Paul Revere's Ride (50 page)

General Gage remained in Boston for another catastrophic year. He was the British commander during the battle of the Bunker Hill, adding one more epic disaster to his long experience of defeat. Even that event did not end his career. He was reappointed to his command in August 1775, but in Boston his own officers refused to obey him. Finally, in October, he was recalled and sailed home from America, never to return. In Britain, he continued to hold the title of Royal Governor of Massachusetts even after American independence, and following Lord North’s fall from power was promoted yet again to full general. After returning to London, he was estranged from his wife. In 1787 Thomas Gage died at his London home, and was buried at Firle Place, in his beloved Sussex countryside.

Paul Revere’s life took a different path. In 1776 he joined the army with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and was made commander
of Castle William, with the urgent task of fortifying Boston against the expected British return. He desperately wanted a field command with the Continental Army and pulled every string to get one, but without result. In 1777 he complained to his old friend John Lamb, “I did expect before this to have been in the Continental Army, but do assure you I have never been taken notice of, by those whom I thought my friends, [and] am obliged to remain in this state’s service.”
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Twice during the war Paul Revere went on active service with state troops in New England. In 1778 he joined an abortive campaign against the British garrison on Rhode Island, as lieutenant-colonel of Massachusetts artillery. The following year he commanded the artillery in an ill-fated expedition by Massachusetts troops against a British fort at Penobscot Bay. The mission ended in disaster for the Americans, and led to an angry controversy in which he was deeply involved. Paul Revere’s brief military career was the one great failure in his life.
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After the war Paul Revere returned to his ruined business. His silver shop expanded rapidly, shifting from custom work to standardized production. One scholar writes that Paul Revere “played an active role in not one, but two, revolutions: the War of Independence, and the nascent industrialization of American silversmithing.”
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Revere added other lines of business with mixed success. For a time he tried his hand at selling hardware, but found that business tedious and dull, and gave it up. More interesting to his restless and curious mind was the science of metallurgy, which he began to study after the war. He wrote for help to experts abroad, telling them candidly that he did not know much about “chemistree.”
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While his son looked after the silver shop, Paul Revere taught himself to cast bell-metal, and opened a foundry in the North End for the manufacture of church bells in New England. He was just in time for a religious revival that historians call the second great awakening, and business boomed. The youngsters of the North End liked to visit Paul Revere in his bell foundry, gathering so close that he had to warn them away from the hammers and flames. Many years later, one of them remembered the old “founder,” as he now called himself, prodding them cheerfully with his silver-headed cane and telling them with a laugh, “Take care, boys! If that hammer should hit your head, you’d ring louder than these bells do!”
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He also invented new alloys and amalgams, studied the latest
European techniques, and became one of the first manufacturers in America to roll copper sheets on a large scale. Paul Revere’s copper covered the top of the new Massachusetts Statehouse, and the bottom of frigate
Constitution.
He made the boilerplate for Robert Fulton’s steamboats, and cannon for the forts and warships of the new Federal government. Later he moved his business to the rural town of Canton, where it expanded into the Revere Copper and Brass Company, one of New England’s largest manufacturing enterprises.
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Paul Revere at the age of seventy-seven in June 1813. His son Joseph Warren Revere paid the American artist Gilbert Stuart $200 for these paintings of his parents in old age. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

After the war Paul Revere also continued active in politics. He was appalled by the disorders of the postwar period, and threw his influence behind the framing of a Federal Constitution. When John Hancock and Samuel Adams were reluctant to support its ratification, Paul Revere organized the Boston mechanics into a powerful political force, and worked behind the scenes with such effect that he is commonly thought to have turned the narrow balance in a critical state. Once again, he showed his genius for being at the center of great events. His nation owes him another debt for his role in the enactment of the new government.

During the early Republic, the Whig leaders of the American
Revolution divided into two political parties. Revere’s cousin Benjamin Hitchborn became a leader of the Jeffersonian Republicans in Massachusetts. Paul Revere himself was a Federalist of the old school, strongly opposed to the growth of Jeffersonian democracy. He wrote to an old comrade, “My friend, you know I always was a warm Republican. I always deprecated Democracy as much as I did Aristocracy.”
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Rachel Revere was sixty-seven years old when she sat for this painting. She died a few weeks later on June 26, 1813. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

In old age, when young men began to wear pantaloons and top hats, Paul Revere continued to dress in knee britches and a cocked hat. In his last years he retired to a country estate next to his factory at Cantondale, surrounded by his large and growing family. More than fifty grandchildren had been born by the time of his death. Today his descendants are reckoned in thousands. When they return to visit the Revere House in Boston, the staff observes that many bear an uncanny resemblence to the portrait by John Singleton Copley.

Paul Revere died in the New England Spring, on May 10, 1818. His loss was mourned in Massachusetts as the passing of an age, but the myth and legend of his acts was only beginning its long career. Today, a long stretch of the road that he traveled on his midnight ride is a National Park. The anniversary of the ride
and battle is still kept as a public holiday called Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts and Maine. Every year since the battle itself, the event continues to be celebrated with what a 19th-century writer described as “new and old rehearsals of what occurred at the North Bridge at Concord, with the ringing of bells, the firing of salutes, the parade of military, orations, bonfires and general glorification.”
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That custom of “general glorification” is still observed in the author’s town of Wayland, the seat of the original Sudbury from which five companies of militia and minutemen marched to Concord. In some ways, the town itself has changed profoundly since 1775. Only a small minority of its inhabitants are of Yankee stock. A plurality of the church-going population is Roman Catholic, as in every county of New England. On the Boston Post Road where Ensign De Berniere stumbled through snowdrifts and the post-rider Israel Bissell carried his news of the battle, one finds today a gleaming Jewish synagogue on one side of the old highway, and a new Islamic mosque on the other.

Much has changed in this old New England town, but some things remain the same. On weekdays the people are still busy in their callings, and on Sundays the churches are as full as they were two centuries ago. The town meeting has moved to the high school
gymnasium, but still operates very much as it did in 1774, when Parliament unwisely tried to curtail it. The common schools continue to be open to “the children of all,” and the newspapers still exercise their ancestral right to rage against the government. The town has become a suburb of Boston, but it does not think of itself as subordinate to anything, and remembers its long history with fierce and stubborn pride.

Near the end of his life, Paul Revere attended a meeting of a voluntary association in Boston, and absent-mindedly left his eyeglasses behind. They were picked up by someone else and found their way back to the Paul Revere House, where they may be seen today, as if he had dropped them only a moment ago. (Paul Revere Memorial Association)

Each year, that old memory is carefully renewed. On the 19th day of every April, at the same hour when the messenger of alarm arrived in 1775, the town’s great bell is made to ring again in the night. The people of the town awaken suddenly in their beds, and listen, and remember. It is an ancient tradition in the town that the ringers should include the children, so that the rising generation will remember too. The bell itself was made by Paul Revere. Still it carries his message across the countryside.
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The Revere Family

Apollos Rivoire, the father of Paul Revere, was born in the parish of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, France, Nov. 20, 1702, and died in Boston, July 22, 1754. On June 19, 1729, he married Deborah Hitchborn, who was born in Boston on Jan. 25, 1704, and died there on May 23, 1777. Twelve children were born of this marriage:

John Revere, born Jan. 10, 1730; died Dec. 1730.

Deborah Revere, born Feb. 21, 1732; died after 1763; she married Thomas Metcalf.

Paul Revere, born Dec. 21, 1734, baptized Dec. 22, 1735; died May 10, 1818.

Frances Revere, born June 11, 1736; died before March 1763; she married Edward Calleteau.

twin sons, born 1737?; both died “young.”

Thomas Revere, baptized Aug. 27, 1738; died “young.”

Thomas Revere, born Jan. 10, 1739/40; died in military service,
ca.
Oct. 1779; he married Mary [Churchill?].

John Revere, born Oct. 2, 1741, died July 8, 1808; he was a tailor; he married (1) Anna Clemens and (2) Silence Ingerfield.

Mary Revere, born July 10, 1743; died in Boston, Dec. 27, 1801; she married (1) Edward Rose and (2) Alexander Baker