Paul Revere
- “Listen, my children, and you shall hear
- Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
- On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
- Hardly a man is now alive
- Who remembers that famous day and year.”
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every American child has or should have heard of Paul Revere’s “Midnight Ride” when he rode to let the American patriots know the British were coming. Revere had instructed Robert Newman, the sexton of the Old North Church, to send a signal by lantern to alert colonists in Charlestown as to the movements of the troops when the information became known. One lantern in the steeple would signal the army’s choice of the land route, while two lanterns would signal the route “by water” across the Charles River.
Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, c.1768–70
Paul Revere (bap. January 1, 1735 [O.S. December 22, 1734] – May 10, 1818)[1] was an American silversmith and a patriot in the American Revolution.
He was glorified after his death for his role as a messenger in the battles of Lexington and Concord, and Revere’s name and his “midnight ride” are well-known in the United States as a patriotic symbol. In his lifetime, Revere was a prosperous and prominent Boston craftsman, who helped organize an intelligence and alarm system to keep watch on the British military.
Revere later served as an officer in the Penobscot Expedition, one of the most disastrous campaigns of the American Revolutionary War, a role for which he was later exonerated. After the war, he was early to recognize the potential for large-scale manufacturing of metal.
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