Paul Revere did not shout 'The British are coming!'

Paul Revere rode to warn colonial leaders, but he would not have shouted that the British were coming because the colonists considered themselves British. He was also trying not to alert patrols.

Context

On the night of April 18, 1775, Revere and other riders, including William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, carried word that British troops were moving out of Boston toward Lexington and Concord. Colonists in Massachusetts still thought of themselves as British subjects, so calling the soldiers simply 'the British' would have made little sense, and the aim was to warn quietly rather than shout through the countryside.

Accounts from participants suggest that the messages were closer to a warning that the regulars, meaning the British army's regular troops, were out or about to march. Revere was also stopped by a British patrol before he reached Concord and was detained for a time, so he did not complete the ride himself; Prescott carried the news onward.

The popular version comes largely from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem 'Paul Revere's Ride', which shaped public memory and made Revere the central figure, partly because Longfellow wrote at a time when the country was looking for patriotic stories before the Civil War. The poem contains several errors, but its main phrases and image stuck. Revere's own later account is the main source scholars use to reconstruct what actually happened.