The series From Colony to Commonwealth will step back in time to the dank taverns, fledgling newsrooms and spy routes of colonial Massachusetts. As the United States commemorates its 250th anniversary, we’re tracing the commonwealth’s tumultuous path to self-governance.
In the hallowed space where the Boston Public Library safeguards its rare books and manuscripts, curator Jay Moschella has carefully laid out a handful of weathered images.
Two depict black coffins with skulls and bones. Another bears the “Join or Die” snake on the masthead of the newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy.
In the most colorful piece, a group of colonists topples over in pain as red-coated soldiers fire in their direction, a cloud of musket powder billowing.
This is “The Bloody Massacre,” Paul Revere’s famous depiction of the Boston Massacre in 1770. It was an image that helped pave the way to revolution.
“He really played a hand in kind of shaping public understanding of events,” Moschella said. “Sometimes in not-so-subtle ways, but in other times in somewhat subtle ways.”
These days, Revere’s name is synonymous with his April 18, 1775, horseback ride through Massachusetts towns in advance of the British military’s advance. He also dabbled in dentistry, ran a hardware store and owned a bell and cannon foundry.
But in the 1770s, he was probably best known for his work as a talented silversmith, a skill that enabled him to engrave the copper plates used in printing presses. That opened the door to all sorts of possibilities, including political cartoons.
“He’s making business cards for people. He’s making hymnals. He made the plates in order to print money when Massachusetts was printing its own money during the first year of the war,” said Tegan Kehoe, research director at the Paul Revere House. “So he had a really wide repertoire in what he was able to do because he could engrave on copper.”
One of Revere’s patriotic hit pieces is called “A Warm Place in Hell” and shows pitchfork-clutching demons pushing 17 members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives into the fiery mouth of a nightmarish dog. Their sin? Refusing to get behind a letter criticizing Parliament.
For more information on Paul Revere, read this story from GBH News on his ties to the slave trade. Check out our full series on the connections between the Freedom Trail and slavery.
But his most famous work by far is his engraving of the Massacre. And it’s not even originally his. Although he made slight changes of his own, Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre appears to have been a copy of the work of another artist named Henry Pelham.
“Pelham sent a note to Revere — an unhappy note — saying that he was really shocked that that had happened” Moschella said. “I don’t know why Revere did that and sold it. It’s a source of speculation.”
Still, it was Revere’s version that raced through newspapers and broadsheets.
Peter Drummey, chief historian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, said a judge in a trial stemming from the Massacre even questioned how defendants could get a fair shot given how widespread Revere’s engraving was.
“It was so effective because it was repeated,” Drummey said. “It was repeated at anniversaries. It was repeated on newspaper pages and printed within publications — rather than only being a single engraving that circulated widely but wouldn’t have had that same influence.”
In Revere’s “Bloody Massacre,” the Old State House is shown prominently in the background — and that was purposeful, said Matt Wilding, senior director of interpretation at Revolutionary Spaces, the nonprofit that stewards the historic building.
“He is putting the capitol of the colonial world in Massachusetts front and center behind the Boston Massacre incident,” he said. “Because he wants to emphasize, ‘This is the government. This is what the government is doing.’”
Wilding said the Old State House is where people like James Otis and Samuel Adams laid down a lot of the ideas that became the basis for the American Revolution. It’s where the Declaration of Independence was first read out to the citizens of Boston. But he admits that there is no better visual advocate for the building’s role than Revere’s engraving.
“The Old State House is visually recognizable in American history almost entirely because of the Boston Massacre engraving,” Wilding said. “It is without a doubt the most famous image of our building.”
Revere’s artwork can often be described as propaganda. His engraving of the Boston Massacre was probably plagiarism. But more than anything it was powerful.
Robert Allison, a professor of history at Suffolk University, points out dissenting art like Revere’s was an essential vehicle to promote the revolutionary cause.
“Someone like James Otis, Samuel Adams — I mean, their rhetoric isn’t going to capture it in the same way an image does,” Allison said. “So [Revere’s] images are really essential to this story.”
