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Arrivals
In which the forebears of our hero trade the trials and hardships of the Old World for the uncertainties and hopes of the New, starting our story rolling in the boisterous town of Boston, in the British colony of Massachusetts.
In England, John Winthrop observed, “This land grows weary of its inhabitants.” England was too small, geographically, theologically, politically, and economically. In 1630, John Winthrop gained control of the Massachusetts Bay Company and led a pack of Puritans to America.
Virginia had tobacco. New York had furs. And Boston had the “sacred cod.” It’s an apt adjective. The fish is one of the earliest Christian symbols, so it makes a providential sort of sense that Winthrop and his fellow Puritans bettered themselves through the burgeoning industry.
Apollos Rivoire (Paul Revere’s father) was indentured to the Apollos’ family in order to pay for his apprenticeship to goldsmith John Coney. Indenture ensured long-term care and safety.
Ascent
In which the father of our hero, Apollos Rivoire, comes into his own, and changes the family name before buying his freedom, marrying a good Yankee girl of hardy stock, and then bringing little Paul into a world beset by economic troubles.
John Coney showed Apollos the tools and techniques of the trade: how to melt silver coinage and recast it as salver, tankard, or bowl; how to beat an ingot of silver into a large sheet; how to raise a disc of flattened silver into a teapot; how to engrave everything from porringers to printing plates. Apollos spoke no English but picked up his new tongue with his craft.
So thoroughly anglicized was Apollos by this point that he called himself “Paul” and changed his last name “Rivoire” to “Revere.” His son, Paul Revere, said he made the switch because “the Bumpkins pronounce it easier.”
Apollos never finished his apprenticeship under Coney because in 1722, Mr. Coney died.
Apollos pulled together the funds and bought his own contract. Freedom.
Coney’s neighbor Deborah saw Apollos trying the same hand-over-fist climb. Now he was finally in business for himself. She could do worse for a husband. The couple married on June 19, 1729, when he was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five.
Apollos and Deborah’s second child—Paul Revere—arrived in December 1734, on the twenty-first day of the month, and the family finances suffered throughout his early years. The Reveres knew from the Bible that the love of money was the root of all evil. They also knew that the lack of it wasn’t much better.
Moxie
In which our hero grows up, learns his ABCs along with his father’s trade of goldsmithing, shows self-determination, and gets a whupping for going to church— all before tragedy strikes the family.
Along with academic schooling, the law mandated that Paul and his siblings be schooled in the faith. Once he’d mastered all there was to know in the world—or at least enough for the son of an artisan—Paul would have ceased formal schooling, strapped on a leather apron, and commenced apprenticeship with his dad, probably around age twelve or thirteen.
From his father, Paul would have become keen to the beauty of silver.
Foes
In which our hero launches into the troubled waters of business, learns the many frustrations of regulation and taxation, and then leaves it all behind to fight the encroaching French.
Since hitting the Boston shore, Paul Revere’s father forged his world from silver and gold. He bequeathed his son a fully functioning smithy, complete with tools, designs, molds, and customers.
Paul, who would one day become the most acclaimed goldsmith in America, was legally barred from taking up his father’s tongs and hammers. The law said that Paul had to finish his apprenticeship and strike more than a year off the calendar before he could become a legal shop owner. Had to be twenty-one for that.
Money was so tight that Paul and the family had to stretch the rent with rum, fish, and silver work for the landlord. Making do was hard, and it was going to get harder.
The British took a typically British approach: if at first you don’t succeed, enlist more men and have another go next year. Paul was part of the second assault.
Revere married Sarah on August 17, 1757, and she gave birth to little Deborah on April 8, 1758.
Friends
In which our hero hones his business acumen along with his art, experimenting with novel metallurgic methods and embellishments, while still making time for compotation and conviviality at the Green Dragon—and joining an extraordinary society of immense secrecy.
Magnetism characterized Paul Revere’s personality perhaps more than anything. There’s every indication that he loved his wife and home, but he also frequented inns and taverns, joined clubs, and befriended many people high and low. After a trying day at the trade, Paul often repaired to bastions of beer and brotherhood.
Because they provided space to meet, usually private rooms adjoining or in the floor above taprooms, political and social clubs often met in taverns—including one Paul was very soon to join, the Masons. Originally founded as a medieval trade union of stonemasons, as the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, the secretive body transmogrified into something of a gentleman’s club.
The Masonic creed held that men were naturally equal and achieved rank not through class or inheritance, but through learning and merit—a worldview that resonated within Puritan New England with its strong ethic of striving and work.
Goldsmiths were the princes of artisans. That meant they had to be trustworthy people and trusted by the people who mattered the most in their communities— people like the Hutchinsons, people with enough wealth to require their services more than occasionally. In that rare position, they tended to straddle traditional classes, bridging the working class and the leisure class.
Paul’s 1756 commission in the Massachusetts militia was addressed to “Paul Revere, Gentleman.” It’s a throwaway compliment today, but in Revere’s day gentleman was a description of social status, reserved mainly for men of land, wealth, or title. Revere was none of those things, but in the New World the social ladder was as short as it was unstable.
Revere’s membership in the Masons connected him to the men who would soon lead the resistance to overreaches of Crown and Parliament, men like Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren. He seemed to easily ingratiate himself to people of all walks. Business started to gleam.
Grudges
In which the narrative swerves afield to discover the key role that smuggling played in the discord between England and America, with special focus on the so-called and much-loathed writs of assistance and how Thomas Hutchinson came to make enemies of all the wrong men.
More than three-quarters of American tea was smuggled, and most of the smuggled stuff came from Holland.
Pox
The year 1762 begins well for our hero, but the smallpox returns and runs rampant through Boston, a ravage shortly followed by a novel tax measure that for the first time set the colonies against the imperial government.
Never locked into a particular program or way of doing business, Revere was always flexible and willing to try something new if it meant amusement, a challenge, or a paycheck. An example of all three: one customer requested, and Paul created, a silver chain for his pet squirrel.
1762 was a year for advancement, but 1763 was a different story. The war boom went bust, and Boston slowly reverted to economic bedlam, no small part of it exacerbated by England’s trade laws. In December 1763 things went from bad to disastrously worse.
The pox returned. The disease prowled through the streets and among the shops, reaching into the homes of both rich and poor.
Wars are a lot of things, none of them cheap. In the eight years between 1755 and when the peace treaty with France was finally inked in 1763, Britain’s debt ballooned by £50 million—from £72 million to £122 million.
Parliament also needed to maintain an army in their newly won territory to keep the French from getting any ideas. Ten thousand troops would cost roughly £220,000 a year. Asking Brits at home to pay for the army stationed in America, on top of all they were already paying (which was a lot), seemed out of the question, so Parliament started looking for change in the cushions, and they started poking around in the colonies.
The 1764 Sugar Act dropped the import duty on molasses—lower taxes are more likely to be paid. It’s counterintuitive, but that was a problem. As the colonists saw it, for the first time Parliament, in which they had no representation, was trying to tax them.
A pamphlet called The Rights of the British
Colonies Asserted and Proved discussed
the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or land, or houses, or ships, on
real or personal, fixed or floating property, in the colonies, is absolutely
irreconcileable with the rights of the Colonists, as British subjects, and as
men. The pamphlet asserted, “No man can take my property from me, without my
consent: If he does, he deprives me of my liberty, and makes me a slave.”
Riots
In which our hero struggles through the vagaries and vicissitudes of trade, while the Stamp Act is foisted upon the unsuspecting populace of the American colonies, prompting Bostonians to act in a manner both violent and shocking, giving birth, as it were, to the Sons of Liberty.
The Sugar Act became law in September 1764—new costs at a time when revenues were low.
Parliament had another scheme to raise funds in America. Then they cranked up the heat in the spring of 1765. The idea was to charge a fee on almost any transaction in which paper was exchanged.
Everything had to bear an official stamp, which official stamp men would sell. The fees would jump the sea to Parliament’s purse.
Paul’s friend, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew announced his opposition to the Stamp Act and fought against this political imposition with equal ferocity. The law could only be enforced, he said, “at the point of a sword,” and “no people are under religious obligation to be slaves…” He alerted friends that he would address the matter in a sermon.
On Sunday, August 25, 1765, Mayhew ascended the pulpit in his silver wig, flowing black robes, and stiff white neck bands. His finger traced down the page of the open Bible to Galatians 5:12-13, and he read, “I would they were even”—imagine his hand coming down in a chopping motion—“cut off which trouble you. For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty…”
Parties
In which the end of the Stamp Act is celebrated by great and common alike, before Paul bends his back in his trade again and all merrymaking is cut short by a grievous and untimely death.
The Stamp Act was supposed to go into effect in November 1765. Because of the sharp and organized resistance by patriots in Massachusetts and the other colonies, it never did.
Mayhew passed away on July 9, 1766. It’s impossible to imagine Revere anywhere else but in the crowd of his funeral, and he probably heard the eulogy: “friend to liberty both civil and religious.” To stave off any fading of the reverend’s memory, Revere cut an etching of Mayhew.
Boycotts
In which the confrontations between the king’s customs men and the people of Boston, including our hero, increase and intensify, while nonimportation is tried and the case against taxation is made.
If Americans benefited from British protection, they should shoulder the burden. The minority opinion was concerned that if the Americans were paying for protection, they couldn’t pay for British goods. Neither opinion factored the American concern about the propriety of taxing Americans at all—the whole taxation without representation issue hadn’t changed but was just as ignored as before.
It’s none too surprising that Revere withdrew and worshipped among more like-minded congregants. Mary received the sacrament at West Church. With Mayhew gone, the new pastor, Simeon Howard, steered the church in the radical politics and theology that separated many of the patriot leaders from the establishment loyalists.
Paul not only did business with almost anyone, but he was also quick to learn a new means for separating fellow citizens from their cash, including dentistry. Revere’s friend Joshua Brackett lodged a surgeon from England who not only practiced the trade but taught Paul. Soon enough Paul was advertising in the Boston Gazette the following:
Anyone so unfortunate as to lose their Fore-Teeth by Accident, or otherways…may have them re-placed with artificial Ones, that looks as well as the Natural, & answers the End of Speaking to all Intents. – Paul Revere, Goldsmith
Showdown
In which the patriots count themselves in the camp of radicals and the Crown responds by military imposition before Governor Bernard is knighted and his chapter closed.
Ships flanked the town, guns trained on the people. Soon the troops came ashore, boat after boat, till they all stood at Long Wharf, where, said Paul, they “Formed and Marched with insolent Parade, Drums beating, Fifes playing, and Colours flying…”
Despite talk of armed opposition, Boston gave no resistance. The situation was tense, but for respect, for fear, for self-protection, for whatever amalgam of motives, most people behaved.
Within days and weeks of the soldiers’ arrival, Sam Adams and others started dipping and scribbling, anonymously inking story upon story about soldiers abusing the populace, beating men, assaulting women, and cursing up a storm. Enough of it was true to make an impression—in Boston and in the other colonies.
Revere knew that American liberty was jeopardized by a standing army and interference by a government in which they had no representation.
Commanders wondered why they were stuck in Boston and ardently petitioned to leave. The only trouble facing the troops, it seemed, was instigated by the troops’ very presence. It was time to leave.
Skirmishes
In which our hero partakes in patriotic celebration before scoundrels strike a craven blow, after which the Masons convene and a murder unfolds on the cobbled streets of Boston.
Half of the troops were gone. It was finally time to celebrate.
The official papers recognizing the new Mason Grand Lodge arrived from Scotland. Revere was appointed the senior grand deacon, Joseph Warren the grand master. The lodge’s jurisdiction extended from Boston to “within one hundred miles of the same.”
Paul pulled in enough cash in 1769 to finally buy a house—though not enough to avoid a sizable mortgage. Paul borrowed £160 of the £214 price. It was in the same neighborhood as his shop, on North Square just a block back from Clark’s Wharf, where he continued to rent his shop. The house was old, built the previous century, but it was sturdy and spacious enough for Paul’s ever-growing family. Aside from making room for his growing family, buying a home also helped Paul’s social ascent. Several of Boston’s upper crust lived in the vicinity.
True to form in the North End, many of Paul’s new neighbors were just as common as he—a couple of tailors, a bricklayer, some merchants, mast makers, and spinsters. Another goldsmith lived in the neighborhood, Benjamin Burt. He was a patriot like Paul and a member, also like Paul, of the North End Caucus.
Massacre
In which the oil-and-water mixture of soldier and civilian turns turbulent and spills into bloody confrontations at which time our hero engraves a shocking scene of horror and shame.
For the investigation and trials, Paul drew a scene of the killings. He detailed how the troops were arrayed, standing in a semicircle, their guns pointing outward. He showed where four of the five bodies fell of the men who died. It communicated what the people of Boston felt—that the event was a deliberate act of murder.
A month following the killing on King Street, Revere also engraved a scene of the troops landing in 1768, an elaborate image that shows an ocean view of Boston, two-thirds of it, all of the North End on the right, moving across the page with part of the South End to the left. It shows eight ships arrayed in the harbor, with their guns facing the town and streams of boats bringing redcoats to shore, muskets and bayonets up, pricking the sky.
Ebb
In which the fortunes of the patriots turn and a tempest starts stirring in its proverbial pot while tragedy coils like a snake before striking the heart of our forlorn hero.
The Townshend Acts had been repealed in 1770. But the tea provisions stood. Now on March 29, 1773, the Boston Gazette reported about a bill called the Tea Act, essentially a massive financial rescue mission for the British East India Company, a private corporation of merchants whose efforts had colonized India for the Crown, similar to John Winthrop’s in Massachusetts.
Sarah—Paul’s wife of sixteen years, mother of their eight children—also died. She was thirty-seven years old.
Flow
In which our disheartened hero patches together his life, courts a fetching new love, while the events of fate tax the patriots anew, test their resolve, and force a destructive hand in Boston Harbor.
Paul struggled with life as a single father. Despite the help of both Deborahs—mother and eldest daughter—there was too much to manage.
Eleven years his junior, almost to the day, Rachel Walker came from a good family and seemed intent to make Paul a good wife. Their meeting at the North Square couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Paul was in desperate need.
In late June came news that the Tea Act bailout package had passed Parliament.
Little Isanna, the child who’d struggled since her birth in December, passed away on September 19, 1773. In the thick of grief, Paul turned ever more to Rachel. They married less than a month later, on October 10, 1773.
The first tea ship—The Dartmouth—arrived on November 28. No way the patriots were going to allow the tea to be offloaded. The town meeting affirmed their resistance with formal resolutions, insisting that the tea “should not be landed; that it should be sent back in the same bottom to the place whence it came, at all events, and that no duty should be paid on it.”
Down the streets they swarmed toward Griffin’s Wharf, dozens and dozens of men disguised as Indians, Revere in the forefront, with hundreds of townsfolk in their train, including Paul’s own thirteen-year-old son and namesake, Paul Jr.
Revere and the Mohawks boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver. Each ship had more than a hundred crates of tea in her hold, more than ninety thousand pounds of the stuff. The Indians went straight to work. They opened the hatches and hoisted the crates to the decks. Men with hatchets—crack!—busted them—crack!—open and tipped the boxes overboard, one after another after another after another. They were at it for two solid hours, but by the time they were done, nearly every ounce was brewing in the briny bay.
The job now was to alert sister colonies. In the hours that followed, Sam Adams sat down and started scribbling the news for the Committee of Correspondence, so fast he sometimes literally failed to dot i’s and cross t’s or even punctuate. “We conceived it our duty to afford you the most early advice of this interesting event by express,” penned Adams to patriot leaders in New York and Philadelphia. The news was to be carried by express. As to the express rider himself, “The bearer is chosen by the committee from a number of gentlemen, who volunteered to carry you this intelligence.” That gentleman was Revere. And over Boston Neck he flew.
Express
In which our hero, thrust into a new role, becomes known far and wide— even in lands across the stormy sea—as the messenger of the Revolution, while the Crown cracks down with merciless resolve.
To be effective, express riders had to be swift. This was Paul’s first time out. He tore up the road. Bundled against the rain and the chill winds, he never slowed as he made the two-hundred-mile trek past leafless birches and naked elms to New York.
The Boston Gazette congratulated him for delivering the news “in a shorter time than could be expected at this season of the year.”
More East India Company tea arrived. Not as much as before, but it met with the same fate, every leafy clump chucked into the harbor.
Revere was growing in stature and importance in the patriot movement. Revere rode again, this time a three-hundred-mile trek to Philadelphia to deliver the Suffolk Resolves to the Continental Congress. He arrived on September 16. The delegates read the resolves the following day before all those assembled inside Liberty Hall. They said among other things that Massachusetts owed “no obedience” to the Port Act or Massachusetts Government Act, “but that they should be rejected as the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America.”
Paul set out on the eighteenth and arrived back in Boston, Friday evening, September 23. The word he carried— the Bay Colony—had the full support of the Continental Congress.
Revere was the vital link between the patriots in Congress and those in Boston. For all his growing fame, Paul’s most famous ride was still to come.
Ride!
In which our hero plays spy before General Gage makes his move on Lexington and Concord, whereupon he sets two lights blazing in a high spire before riding to warn his compatriots and roust the sleeping countryside as dawn breaks on open war.
The Sons of Liberty, Revere among them, kept their eyes peeled. “In the Winter, towards the Spring, we frequently took Turns, two and two, to Watch the Soldiers,” he said, “By patroling the Streets all night.”
The source informed them that troops were marching that night to destroy the powder stores at Concord and to arrest Adams and Hancock at Lexington. Warren had to warn them. He sent for Revere. Revere arrived in Lexington about midnight.
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War had begun. The fighting lasted all day, the outnumbered and fatigued redcoats finally making the long march back to Boston in the afternoon. They marched for hours, all the while, militiamen sniped at them from the woods and swarmed on the beleaguered redcoats like hornets.
Betrayal
In which the patriots are exiled in their own lands and rally against the redcoats, while our hero is rejoined by his dear wife and family as the treachery of the Revolution’s first Judas is exposed.
Waiting
In which our hero fails to catch a break but ends up putting his frustrated talents to many good and profitable uses, including the making of gunpowder and cannon, while the war drags on.
In 1676 a Crown official visited Massachusetts and reported that the citizens “would make the world believe they are a free state.” It took a century to live up to the reputation, but on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia declared the independence of the colonies, including the irascible Massachusetts. On July 18, the Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony of the Town House in Boston, after which every royal insignia in town was pried off wall and beam and burned in King Street.
Penobscot
In which our hero finally finds his shining moment to apply his martial skills to the service and benefit of his country, only to discover that fate steers both ships and men in trajectories of tumult and tragedy for its own grim and indiscernible pleasures.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere led a rag-tag bunch of Massachusetts militiamen in 1776. The Contintental Navy sailed into Penobscot Bay on July 25, 1779, and initiated an amphibious assault following a difficult landing on the mainland. After some fierce fighting, Revere and 600 militiamen under the command of General Solomon Lovell found themselves just a few hundred yards away from the British fort and in striking distance to overrun the enemy. At this point, however, the patriot land and naval officers gridlocked on strategy.
The stalemate dragged on for two weeks until a British relief fleet arrived on August 13 and left the patriots pinned inside Penobscot Bay. The Americans retreated and fled up the Penobscot River to avoid capture. Revere’s men made a mad scramble into the Maine wilderness and were left to find their ways back to Boston. Hundreds of militiamen were killed or captured. The military fiasco was one of the most disastrous campaigns of the Revolution. A scapegoat was needed, and Revere was typecast for the part.
The silversmith was not popular among the troops. Revere’s aggressive command and perceived arrogance rankled many of his subordinates as well as his fellow military officers. Some used the debacle to settle old scores and accused him of insubordination, neglect of duty and cowardice.
Brigadier General Peleg Wadsworth charged Revere with disobeying orders, and shortly after he returned to Boston, he was placed under house arrest on September 6 until the failed expedition was investigated.
With his character besmirched, Revere actually pressed for a court-martial to clear his name. They were silent on his case. Revere was peeved. His military salary was on hold. His reputation and character were tarnished.
In mid-November, they finally rendered a verdict and scuttled the more ridiculous charges against him but held him accountable for disputing Wadsworth’s order and said that he was “not wholly justifiable” in returning to Boston without orders. Revere thought he was still wronged and in January 1780 pushed for a proper court-martial. No go. He pushed again in March. A court-martial was granted but never called.
While he’d finally been granted his back rations, Paul was maintaining a family of twelve in a depressed wartime economy with a sullied name. It was tough going. In May he moved his family out of the North End home and rented it out to make ends meet.
With a timely arrangement between the French and Americans, Cornwallis met a match he could not best and was forced to surrender at Yorktown, effectively ending hostilities in the fall of 1781 and beginning the long process of negotiating the peace. The war was over. The Americans had won. Back in Boston, out of the blue, in February 1783 the court-martial met and reviewed Paul’s case. Because Revere did, after rebuffing Wadsworth, eventually comply with his order, the court-martial acquitted him of this charge.
In short, Revere had done no wrong. He was vindicated.
Founding
In which our hero, fresh from restoring his good name, launches again into the uncertain and choppy waters of commerce and industry only to succeed in ways beyond reckoning, establishing himself as one of the new nation’s first industrialists.
Revere took that new energy and released it in a surge of creativity and invention, developing, adopting, and adapting new technologies; embarking on new trades and new ventures; grabbing every lever, using every edge, maneuvering every advantage he could find or make to expand his business, better his station, and improve his family’s lot.
Revere’s shop years are divided into two periods, 1761–75 and 1779–97. Just looking at silver objects like flatware, tea and coffee sets, and personal items such as buckles, buttons, and thimbles, in the first period his output was significant, some 1,145 total items. But in the second, Revere’s output of the same jumped 368 percent—4,210 such objects.
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As his financial situation improved, so did the lot of his children. His older children, like daughters Deborah and Frances and son Paul Jr., all married in the 1780s and gave Paul and Rachel a string of grandchildren in quick succession. And Paul and Rachel were far from finished; they had five more children in the same period.
Paul became a founder of a different sort. He opened Boston’s first bronze and iron foundry in North Boston and started pumping out hammers, anvils, nails, spikes, bolts, and other hardware, even cannons, which he had learned about casting during the war.
Between 1792 and 1828, Revere and Son (as the business was called when he brought in Joseph Warren) cast 398 bells for churches, ships, plantations, and more. It’s no stretch to say that Revere’s bells were heard around the world. His timing couldn’t have been better. It took about twenty years for postwar trade (and with it the shipbuilding industry) to really rebound.
One Massachusetts shipyard between 1799 and 1801 averaged twenty-three new ships a year. Paul’s foundry was able to outfit ships galore with all manner of iron, brass, and copper fittings.
In a meeting called for April 16, 1795—almost twenty years to the day after his famous ride—the artisans elected officers and chose Paul as the president of the group.
There is no greater destroyer of wealth than misguided government. The only antidote short of revolution was vigorous political activism and even more vigorous entrepreneurial effort. Paul was handy at both, but now in his old age his strength lay more in the latter.
Departures
In which our hero is laid to rest in hope of the resurrection, saying before his death, “In my last Stage, how blest am I . . .” and loved and admired by many after his passing.
In 1811, at age seventy-six, Paul Revere finally retired from business and handed the reins to his son Joseph Warren Revere.
Sarah bore him eight children, Rachel the same. Paul outlived most of his “little lambs.”
Not even Paul’s oldest boy, Paul Jr., made it beyond. The boy who cared for the family when dad was out on express rides, who guarded the house during the British occupation, who served in the Massachusetts militia with his father, who ran and operated the family silversmith shop, died of tuberculosis in January 1813. Then the greatest pain of all: the gentle and capable Rachel Revere, Paul’s constant companion, succumbed to a brief but powerful illness and closed her eyes for the last time June 26, 1813.
Revere died on May 10, 1818 at the age of eighty-three.
The newspapermen were quick to their pens. “During his protracted life, his activity in business and benevolence, the vigor of his mind, and the strength of his constitution were unabated,” ran one of many notices. “Seldom has the tomb closed upon a life so honorable and useful.”
Consider what you can learn from the Revolutionary Paul Revere today—on the 245th anniversary of his famous Midnight Ride—as you continue to shoot for the stars!