Constructing a Revolutionary Heroine: Sybil Ludington in Historical Memory

Join one of our blog writers, Memoria, in remembering the iconic Midnight Ride as a fuller historical narrative, while also touching on Sybil Ludington, another icon of the Revolutionary War that has seeped into public memory. Join Memoria in exploring these two examples of public memory and how it impacts the way we learn history and let it define us today.

Paul Revere has been an iconic figure in Boston ever since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s immortal 1861 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride”. Critics of the poem sometimes claim that because Revere’s ride was not particularly challenging, he should not be known as the Midnight Rider; that title should go instead to Sybil Ludington. After all, she rode 40 miles to Paul Revere’s 15, at only sixteen years old! Why is there no famous poem about her?

On April 26th, 1777, British soldiers attacked the town of Danbury, CT. According to one nineteenth-century historian, 

Late in the evening [of April 26th] a flying messenger for aid reached Colonel Ludington in Carmel, New York, whose men were at their homes scattered over the distance of many miles; no one being at home to call them, his daughter Sibyl Ludington, a spirited young girl of sixteen, mounted her horse in the dead of night and performed this service, and by breakfast-time the next morning the whole regiment was on its rapid march to Danbury.

A later account includes the comment that “There is no extravagance in comparing her ride with that of Paul Revere and its midnight message.”

The problem with comparing Ludington’s ride to Revere’s is that one of those rides is far better documented than the other. Revere himself wrote three accounts of his famed ride, two of them in its immediate aftermath. In contrast, when Ludington applied to the federal government for a widow’s pension in 1838, she cited only her husband’s military service—not her own ride. The story of her ride first appears in print in 1880, forty-one years after her death. 

If Sybil Ludington never made this ride, why is she held up as an icon of the Revolutionary War? 

Henry Longfellow knew that the image of a messenger galloping through the night is a powerful one. That power is increased by the combination of Sybil Ludington’s perceived weakness as a teenage girl, the potential danger of the situation, the physical stamina needed to accomplish it, and the courage required to volunteer. There are unfortunately few examples of an individual woman’s actions changing history in the way that Revere’s ride did, so people in the 19th and 20th centuries have looked to Ludington to fill the gap. 

Making Sybil Ludington into a heroine has provided more recent generations with a strong, Revolution-era female figure, but it has also turned a real person’s life into a story. Instead of using fiction such as “Paul Revere’s Ride” to teach history, historical fiction should be used to teach about the period in which that fiction was written. In order to teach about a specific period, look to the archives. Nothing in the surviving documents about Ludington indicates that she was anything other than a typical young woman of her region and social class, which is not a bad thing. If we take anything from the story of Sybil Ludington’s life, it is that the Revolution touched everyone who lived through it, even ordinary teenage girls. 

Sources: 

• Hunt, Paula D. “Sybil Ludington, the Female Paul Revere: The Making of a Revolutionary War Heroine.” The New England Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2015): 187–222. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24718670.

• Lamb, Martha J. History of the City of New York: Its Origins, Rise, and Progress. Vol II. A. S. Barnes and Company, 1896.

• Johnson, Willis Fletcher. Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir. New York, 1907.