How the weather helped to win an early Revolutionary War battle on April 19

In this Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2018 photo Old North Church stands behind a statue of Paul Revere in the North End neighborhood of Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Schoolchildren for more than a century have heard of “Paul Revere's Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also commonly referred to as "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," which immortalizes Revere’s historic middle-of-the-night jaunt to warn colonial Americans that the British were coming. 

Revere got the publicity, thanks to Longfellow, at the expense of fellow riders William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott in advance of the battles of Lexington and Concord. The important impact of the weather also received no poetic justice.

Heavy rains on April 18, 1775, made for soggy, muddy conditions as Revere rode from Boston to Lexington. He met up with Dawes and Prescott on the way to Concord, but a British patrol intercepted the three, with Dawes and Prescott escaping to go on and warn the colonists in Concord. Revere returned to Lexington.

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In the first armed conflict of the Revolutionary War, the British routed a small group of militia in Lexington before advancing to Concord. They would have no such luck there. 

Thanks to the advance warning, Concord’s militia outnumbered the British and forced them to retreat. They were also missing a key element which led to their defeat. 

“The British had planned to bring about their small cannons with them to teach the rebels a lesson,” said AccuWeather Chief Operating Officer Evan Myers, host of the This Date in Weather History podcast. “That ordnance would have come in handy that day, but the roads were still soft and muddy on April 19, 1775.

“Even though the sun was out, it was cold, and the sun was little help to dry the roads,” Myers said. “It was a chilly spring day because a cold front had brought that rain the day before. The cannons got stuck in the mud on the road from Boston and had to be left behind. The battle perhaps turned on the muddy road and the rainy weather from the day before.”

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