Revere had a fondness for the rules and accountabilities of such voluntary societies as the bell ringers. He would go on to belong to many of them, most significantly the Masons, who were integral to the devising and organizing of the early acts of resistance to British rule and who were equally integral to the maintenance of trust and understanding among its members when events were engineered and then unfolded in the preamble and onset of the Revolutionary War.
It was still later in his life, in 1792, when Paul Revere was no longer in the thick of things, when he was fifty-seven years old and still as industrious as any man, that he embarked on a business casting church bells, the very first church bells cast in America. Revere's earliest bells gave a crude, unpolished sound, but over time the bells he cast would become known for their excellence of shape and for the clear, high quality of their peal. Revere and his son Joseph Warren Revere oversaw the casting of hundreds of bells during the later years of Paul's life. Scores of them still ring from church belfries in New England towns and villages today.
The ringing of the bells at the Old North Church during the time of Paul Revere's childhood had various meanings. The boys rang to signify the end of Sunday services and the nearing of the Sunday meal. They rang to announce a wedding or a birth or to honor a notable death. The bells sounded over the streets where the boys and their families lived, and the shops where they worked and the waters where they would sometimes swim. Ringing a bell like this was, finally, a means 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 them know that there was a reason to prepare themselves, to gather and to act.
CHAPTER THREE
KINSHIP
In the years after Paul Revere's father died, and after Revere had fought a grueling and anonymous turn with the British army against French forces in the French and Indian War, in the years when he and Sarah were newly married and their first children were born, he joined the Ancient Order of Masons, the Freemasons, and began to sharpen his view of the world and the situation around him and to determine his own aspirations. The Masons met on the first floor of the Green Dragon Tavern, on Union Street by the working shores of Mill Pond.
The members sat at long tables, and in rows of chairs, and when the meetings ended and you stepped out into the night, you could smell the salted air and the day's labor coming in off the pond. In summers the Masons gathered once a month from 6:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. In winters it was five until nine.
Paul's father had died suddenly, at age fifty-one, when Paul was nineteen. He was buried under a stone marker in the Old Granary grounds surrounded by the graves of his wife's family, the Hitchbourns. Apollos Rivoire had journeyed to America from a tiny, landlocked town in the southwest of France, arriving alone to the Boston docks at age thirteen, with that French name, and a French accent. He apprenticed to a silversmith and then set up a shop of his own and changed his name to Revere and advertised his work in the newspapers. He married an American woman and attended the New Brick Church, to which he gave at a level above his means. Upon his death he left behind his hardworking, can-do example and bequeathed to his son Paul, the second of nine children and the eldest boy, the silversmithing business. Paul had been his father's apprentice, and after the death he had to learn the last points of the trade on his own. A few years after he had begun to run the business professionally, Paul, at age twenty-five, came to the Masons, in part as a way to meet new people and to grow his clientele.
The masons of the Middle Ages designed and built great structures: cathedrals, castles, monasteries. They were specialists, skilled and sought after, and often they traveled straight from one job to the next. In a spirit of professional collegiality, the masons formed an order, a fraternity, that began to convene at lodges in England and Scotland. Over the decades the talk and activities at the lodges expanded beyond the challenges of stonework and evolved into a social order that provided, along with comradery, a kind of moral instruction and guidance. Beginning in the 1600s and certainly by the 1700s, the requirement, or even the expectation, that the members of the order would work in masonry disappeared.
Masonic lodges were authorized by the Grand Lodges in the United Kingdom and had operated in the colonies, in Boston and Philadelphia, since before Revere was born. The new St. Andrew's Lodge, to which Revere was in 1760 an early initiate, had been established in dissent—a workingman's alternative to the more elite, more moneyed St. John's Lodge, most of whose members (though not all) were loyal to the Crown.
The members of St. Andrew's worked as boatbuilders and sailmakers, shipwrights, gunsmiths, coopers, and painters. By and large they were men (and only men) who used their hands and who depended on a healthy maritime economy, a good flow of commerce through the ports. During meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern the lodge members discussed matters of internal governance and external industry, and they abided by clear, stated values—the most critical being that you broke no oath, and that you acted toward the benefit of your Masonic brother and to the benefit of your fellow man and woman. It was at the lodge that Revere formed alliances across the artisan and mechanic communities and where he built a strong and respected position among the men who plied those trades. The Green Dragon Tavern sat less than a quarter of a mile from where Revere lived and worked.
