Hyping the Boston Massacre

Dear Readers:  For this month’s Mr. History, I offer a recent e-mail exchange between a friend and me.  Maybe this is why not a lot of friends send me e-mails.

Hi Mike.  I recently took the Freedom Trail tour in Boston with my son’s third grade class.  We learned that when Sam Adams and Paul Revere collaborated to produce that famous engraving of the Boston Massacre, these champions of liberty took a few liberties of their own with their depiction of the event.  Were two of America’s founding fathers also founding fathers of tabloid journalism?

From: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
To: Tina O’Rourke
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 9:18 AM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

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Great question, Tina!  Revere’s engraving is only part of the fascinating story of how the press was a significant factor in the Revolution.  But it’s important to understand that Revere and Adams didn’t collaborate on the famous engraving.  And you’ll have to be patient with me; I just returned from a long vacation in Hawaii and am far from focused.  Right now I’m sipping a mai tai and wearing a grass skirt.

From: Tina O’Rourke
To: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 9:32 AM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

Please tell me there are no coconuts involved in that outfit.  Okay, I know how long-winded a couple of mai tai’s can make you — pretty soon we’ll be off on the importation of rum during colonial times and I’ll never get an answer to my actual question.

From: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
To: Tina O’Rourke
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 11:18 AM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

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Tina, all I hear is “keep talking.”  For starters, what became known as the “Boston Massacre” was really more of a riot with tragic consequences, and responsibility for the event probably rests on both the royal authorities and the colonials.  British troops arrived in Boston in October, 1768, to help enforce the Townshend Acts and to ensure the safety of Customs officers.  Hostility between the soldiers and Bostonians soon developed; though the British troops saw themselves as enforcers of Parliament’s laws, some Bostonians considered them an occupation force.  Brawls between soldiers and citizens became frequent, and began reaching a crescendo in early 1770.  On Friday March 2, 30 soldiers and 14 workers brawled at a South End ropewalk, and other fights occurred throughout the weekend.  By Monday, March 5, tensions were high.  That evening, the British sentry outside the Customs House on King Street overheard a teenage barber’s apprentice named Edward Garrick speaking disrespectfully to a British officer.  The sentry, Private Hugh White, whacked the boy on the head with his musket.  Garrick went for help and someone rang church bells, which was usually the alarm for a fire, and people poured into the streets.  Soon a crowd of Bostonians gathered around Pvt. White, who was reinforced by a squad of 6 soldiers and Captain Thomas Preston.   More than one person, including Preston, tried to gain control of the rapidly escalating situation but one soldier, Pvt. Hugh Montgomery, was knocked to the ground.  Montgomery scrambled to his feet, fired his musket into the crowd out of fear and confusion, and possibly yelled the command “fire!”  Six other soldiers fired right after him.  Three citizens were killed outright and 8 were wounded, 2 of whom later died.

Some Bostonians quickly sought to influence opinions to ensure that blame landed on royal shoulders, especially the Customs service for requesting the presence of troops in the first place.  Within three weeks, Boston artist Henry Pelham created a line drawing of the shooting that he titled, “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or, the Bloody Massacre.” Pelham gave a copy to Paul Revere, possibly to have it rendered into an engraving for printing.  But at some point, possibly because Pelham still had not put his engraving on sale, Revere copied Pelham’s design and published his own.  Pelham’s artistry was a bit better but the two engravings are amazingly similar and have purposefully strong imagery.  Both artists showed the British soldiers firing into the crowd with sinister intent, instead of the panicked shots that actually occurred.  The “Butcher’s Hall” sign prominently shown above the soldiers and the depiction of someone shooting from a Customs House window were attacks on the Customs service, though the testimony about someone shooting from inside the Customs House was later discredited.  In the background, the Massachusetts State House, called the Town House at the time, looms over the scene as a symbol of what Pelham and Revere considered the correct civil authority – the colonial government.  The citizens are shown as a peaceful crowd, and there is no sign of the snow and ice that blanketed Boston that night.  To drive the point home, Revere titled his version “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston, on March 5th, 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt” which was an indictment so clear that anyone, even the most bleary-eyed, ale-sodden tavern customers, could not miss it.

All of this makes Revere’s (and Pelham’s) print a classic, well-thought out propaganda piece designed to sway public opinion to fault the soldiers and Customs officials for the shooting.  So yes, Revere did take some liberties with the image, but that was because he intended it as a political statement, not a historical record.  But probably the biggest liberty he took was copying it from Pelham.  Once Revere’s print went on sale March 26, Pelham wrote to Revere and basically said, “Hey; I entrusted my drawing to you, and you stole it.  Not cool.”  I’m paraphrasing of course.  But don’t be too harsh on Revere.  Copying like this was not uncommon in the 18th century, and Pelham’s complaint was really about his lost sales, not lost artistry.

From: Tina O’Rourke
To: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 11:52 AM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

Interesting but I’m confused. You called Revere’s engraving a “propaganda piece.” Does that mean it wasn’t the beginning of tabloid journalism?

From: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
To: Tina O’Rourke
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 12:18 PM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

I don’t think we can call Revere’s print tabloid journalism.  The term “tabloid” emerged in the 1880’s, it first referred to small pharmaceuticals, and evolved to be associated with newspapers printed on half-sheets that featured racy stories.  But some of the press coverage of the “Massacre” certainly featured strong imagery designed to evoke an emotional response from readers.  For example, the Boston Gazette published a black-bordered memorial issue about the “Massacre,” and Revere added to the issue with a depiction of coffins for the dead victims, complete with skulls and crossbones and the initials of the deceased.  So I think we can consider Revere and others as practitioners of sensationalist journalism.

Sensationalism in American newspapers was nothing new in 1770.  The Boston News-Letter, for example, the first regularly-printed newspaper in America that began in 1704, printed news from Europe and the colonies but didn’t mind raising the heart rates of readers with thrilling accounts of colonial battles with pirates and Native American tribes.  Such sensationalism continued as the American press developed – readers always loved gossip and stories about the royal courts – but the presence of British troops in Boston pushed it to a new level.  Within a month of the arrival of British soldiers in 1768, anonymous writers in Boston began crafting one-sided reports designed to portray the Redcoats as lewd, brutal oppressors; fighting, drunkenness, assaults on women, and – worst of all in Puritan New England – disrespect of the Sabbath and blasphemies.  Captured weekly in articles titled the Journal of the Times or Journal of Daily Occurrences, these inflammatory pieces first appeared in New York City newspapers, then in Boston itself, and then throughout the American colonies and even London.  The Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts at the time, Thomas Hutchinson, called the Journals nine tenths “absolutely false or grossly misrepresented” though we should also consider his probable bias as a royal authority.  Some colonials disagreed with how the Journals portrayed the soldiers, and like in almost any time of conflict, both sides pointed out poor behavior by their opponents while often ignoring their own.  But the sensationalist Journal was an effective propaganda tool.

From: Tina O’Rourke
To: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 12:56 PM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

Okay, time to ditch the grass skirt, put your pants back on and return to your regular territory.  What role did Samuel Adams play in all this?

From: Michael “Mr. History” Schellhammer
To: Tina O’Rourke
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 1:55 PM
Subject: RE: Boston Massacre

I don’t know where my pants are.  It is likely that Samuel Adams was one of several of the anonymous writers of Journal of Occurrences entries, though definitive proof of that is elusive.

However Adams probably sought to gain political advantage from the Massacre.  After a March 6 town meeting where Bostonians agreed that the British soldiers must leave Boston, Adams was part of the delegation to Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was succeeding Bernard, which demanded the departure of British troops.  He was probably one of the organizers of an ornate and somber public funeral for the Massacre victims that took place on March 8.  He may also have been involved in the decision to appoint a committee to collect testimony from witnesses to the Massacre.  Beginning March 13, the committee and justices of the peace began taking the depositions of 96 witnesses that offered testimony under oath.  Though there was no cross-examination, in general their accounts were most likely sincere.  The committee captured the testimonies in a pamphlet titled, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March, 1770, by Soldiers of the 29th Regiment.  You can probably figure out that the account was not favorable towards royal authorities.  A Boston town meeting voted to prohibit local sale of the Short Narrative to preclude influencing potential jurors for the projected trial of the soldiers, but the pamphlet was distributed to Britain and the other colonies.  An anonymous London author later produced another pamphlet based on testimonies from the soldiers and some Bostonians.  Called A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston in New England, the pamphlet was friendlier towards royal authorities.  But by then the Short Narrative was already in distribution, and whether we term it sensationalist press or propaganda, the colonists scored the first win in this battle for public opinion.

By the way coconuts are part of my outfit.  And I look great.

There is much more to the Boston Massacre and how the American press influenced the Revolution.  To read up on this yourself, check out, The Boston Massacre, by Robert Allison, Samuel Adams: A Life, by Ira Stoll, or The Early American Press, 1690-1783, by William David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams.  You can see Henry Pelham’s engraving and read some great commentary on the Boston Massacre at the website, “Boston 1775” at: http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2009/03/henry-pelham-complains-to-paul-revere.html