The Boston Massacre, or, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston on March 5, 1770 by a party of the 29th Regiment

A Boston silversmith and engraver, Revere issued this print fifteen days after the infamous confrontation there between British troops and locals. With two thousand British soldiers billeted in the city to enforce the collection of taxes on imported goods, tensions grew. On March 5, 1770, a group of Americans began to throw stones and ice balls at a lone guard outside the Custom House. Once British reinforcements arrived, a standoff ensued and the soldiers eventually fired. Among the five fallen Bostonians was Crispus Attucks, a sailor and dockworker of Native (Wampanoag) and African American ancestry, shown here in the foreground, his face distinguished from his fellows by the addition of watercolor.

Revere’s masterful piece of visual propaganda presents an unarmed group of about twenty Bostonians fired upon at close range by British soldiers commanded by Captain Thomas Preston. Contemporary accounts indicate events that night unfolded in a more disorganized way as crowd of over fifty Americans, armed with clubs and icy projectiles, taunted and threatened a small band of soldiers. The artist presents us with a scene of calculated aggression and communicates outrage through his choice of title and by labeling the Custom House "Butcher’s Hall."

When Revere advertised his engraving in Boston on March 26, 1770, he failed to credit the design to his half-brother Henry Pelham, who would publish his own version a week later. An outraged letter from Pelham to Revere, dated March 29, makes it clear that the younger man had shared in confidence an early sketch which Revere then copied without permission and rushed to publish. While no American laws copyrighted artistic designs at this date, and engravers freely reproduced what they wished without acknowledgement, Revere　clearly compromised family trust. Other copies soon followed, including a 1770 engraving by a Newburyport, Massachusetts, clockmaker named Jonathan Mulliken, and a variation used to illustrate a London broadside of the same year titled "A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre." Revere himself cut a simplified woodcut version for the Boston printer Isaiah Thomas, who used it to enhance "The Massachusetts Calendar of Almanac for 1772" and circulated it as a separate print. These additional prints helped to shape public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic.