March 5, 2014
On this day in history…
… what is perhaps the greatest piece of pro-colonial propganda ever occurred: The Boston Massacre.
On a cold, snowy night in Boston in 1770, a group of colonists calling themselves ‘patriots’ began taunting a group of British soldiers guarding the Boston customs house. The patriots were protesting the occupation of their city by British soldiers sent to enfoce taxation policies (we all know how that turned out). Captain of the British troops ordered his troops to fix their bayonets and stand guard with the men being verbally taunted outside the building. In response to this, the colonists began throwing icy snowballs speckled with gravel at the soldiers, leading one of them to fire his weapon into the crowd. This led to an all out frenzy of gunshots and fighting, and when the smoke finally cleared a few moments later, Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and James Caldwell were dead, along with three more people injured. Crispus Attucks, a black man, is believed to be the first of the five to die, thus making him the “first fatality of the Revolutionary War” according to many historians. The fatal outcome of this altercation led Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty to begin a protest for the removal of the British troops from Boston, with help from Paul Revere (hint: he will be very significant in a few years), who made a slighty one-sided woodcarving of the event:
Paul Revere’s woodcarving depicting the Boston Massacre
You may be thinking, “wait, hang on a second… only five people died? I thought this was a massacre!”
Exactly.
If you thought this, John Adams (a future US President) would have agreed with you, for he served as the defense attorney for the British troops when they went on trial for murder following said ‘massacre’. Adams did a fairly good job— only two of the soldiers were convicted of murder, and only received an ‘m’ branded on their thumb for ‘murderer’.
The Boston Massacre can be viewed as one of the first instances of the media blowing an event way out of proportion; leading to a lot of anti-British sentiment due to the spread of Paul Revere’s helpful engraving.
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This is a very interesting post! I always forget that the Boston Massacre is blown out of proportion. I find it so intriguing to read about propaganda. Keep it up!
This is a really cool passion blog idea. I had no idea the Boston massacre happened around this time of year. It’s cool to think about what has happened in the past and what the atmosphere would have been like surrounding those events way back when.