Paul Revere's Ride Read online

  To reconstruct that sequence of happenings, the best and only instrument is narrative. Whatever one might think of Paul Revere’s ride as myth and symbol, most people will agree it is a wonderful story. Edmund Morgan observes that the midnight ride is one of the rare historical events that respect the Aristotelian unities of time and place and action. For dramatic intensity few fictional contrivances can hope to match it.

  This book seeks to tell that story. Its purpose is to return to the primary sources, to study what actually happened, to put Paul Revere on his horse again, to take the midnight ride seriously as an historical event, to suspend fashionable attitudes of disbelief toward an authentic American hero, and to move beyond the prevailing posture of contempt for a major British leader. Most of all, it is to study both Paul Revere and Thomas Gage with sympathy and genuine respect.

  To do those things is to discover that we have much to learn from these half-remembered men—a set of truths that our generation has lost or forgotten. In their different ways, they knew that to be free is to choose. The history of a free people is a history of hard choices. In that respect, when Paul Revere alarmed the Massachusetts countryside, he was carrying a message for us.

  Paul Revere’s Ride

  Paul Revere

  A portrait by John Singleton Copley, circa 1770 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

  PAUL REVERE’S AMERICA

  The Patriot Rider’s Road to Revolution

  Town born! Turn out!

  —Boston street cry, 1770

  IN OUR MIND’S EYE we tend to see Paul Revere at a distance, mounted on horseback, galloping through the dark of night. Often we see him in silhouette. His head is turned away from us, and his features are hidden beneath a large cocked hat. Sometimes even his body is lost in the billowing folds of an old fashioned riding coat. The image is familiar, but strangely indistinct.

  Those who actually knew Paul Revere remembered him in a very different way, as a distinctive individual of strong character and vibrant personality. We might meet the man of their acquaintance in a portrait by his fellow townsman John Singleton Copley. The canvas introduces us to Paul Revere at about the age of thirty-five, circa 1770. The painter has caught him in an unbuttoned moment, sitting in his shirtsleeves, concentrating on his work. Scattered before him are the specialized tools of an 18th-century silversmith: two etching burins, a steel engraving needle, and a hammering pillow beneath his arm. With one hand he holds an unfinished silver teapot of elegant proportions. With the other he rubs his chin as he contemplates the completion of his work.

  The portrait is the image of an artisan, but no ordinary artisan. His shirt is plain and simple, but it is handsomely cut from fine linen. His open vest is relaxed and practical, but it is tailored in bottle-green velvet and its buttons are solid gold. His work table is functional and unadorned, but its top is walnut or perhaps mahogany, and it is polished to a mirror finish. He is a mechanic in the 18th-century sense of a man who makes things with his hands, but no ordinary things. From raw lumps of metal he creates immortal works of art.

  The man himself is of middling height, neither tall nor short. He is strong and stocky, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, muscular arms and powerful wrists. In his middle thirties, he is beginning to put on weight. The face is round and fleshy, but there is a sense of seriousness in his high forehead and strength in his prominent chin. His dark hair is neatly dressed in the austere, old-fashioned style that gave his English Puritan ancestors the name of Roundheads, but his features have a sensual air that calls to mind his French forebears. The eyes are deep chestnut brown, and their high-arched brows give the face a permanently quizzical expression. The gaze is clear and very direct. It is the searching look of an intelligent observer who sees much and misses little; the steady look of an independent man.

  On its surface the painting creates an image of simplicity. But as we begin to study it, the surfaces turn into mirrors and what seems at first sight to be a simple likeness becomes a reflective composition of surprising complexity. The polished table picks up the image of the workman. The gleaming teapot mirrors the gifted fingers that made it. We look more closely, and discover that the silver bowl reflects a bright rectangular window that opens outward on the town of Boston. The artisan looks distantly toward that window and his community in a “reflective” mood, even as he himself is reflected in his work. As we stand before the painting, its glossy surface begins to reflect us as well. It throws back at us the lights and shadows of our own world.

  To learn more about Paul Revere is to discover that the artist has brilliantly captured his subject in that complex web of reflections. This 18th-century Boston silversmith was very much a product of his time and place. For all of his Huguenot origins, Paul Revere was a New England Yankee to the very bottom of his Boston riding boots. If we can see him in Copley’s painting, we can also hear him speak in the eccentric way he spelled his words. His spelling tells us that Paul Revere talked with a harsh, nasal New England twang. His strong Yankee accent derived from a family of East Anglian dialects that came to Boston in the 17th century, and can still be faintly heard today.

  When Paul Revere’s friends wrote in defense of their cherished charter rights, they spelled “charter” as chattaer, with two t’sand one r, and probably pronounced it with no r at all. All his life Paul Revere spelled “get” as git. His mother’s maiden name of Hitchborn was written Hitchbon in the town of Boston, which was pronounced Bast’n. His friends wrote mash for “marsh” and want for “weren’t,” hull for “whole” and foller for “follow,” sarve for “serve” and acummin for “coming.” They favored biblical cadences such as “we there abode” and homely expressions such as “something wet and misty.” This was the folk-speech of an Anglo-American culture that was already six generations old by 1775, and deeply rooted in Paul Revere’s New England. 1

  But in another way, the provincial ring of Paul Revere’s Yankee speech could mislead us. Just as in the surfaces and subtle depths of Copley’s painting, there was more to this man than met the ear. His simple New England twang belied a remarkable complexity of character and culture—the complexity of the nation that he helped to create. Paul Revere was half French and half English, and always entirely American. He was second-generation American on one side, and old-stock American on the other, and cherished both beginnings. He was the product of a Puritan City on a Hill and a lusty, brawling Atlantic seaport, both in the same American town. He thought of himself as an artisan and a gentleman without the slightest sense of contradiction—a new American attitude toward class. He was a man on the make, consumed with personal ambition; and yet he was devoted to his community. He believed passionately in the rule of law, but he assaulted his own kinsman, and did not hesitate to take the law into his own hands. He helped to start a revolution, but his purpose was to resist change and to preserve the values of the past. He was Tocqueville’s American archetype, the “venturous conservative,” consumed with restless energy and much attracted to risk, but never questioning the great ideas in which he always believed. His ideas were a classic example of what Gunnar Myrdal has called the American creed: “conservative in fundamental principles … but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”

  His temperament was as American as his ideas. Like many of his countrymen he was a moralist and also something of a hedonist—a man who sought the path of virtue but enjoyed the pleasures of the world. He suffered deeply from the slings of fortune, and yet he remained an incurable American optimist, even an optimistic fatalist. His complex identities were a source of happiness and fulfillment to him—not of frustration or despair. Paul Revere was many things and one thing, quintessentialy American.

  The story of this American life begins 3000 miles away, on the small island of Guernsey in the English Channel. The year was 1715. Peace had recently returned to Europe after a long war, and the sea lanes were open again. On the isle of Guernsey, a small French lad named Apollos Rivoire, twel
ve years old, was taken by his uncle to the harbor of St. Peter Port. He was put aboard a ship, and sent alone to make his fortune in America.

  Like so many immigrants who came before and after him, this child was a religious refugee. He was from a family of French Huguenots, and had been born in the parish of Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, thirty-eight miles east of Bordeaux in the valley of the Gironde. That region had been a hotbed of French Calvinism until the cruel Catholic persecutions of Louis XIV. Some of the Calvinist Rivoire family were forcibly converted to the Roman Church. Others fled abroad—among them young Apollos Rivoire, who was sent to his uncle Simon Rivoire in Guernsey, and later bound as an apprentice to an elderly silversmith in Calvinist New England, where many Huguenots were finding sanctuary. 2

  Apollos Rivoire sailed to Boston on November 15, 1715, six days before his thirteenth birthday. He entered the shop of a gifted Yankee artisan, and showed a rare talent in his craft. As more of his work has come to light, experts have studied it with growing respect. A small token of his skill is a set of tiny sleeve buttons that survives today in an American museum. Their delicate tactile beauty has a grace and refinement and sensuality that set them apart from the often austere art of Puritan New England. They are among the finest gold work that was done in British America. 3

  In 1722, his master died. Apollos Rivoire bought his freedom from the estate for forty pounds, and set himself up as a goldsmith in Boston. It was not easy to get started. At least three times he was in court for debts he could not pay. 4 Another problem was his name, which did not roll easily off Yankee tongues. After it was mangled into Reviere, Reveire, Reverie, and even Rwoire, the young immigrant changed it to Revere, “merely on account that the bumpkins pronounce it easier,” his son later explained. Paul Revere was a self-made name for a self-made man, in the bright new world of British America. 5

  Like many another French Huguenot, this young immigrant moved freely among New England Puritans who shared his Calvinist faith. But the two cultures were not the same, as Apollos Rivoire discovered when the first Christmas came. French Huguenots celebrated the joy of Christ’s birth with a sensuous feast that shocked the conscience of New England. Puritans sternly forbade Christmas revels, which they regarded as pagan indulgence, and proscribed even the word Christmas because they believed that every day belonged to Christ. In 1699, Boston magistrate Samuel Sewall reprimanded a townsman for “partaking with the French Church on the 25 [of] December on account of its being Christmas-day, as they abusively call it.” 6

  These artifacts testify to the extraordinary skill and creativity of Apollos Rivoire, the father and teacher of Paul Revere. The small sleeve buttons (made circa 1730) are among the finest surviving gold work ever done in British America. Their delicate floral pattern and swirling leaf border are common design motifs of the period, but their deceptively simple shape and proportions are very distinctive, and exceptionally difficult to manufacture. The various elements are brought together in a design that combines vitality and symmetry with high success. In the same manner, the silver tankard above (made by Apollos Rivoire circa 1750) develops the conventional designs of English craftsmanship with a distinctive flair that was unique to its gifted maker. The result is an extraordinary synthesis of refinement and strength. (Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Henry Francis Dupont Winterthur Museum).

  Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, Huguenots and Puritans intermarried at a rapid rate. Of all French weddings in Boston before 1750, no fewer than 88 percent were to an English spouse. One of these mixed marriages was that of Apollos Rivoire. In 1729 he married a Yankee girl named Deborah Hitchborn and became part of her large family, which supplied the other side of Paul Revere’s inheritance. 7

  The history of the Boston Hitchborns is a classic American saga. The founder was Deborah’s great-grandfather, David Hitch-born, who came to New England from old Boston in Lincolnshire during the Puritan Great Migration. He appears to have been a servant of humble rank and restless disposition. For some unknown offence, a stern Puritan magistrate sentenced him to wear an iron collar “till the court please, and serve his master.” 8

  The second generation of Hitchborns left servitude behind and became their own masters—still very poor, but proud and independent. The third generation were people of modest property and standing; among them was Thomas Hitchborn, proprietor of Hitchborn wharf and owner of a lucrative liquor license that allowed him to sell Yankee rum to seamen and artisans on the waterfront. The fourth generation were solid and respectable Boston burghers; they included Thomas Hitchborn’s daughter Deborah (1704-77), a godfearing Yankee girl who married the gifted Huguenot goldsmith Apollos Rivoire, owned the Puritan Covenant in Boston’s New Brick Church, and raised her children in the old New England way. The fifth generation began with her eldest surviving son, the patriot Paul Revere, who was baptized in Boston on December 22, 1734. 9

  Paul Revere grew up among the Hitchborn family—he had no other in America. His playmates were his nine Hitchborn cousins. When the time came to baptize his own children, all were given Hitchborn family names except the patronymic Paul. He never learned to speak his father’s language. In 1786 he wrote, “I can neither read nor write French, so as to take the proper meaning,” But he cherished the emblems of his French heritage—a silver seal from the old country, a few precious papers, and the stories that his father told him. In a mysterious way, something of the spirit of France entered deep into his soul—a delight in pleasures of the senses, an ebullient passion for life, an elan in the way he lived it, and an indefinable air that set him apart from his Yankee neighbors. 10

  Boston in 1775

  A view of the North End from Beacon Hill. The large warship in the harbor is HMS Somerret, and the highest steeple is the Old North Church. Ink and watercolor draning. (Librar) of Congress)

  At the same time, he became a Yankee too. His mind and character were shaped by the established institutions of New England—family, school, church, and the town itself. Probably he learned his letters in a kitchen school where ancient Puritan dames kept order with their pudding sticks, and little Yankee children learned to recite the alphabet as if it were a prayer. At about the age of seven, he was sent to Boston’s North Writing School, famous for its stern Calvinist pedagogues who specialized in purging the old Adam from obstreperous youth. Their methods were harsh, but highly effective. Paul Revere gained a discipline of thought without losing his curiosity about the world. His teachers made him a lifelong learner; all his life it was said that he “loved his books.” 11

  In a larger sense, the town of Boston became his school, and the waterfront served as his playground. An engraving he later made of Boston’s North Battery shows three boys splashing in the harbor near his childhood home. One of them might have been young Paul Revere. 12 The Boston of his youth was very different from the city that stands on the same spot today—closer in some ways to a medieval village than to the modern metropolis of steel and glass. In 1735, Boston was a tight little town of 15,000 inhabitants, crowded onto a narrow hill-covered peninsula that sometimes became an island at high tide. From a distance the skyline of the town was dominated by its steeples. Boston had fourteen churches in 1735, all but three of them Calvinist. Despite complaints of spiritual declension by the town’s Congregational ministers, the founding vision of St. Matthew’s “City on a Hill” was still strong a century after its founding. Such was the rigor and austerity of this Puritan community that Samuel Adams called it a “Christian Sparta.” 13

  The town was not welcoming to strangers. From the mainland it could be entered only through a narrow gate across the slender isthmus called Boston Neck, or by ferry from Charlestown. On Boston Neck the first structure that greeted a traveler was a large and well-used gallows. In Charlestown, the road to the ferry led past a rusted iron cage that held the rotting bones of Mark, an African slave who had poisoned his master. The slave’s accomplice had been burned at the stake.

 
But there was also another side of Boston. This City on a Hill was a busy seaport. No part of the town was more than a few blocks from salt water. The housefronts echoed to the cry of oystermen with bags of bivalves on their shoulders, shouting “Oise, buy-ni-oise: here’s oise!” Lobstermen pushed their barrows, “always painted red within and blue without,” calling “Lob, buy Lob!” as they went along the streets. 14 On the waterfront the boys of Boston darted to and fro beneath bowsprits and mooring lines, while fishermen unloaded their catch and artisans toiled at their maritime trades. Seamen in short jackets strolled from one tavern to the next, and prostitutes beckoned from alleys and doorways. “No town of its size could turn out more whores than this town could,” one 18th-century visitor marveled. All this was part of the education of Paul Revere. 15

  Inside Boston’s North End where Paul Revere lived most of his life, visitors found themselves in a maze of crooked streets and close-built brick and wooden houses, with weather-blackened clapboards and heavy forbidding doors. The inhabitants were closely related by blood and marriage, intensely suspicious of strangers, and firmly set in their ancestral ways. In time of danger, an ancient cry would ring through the streets: “Town born! Turn out!” 16

  Even as a child, Paul Revere entered into Boston habits. Near his house was a handsome brick church, variously called Christ Church, North Church, or the Eight Bell Church, after its carillon of English bells. One bell was inscribed “We are the first ring of bells cast for the British Empire in North America AR Ano 1744.” 17 The great bells fascinated the boys of the North End. In their early teens, Paul Revere and his friends founded a bell ringers’ association. They sent a petition to the Rector, proposing that “if we can have liberty from the wardens of Dr. Cuttler’s church, we will attend there once a week on evenings to ring the bells for two hours,”