Paul Revere

2 Pages 473 Words

REVERE, PAUL
1735-1818, silversmith, industrialist, and American Revolution figure. Although most familiar as the hard-riding hero of Longfellow's poem, Paul Revere's claims to historical significance rest even more on his talent as a craftsman and on his industrial perspicacity.
The son of a Huguenot silversmith, Apollos Rivoire, and Deborah Hitchbourn, Revere received a rudimentary "writing-school" education before turning to his father's trade. Upon the latter's death, Paul at nineteen assumed artistic responsibility for the family's shop. Over the next twenty years, he became one of the preeminent American goldsmiths - a term that encompassed every phase of the eighteenth-century precious-metals craftsman's art. Besides silver bowls, utensils, pots, and flatware (many of which are museum pieces today), Revere and his apprentices and journeymen turned out a variety of engravings: pictures, cartoons, calling cards, bookplates, tradesmen's bills, and even music. As a sideline, he practiced what passed for dentistry in his day, developing as well a rudimentary form of orthodontia.
From the beginning, Revere participated in public affairs. During the French and Indian War, Richard Gridley (who had commanded the artillery at the siege of Louisburg and was later to direct the American digging-in at Bunker Hill) organized an artillery regiment. Commissioned a second lieutenant, Revere participated during 1756 in the failed expedition against Crown Point.
Revere became a Freemason in 1760, and soon joined two more overtly political groups - the Sons of Liberty and the North End Caucus. Through them, he participated in Samuel Adams's gradually accelerating movement toward independence, serving primarily as a courier and an engraver of propaganda pictures, the two best-known examples of which are a "view" of British ships landing troops in 1768 and a wildly inaccurate cartoon depicting the Boston Massacre of 1770.
The highlight of hi...