In the January 1861 issue of The Atlantic, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, already the country’s most popular poet, published what would become his most famous poem. Its opening lines are legendary: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”  

"Paul Revere's Ride" is famous and memorable, without being well-regarded. The past century or so has not been kind to the entirety of the Longfellow canon. Many critics have judged him to be a sentimental mythmaker, a purveyor of manipulative doggerel. But beneath the shortcomings of “Paul Revere’s Ride” are hidden layers that cast the work in a more meaningful light. 

Longfellow, like most of The Atlantic’s founders, was an enthusiastic abolitionist. He used funds raised from the sale of his poems to buy freedom for enslaved people in the South. Longfellow wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” to rouse the sleeping North. It was a summons to join the great abolitionist struggle when the future of the Union was in doubt. Longfellow was motivated by the patriotic idea that the American experiment was worth saving and by the belief that his fellow citizens would awaken to the threat of secession if only they were to hear the cry of a modern Paul Revere. “In the hour of darkness and peril and need, / The people will waken and listen to hear / The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed, / And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.” The midnight message, of course, was the message of liberty.