America's Hidden History by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
Amazon: B01I8EYORO
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T07:00:00+00:00

Our Warren’s there, and bold Revere

With hands to do and words to cheer.

For Liberty and laws.19

Although successful, Paul Revere came from the other end of Boston’s economic spectrum, the “mechanic” class of tradesmen, laborers, and dockworkers. He was the son of Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot immigrant who arrived in Boston at age thirteen, bound as an indentured apprentice to a New England silversmith. Expertly learning the trade, Rivoire purchased his freedom following his master’s death and set up shop as a silver and goldsmith. When New Englanders struggled with his French surname, he changed it to Revere. In 1729, he married Deborah Hitchborn, whose large Yankee family was descended from an indentured servant who had arrived during the Puritan migration. On December 21, 1734, their first son, Paul Revere, was born.

Apprenticed to his father, Revere grew up in Boston’s boisterous North End, receiving a basic education but acquiring a lifelong love of reading. His father died when he was nineteen, and Revere inherited the business. Working mostly in silver, he crafted buckles, a brandy cock for Samuel Adams, pins and other jewelry, and the tea sets and household items that now fill museum shelves. He also made frames for the miniatures painted by John Singleton Copley and learned the art of engraving and the setting of false teeth—he would later make a set for Joseph Warren. In 1757, he married Sarah Orne. After bearing eight children, she died in 1773. He remarried five months later.

Prosperous although never wealthy, Revere belonged to the colonial American version of the middle class. A regular church member and active in Boston’s civic affairs, Revere was a joiner. He had served in the militia during the French and Indian War and became an active Mason. In a fitting summary of what Freemasonry may have meant to men such as Revere, David Hackett Fischer wrote, “All his life he [Revere] kept its creed of enlightened Christianity, fraternity, harmony, reason, and community service.”20 Revere also joined the North Caucus Club, the political organization founded by Samuel Adams’ father. And in 1765, as resistance to the Stamp Act coalesced in Boston, he became a member of the newly formed Sons of Liberty. Turning his engraving skill to politics, he was an aspiring political cartoonist. But his greatest accomplishment may have been the engraving he crafted after the 1770 Boston Massacre. Showing the British soldiers firing point-blank at their prostrate victims, it was one of the most effective pieces of patriotic propaganda ever created.

With this substantial patriot resumé, Revere was eventually invited to join the Long Room Club, another secretive group that met above the print shop where the patriotic propaganda journal the Boston Gazette was published. He was now in the heart of Boston’s patriot inner sanctum, along with some of Boston’s most notable lawyers, doctors, and men of wealth. Most were products of Harvard. Lacking their education and status, Paul Revere was pulled into this tight-knit group as a link to Boston’s “street.” He became a

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