A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere

CROWDED AND NOISY, Boston's North End was dominated by wharves and shipyards and peopled with mariners, ropemakers, housewrights, and silversmiths, along with wealthy merchants like the Hutchinsons. Here Paul Revere, the second child and first son of Paul and Deborah Hichborn Revere, was born on December 21, 1734. His family was probably living on North Street (now Hanover) opposite Clark Street near the corner of Love Lane (now Tileston Street), where his father practiced the goldsmith's trade. In 1743 the Reveres moved to Clark's Wharf, where they rented a house or part of a house from Dr. John Clark. Young Paul grew up surrounded by the hustle and bustle of Boston's waterfront and by the numerous Hichborn clan. His world was bounded by family, the New Brick Church, the North Writing School, and a sense of his place in a stratified world.¹

Paul's father, a French Huguenot, was born Apollos Rivoire in Riocaud, France, near Bordeaux, on November 30, 1702. On November 21, 1715, Apollos left his birthplace in the center of French Protestantism to join his Uncle Simon, who had emigrated to the English Channel Island of Guernsey ten years earlier. Simon Rivoire then paid for his nephew's passage to Boston and for his apprenticeship to goldsmith John Coney. In late 1715 or early 1716, thirteen-year-old Apollos Rivoire arrived in his new home. The warehouses and wharves, the densely packed streets, and the mingled voices of ship's captains, fishermen, merchants, and tradesmen speaking a foreign language must have bewildered a young French boy from the vineyard region of Bordeaux. Still, by the early 1700s, Boston was not an entirely alien city for French Huguenots.²

In the summer of 1686, less than a year after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of

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