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felt that “the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears.” John Adams said that Lexington “changed the instruments of war from the pen to the sword.”

If Lexington and Concord were small-scale engagements in the scheme of things, the reverberations were enormous. They sent a message that a defiant American population wouldn’t be easily subdued.

Wadsworth concluded his poem with the lines: “Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoofbeats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”

May it be so.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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