Imagining the Boston Massacre Imagining the Boston Massacre asks students to consider images of the one of the most important and controversial events of the Revolutionary era. This lesson invites students to examine and interpret depictions of the Boston Massacre—the deadly confrontation between Bostonians and British troops on the evening of March 5, 1770—by examining contemporary engravings of the event by Henry Pelham and Paul Revere of Boston and Jonathan Mulliken of Newburyport, Massachusetts, as well as later versions of the same image. The goals of the lesson are for students to understand the importance contemporaries attached to the event, how the event reflected and shaped colonial resistance to British authority, and how powerful images can focus popular attention and shape political views. Like the other lessons in this series, Imagining the Boston Massacre asks students to go beyond obvious questions about the literal accuracy of images to consider them as valuable sources for understanding how artists and their audiences understood the events depicted. Suggested Grade Level Middle and High School Recommended Time Two +/- fifty minute class periods Objectives and Essential Questions At the conclusion of the lesson, students will: • understand how the artists and their audiences understood the events of March 5, 1770; • understand how the Boston Massacre contributed to the growth of Revolutionary sentiment by stirring popular outrage at the British army and the British ministry; • develop skills needed to analyze and interpret visual images through close comparison of similar, but not identical, images; and • understand how the publication of dramatic images reflects and shapes popular opinion. 2 Materials and Resources Images for the Lesson 1. The Bloody Massacre, engraved by Paul Revere, Boston, [1770], Massachusetts Historical Society 2. The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, [engraved by Henry Pelham, Boston, 1770], American Antiquarian Society 3. The Bloody Massacre, engraved by Jonathan Mulliken, Newburyport, Mass., [1770], Harvard University Libraries Images for the Assessment 1. The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, engraver unknown, London: W[illiam] Bingley, [1770], private collection 2. The Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston, frontispiece of A Narrative of The horrid Massacre in Boston, London: W[illiam] Bingley, 1770, private collection Images for the Extension 1. The Boston Massacre, wood engraving [by Paul Revere], frontispiece to The Massachusetts Calendar, or an Almanac for The Year of our Lord 1772, Boston: printed by Isaiah Thomas, [1771], private collection 2. A Monumental Inscription on the Fifth of March. Together with a few Lines On the Enlargement of Ebenezer Richardson, Convicted of Murder [Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1772], American Antiquarian Society 3 4 Background Knowledge This lesson presumes that students have already learned the basic story of the the Boston Massacre, an incident on the night of March 5, 1770, in which a party of the British troops occupying Boston was confronted by a large and angry crowd of civilians outside the customs house on King Street. Relations between the army and Bostonians had been difficult since the troops arrived in 1768, but they grew very bad during the winter of 1769-1770. Insults were exchanged daily, and fights between soldiers and civilians were frequent. Then on February 22, a customs official named Ebenezer Richardson, angered by a crowd of boys and young men throwing snowballs, rocks, and dirt clods at his house, fired a gun loaded with bird shot at them from an upstairs window, hitting a young man named Samuel Gore and a boy named Christopher Seider. Christopher died hours later. Hundreds of Bostonians joined his funeral procession, held on February 26. Relations between Bostonians and the army grew worse in the days thereafter. The confrontation that led to the shootings on March 5 began when a sentry at the customs house hit an apprentice, with whom he had been exchanging insults, in the head with his musket. A crowd gathered in support of the apprentice, and the sentry called for help. Capt. Thomas Preston appeared with six armed soldiers and shouted at the crowd to go home. Instead of obeying Preston, people began throwing sticks, snowballs and chunks of ice at the soldiers. One hit Private Hugh Montgomery and knocked him down. Montgomery got to his feet, picked up his gun and fired it into the crowd. Within a few moments other soldiers began firing. Eleven civilians were shot. Five were killed on the scene and two others died within a few days. The angry crowd moved back into the nearby streets and many more armed soldiers arrived to support Preston and his men. The shooting stopped. Governor Thomas Hutchinson came to the scene and spoke to the crowd from the balcony of the nearby State House. He promised there would be an investigation and asked the people to go home. The sullen crowd broke up. The next day, the Boston Town Meeting demanded that the governor order the troops out of the city. In order to avoid further loss of life, the British commander withdrew all his troops from the city and moved them to Fort William on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. The town meeting also launched its own investigation of the tragedy, appointing three leading citizens to interview witnesses and prepare an account of the event. Preston and several of the soldiers were arrested and charged with murder. Within a few days, public funerals were held for the five victims. News of the Boston Massacre spread quickly and angered colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia. Samuel Adams and other patriot leaders made sure that published accounts of the event made it appear that the civilians did nothing to provoke the soldiers. A pamphlet published by the Boston town meeting titled A Short Narrative of the horrid Massacre described the shooting as a vicious attack on peaceful Bostonians. In response, loyalists published a pamphlet titled A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance in Boston. It described the shootings as the result of an ambush planned by street gangs. Boston lawyers who were sympathetic to the British soldiers refused to defend Preston and his men in court. They worried that angry Bostonians would retaliate against them. Finally John Adams, a cousin of Samuel Adams, agreed to serve as their lawyer. He believed everyone deserves a fair trial, 5 including the services of a lawyer to argue on their behalf. Preston was found not guilty because the jury agreed he did not order his men to fire and that he tried to stop them. Hugh Montgomery, the first soldier who fired into the crowd, and another soldier who fired were found guilty. The jury agreed that the two soldiers had been afraid they might be killed and so were not guilty of murder. They were convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. They were released after having their thumbs branded. This was a sign that they had been found guilty of manslaughter and that if they were found guilty of it a second time, they would be executed. The news that British soldiers had fired on colonists armed only with snowballs and sticks shook the loyalty of many colonists to King George III and his government. They became more convinced than ever that the British government did not care about them and was working to take away their freedom. John Adams later wrote that the “foundation of American independence was laid” on the evening of March 5, 1770, in the streets of Boston. 6 Sequence and Procedure Step 1: Share the Story of the Boston Massacre Prints Prints of what quickly became known as the Boston Massacre were published in the weeks after the tragedy. The most common, but flawed, interpretation of these prints is that they were patriot propaganda that deliberately misrepresented the tragedy to encourage popular outrage and anger at the British troops and the government that had sent them to Boston. This interpretation—which is often presented to students as indisputable fact—misses the true importance of these prints. The prints reflect the reaction of the artists and their American audiences to the tragedy as much as they shaped those reactions. By far the best known of the prints, then and now, was engraved by Paul Revere (1735-1818), the Boston silversmith immortalized in the middle of the nineteenth century by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for his daring ride to call out the militia on the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre has been published and republished in history books for two hundred years and is the best known contemporary image of an event in the American Revolution. It may surprise students to learn that the image was not created by Paul Revere. It was the work of a young Boston artist named Henry Pelham (1749-1806) who drew a depiction of the confrontation between the British soldiers and the crowd with the intention of engraving and selling it to the public. Pelham was the younger half- brother of John Singleton Copley, a gifted Boston John Singleton Copley painted this portrait of portrait painter. Copley, who was ten years older silversmith Paul Revere in 1768, two years before than Pelham, apparently taught his half-brother the Boston Massacre (Museum of Fine Arts, how to draw and paint. Boston). Pelham showed Revere the engraved plate he had prepared and seems to have left it in Revere’s custody for some reason. Revere knew how to cut designs on metal, and had taught himself how to cut engraving plates, which he had been doing as a sideline for several years. Pelham had little experience with engraving and may have gone to Revere for technical advice or help.