Paul Revere
Paul Revere rode to Lexington on the night of 18 April 1775 and was famous for it only after Longfellow. He was a Boston silversmith, the son of a Huguenot immigrant, and one of the best in the colonies - the work survives and is still the standard of American colonial silver. He was also an engraver who produced propaganda, and his print of the Boston Massacre, copied from another artist and showing Captain Preston ordering a disciplined volley into unarmed civilians, is what most people know of that night; the jury that acquitted Preston did not believe it. He was a courier for the Boston committees for years before 1775, riding to New York and Philadelphia with news of the Tea Party and the Port Act. On the night of 18 April, warned that the regulars were marching to Concord, he had two lanterns hung in the Old North steeple as the prearranged signal to Charlestown, was rowed across the Charles under the guns of a warship, and rode to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams. He was stopped by a British patrol on the road to Concord; William Dawes and Samuel Prescott were riding too, and Prescott was the one who got through. His war afterwards was undistinguished, ending in a court-martial over the failed Penobscot expedition, of which he was cleared. He went back to metal and built the first copper-rolling mill in America, which sheathed the hull of the Constitution and the dome of the State House. The poem was written in 1860, on the eve of another war, and it has him arrive in Concord, which he did not. Longfellow wanted a hero, and the one he made has outlasted the correction.
- Lived: 1735 CE – 1818 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: craftsman, revolutionary
