Sarah Palin, the Midnight Ride and Paul Revere in His Own Words

Sarah Palin continued her "One Nation" bus tour of historical sites on Friday, visiting sites in Boston marking the eve of and early stages of the American Revolution in 1775, including the home of famous intelligence messenger Paul Revere, church-turned-signal house Christ Church, and Bunker Hill, site of an early battle won by the British at the cost of heavy losses.

Palin's tour began last Sunday in Washington D.C., making stops at various locations including Philadelphia and New York City. The tour has been marked by speculation that she is contemplating a presidential run but she has said she has not yet made a decision.

One of her stops was the house of Paul Revere, one of the men who worked closely with major figures such as John Adams and John Hancock. Revere is most famous for his late night and dawn ride on horseback, the "Midnight Run of Paul Revere," in which he famously warned people in towns north of Boston of advancing British troops. The ride turned out to immediately precede the American Revolutionary war.

One of Palin's comments which has drawn scrutiny in various media outlets for being inaccurate is her brief retelling of what Revere did and why he did it. Here is her statement which aired on local television. Palin spoke of Revere describing him as:

"He who warned the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and by making sure that as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free and we were gonna be armed."

According to a letter he wrote many years after that night, Revere had two missions. The first was to warn John Adams and John Hancock, a pair of leaders within the revolutionary movement, that British troops had left Boston and were headed northeast more than 30 miles to Lexington to arrest them. The second was to depart for Concord to inform that British troops were seeking to destroy guns and ammunition stored in Concord. He never completed that portion of his mission, although another messenger with him managed to escape British officers and complete the mission. Along the first leg of his ride, and with help from companions in part of the second, Revere famously alerted people and the militia of the advancing troops.

According to a history of the ride by David Hackett Fischer in his 1995 book "Paul Revere's Ride," after Revere awakened the community in Medford, just north of Boston, Revere rode to the house of Captain Isaac Hall, commander of Medford's minutemen, "who instantly triggered the town's alarm system. A townsman remembered that 'repeated gunshots, the beating of drums and the ringing of bells filled the air.'"

In the book, Fischer recounts what British troops marching north heard. The "meeting bells" were "not very loud - nothing like the carillons of ancient English churches," Fischer wrote.

"These were small, solitary country bells, clanging faintly in the night, but the sounds came from every side - west, north, and even east behind the column" of troops.

Non-bell alarms included beacon fires. Fischer writes about one soldier who also recalled seeing visual warnings.

"On distant hilltops he began to make out beacon fires burning brilliantly across the rolling landscape," Fischer writes.

Below is a summary of what Paul Revere wrote of his famous ride, according to letter written in 1798 to Jeremy Belknap, a corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here for a link to a transcript of a handwritten recollection by Revere himself.