Paul Revere (1734–1818) was an American silversmith, engraver, and patriot best known for his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, when he carried word from Boston to Lexington that British regulars were marching to seize colonial arms and arrest revolutionary leaders—an alarm that helped mobilize the militia for the battles of Lexington and Concord the following morning. Born in Boston to a French Huguenot immigrant father, Revere trained in the family silversmithing business and became one of the most skilled craftsmen of his era, while also producing political engravings, including a widely circulated and propagandistic depiction of the Boston Massacre. He was an active member of the Sons of Liberty, participated in the Boston Tea Party, and served as a principal express rider for Boston's revolutionary committees before and during the war, later commanding an artillery regiment in the disastrous Penobscot Expedition of 1779. After the Revolution, he expanded his trade into industrial manufacturing, casting church bells and cannon and establishing the first successful copper rolling mill in the United States, which supplied sheathing for naval vessels including the USS Constitution. Though a respected figure in his lifetime, his enduring fame owes much to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem "Paul Revere's Ride," which dramatized—and considerably mythologized—the events of that April night.
