Sarah Palin Was Not Wrong About Paul Revere

Sarah Palin wasn't 100 percent wrong.
When the former Alaska governor insisted that part of Paul Revere's ride was meant to warn the British, she was ridiculed by many. But PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-finding project of The St. Petersburg Times, researched the facts and found a grain of truth in what she said.
Here is Palin's statement to Fox News' Chris Wallace, who said that she had "messed up" about Paul Revere: "Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British."
PolitiFact.com looked at two similar accounts Revere wrote about the night of April 18, 1775. The first came in a deposition, while the second was from a letter Revere wrote in 1798, PolitiFact.com reported.
In both instances, Revere said he set out to Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were advancing. Halfway there, he was captured. In the letter, he explained that a British commander questioned him, PolitiFact.com reported:
"He asked me if I was an express," Revere wrote. "I answered in the affirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and added, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up."

The deposition said essentially the same thing. And PolitiFact.com points out that author David Hackett Fischer relied on historical documents to recount a similar passage in his 1994 book, "Paul Revere's Ride."

So, PolitiFact.com says, "Palin is correct about one point: Revere did warn the British that they were going to face armed resistance from some 500 colonists."