The time was about ten o'clock at night, April 18, 1775. A Boston silversmith named Paul Revere rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown, Massachusetts. Stealth was of the essence. He slipped past a British warship under the cover of darkness and arrived safely on the other side.
Earlier that evening, a patriot leader had given Revere (and another messenger, separately) an urgent mission: ride to Lexington and Concord and warn that the British troops were on the march to arrest patriots and seize colonial militia stockpiles. First, Revere needed to tell Charlestown patriots to look for a signal in the steeple of Old North Church in Boston. There would be one lantern or two, depending on whether the redcoats were marching by land or crossing the river.
Now Revere was racing out of town on horseback. He narrowly avoided capture by British patrols more that once but remained undeterred. He awakened residents inside their homes along the way, bearing the ominous news: "The Regulars are coming!"
Revere arrived in Lexington just after midnight and delivered the message to patriot leaders. Joined by William Dawes—after riding a separate northern route—the pair continued toward Concord and were thereafter joined by fellow rider Samuel Prescott. Shortly after leaving Lexington, British troops intercepted the three riders. While Prescott and Dawes escaped, Revere was detained, questioned, and released, without his horse: a fabled ride immortalized in poetry nearly a century later.
"Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere..."
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1861)
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The first American intelligence network on record was a secret group in Boston known as the "Liberty Boys" or, more memorably, the "Mechanics." It was an apt nickname for the skilled artisans and tradesmen who could fix anything while moonlighting as spies. One could say that the Mechanics were the spy arm of a political organization called the Sons of Liberty, famous for dumping a ship-load of tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773 to protest British taxation without colonial representation. Increasingly draconian British policies to oppress the colonies were enacted.
Paul Revere was born in Boston in 1735, became a silversmith by trade, and served as a courier before he undertook the most famous tactical warning in U.S. history. He was a participant in the Boston Tea Party and member of the Mechanics. This network of spies was responsible for organizing resistance to British rule, carrying out the occasional sabotage operation against the occupiers, and reporting on redcoat activities. According to Revere, the Mechanics came together "for the purpose of... gaining every intelligence on the movement of the Tories. We frequently took turns, two and two, to watch the (British) soldiers by patrolling the streets all night."
Although the Mechanics honed their spycraft in Boston, their security practices were not refined. For instance, they regularly met at the same location—The Green Dragon Tavern—to share information, and one of their leaders turned out to be a British informant. Fortunately, the Mechanics tapped multiple intelligence sources, which ultimately alerted the patriots to the British plan.
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On April 19, 1775, the Americans were ready to fight, thanks to the patriots who sounded the alarm the night before. When 700 British Regulars arrived in Lexington around dawn, someone (the identity remains unknown) fired the first shot—later known as "the shot heard 'round the world." After a short skirmish, the far-outnumbered minutemen fell back, and the British marched on to Concord. By then, the colonists had relocated the caches of munitions the British expected to find.
In Concord, hundreds of militia reinforcements engaged the enemy, inflicting casualties on both sides. As the redcoats retreated to their garrison in Boston, they were harried along the entire route by militia from neighboring towns. By the day's end, the British suffered roughly 70 killed—about one-tenth of the force that had set out—and many more wounded.
It was a decisive, early victory for the colonial rebels and the first taste of freedom. Without the good intelligence work of the Mechanics and the warning delivered by Paul Revere and his fellow riders, the poignant opening shot—and the whole conflict—might have unfolded quite differently.