"Paul Revere's Ride" Turns 150-Years-Old

The Atlantic takes a look back at Longfellow's anti-slavery poem.

From the piece...

A century-and-a-half ago today, in our January 1861 issue, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published what's still his best-known poem, "Paul Revere's Ride." In Sunday's New York Times, Jill Lepore explains what the poem was doing here: Despite the demure Longfellow's aversion to playing directly into public debate, he was -- like The Atlantic's whole founding generation -- an intensely committed abolitionist, who wrote "Paul Revere's Ride" with the coming Civil War, as much as the War of Independence Revere rallied for 85 years earlier, in mind. In 1842, Longfellow had put out a volume called "Poems on Slavery" for his best friend Charles Sumner (later a leader of the anti-slavery movement in Massachusetts and, later still of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Senate during the Civil War and Reconstruction); for years, Longfellow quietly spent the earnings from his best-selling poetry to buy slaves their freedom; and on December 2, 1859, the day when the radical abolitionist John Brown was executed for treason against the state of Virginia, Longfellow wrote in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history, the date of a new Revolution quite as much needed as the old one."