The Perfidious Benjamin Church and Paul Revere - Journal of the American Revolution

For many years Paul Revere was not prominent in the history of the Revolutionary War. Extremely versatile, he was a Massachusetts militia officer and artillery commander, a skilled artist and engraver, a caster of bells, an esteemed silversmith, and an industrialized coppersmith.[1] He also was a prosthodontist and at one point a forensic dentist.[2] Revere was the principal messenger of the patriot leaders, carrying messages to patriots in New York and Philadelphia on several occasions. Later, he wrote three accounts of his ride to Lexington. Despite these firsthand accounts, Revere did not appear prominently in histories that dealt in the period until after his death in 1818. After the fiftieth anniversary of the April 19 event he began to acquire notoriety largely through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” published in Tales of a Wayside Inn in 1863.