William Dawes needs a poet

Boston Globe

11-04-2025

Meh. Doesn't have the same ring to it. It's tricky to rhyme anything with Dawes. Gauze. Claws. Straws. Flaws.
But rhyming Revere is so clear, my dear.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the 'midnight ride' that kicked off the American Revolution, the legacy of Dawes, the
on that fateful night of April 18, 1775, to warn Lexington that the Redcoats were coming, is receiving renewed focus.
And with it, comes an old question: Is this all about a poem? If
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There is no question that their legacies are unequal. Revere, a patriot leader and famous silversmith, has statues and a city named after him. Dawes is believed to be buried in an unmarked grave in Forest Hills Cemetery.
Is this all simply because Dawes was trickier to rhyme?
'We all kind of kid about how nothing really rhymes with Dawes,' said Barb Moberg, president of
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Catchy poem is perhaps an understatement. It's been theorized that 'Paul Revere's Ride,' with its unforgettable opening line of
'Listen my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,'
is the most memorized poem in American history.
The poem has been criticized for historical inaccuracies and poetic license (Revere did not actually wait for the '
And there is no question that the 1861 poem made Revere into a household name, 86 years after the midnight ride, and more than four decades after his death. And it happened at a time in American history when he risked sliding toward obscurity. Instead, 10 years after the poem came out, the town of North Chelsea was renamed in his honor.
'Scholars would have known about him, but not every kid would have heard of him, and the poem vaulted him from the corridors of history to the popular imagination,' said Kostya Kennedy, author of the new book '
Kennedy and others have shown that Revere was a much more important figure in the story of the revolution, already a known figure on the night of April 18, who was better able to rally support from the towns he galloped through.
'This is not to lessen Dawes, for what he did required just as much courage as what Revere did, but quite frankly his ride was not nearly as impactful,' Kennedy said. 'If there's only one person who is going to be remembered from that night, it should be Revere.'
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Dawes, on the other hand, took what was arguably the more dangerous route, having to travel straight through a British checkpoint at Boston Neck, the narrow stretch of land that connected Boston to the mainland before the area was filled in. He was given the assignment precisely because he was basically an unknown tanner. The Redcoats knew to be on the lookout for Paul Revere. No one knew William Dawes.
Other factors contributed to Revere's legacy flourishing while Dawes became the answer to a trivia question. Revere
Charles Bahne, a historian, tour guide, and Dawes scholar, was part of a group of researchers who discovered that Dawes — and 27 other relatives— had been unceremoniously moved at some point in the 19th century from the overflowing King's Chapel Burying Ground, near Boston Common, to a plot at Forest Hills that belonged to the family of his first wife. While there is still a plaque honoring Dawes at King's Chapel, there is nothing to mark his actual grave in Jamaica Plain, a fact that the Dawes descendants group has tried and failed to rectify.
'This is just another one of these things that seemed to work against Dawes' legacy,' Bahne said. 'Revere had all these other things in the revolution that he would have been known for today even if [he] hadn't done the ride. Dawes, no. That was the biggest thing he ever did in his life.'
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And Revere had the poem, and what a poem it was, written as a rallying cry just as the country was on the verge of civil war, composed by America's most-famous living poet.
'Longfellow isn't just talking about the revolution; he's talking about the union which we have to preserve,' said Nicholas Basbanes, the author of '
'It was written with the meter of the clippity-clop of a horse, brilliantly crafted to stick with you,' Basbanes said. 'And at the time, Longfellow was probably the closest thing to a rock star, so it was circulated everywhere.'
The Paul Revere poem, like his other popular works such as '
It's a pop song you can't get out of your head, easy to knock but impossible to replicate. And for Dawes, people have tried, most notably in 1896, when Helen F. Moore published the complaint '
I am a wandering, bitter shade,
Never of me was a hero made;
Poets have never sung my praise,
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Nobody crowned my brow with bays;
And if you ask me the fatal cause,
I answer only, 'My name was Dawes'
Billy Baker can be reached at