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Paul Revere

The role for which he is most remembered today was as a night-time messenger before the battles of Lexington and Concord. His famous "Midnight Ride" occurred on the night of April 18/April 19, 1775, when he and William Dawes were instructed by Dr. Joseph Warren to ride from Boston to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the movements of the British Army, which was beginning a march from Boston to Lexington, ostensibly to arrest Hancock and Adams and seize the weapons stores in Concord.

When a Paul Revere enters the history books, strange things happen to him. He suddenly becomes the conscious agent of worldwide events. He is forced onto a stage which he never knew and which exists only in retrospect. Historians tempt us to see him as the harbinger of events that reverberated through the courts of Europe, that shaped empires and the destiny of Kings, that would provide a republic enduring for centuries. But we must try to rediscover him as an energetic, enterprising, public-spirited, anxious, hopeful, and provincial Bostonian.

Paul Revere's own eyes were focused on Boston and its environs. What happened even in Philadelphia or in New York entered his experience only when it seemed to help or hinder his locally urgent causes. The population of Boston as a whole, much less of New England, the thirteen colonies, or the British Empire, hardly entered his consciousness. Demography, "medical knowledge," or "public health" meant nothing compared to the yearly menace of smallpox to his own family. Death had a vividness which statistics could only conceal. Paul, born in 1735, the third of twelve children, was unusually lucky in that only two of his brothers or sisters died in infancy. Of Paul Revere's own sixteen children — eight by his first wife and eight by his second — five died in infancy. His grandchildren were the same age as his own younger children.

When news arrived in Boston that George Washington had died, Revere, as a prominent Mason, helped organize the town's funeral ceremony, which became a procession of the Masonic Lodge with all the ritual and regalia of Masonry. They mourned Washington more conspicuously as a fellow lodge member than as the Father of his Country. Plainly the death of the great Washington affected Revere far less than that of one of his own infant sons (which made him resolve at age fifty-one that he would have no more children, a resolution he did not keep), or the death of his beloved wife when he was seventy-eight, or of his eldest son when he was eighty-three.

Other episodes in Paul Revere's life help us recapture his own perspective on his "country" and what it meant to be a colonial Briton. As a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant, he fought courageously with the British provincial forces against the French-held forts in lower Canada. It was no grandiose political theory or Rights of Man dogma that made him support the American cause. We see Sam Adams sensationalizing the threat of the newly enforced British taxes and trade regulations to the craftsmen of Boston. And we can see, too, how real was that burden and that threat.

Guy Fawkes' Day (in Boston known as Pope's Day) had long been celebrated by boisterous parades when town roughnecks, led by an eponymous "Joyce Jr.," spread terror among respectable citizens. As agitation against England gained momentum, these same roughnecks exploited the political opportunity. From where Paul Revere stood, the war for independence had much the aspect of a civil war. Yet, except for the much touted Boston Massacre there were remarkably few war casualties within the civilian population of Boston. The struggle did split families and caused deep pain among old friends. When General Howe's troops occupied Boston, they cleared the pew out of Old South Church to make a riding ring for the favorite mounted British regiment, saving only one pew for a pigsty. Then, when Howe evacuated Boston, he gave the city's Tories ten days to pack up and join him. Many of the town's wealthiest merchants and most respectable citizens "preferred the innovations of England to those of Sam Adams." In their haste they had to make the painful decisions that have afflicted refugees in every generation. To take the sheets or the family portraits? Warm underwear or the scarlet robes of a judge of the King's Court? What to do with the old dog? Few ever saw Boston again.

The Midnight Ride In 1861, over 40 years after his death, the ride became the subject of "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem has become one of the best known in American history and was memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Its famous opening lines are: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year... In his poem, Longfellow took many liberties with the events of the evening, most especially giving sole credit to Revere for the collective achievements of the three riders (as well as the other riders whose names do not survive to history).

Besides helping to organize the town's "mechanics," Paul Revere served the coming Revolution mainly in the prosaic role of courier on horseback. We are reminded that for him this task became routine. In the winter of 1773, he carried news of the Boston Tea Party to the Committee of Correspondence (about 350 miles, covered at about sixty-three miles a day) in Philadelphia; the following year he rode to Philadelphia and back four times. He also brought news of the Boston Port Bill to fellow Sons of Liberty in New York City (a twelve-day round trip). To Boston's experienced and hardy courier, the celebrated trip to Lexington on "the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five" was just another assignment. And on that legendary ride, one of his most important tasks was to rescue from Buckman's Tavern in Lexington John Hancock's trunk, which held treasonable documents and probably also Hancock's dandyish wardrobe.

Paul Revere's own time dimensions, like his spatial vision, were those of the clock and the rising sun, rather than the decades or centuries. Of course the outcome of the local struggle was far from certain, which made his personal situation riskier than it seems in retrospect. What was happening at that moment on the streets and in the shops and homes of Boston and the neighborhood loomed largest for him. When the Depression, which came with Britain's enforcement of the restrictions on colonial trade, made Boston customers scarce for Revere's silver cups, he branched out, using his skills and his tools to make copperplate prints and false teeth. Wartime inflation and threats of famine encouraged even a solid mechanic like Revere to invest his money in privateering. Challenging new assignments were his opportunity to print the first issue of Continental money, to set up a mill for gunpowder, and to make an official seal, still in use, for the state of Massachusetts.

Local sensations and scandals overshadowed the broad stream of history. How appalling that the eminently respectable Dr. Benjamin Church (Harvard, 1754; chief physician of the American army hospital in Cambridge), who had joined the inner Revolutionary councils along with John Adams and Joseph Warren, should be caught red- handed sending coded letters to the enemy! Though he was convicted in a court-martial, they somehow never could catch the scoundrel.

The notorious Deborah Sampson Gannett, who hardly lives in our textbooks, incited the tsk-tsk-tsk-ing of Boston gossips and the knowing winks of barflies. At twenty Deborah had run away from home disguised as a boy, and then enlisted in the Continental army. Especially tall for a girl in her time (5 feet 7 1 / 2 inches), with her lithe figure she was said to be "fleet as a gazell, bounding through swamps many rods ahead of her companions." As "Robert Shurtleff" she proved a "faithful and gallant soldier and at the same time preserved the virtue and chastity of her sex unsuspected and unblemished." Her unshaven "smock face" roused no suspicions because so many others in the army were still too young to shave. She was so modest, the story went, that when wounded, she had pried out the bullet herself rather than risk a physician's examination. When her sex was finally discovered, General Knox gave her an honorable discharge. Paul Revere took a special interest in her case. After the war when her earnings from her published adventures and from occasional lectures would not support her, he tried to persuade Congress to grant her a pension. "I think her case much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress has been generous."

Paul Revere's own reputation in the Boston neighborhood was far from unblemished. There was enough doubt about his conduct at the ill-fated expedition at Penobscot in 1779 to lead to his being relieved of his command under suspicion of "unsoldierly conduct and cowardice," and then to his house arrest. It was three years before he had the satisfaction of acquittal by a court-martial. Bostonians were not quick to forget.

The progress of Revere's own long careers as "mechanic" and businessman dramatizes the opportunities of life in a colonial capital. If he had been living in London, guild restrictions would have prevented him from trying his hand so casually at so many different crafts. Today he remains best known for his elegant silver pieces, like the bowls that still bear his seal or the teapot that he holds in John Singleton Copley's portrait. But he was not above teaching himself copperplate engraving, and then producing second-rate frontispieces for singing books and works of history, or crude pictures of the Boston Massacre. When there was a need for dentists, and a scarcity of customers for silver pieces, he learned the art of fixing false teeth from a Mr. John Baker who had practiced that craft in Boston for a year and a half. Though Revere was prudent enough to confine his claims to cleaning teeth and setting "foreteeth," his advertisement in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal on July 30, 1770, was less modest: "He has fixed some Hundred of Teeth and he can fix them as well as any Surgeon-Dentist who ever came from London, he fixes them in such a Manner that they are not only an Ornament, but of real use in Speaking and Eating."

The eighty-three years of Paul Revere's life brought him from an era of colonial craftsmen into the early modern industrial New England. He was alert to the new local opportunities in the new age. Outside Lexington he found an old powder-mill property that was blessed with abundant waterpower. With $25,000 of his own money and a loan of $10,000 from the United States Government, he set up there a mill for rolling sheet copper, and devised an improved machine for the process. His foundry then provided the bolts, spikes, and copper accessories for the Constitution ("Old Ironsides"). "The carpenters gave nine cheers," setting out after the Algerian pirates that ship's log reported on June 26, 1803, "which was answered by the seamen and calkers, because they had in fourteen days completed coppering the ship with copper made in the United States." Working closely with Robert Fulton, he had a stake in the hidden future, for he used his process to roll copper plates for the boilers of Fulton's steamship.

In the great bells he cast for churches and town halls, this success as a versatile Boston "mechanic" still resounds. Revere had picked up the techniques from a French engineer who happened to stop at the Abington Inn. Revere then went after the needed copper and tin, dug a great pit for the molten mass, and proudly inscribed his product for the Second Church: "The first bell cast in Boston 1792 by P. Revere." Not discouraged when some said the bell sounded “panny, harsh and shrill," he went on to an additional prosperous career as bell founder, witnessed by the 2,437-pound bell (his largest) which in late twentieth century still hung in the stone tower of King's Chapel in his home town. Despite complaints that Revere had "no ear & perhaps knows nothing of the laws of sound and his excess of copper to ensure the strength of his bells depreciates their value," all could admire him as a most "enterprising mechanic." At his death in 1818 he left an estate valued at some $30,000, a fortune in those days.

Daniel J. Boorstin. . Harper & Row. Publishers. 1987.

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