Paul Dudley Sargent (Baptized June 23, 1745, Salem, Massachusetts – September 28, 1828 Sullivan, Maine) was a privateer and soldier in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.

It is unclear whether Sargent continued his privateering activities after the war, but he did engage in real estate speculation, successfully petitioning in 1784 to acquire an archipelago off the Maine coast including Rogues, later Roques Island,[7] which some years afterwards was transferred to the Peabody family, whose descendants the Gardners still hold it.

In 1803 Sargent played an inadvertent role in a test of the early republic's constitutionally mandated separation of powers, having been, along with William Vinal, the target of an effort by the Massachusetts General Court to strip him of his commission as Justice of the Peace for seeking to be reimbursed for expenses in amounts in excess of what was allowed.

[9] Unlike many of his business partners and relatives, Sargent left no monument of domestic architecture by Charles Bulfinch or oil portrait by John Singleton Copley or Gilbert Stuart.

A well-stocked library, frequent extended stays with family in Boston and Salem, and much visiting back and forth with French revolutionary expatriates at nearby Fontaine Leval [1] contributed to the cultivated atmosphere of the Sargent household, where Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a guest on at least one occasion.

[10] Perhaps representative of Sargent's taste, or that of any man of his times and circle, is the silver service he commissioned from Paul Revere when in funds during 1781, the tea pot being the same type as that displayed in the famous portrait of its creator by Copley.

[11] His father Epes's bookplate, engraved by the same hand, is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,[12] as is the Revere coffee pot, both displaying the Sargent coat of arms.