with a Roman head. They even came to build a monument in bronze portraying such. The ‘iconoclasts’ set him on a slow and bedraggled plow horse. The truth, in this case, wasn’t even in between things. Brown Beauty was simply a fine mare.
Then there is the vice I am guilty of in this column, namely ‘big words.’ To which I direct: William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Writers make choices too.
