Paul Revere, Bell Ringer by Kostya Kennedy

Paul Revere is most well-known for his extraordinary midnight ride, in which he said, “The British are coming! The British are coming.” Fewer people are aware though that Paul Revere was the jack of many trades, as The Ride author Kostya Kennedy shares with The History Reader below.

Paul Revere’s industriousness and professional adaptability led him to fashion several careers and handle many jobs across the span of his long life. He most famously worked as a silversmith and part-time engraver—his livelihoods around the time that he made his midnight ride in April of 1775. But Revere also dabbled for a time as a self-trained dentist (an unnerving phrase, to be sure, but the profession then was young and full of dilettantes and Revere had a steady hand). He counted Joseph Warren among his patients. Later, after a trying turn as a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts Artillery during the Revolutionary War, Revere taught himself to cast church bells and founded Revere Bells, a family company which would cast close to 400 bells over more than three decades. Some of those bells are still occasionally rung in churches today. In Bath, Maine, for example. In Groveland, Mass., in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in Woodstock, Vt.

In his 60s, Revere learned to roll copper, and the copper mill that he established in Canton, Mass., in the early 1800s would go on to provide copper sheathing to fortify American ships against the British in the War of 1812. That copper production was another critical contribution to American military success, nearly four decades after Revere’s daring ride to rouse the countryside and rally the rebels to Lexington and Concord.

The most interesting of Revere’s many working endeavors—interesting because of what it illustrates about Revere’s native temperament and because of its almost numinous foreshadowing of his singular act, the ride—is the job he got for himself at age 15, as a change-bell ringer at Boston’s Old North Church. Change-bell ringing is a particular skill. It came over to the colonies from England where it began in the seventeenth century. A group of ringers, possibly as many as 16 and rarely fewer than six, stand in a circle, each with a rope in his or her hands. Each rope is attached to a different bell mounted above, and the bells get rung in succession according to a precise, preestablished pattern, or sometimes as instructed by a leader who calls out the order of ringing in real-time. The Old North Church featured eight bells, one of which bore—and still bears—the inscription, We are the first ring of bells cast for the British Empire in North America. When Revere and the other change ringers rang those bells on a clear evening, a great part of Boston heard a waterfall of sound, a flowing pattern of discernible, individual notes that ran into the next. As best as anyone can tell, Revere and his cohorts were the first to ring those bells, or do any kind of change-ringing, on American soil.

What’s illustrative about this job is not simply that Revere was adept in learning the skill, but also his enterprise in recognizing an employment opportunity and seeking out the work. Also, most resonantly, there’s the signed covenant that Revere entered into with six other ringers, all boys of the North End and all about his age. The boys wrote out specific rules of process and behavior. They agreed that the group would never “exceed eight persons” and they determined that, “never shall be admitted a member of this society without a unanimous vote of the members.” The signers of the covenant pledged not to beg for money from anyone at Old North Church, and to always make themselves available to ring the bells when a church leader asked.  

This kind of a closed society, bound by fealty to a code and characterized by an allegiance among its members, is just the sort of society that Revere would seek out as an adult, most impactfully as a Freemason. The young bellringers were sworn to one another in the way that Revere would later be sworn to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other members of the groups and caucuses who in the late 1760s and early 1770s devised and carried out the events that led up to the Revolution.

There’s something else about Revere’s teenage job as a bellringer, and that has to do with its purpose. The peal of bells from the Old North Church told the wider community that a sermon might soon start, or that a meal might soon be served. Or that a prominent wedding or an important town meeting was soon to begin. That is to say that the act of ringing those church bells bell was, at its core and like the midnight ride then decades ahead of him, a means for Revere to alert people to something happening, to summon them to a place and to engage them in a common thought, to get the message out, to let the people know that there was a reason to prepare themselves, to gather and to act.