But she says the poem can also be interpreted as “a fugitive slave narrative,” a tale of capture and escape whose rhetoric echoes other Longfellow poetry explicitly about slavery. Published in the January 1861 issue of the Atlantic, “Paul Revere’s Ride” was read as a “call to arms, rousing northerners to action,” Lepore writes. In an 1859 diary entry reflecting on the imminent execution of John Brown after his failed raid on Harpers Ferry, Longfellow predicted “a new Revolution, - quite as needed as the old one.” Longfellow was close to both Charles Sumner, a leading abolitionist, and his brother George.
Lepore sweeps away both sets of objections by arguing that the poem is, in fact, “not about liberty and Paul Revere, but about slavery and John Brown.” The date of composition is telling: 1860, on the brink of the Civil War.
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