[On March
5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on
King Street. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that
pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to a special Guest Post from my
sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]
On three media
that have contributed to our collective memories of the Massacre.
1)
Pamphlets: As you might expect from the era that
gave us Tom
Paine and the Declaration being distributed
instantly to read aloud, rapid-fire political pamphlets became a weapon of
choice for both sides in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath. The colonists had A Short
Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston and its sequel, Additional
Observations to A Short Narrative, which gathered depositions from
numerous witnesses (or at least alleged witnesses) to make the case against the
British soldiers. Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson produced his own pamphlet, A
Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance in Boston, which used contrasting
depositions gathered by Hutchinson’s agents to tell an alternative story. I don’t
imagine that any of the texts in this pamphlet propaganda battle did much to
sway supporters of the opposing perspective, but at the very least they provide
a compelling set of contemporary accounts of the events in King Street and
their collective interpretations.
2)
Engravings: By far the most famous such
propagandistic portrayal of the Massacre was a visual one, however. My weekend
Guest Posters will have more to say about the propaganda behind the famous Paul
Revere engraving, which is so mythically remembered that it turns out it wasn’t
even initially created by Paul Revere—his was apparently a copy (famously
published in the Boston Gazette) of
an artistic
rendering by the young artist Henry Pelham (John Singleton Copley’s
half-brother). And as that last hyperlinked story indicates, there were at
least a couple other contemporary engravings that entered the image competition
around the same time, muddying the waters of artistic originality and
collective copying yet further. For an event so dependent upon different and
competing histories and collective memories, it’s only appropriate that the
visual representations became a multi-vocal conflict in their own right, a
battle to determine whose rendering became and remained the definitive portrayal.
3)
Memorials: Both the pamphlet and engraving
battles unfolded in the Massacre’s immediate aftermath; precisely because of
those and many other heated and contested histories and stories, it took far,
far longer for any more permanent commemoration to be constructed. Indeed, it
was not
until 1888 that a memorial
was erected on Boston Common, the same time that the Massacre’s five
immediate casualties were reinterred beneath a new gravestone in the city’s
historic Granary
Burying Ground. Given that these two historic sites are now prominently located
on the Freedom Trail and at the heart of tourist Boston, it would be easy for
visitors to see them as longstanding commemorations, rather than the more
recent additions (and thus reflections of the gradual collective embrace of the
Boston Massacre participants) that they are. Which is as good a reminder as any
both that memorials are themselves contested expressions of collective memory,
and that we need to study and analyze them just as much as we might learn from
them.
Special Guest
Post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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