Given that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born barely 20 years after the victory at Yorktown, and given that “Paul Revere’s Ride” first appeared in The Atlantic on the same day that the South Carolina state convention voted to secede, the definition of an American is central to Longfellow’s poem.

Longfellow offers Paul Revere as the paragon of what it means to be a real American. A diligent researcher for all of his national epics, Longfellow took generous license with the historical figure of Boston’s colonial silversmith to fashion a representative American at the very time his nation was coming apart. Paul Revere emerges as determined to stand up to the British despite the longshot odds of the upstart colonial insurgency actually winning their independence. Scrappy, idealistic, self-sacrificing, independent, resourceful, and committed to the cause of American freedom, Paul Revere reminds Longfellow’s nation as it began the uncertain movement into civil war that again history was calling upon patriots to rise to the challenge of this “hour of darkness and peril and need” (Line 127). Longfellow does not weigh down the character of Paul Revere with any backstory—no mention is made, for instance, of Revere’s status as a respected silversmith. Paul Revere is larger than life, less a person and more an embodiment of a nation’s ideals.