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Aug. 20, 2025 21:20-22:01 - CSPAN
40:55
America 250 Boston's Freedom Trail
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will stilwell
36:45
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unidentified
A chance to visit Philadelphia in 2026.
There are going to be amazing programs and exhibitions all over the city.
Right here at the museum, we're mounting a major exhibition called The Declaration's Journey.
Most people might be pretty familiar with how we get to this moment, the creation of the Declaration, the grievances against Great Britain.
You might not realize that as soon as the Declaration is printed, it's sent around the world.
It's translated into French.
It ends up in Europe, in India, in South Korea, in Africa.
And what happens in those places over the next 250 years, the people who made decisions there blows back to the shores of the United States.
We're going to explore that in an exhibition here at the museum.
The first thing you'll see in that show, for example, are two chairs.
One, the elaborate wooden Windsor desk where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
The other, a nondescript, rusty metal bench.
That's the bench from the Birmingham Jail where Martin Luther King wrote his letter from prison, letter from a Birmingham jail, quoting the Declaration of Independence.
You'll get to imagine these two Americans, almost 200 years apart, reflecting on what it meant to be American.
I'm Ted Clark, and I'm the founder of Hubtown Tours, currently the executive director.
And I started this little business just about 10 years ago.
And we're right here in Boston, and this is very much a Boston-based business because Boston is at the vanguard of the American Revolution.
There is no question where the war began.
And what our little business focuses on is the years that came before the war.
So the political arguments, the debates, the controversies, the protests, the American Revolution, in the words of John Adams, it's not what happened during the war, it's what came before, the 15 years prior to the outbreak of war at Lexington Concord.
So our little business, the way we separate ourselves is we first off are small groups, but we also do a chronological narrative along what's known as the Freedom Trail here in Boston.
And we try to bring that little town of Boston back to life for folks.
The landmarks, there are a number of them, and they serve as a backdrop to the stories that we tell.
This is the Massachusetts Statehouse, and of course, the iconic gold dome topped with a lovely pine cone.
And that beautiful gold dome is actually the namesake of Hubtown.
Boston's nickname as the hub actually comes from a quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a Bostonian, making fun of his fellow Bostonians for our self-centeredness.
Quote, Boston State House is the hub of the solar system, and that is an idea you cannot pry out of the mind of a Bostonian, even if you had a tire iron straightened out the length of creation.
And we're here with Will Stilwell, one of the tour guides for Hubtown Tours, formerly with the National Park Service.
Will, where are we headed today?
will stilwell ▲ ● ▼
We're standing here on Boston Common, often listed as the oldest public park in America and Boston's gathering point for over 400 years.
The Common is a 48-acre green space in the center of an urban town in Boston.
This makes it by nature the spot for Bostonians and others to gather over the course of its history here.
It's a place that even to this day is a place where you're going to find meetings and speeches and protests and concerts.
And that's something that's been going on for hundreds of years, not just in the revolutionary era, but right on to the present day.
Beyond that as well, I think it's important to acknowledge while this has been set aside, this 48 acres for, you know, just about 400 years as this public green space, archaeological work has been conducted on Boston Common over the past 50 years in which they've uncovered artifacts dating back over 10,000 years old.
So really that is when we're talking about our timeline.
I think it's important too as we're thinking about 250 years that that's only one small part of a long history.
There's thousands of years of history here from the indigenous people, their ancestors, the Massachusett people where Massachusetts gets its name onto the English arrival in 1630 to the revolutionary era of the 1760s.
This is a long timeline.
Thousands of years people have stood where we're standing.
That's a point of connection over thousands of years.
Living in Boston during the revolutionary period, the 1760s, the 1770s, you would have felt like you were living in a tight-knit but large community.
This is a town of over 15,000 people, a bustling one with shops, businesses, coffeehouses, taverns, but also a very stratified society, meaning that people tended to not really step out of their social group, their social classes.
You know, the rich and the middle and the poor tend to keep to their distinct groups, socializing with each other.
There's taverns that would be for specific social classes, coffee houses to certain social classes.
You're not going to find the ship owners and the sailors in the same tavern, for example.
And one of the interesting things about the American Revolution in Boston is how these distinct groups, separated socially and economically, are going to be coming together to form a broad coalition.
These social groups really wouldn't socialize outside of their own types here.
But an interesting thing about the lead-up to the American Revolution is how these distinct and separate social classes are going to come together and unite to form a broad coalition against the power of parliament, which will ultimately lead to the Declaration of Independence and the independence of the United States.
All right, so we're walking now into the Granary Burying Ground.
This is the third oldest of Boston's Freedom Trail burying grounds.
It dates to 1660.
We call it the Granary because the Old Town Granary once stood next door where the Park Street Church is located now.
This is what we call a burying ground because it is not a graveyard.
It is not a cemetery.
It is unconsecrated space belonging to the town of Boston.
It is not church-owned.
It is not holy because the Puritans who established this in 1660 did not believe in praying for their dead.
They didn't hold funerals and they didn't bury their dead in special sacred space because they believed that God selected every single person who will ever go to heaven at the beginning of time and you can't get on that list unless you were born on it.
This is also why visitors, millions of them who walk this burying ground every year, they're often struck by the symbols on the headstones, skulls, hourglasses, and scythe.
These are reminders to the living that death is permanent and inevitable.
It isn't a way to memorialize the dead.
But the reason that millions of people visit this burying ground every single year is because there are famous burials associated with the American Revolution here.
We're stepping right now up to the tomb of Samuel Adams.
Buried beneath where we're standing here, one of the most important figures of the American Revolution in Boston.
Samuel Adams was known in his life not for his business.
In fact, despite some modern connection, he did not make beer.
His father made malt, a business that he inherited and which he promptly ran into the ground.
What he found was true passion was in politics, involving himself in Boston's town meeting, writing political articles and synthesis.
And really his great skill is going to be taking together the general anger of people in Boston over their different situations in life and giving them a political argument.
They should be angry that Parliament, by passing taxes, overstepping local government, is taking away a foundational right to the people of Boston as Englishmen.
The grave almost exactly next to Samuel Adams is that of the five victims of the 1770 Boston Massacre.
They represent a completely separate social class from someone like Adams.
Adams being a gentleman who would meet the requirements and eligibility of voting in Boston.
The five victims of the Boston Massacre are the lowest end of Boston society.
These are laborers, these are apprentices, and they are sailors.
In fact, the most famous of the five victims was a sailor, Crispus Attux, the first man to die the night of the massacre.
He was actually born into slavery in Framingham, Massachusetts in the 1720s.
He escaped as a young man and lived the rest of his life free, working independently as a sailor at the time of his death based out of the Bahamas.
This is the tomb of John Hancock, likely the wealthiest man in Boston at the time of the American Revolution, a wealth that he inherited but was not born into.
His father was not extremely wealthy, but after his father's death, when John was only seven, he was sent to live with his wealthy but childless aunt and uncle, Lydia and Thomas Hancock of Boston.
Thomas Hancock was an extremely successful Boston merchant, meaning his business was in transatlantic trade, and he raised John not just to be his son, but to be the heir to his business.
Thomas sends John on to Harvard College.
He sends John to London to learn business.
And when Thomas Hancock died in 1764, he left his entire estate to his nephew John, immediately becoming one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in town.
Pretty much immediately, John Hancock tried to run for election in Boston, now being a prominent gentleman of town, but the entire political structure of Boston was in flux due to Parliament passing the sugar and stamp taxes, taxing the colonies directly for the first time, a move that was very unpopular among those local to Boston, but those of the most powerful positions in town were finding themselves having to defend these unpopular policies.
This will lead John Hancock to the mentorship of Samuel Adams, requiring the political credibility of someone like Adams to aid his quest at acquiring political power.
For someone like Adams, this is a mutually beneficial relationship because Hancock had a lot of money.
His deep pockets would later help fund the American Revolution.
And while his tomb, this marker, is not at all original.
It dates to 1898.
It does fit the wealth and status and stature of a man like Hancock, as does his famous signature, the largest and most prominent on the Declaration of Independence, though he signed first and largest because he was the president of the Continental Congress and he signed everything big.
The king was never going to receive that copy.
It was not signed largest so the king could read it without his spectacles.
Next to John Hancock's tomb is a grave that on the one hand is easy to overlook but also draws a lot of attention here in the burying ground.
This is a grave that reads Frank, servant to John Hancock, Esquire, who died 1771 at the age of eight.
Now there's a lot of questions almost built into this headstone.
How could Frank be a servant and yet only be eight years old?
Where is Frank's last name?
Where are Frank's parents' names?
And the answer is deceptively simple.
Frank was not a servant.
Servant in this context is a euphemism.
It's a way of saying without saying the truth, which is that Frank was likely African and enslaved by John Hancock.
We've been talking about how life in colonial Boston would have been a place, a bustling town of 15,000 people.
Well, between 12 and 1,500 of those people were in bondage.
These are enslaved men, women, and children, primarily African, enslaved by the wealthy and affluent of Boston, like John Hancock.
This headstone is extremely rare.
In fact, it may be the only one in Boston specifically to an enslaved person.
And there's been a lot of discussion around it among people who visit this burying ground.
What I found in my research and in hearing what people talked about in town here was that a lot of people were telling stories in the burying ground about Frank teaching John Hancock to ride a horse or being his mentor when he was a young person.
And it was all built around the fact that no one seemed to know how old Frank was.
And sources, traditional ones, had different ages listed.
So I, as the research manager of Hubtown Tours, took it upon myself to find the answer.
I swept the earth away from the bottom of this headstone, revealing Frank's age to be eight and proving at the very least that those stories people were telling were not true and that Frank's story is a deep tragedy.
A little boy enslaved by a powerful man and his headstone, even though it is memorializing him, it's also dehumanizing him.
What I encourage visitors here to do is to look at Frank's grave and acknowledge something simple, which is that he was a human being who lived, not just a little enslaved boy who died, an acknowledgement that would not have really been made by the powerful people in his life while he lived.
The Granary Burying Ground has every type of person who lived in 18th century Boston.
All different social classes from the top to the bottom.
Men, women, children, Indigenous people, Africans, Native Americans.
And we've covered some of the wealthy and some of the poor, but we need to talk about the middle.
And there's no person that better represents the middle social structure of Boston than Paul Revere, the silversmith and goldsmith of Boston.
He worked in a trade.
He worked with his hands.
He would have called himself but a simple mechanic, meaning he worked with his hands.
And he was not by definition a gentleman.
He was of the middle rank of Boston social society here, but he was eligible to vote at Boston town meeting.
And as Boston is suffering from economic depression, aided and increased by Parliament's taxation on sugar and paper, someone like Paul Revere is feeling the effects of those taxes more than others in town because, unlike the wealthier gentlemen of town, he has thinner margins.
He has mouths to feed.
His children, his wife Sarah, his second wife Rachel, his mother Deborah, for example, here, who are buried all in this burying ground.
This is going to inspire Revere to involve himself politically, etching copper prints of political cartoons and drawings.
He's going to offer up his services as an express rider going from place to place.
And the reason he was the perfect person to do that is that he was known to be quick on horseback while also being honest and trustworthy, meaning he was known to be able to get somewhere fast.
And when he got there, people would listen to him.
It's why he makes the famous midnight ride of April 18th, 1775.
But that was not the only time he'd ridden on horseback delivering an important message.
He did it a number of times over the course of 73, 74, and 75.
The idea for the Freedom Trail really came about in 1951 when a columnist for the Boston Herald Tribune had visited the Old North Church.
And in talking with the church's caretaker or sexton, he was told that visitors were trying to find the Old North Church and they were having trouble locating it, especially people visiting from out of town who weren't used to Boston streets or people honestly who weren't even used to navigating a city generally.
And he proposed in his column that there should be some way of connecting together these separate historic sites and have some kind of catchy name around it.
He proposed a couple of ideas, the Puritans Path, the Liberty Loop.
Eventually, they avoided the alliteration and settled upon the Freedom Trail and eventually came upon the idea of connecting these sites with a physical red brick line through the streets of downtown Boston.
And this really answers one of the biggest questions visitors have when they're visiting Boston.
They're trying to find these historic landmarks.
They're getting lost.
I used to work for the National Park Service where visitors would come to our visitor center, often many of them, having never really set foot in a city before.
Where do I go?
How do I get there?
Having a red brick line to follow, just walk the line, would make it so much easier and give people a great introduction into the city of Boston, kind of allowing them to feel comfortable walking around town like they know where they're going, almost like they're local.
And that's one of the things that attracts, again, millions of people to walk the Freedom Trail every single year.
It's ease of use, its ease of access.
And that was the goal back in the 50s onto the present day.
They've worked really hard, those in the city, to maintain it and keep it to be easy and understandable, even for people, again, who don't have a lot of experience walking around in more urban areas.
December 16th, 1773, 4,000 people crammed into the Old South meeting house here behind me, probably hundreds more out into the streets.
At the end of this meeting, which had been gathered to discuss the tea ships anchored in Boston Harbor in the wake of the passing of Parliament's Tea Act, it was almost a foregone conclusion before this meeting began that those ships were not going back to London and drastic action needed to be taken.
At the end of this meeting, probably 150 individuals streamed out of Old South with 2,000 more following behind to go and watch as those 150 boarded the ships in Boston Harbor to crack open the chests of tea, dump them overboard into Boston Harbor in an event that will later become known as the Boston Tea Party.
That famous event of American history is really born out of the Old South Meeting House right behind me here.
The Old South Meeting House was built in 1729.
At the time of the American Revolution, it was one of about a dozen congregational meeting houses throughout Boston.
And as a congregational meeting house, it would have been used for religious services on Sundays, but then also could be used for any type of public meeting.
You know, most towns in New England in the 18th century would have one public building that would be used for government, for school, and for church.
Boston was large enough to have a dedicated meeting space for its town meeting, Fanuel Hall.
But Fanuel Hall was only built to hold about 1,200 people.
More than enough for any general town meeting, but if you wanted to have a larger indoor meeting, you'd have to come here to the South meeting house.
While they would never do this today, they would put over 4,000 people inside of Old South, which they did on multiple occasions in the 1770s.
You can see that we have the downstairs pews.
As we look up, we can actually see two levels of gallery here as well, allowing for even more space to fill up.
We talked outside how the meeting here of 4,000 people would have led to the Boston Tea Party.
I think it's also important to mention when those tea ships were anchored in Boston Harbor, it wasn't just tea on those ships.
That's all that was destroyed.
One of the other items was actually a shipment of books published by Boston poet Phyllis Wheatley.
Phyllis Wheatley was actually a member of this congregation, but she wouldn't have sat down in the pews we're in right now.
She would have sat upstairs on the third floor gallery because she was enslaved by Mrs. John and Susanna Wheatley.
It was really rare to have works published and written by an enslaved woman.
She was really the first African-American poet, and her name would have borne with her her status as an enslaved woman.
She was enslaved by the Wheatleys and the Phyllis was the slave ship that took her across from Senegambia to Boston when she was only seven years old.
Her works though would be widely published all across the British Empire.
She would have met George Washington after writing a poem for him and later had an audience with King George III, though she didn't end up actually meeting him.
Today she's probably the most famous congregant associated with the South Meeting House.
Thousands of visitors come here every single year to visit this historic space, though it's worth mentioning, not only is this space no longer used for church services, it also does not have the original furnishings because once the British Army occupied Boston in 1774, they actually destroyed the interior pews and used this space as a riding school for their cavalry.
So we just left the Old South Meeting House.
We're now walking over to our next stop, the Old Statehouse.
And the original conceit of the Freedom Trail was to connect together these 16 landmarks that were all managed separately.
Not only are they separate landmarks, but had separate, you know, owners, separate jurisdictions.
In 2020, the proprietors of the Old South Meeting House and the owners of the Old Statehouse merged into a singular organization, bringing together two distinct Freedom Trail sites under one ownership, which is called Revolutionary Spaces.
Sort of a nod to the connections to both buildings to the American Revolution and allowing visitors to come by one ticket and see two sites in a more unified manner.
This is the center point of colonial Boston, both economically, politically, and often socially.
We're standing at the end of modern Washington Street, which would have been one road in and out of colonial Boston.
We're looking down toward Long Wharf, the main entryway to Boston by sea, and right at the intersection of land and sea in Boston is the main government building for the entire colony of Massachusetts.
What was known originally as the Townhouse built in 1713, it's where you would find the royal governor, his office, as well as the meeting point for the elected legislature of Massachusetts.
This would remain the government building for the colony of Massachusetts until the American Revolution, and then it became our statehouse.
It continued to be our capital building even after the Declaration of Independence until we built the current statehouse in 1798.
Meaning that in Massachusetts, we've been in two state capitol buildings in just over 310 years.
October 1st, 1768, 1,200 soldiers of the King's Army marched right by where we're standing to occupy the town in Boston.
They would be here for 17 long months, occupying the town, impossible to miss in their bright red coats in a direct violation of the British Bill of Rights.
It would be relatively peaceful over that 17 months with just sort of minor street fights and arguments between locals and soldiers, but things would truly escalate to violence on March 5th, 1770.
Now the night before, a foot of snow had dropped onto town.
All day and all night had been walked over.
It's a thin layer of ice on March 5th.
Standing guard outside of the custom house across the street from where we stand was Private Hugh White of the Army.
As he's standing guard, he notices two young apprentices walking by shouting insults at one of the officers of the Army.
Private White goes over to them and demands they show respect to an officer.
They show the same amount of respect to him.
They start insulting him.
He takes the butt of his musket and just hits one of the kids right in the forehead.
He was assuming I think that would shut the kid up.
Instead, he screamed.
He fell to the ground.
He started to wail and cry.
And this drew in the attention of the other people walking around that night, mostly young apprentices.
They soon crowd Private White in front of the custom house.
He soon has a crowd of probably 10 to 20 in front of him shouting insults at him.
As the crowd grows, when they see attention coming into here, they start picking up snowballs and ice balls and rocks and oyster shells trying to hit Private White from afar.
This draws the attention of the other soldiers.
Captain Thomas Preston of the guardhouse across the square will gather seven privates.
They'll push through the crowd, their bayonets out, and that draws in more attention.
The crowd is going to grow to 30, to 40, to 50, to 60.
Preston organizes the men into a semicircle in front of the custom house.
He tells the men to load their muskets, but not to fire, because if they fire, that's a criminal action.
The crowd knows this because they're yelling at the soldiers, fire, you cowards, you damn you, you lobsters, you bloody backs, why won't you fire?
At this point, the bells in town start to ring.
People think something is on fire.
They're stepping outside with buckets of water in hand, but they don't find flames.
They find this crowd of maybe 100, mostly men on the lowest ranks of society.
Laborers, sailors, apprentices, enslaved and free men of color gathered into this crowd.
In this crowd of those apprentices are Samuel Maverick and Christopher Monk.
In this crowd of those laborers are Patrick Carr and Samuel Gray.
And of those sailors, James Caldwell and Crispus Addicts.
As one of the soldiers, Private Edward Montgomery, is knocked back, his gun goes off over the crowd.
Seconds go by.
Preston is trying to block his men.
He's standing between them, but they don't hear the order.
They don't know what to do.
One by one, led by Matthew Kilroy, fire, fire, fire, fire.
Addicts, Caldwell, and Gray were all killed instantly.
Maverick was shot in the back.
He died the next morning in his own bed with his mother at his side.
Patrick Carr, shot through the abdomen, hip to hip, lingered for a week, and then he died.
Christopher Monk, shot in the back.
He lived, but he never walked again.
And he wouldn't live to see 30, and his family would blame his early death on the shooting.
Five or six other people wounded, bullet wounds in the arms and the legs and the backs as the crowd scatters and then comes right back, banging on the doors of the statehouse and the guardhouse, demanding justice.
From the balcony of the old statehouse will step out Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, begging the crowd to go home, telling them that he will live and die by the law.
The law says these men will face trial for murder, but later it can only happen when the crowd goes home.
They disperse.
In the coming days, the Army and Navy are fully removed from Boston.
And soon, as this information of this event hits the newsstands across the empire, it will come to be known as the Bloody Boston Massacre.
This is the council chamber here at the old statehouse.
This is where the royal governor would sort of address his council and make his decisions.
This is really probably the most important room in the building, at least of the ones that are extant today, since the building has been so heavily modified since its original 18th century appearance.
You have to imagine royal governors Bernard and Hutchinson and General Gage sitting in this room deliberating.
But probably the most interesting piece in this room is the view out the window onto the balcony.
This is where the royal governor would stand and look down and address the people.
Above him, he's flanked by the symbol of England, the gold lion, and the symbol of Scotland, the silver unicorn.
And those pieces that are up there today are actually replicas.
The originals were torn down and burned in a bonfire in 1776.
And that same year, on July 18th, from this very balcony, the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time in Boston.
On top of Boston's Fanuel Hall is the iconic grasshopper weather vane made by Shem Drown of Boston, capping off Faneuil Hall since 1742, modeled after a similar weather vane that sits on top the Royal Exchange building in London, meant to draw a connection commercially between Boston and London.
Fanuel Hall would have been the center of Boston commerce in the 18th century.
This building was paid for by Boston slave trader and merchant Peter Fanuel, and it bears his name to this day.
The lower floor is the commercial space, the market floor meant to be that center of Boston's market.
And then the upper floor would have been Boston's town hall and town meeting space where some of the many gatherings leading up to the American Revolution would have been held.
This building remained Boston's town hall until 1822 when Boston became a city and it remains a city-owned meeting space to this day.
The centerpiece of Fannieu Hall here is the Great Hall.
We're up on the second floor of Fanny's Hall and this is the room where town meeting would have been held prior to 1822.
This is where Samuel Adams would have stood up to speak out against the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act.
It's where the bodies of James Caldwell and Crispus Addux were brought after they died the night of the Boston Massacre.
And this really was the center of political life in Boston for the town itself.
Now with that being said, this room is very different now than it would have been in the colonial era because in 1806, the whole building was actually doubled in width and height.
So this building is significantly bigger.
This room is significantly larger.
But where I'm standing right now, this is actually the original side.
This is the original portion.
There is original brickwork on the outside of this building.
And the city continued to use this space even after they stopped doing town meeting here in 1822.
This is where you would have had great speeches by people like Frederick Douglass on the subject of the abolition of slavery, speeches from Lucy Stone on the idea of the right to vote for women.
And this continues on to the present day.
The city hosted in 2013 Barack Obama to talk about the Affordable Care Act.
This room is where Boston naturalizes its U.S. citizens, meaning that new citizens of Massachusetts, of the United States, get to sit in this room and enter in that tradition, going back all the way past Obama, past Mitt Romney, and onto Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass and Samuel Adams.
It's a rich history.
There's no better spot, in my opinion, for that to be done than the Great Hall of Faneuil Hall.
We're now leaving downtown to the final part of our tour where we'll be walking through Boston's historic North End.
This is a residential neighborhood known for its crooked and narrow streets and 19th and 20th century tenement style buildings.
It has the character of an early 20th century Italian American enclave today, but it is Boston's oldest neighborhoods, or rather one of them.
It's where you can find the home of Paul Revere and the iconic Old North Church, which are our last two Freedom Trail stops today.
1770, February of that year, Paul Revere, his wife Sarah, and their five children, as well as Revere's mother, Deborah Hichborn Revere, moved in together to a home here in North Square behind me.
This wooden house that they were moving into was already 90 years old when they moved in in 1770.
This house was built in 1680, the oldest house in downtown Boston, the second oldest property in the whole city of Boston, one of only two remaining 17th century structures.
A reminder and a remarker of what it was like to live in the North End in the 18th century, coupled with the brick structure next door built in 1711.
And for many years, Paul Revere's first cousin, Nathaniel Hitchborne, lived there.
So these two homes, the Paul Revere House and the Hitchborne House together, are a way of picturing the neighborhood in the 18th century, as well as showing that family connection between the two houses here.
Paul Revere did not run his business out of this home.
He would have had a separate shop where he ran his gold and silver business here, but that was his primary occupation, his primary income.
He's going to become involved politically over the course of the 1770s, allowing himself to sort of print out images onto paper etched in copper.
He's going to be making express rides.
For example, after 150 Bostonians destroyed 340 chests of East India Company tea in December of 1773, an event known as the Boston Tea Party, leaders in New York found out that happened before the newsstands got to them because Paul Revere hand-delivered that news to them in only five days on horseback.
And this is again due to the fact that he was known to be quick on horseback and also honest and trustworthy.
This is the Prado, the Paul Revere Mall.
Behind me is the statue, equestrian statue of Paul Revere, and behind him, the steeple of the iconic Old North Church.
On the night of April 18th, 1775, 700 British soldiers made their way from Boston, rowing boats across the Charles River to Cambridge on their march out west to Lexington and then on to Concord.
In a pre-set up move here, the Committee of Safety of Boston, led by Dr. Joseph Warren, had planned to have two riders on horseback go out ahead of the British Army the moment they saw them leave town.
The two riders trusted with this, one a local tanner named William Dawes and the other, the silversmith Paul Revere.
Revere, recognizing the flaw in a plan of having only two riders against 4,500 soldiers and a curfew in place at night, set up a backup plan, having lookouts looking in Charlestown for a signal from the steeple of the Old North Church.
One lantern in the steeple if the army made their way down the Boston neck the long way to Concord, or two lanterns in the steeple if they were rowing boats across the Charles River as a shortcut, which is the way they ended up going.
In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one if by land and two if by sea.
We don't know who went up with the lanterns that night because Revere never identified them by name, but what we know is on that night of April 18th, the soldiers were spotted rowing across to Charlestown.
William Dawes was dispatched and rowed out of town.
Paul Revere went to his friend, told that friend two lanterns, and they would have gone up eight stories of stairs and ladders to the top window of Old North, lit the two lanterns out the window towards Charlestown for no more than 60 seconds before blowing them out and getting out of there as quickly as possible.
When Revere himself made it to Charlestown later that night, the militia there confirmed they had seen the signal.
They already had a rider out ahead of Revere.
Revere would mount a horse he borrowed from them, riding west to Lexington, discreetly knocking on the doors of trusted individuals along the way to inform them that the regulars, the army, had left Boston.
They then went and got the local militia ready.
These would be the militia fighting in the following morning, April 19th, 1775, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the first engagement of the American Revolution.
This is the Old North Church, the oldest standing church building in the city of Boston.
It was built in 1723 and is still actively used for worship today.
Its official name is actually Christ Church in the city of Boston, founded as an Anglican congregation.
Today, it's Episcopalian.
This pew that we're in right now is actually decorated in the manner that pews would have been decorated in the 18th century.
The majority of Old North's box pews are plain and white, reflecting a more modern taste for the congregation.
But originally, each one of these pews would have been individually owned and decorated to the taste and means of the owners.
This pew is one that's left open to resemble how pews would have been set up originally in the 18th century.
The church, while it does not maintain its original paint style, it has the white look of the colonial revival of the 20th century.
They have over this past year actually restored original paint features.
You can see these beautiful angels in the archways.
That's actually original 1723, 1724 paint that has been painstakingly restored by scraping away layers of decades and decades of paint.
A brand new look for the thousands of visitors that come here to Old North every single year.
And it was here on the night of April 18th, 1775, that Paul Revere's friend, whoever they were, would have come in through the front door.
They would have climbed up the back stairs.
They would have squeezed behind that pipe organ and climbed up those eight stories of stairs and ladders to the top window to light the two lanterns, one if by land and two if by sea, in the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Here we are at Cops Hill Terrace.
This is the final stop of our tour here today and where our Hubtown Tours, Freedom Trail tours, end.
We're actually looking over the river at the last, the end of the Freedom Trail.
The last two stops are just beyond us here.
You've got USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, anchored permanently across the harbor from us here.
She's famous for engaging with British warships during the War of 1812.
She's undefeated in battle and through all her victories over British warships, she earned the nickname Old Ironsides because it was said that cannonballs would bounce off her oak hull as if she were made of iron.
Behind her is the tall obelisk, the Bunker Hill Monument, 1843.
It's when it was completed.
This monument was actually had ground broken in 1824.
It would take years for it to be completed.
It took a lot of money that was not there in order to build it.
It is marking the location of the Battle of Bunker Hill, but it does not mark the location of the hill, Bunker Hill.
The hill that the battle was fought on and where that monument is is actually named Breeds Hill.
Where's Bunker Hill?
It's another hill that's further back behind.
At some point, the two names got mixed up and swapped permanently.
So now the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought upon Breeds Hill.
And the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was the first major pitched battle of the American Revolution, in one sense is the beginning of the story of the Revolutionary War.
But for the story of Revolutionary Boston, it represents the end.
That battle, though it was a British victory, would maintain the siege of Boston by the Continental Army, which would end in March of 1776 when the British Army would evacuate from pressure from George Washington, the Continental Army at Dorchester Heights, south of Boston.
And with the evacuation of the British troops in March of 76, the Revolutionary War never returns here, which means that even though it goes on for seven long years after 1776, for Boston, the story ends here.
The story ends there.
1776 really represents the end of that chapter that started all the way back in 1763 with the end of the French and Indian War and is an ideal place for us to end our story here today.
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This August, tune in to C-SPAN for highlights of our America 250 coverage.
Join us as we continue to explore the American story through the voices, sights, and stories that shaped it.
Lay down your arms!
will stilwell ▲ ● ▼
Disperse and return to your homes!
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