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Paul Revere Biography

Revolutionary War Figure

Paul Revere was a hero of the American Revolutionary War, famous for his "midnight ride" of 1775, during which he sounded the alarm that British forces were moving against the colonists. His fame was galvanized in the late 19th century, thanks to the poem "Paul Revere's Ride," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. An accomplished gold and silversmith, Revere was a Boston artisan who was smack in the middle of pre-revolutionary action. One of his many associations was as a rider for the Committee of Correspondence, and between 1773 and 1775 Revere relayed messages about British troop movements from Boston to Philadelphia, New York and Hartford. When British general Thomas Gage was about to move against revolutionary-minded colonists in Massachusetts, Revere and William Dawes were given the task of alerting the colonist rebels. Revere's efforts that night, his services during the war for independence and his later success as a businessman in Boston and Canton, Massachusetts made him a local hero. Longfellow's poem, published nationally in 1861, made Revere a legendary figure whose story had to be corrected a century later. He never said "the British are coming!" (he called them "regulars"), and he and Dawes (and latecomer patriot, Dr. Samuel Prescott) were captured by the British and detained -- but Dawes and Prescott escaped and got the word out. Nonetheless, Revere is remembered for his active role in events preceding the Revolutionary War, and for his metalworking talent and entrepreneurial savvy.

Extra credit: According to an advance plan, a two-lantern signal in Boston's Christ Church (known as the Old North Church) communicated that Gage's forces were advancing by water, not land. Thanks to Longfellow's poem, generations of American schoolchildren later learned the rebels' simple lantern code: "One if by land, and two if by sea"... It has long been suggested -- without concrete proof -- that an informer let the American patriots know of the British army's intentions, and that it may have been Margaret Kemble Gage, the British commander's American-born wife... Many sources give Revere's birthdate as 1 January 1735, but most historians these days agree he was probably born in late December of 1734, possibly on the 21st or 22nd.