Many Americans are familiar with the story of Bostonian Paul Revere, whose midnight ride on April 18, 1775, alerted the Massachusetts countryside to the presence of British troops in the hours before the opening battle of the American Revolution. But far fewer know that Revere also heroically rescued a vital trunk of paperwork that night.
The race to save this patriot archive underscores the fact that the Revolution wasn’t won solely on the battlefield. The safeguarding of government paperwork contributed to the Americans’ victory, too. As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding on July 4, 1776, the fierce contest over access to these records, involving nighttime raids and daring wartime rescues, is worth revisiting.
Historical sources generally agree that Revere set out from Boston around 11 p.m., arriving in the town of Lexington an hour or so later. There, he warned patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were on the move (though he never shouted the famous phrase “The British are coming!”).
Next, Revere and another rider left to check on the rebels’ store of arms and munitions in neighboring Concord. Along the way, the pair met up with a third man. Although a British patrol stopped the trio, Revere’s companions managed to escape. The British held Revere for a few hours and kept his horse when they finally released him. Revere then walked back to Lexington.
Revere headed to the house where Adams and Hancock were staying and helped persuade them to leave as quickly as possible. Hancock’s prevaricating that night reads like something of a farce. He wanted to join the confrontation with the redcoats himself and only grudgingly left Lexington after much cajoling by “his friends, who convinced him that the enemy would indeed triumph if they could get him and Mr. Adams in their power,” according to a 19th-century chronicle of New England history. Upon arriving at a safe destination, Hancock sent his coach back to the house to retrieve his aunt and his fiancée, as well as a fresh river salmon that he’d been gifted.
Hancock, then serving as president of the rebel government’s Massachusetts Provincial Congress, had also left behind something much more important than his dinner: a trunk of documents detailing the patriots’ movements and plans. As historian David Hackett Fischer wrote in Paul Revere’s Ride, the papers contained “the innermost secrets” of the rebel cause, including “written evidence that could incriminate many leaders.” After his late night, Revere found himself rushing with yet another compatriot to a tavern where the trunk had been stashed. The two men struggled to carry the heavy, bulky object across the village green as British soldiers advanced on patriot militiamen ahead of the opening salvos of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
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In a scene at least as dramatic as his ride from Boston, Revere later recalled, “I could distinguish two guns, and then a continual roar of musketry, when we made off with the trunk.”
The history of government documents (or the documents of a government in the making, as was the case in Lexington) is also a history of record-keeping and all the debates that come with it. Whether at the local or national level, in courts or with presidents, Americans have come to expect that records describing a government’s ambitions and actions should provide a level of transparency. Then as now, however, access to such documents—and the question of what exactly should be preserved—is highly contested.
During the Revolution, the patriots and the British were both keen to acquire the collected records of Colonial governments, the rebel resistance and new American governments formed in the wake of independence. Both sides recognized these documents as uniquely valuable. Before the war, every colony was required to maintain records of its business dealings, legislative and court proceedings, land deeds and more. Typically, these were stored in a courthouse or similarly safe location, and a clerk or secretary was charged with preserving them.
One of the Continental Congress’ first acts was the appointment of a secretary named Charles Thomson. He served from the first meeting of the Congress, in the fall of 1774, through the 1787 Constitutional Convention, managing the flow of government documents and their publication.
The Congress issued its Journals in a variety of formats, printing them throughout the 13 states and abroad to share information about the activities of the nascent American government. In the immediate aftermath of Lexington and Concord, for example, the Journals published testimony from local patriot men and women who gave firsthand accounts of the conflict and of the violence wrought by British troops against civilians, including theft and property damage.
George Washington similarly recognized how important his personal papers would be, given his role as commander in chief of the Continental Army. He ordered specialty trunks to hold his extensive correspondence and other records; early in the war, he sent word to a relative at Mount Vernon to secure the safety of both his wife, Martha, “and my papers.” Today, tens of thousands of Washington’s documents are available online.
Anxiety over the state and fate of government records was heightened in areas directly in the line of fire during the Revolution, especially as the patriots occupied places that had previously been under royal governance and the British seized American cities like Philadelphia. Displaced governments worried about the prospect of moving their base of operations and debated whether they would abandon their archives if they had to leave. (Thomson, for his part, brought the Congress’ papers with him when the legislature fled from and then reconvened in Philadelphia.)
Bureaucrats also feared events that might prevent the creation of new records. New York City’s government basically ceased operating under British occupation, so no official city records were created between May 1776 and February 1784.
On the patriot side, “for a year after the outbreak of violence at Lexington and Concord, local committees, councils and congresses seized the reins of power and displaced former Colonial officials and their supporters,” historian Donald F. Johnson writes in Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution. “Taking control of provincial records … proved essential to establishing the legitimacy of the new state regimes.”
In January 1776, representatives of the Georgia Provincial Congress met in Savannah’s courthouse to take possession of the city’s Colonial-era records. Henry Preston, a clerk appointed by the crown, held both the physical key to the courthouse and the metaphorical key to understanding how the documents were organized. He didn’t intend to give up either without a fight.
Confronted at his home on multiple occasions, Preston repeatedly cited his oath of office, that “no man whatever should have [the keys] but myself.” When the patriots—“seemingly in a passion,” according to Preston—threatened to take the keys by force, the clerk found himself at an impasse. If the men managed to gain access to the records, he could at least try to prevent them from sowing further chaos by damaging the papers. Preston agreed to show the patriots “how to take the papers down from the cases where they were in proper order.” Ultimately, the men left with two large cases and a small trunk packed with documents.
Two days later, Preston wrote a lengthy account of the incident. He might not have kept the archives of His Majesty’s government in Georgia out of the revolutionaries’ hands, but at least he had done his best to see them preserved.
In Newport, Rhode Island, the situation was both very different and very much the same. The British occupied the seaport for nearly three years, from December 1776 to October 1779. Located on Aquidneck Island, Newport was strategically valuable in large part because of its deep-water harbor. It had a conflicted population of both patriots and people who remained fiercely loyal to the crown.
