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Like most of his fellow St. Andrew's Masons Revere was without a deep education. He had no connection then to politics, no claim to any agency beyond the parameters of his own career and life. He was nearing thirty, thickset and purposeful in manner. Likable and reliable. Ambitious, practical, hale.

At St. Andrew's, members attained organizational status through active participation and committed effort. Revere proved unrestrained in his appetite for work and community. Over the years at St. Andrew's through the 1760s and into the 1770s, he rose swiftly through the Masonic hierarchy: apprentice, junior deacon, junior warden, senior warden, secretary, master. He was part of a committee that handled St. Andrew's purchase of the Green Dragon Tavern. He sat on a committee that wrote to Scotland to resolve some matters relating to St. Andrew's charter. For several years Revere helped arrange and execute the lodge's annual summer feast of John the Baptist. He drew up procedural regulations for members' funerals, and he drew up regulations for the dispensing of charity. He was among those members of St. Andrew's who signed bylaws that forbade swearing during meetings and that determined that members could not be "disguised in liquor." Revere was active across a range of duties, and he showed up. According to Paul Revere and Freemasonry, a 1985 book by Edith Steblecki, Revere attended 169 of 185 Masonic meetings between 1761 and 1771. The goings-on and discussions at St. Andrew's were closely held and operated in an environment dependent upon internal secrets and codes. The Masons were good at planning things, and they took care of their own.

Deep friendships formed at St. Andrew's. So did a collective spirit, a tendency toward rebellion and independence that simmered even in the years when the relationship with the Crown was in the main untroubled. That rebellious tendency came to a boil through the developments that ultimately kindled the flame for revolution: the Stamp Act of 1765, which the Crown imposed with the intention of collecting a tax on the paper the colonists used, and then the Townshend Acts of 1767, which levied a tax on imports of glass, lead, and tea. The Stamp Act was soon abolished, but the suggestion of it, the insult as many colonists felt it, had been permanently lodged. Greater unrest—letters of defiance, protests on the streets—followed the Townshend Acts, which is why, in October of 1768, four thousand British troops came ashore at the Boston docks to occupy and attempt to control the city.

Some of the troops would return home after a while, replaced by other British soldiers. Some troops deserted and began a civilian or military life among the Patriots. Some troops simply stayed on and rose in rank and never left. For the people of Boston an uncomfortable feeling touched their daily lives, a feeling that stayed with them as the months and then the years went on, the sense of being intruded upon, of being under watch. On the night of December 16, 1773, a Thursday five years after those troops docked in Boston Harbor, attendance at the Masonic meeting proved unusually sparse.

Many of the members, Revere included, were at that precise time in painted face climbing aboard British ships anchored at Griffin's Wharf—the Beaver, the Dartmouth, and the Eleanor—to protest the Crown's enforced taxes by relieving those ships of 340 chests, that is, an extraordinary forty-six tons, of black tea.

By then St. Andrew's had evolved its charter, earning the designation Massachusetts Grand Lodge. The threescore, then fourscore, members of St. Andrew's Lodge were hardly alone in their resistance to British control. They were a fraction of the many resisters in the city and in the outlying towns. Yet the lodge and its members became a vital force for thought, organization, and resolve. Along with the many tradesmen who came to St. Andrew's, and along with the familiar friends to Paul Revere—his cousin, the boatbuilder Nathaniel Hitchborn, Revere's childhood friend, now jeweler, Josiah Flagg, and others—arrived a young physician. He was Harvard educated, keen for action, and marked by intelligence, charm, and a talent for public speaking that he used to declaim upon the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts and to help inspire the colonists in their response. Revere first met the young doctor at St. Andrew's in 1761, and a few years after that a bond took hold. Over time, and in the context of the events that would define Revere in life and in death—events that would define the onset of the Revolutionary War—that doctor became as critical and influential a friend as Paul Revere ever had: Dr. Joseph Warren.

Later, Revere would think back on Warren. After the fateful days and weeks of 1775, after Warren had fallen at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later still after he, Revere, had been called upon to identify Warren's remains, Revere would recall how much Warren had meant to his life. Through the years Warren had helped shape Revere's views and his approach to the resistance. Warren, perhaps more than anyone else, had led Revere to his role and purpose as an express rider. And it was Warren who, upon learning that the Royal Army was on the move on the night of April 18, 1775, directed Revere and William Dawes on the routes they should ride out of Boston, to Lexington.

There was a gestural elegance to Warren, a fluidity to his limbs, a firmness to his trunk. He bore a fierce, unbending courage in words and deeds. By the time of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, Warren had been named a major general of the fledgling army, but he chose instead to fight alongside the common soldiers of the militia, and to fight to the very last of the British assault even as others among the Patriots began the retreat. He took a musket ball between his eyes and was tossed by the redcoats into a shallow grave. Two years later Revere named his newborn son Joseph Warren Revere.