Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution

CHAPTER THREE

Flames for the Cause

By 1768, as Otis became further incapacitated by mental illness, Samuel Adams emerged as the radical leader. One indication that Adams was now at the helm was the appearance of his front-page articles in the Boston Gazette. In pieces that tilled the Wilkite legacy of stirring popular ferment by appealing to long-standing and deep-seated fears, Adams dug deeply into New England’s fertile anti-Catholicism. As the “Puritan,” Adams argued that “popery” posed a more serious threat to Massachusetts than British tyranny, and the members of the General Court who did not support the Boston Whigs were clearly papists. If Protestants did not replace such representatives, Massachusetts tottered at the edge of rule by the Holy See (S. Adams 1:203, 210, 212). Metaphor might have moved into hyperbole, but for New England readers, who viewed the specter of Catholicism as rule by outside authority, it was nonetheless a carefully chosen weapon.

Unlike the frontal assaults in Adams’s use of anti-Catholicism, the Boston Gazette published no fiery articles calling for continued black subjugation. Instead, by a variety of techniques, including silence, innuendo, and selectivity, all as much a part of the propaganda arsenal as Adams’s front-page essays, blacks and slaves were portrayed as appropriately placed in their subservient role. Indeed, nothing in the Boston Gazette contradicted the attitudes and prejudices found in the slave advertising or news items that appeared in the Boston papers and elsewhere. As the revolutionary decade approached, those prejudices and attitudes were not so much tolerated as they would be put to use in revolutionary propaganda. As Adams was to discover in the Boston Massacre, the status of black colonists could not be ignored in any discussion of power or place. By the time of the Massacre and the manipulation of the race of one of its fallen heroes, Crispus Attucks, Adams and his coterie of writers were long experienced with the use of the press to promote a political agenda. The Boston Gazette had been the radical organ since 1755, when Adams put his support behind the paper as the two print shop apprentices, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, started out on their own.

Adams’s recruitment of Edes and Gill deserves mention, as the young men were never the hired hands of previous political campaigns. Like other members of the patriot press, they were active partners in the promotion of the radical agenda. Indeed, the recruitment of Edes and Gill set out a template for the construction of the patriot press, drawing to the cause men like Edes and Gill, whose traditional place in the world was undergoing change. Such men were appropriate choices to carry the theme that the British treated the American colonies with the same contempt that white colonists reserved for black colonists.

The New York printer James Parker, writing to his business partner, Benjamin Franklin, wearily commented at one point, “Printers are obliged to work like Negroes, and in general are esteemed but little better, on many Accounts” (Franklin, Papers 4:310). Of all the stops on the continuum of the metaphor of slavery perhaps none was more meaningful to white Americans of a certain class than the fear of descent into unacceptable status, a status so clearly illustrated in the slave advertising and kept in front of colonial readers by the rhetoric of slavery that typically warned of dire consequences: “If Great Britain, instead of treating us as their fellow-subjects, shall aim at making us their vassals and slaves” (BG 7/24/71). In exploring this thesis, F. Nwabueze Okoye writes: “The outrage of the colonists stemmed from their conviction that only black people in America were deserving of servile status.” Okoye contends that underlying the patriot zeal, beyond the use of metaphor, was the fear that colonists were to be treated by Great Britain the way white Americans treated black bondsmen and women. “The great fear of the colonies,” he writes, “was equality of status with enslaved blacks” (Okoye 7).

James Horton and Lois Horton take a different view, noting that in the stratified society of the late colonial period poor whites forged bonds with black colonists that resulted in “interracial cooperation among the lower ranks of American society” (Horton and Horton, In Hope 281). Such cooperation, if it existed, puts a greater onus on the patriot propaganda, suggesting that the propagandists set about to destroy whatever cooperation existed by enlarging upon the threads of discontent that existed.

The fear of a decline in status, however, was not without basis for the generation that took up the patriot banner. White Americans of the revolutionary generation had indeed experienced various aspects of leveling in their coming of age. The first was welcomed. In the Great Awakening great numbers of colonial Americans, including Sam Adams, eschewed the leadership of local ministers in order to participate in an evangelical, one-to-one experience with God. The second, however, was the economic decline of the 1760s, which translated into a social stratification and a loss of social and economic mobility for artisans and workers alike. As the revolutionary era developed, these changes in colonial society, including Boston, were exacerbated. “The rich became richer, and aristocratic gentry everywhere became more conspicuous and self-conscious; and the numbers of poor in some cities increased,” as Gordon S. Wood describes it. The resulting tensions were not out of incipient class warfare, he writes, but rather because the new class lines were out of sync with what had been the “pervasive equality of American society (Wood, Radicalism 170).

The increasing stratification for white Americans could be indicated in the most personal of ways. In Charlestown, the village across from Boston, the selectman found it necessary to make it illegal to dress beyond one’s rank (Frothingham, History 256). Boston’s Isaiah Thomas, printer of the fiery Massachusetts Spy, resisted the definitions that prompted such laws by dressing “considerably above his social position and had manners which made him accepted to those who, in that caste-ridden age, regarded themselves as superior to any craftsman” (Shipton 133). Benjamin Mecom, the unhappy nephew of Benjamin Franklin, quite literally refused to wear the leather apron, choosing to operate his press in “a powdered bob wig, ruffles and gloves, gentleman-like appendages which the printers of that day did not assume,” as Thomas described his contemporary, despite his own proclivities for gentlemanlike appendages (Thomas 141–42). Other printers were said to call Mecom “Queer Notions” after a department in his magazine (Winsor 2:409). But there was no humor when, in 1771, a Harvard student dismissed Richard Draper, a member of one of Boston’s old and respected printing families, as “a Meer mechanic… below the notices of a Freshman” (BNL 8/15/71). Draper became a loyalist, his own way perhaps of remaining true to a former time.

Sudden artisinal concern with dress, however, was not out of step with a late-colonial society that was consumed with new aspects of manners, evidence, according to one researcher, that middle-class culture was emerging earlier than once recognized (Hemphill). Advice books about middle-class conduct, the promotion of female domesticity, the growth of belles lettres, the rejection of hurly-burly taverns in favor of more protected environments all indicate a search for identity by the establishment of new boundaries. But clearly the closing down of what had been fairly permeable layers of society and the accompanying anxieties and self-doubt were useful accoutrements to members of a society promoting radical change. In Anne Norton’s theory of the construction of political identity, men and women displaced from their previous places in society become “liminars,” occupying a status between existing orders, whether political, economic, ethnic, or class. Out of this state of confusion, in a moment of “unparalleled political importance” comes a new definition of abstract principles—altogether a potent political force (A. Norton 53). What might be added is that men and women in this state, seeking to reaffirm a former status, are not the population likely to open doors to those below them. Of all the rationales put forward for slavery and for the second-class status of free blacks, the most compelling for such colonial liminars was likely unstated—the proof offered by the existence of slavery that white colonists had not yet reached the very bottom. Put into the context of the social upheavals of the period, the metaphor of slavery was not so much a call for vigilance in the face of popish plots as one for the vigilance it took not to slip further down a slippery slope.

Growing up in Charlestown in an environment affected by the sweep of New Light ministry (Budington), Edes and Gill came from families who had experienced the prosperity and status encouraged by an earlier equality. Edes was the second son of a well-known Charlestown man, Peter Edes, a hatter whose interests had expanded into real estate (Wyman 1:319–22). In a not unusual role for an artisan of the earlier period, Edes was one of the founders of the city’s oldest fire societies whose members were described as “the owners of many of the prominent estates in the town” (Hunnewell 65). By midcentury the value of Peter Edes’s property was among that of the upper half of the townspeople (Pruitt 182–83).

The Edes and Gill families may not have had grand ambitions for their sons when they apprenticed them to Samuel Kneeland, printer of Boston’s many religious works, including the New Light Christian History, but Kneeland was the example of the successful and religious artisan whose hard work and demonstrated virtue allowed him to become “independent in his circumstances” (Thomas 104). The Massachusetts Stamp Tax in 1755, culminating declining circumstances, provided the impetus for the transfer of the Boston Gazette to the ownership of the two young apprentices about to embark on their own careers.

It seems apparent that the radical group chose Edes and Gill more carefully than had been the case in the selection of the printers of the radical’s previous organ, the Independent Advertiser, whose printer, Daniel Fowle, complained bitterly and publicly at his treatment by the radical circle (Fowle). From the Gazette’s debut, burdened by the colony’s stamp tax, solvency was not taken for granted. The partnership would eventually produce the largest annual amount of printing in the city (Yodelis, “Who Paid”). Some of that was because of public printing, probably a result of Adams’s influence in the General Assembly. But early on the shop profited from religious printing, including the growing connection between religious printing and the revolutionary cause. In the 1760s, Jonathan Mayhew’s attacks on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was not only making Mayhew more acceptable to the Boston clergy, the 176-page diatribe and related publications were a boom for the young business. Both Edes and Gill were members of Mayhew’s West Church, as was Paul Revere and other ambitious artisans, but it was likely Mayhew, an Adams intimate and no novice in propaganda, who connected the young printers to the Adams circle in its search for a new vehicle and helped provide its economic base.

Given the financial difficulties of the time, Edes and Gill would likely have had little long-term success without the radical connection. Yet even with the radical connection, the marriages of Edes and Gill suggest the sliding status of the artisan (as it also suggests personal preference). Unlike the successful Moses Gill, who made two prestigious marriages in his climb, Edes and Gill made practical matches, and, in the end, neither man was able to parlay the prosperity of the printing house into permanent success. After the Revolution both died in much reduced circumstances.

For Edes, however, the most politically active of the partners, the financial stability offered by the radicals was probably less important than the opportunity to be among the community’s political leaders, as his father had been in Charlestown. Two years after the launching of the Gazette, Edes was town constable and subsequently was regularly elected to city positions as surveyor of boards, clerk of the market, and collector of taxes, the latter position one that Adams had held almost ten years earlier and which Edes resigned, as had Adams. He was closely involved in Boston’s inner political circles, notably the North End Caucus, and in the 1760s he and other artisans were recruited for Boston’s artillery company (Robert 2:101, 124, 220). By 1765, Edes was first sergeant in the artillery company and in a position to organize resistance to the Stamp Act. He would serve as emissary when Adams sought to bring together Boston’s rival North and South End gangs, turning their frustrations away from attacks on each other into patriot fervor (Cullen).

Adams’s recruitment of Edes and Gill as the foremost printers of the patriot cause exemplified how Adams served to put the tensions of the artisan class to use in the construction of the patriot press, as in other areas, and provides an avenue for understanding why the patriot press largely followed Adams’ agenda by remaining silent on the issue of slavery. Although the emphasis here has been on the Boston Gazette, it should be noted that the early patriot press was composed of a cadre of independently owned newspapers. Despite the conservatism of the colonial printing craft as a whole—not men and women who sought conflict (Botein)—Adams was able to draw together a committed group of patriot printers by recruiting men who could be characterized as, Norton puts it, “betwixt and between.” The core members of the patriot press—Edes and Gill, John Holt, John Dunlap, Isaiah Thomas, and William Goddard—were men who did not have the same intergenerational and family ties to the craft as the Boston Drapers and other members of the moderate press, and, except for William Bradford, a later member from Philadelphia, seemed to have become printers because of previous failure or force of circumstance (Miner; Palsits; Shipton; Teeter, “John Dunlap”; Walker). Like Adams, no example of worldly success, they were men whose unsteady personal histories, marked by erosion of rank and diminishing opportunities, were not likely to seek the empowerment of a class of people below them.

The Boston Massacre was the culmination of years of radical activism. Adams’s invectives against the colony’s governor, Thomas Hutchinson, during the Stamp Act crisis had encouraged a Boston mob to destroy the Hutchinson family home—burning its remarkable library, smashing the expensive glass windows that symbolized wealth and station, and shredding its fine interior. When the British colonial office, fearing a repetition of Wilkes-type mobs in the American colonies, ordered the occupation of the city, Adams was presented the opportunity to take local political action to the intercolonial stage. There could be no better representation of British prerogative than the occupation of a colonial city by a standing army, surely an example all American colonies should heed.

Backed by the proved loyalty of Edes and Gill and the new adherents to the patriot cause resulting from Stamp Act agitation, Adams’s understanding of the tools at hand was best illustrated in 1768 and 1769 with a series of items that became known as the “Journal of the Times” or “Journal of Occurrences,” prepared for use across colonies by Adams and his circle.

Certainly, one danger of a propaganda organ is that it will preach to the converted. To avoid the encumbrances of its too well-known politics, Adams and the Whig circle turned to John Holt’s New-York Journal, a newspaper that had benefited from the Sons of Liberty. From their base in Boston, the propagandists also issued the same set of paragraphs it had prepared for the New-York Journal (altered slightly to avoid names) for the Boston Evening-Post, now published by brothers Thomas Fleet Jr. and John Fleet. The choice of the Evening-Post over the Gazette was significant because the Post was a newspaper recognized for fair-mindedness (Thomas 143). The paper went out of business in 1775, according to all accounts then and now, when impartiality became impossible, although it might also be considered that it went out of business when an impartial newspaper was no longer needed by the radicals. In 1769, however, the impartial Evening-Post was an excellent venue for spread of the propagandists’ view across the colonies and even into British publications by way of the exchange system, and probably received the widest distribution of any colonial writing up to the time outside of John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” (Dickerson viii). The sophistication of the plan also indicated that Otis was no longer a player as a leader of the Boston Whigs. Otis’s personality, growing rasher by the day, made it unlikely he could instigate a plan that took restraint.

Under a standing head, the weekly paragraphs eschewed lengthy discussions of American rights in favor of a personal, intimate style that emphasized the role of the British occupation in the lives of ordinary Bostonians. These paragraphs included some accurate news of troop movements, occasional sentences that were clear calls to British readers, news of support from other colonies, examples of Bostonian forbearance despite extraordinary provocation, and warnings that the Daughters of Liberty were capable of replacing British goods by spinning wool and manufacturing needed items at home. But most important were the accounts of the impact of the occupation on everyday lives. Townspeople, on their own business, in a “civil society,” found themselves arbitrarily stopped and challenged by British soldiers. Some of these early accounts were hardly narratives of atrocities. One group of townspeople was “stopped and detained so long in the street, in a very cold season, that one of the married ladies, through the cold and surprise, is now much indisposed” (Dickerson 30). However, accounts of physical abuse increased; the specter of rape emerged: “A girl at New-Boston, was lately knock’d down and abused by solders for not consenting to their beastly proposal” (Dickerson 99). By June of 1768 the Journal-reported insults were so numerous that it was unclear “how much a local and prudent people can bear” before they proceeded to “extremities” (Dickerson 107).

Whether minor occurrences or not, the public theme that united all these paragraphs was the subjection of all Bostonians to the leveling aspects of British power. Indisposed ladies may not seem to be the heady stuff of revolutionary propaganda, but for Adams’s sophisticated pen there was value in spreading the word of a degradation that spared no one. The theme that the British viewed all colonists alike allowed the propagandists to emphasize an American commonality that crossed colony boundaries and class lines. But the theme also inferred a lack of British sensibility to colonial boundaries of difference. Among all boundaries, of course, race was the most significant. The ultimate betrayal was the notion that the British were not above instigating rebellion among black servants. The themes were explored on large and small stages in the Journal of Occurrences, beginning with the Journal accounts of the use of the whip.

Even into the nineteenth century, it was standard practice for British authorities to use the whip to keep its soldiery in line. Although the Journal writers were eager to convey a sense of the debauchery of the British soldiers, the Journal nonetheless reported instances of whipping with sympathy, noticing on more than one occasion that the whippings were severe enough to cause death (Dickerson 9, 89). This was clearly a powerful image in the South, where the use of the whip was confined to slaves. But by any colony standard, the use of the whip on white British subjects, soldiers or not, was not only severe punishment for bouts of drunkenness but also a humiliating one. To emphasize the humiliation, the Gazette made clear the use of a “black drummer” as the whipper in one early account of a flogging (Dickerson 6). This was not a casual piece of information for any colonial reader with its implications that a black whipper meting punishment on a white man was a world of power in reverse.

From its insinuations that whipping was an example of how the British authority could treat its own and, by inference, of British misuse of American colonists, the Journal moved into the most powerful aspect of its propaganda vis-à-vis the black population. These were the reports of British officer seeking to turn black servants against their masters. In November of 1768 (in a article that only appeared in the New-York Journal), the British captain James Wilson was heard to tell a group of slaves that “the Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves” if blacks would only “cut their masters’ throats.” A few days later, “a person of credit” was overheard giving the opinion “‘if the Negroes could be made freeman, they should be sufficient to subdue these damn’d rascals.’” Boston selectman responded quickly to these reports of interference with Boston’s slave population by instigating a slave curfew; Boston’s judiciary lodged a charge against Wilson for his careless words (Dickerson 16).

These Journal accounts appeared at a time of high tension in Boston’s race relations as Massachusetts’s legislators faced a major thrust aimed at ending slavery, not just the slave trade, in the colony. In March of 1767, a bill that called for an end to the slave trade and the ownership of slaves received two readings in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. On the third reading, the bill was compromised in favor of a new bill laying an import duty on slaves, which was quickly followed by second and third readings. On its third reading, the original abolition bill was now watered even further with the addendum that the act, if passed, would be only be in effect for one year. This was the bill that was sent finally to the Council, approved, and returned to the House where, as a nineteenth-century historian notes, it was simply lost (G. Moore 127–28).

Shortly after the controversy over the slave trade bill, Bostonians faced one of the deepest fears held by colonial Americans, the attack of a slave on a white woman. In September of 1768, a slave belonging to a Worcester man was sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman. The crime was sensational and, not surprisingly, news of it was reflected in the Boston press (BEP 10/3; 10/17/68; BPB 10/3; 10/24/68; BNL 10/3/68), including a broadside printed by Boston’s struggling Kneeland and Adams. In the broadside, according to the ministerial pen recording his last words, Arthur provided an account of his fall into degeneracy. The attack, the reader learns, was no lone, impulsive action but part of a pattern of behavior of drunkenness, thieving, jail breaks, “indecencies” and “black Designs” towards white women. On one occasion, Arthur reported he was one of a group of blacks introduced to a “white Woman of that Place. And our Behaviour was such, as we have much Reason to be ashamed of.” It was on his escape from jail as a result of one of these escapades, fleeing to his Indian haven, that “the Devil put it into my Head to pay a Visit to the Widow Deborah Metcalfe, whom I in a most inhumane manner ravished: The particulars of which are so notorious that it is needless for me here to relate them.”

Outside of the devil’s promptings, the account explains Arthur’s action on the basis of the bad company of Indians and other blacks as the final encouragement to Arthur’s predilections. What the account leaves in place is the notion of the irrational, “bad seed” black criminality that was often found in slave advertising. Arthur reportedly admitted his master had educated and treated him “very kindly.” Facing death, Arthur concludes, “I freely acknowledge I have been better treated by Mankind in general than I deserved.”

News of the attack and Arthur’s confession and execution coincide almost exactly with Captain Wilson’s comments. Arthur, indeed, was put to death just a week after Wilson’s comments became known. These were incendiary intersections—a call to slaves to slit the throats of their masters even in the face of what Bostonians may have regarded as proof of essential slave criminality. Further, occurring during the occupation of the city by a standing army, a crime of rape brought with it all the attendant images of despoiled virtue and powerlessness. Whipping was one example of how British authority treated its own and, by inference, the American colonies. But news of the rape of a white woman by a black slave, accompanied by inflammatory comments of a British officer, could only infer the British had so little understanding of American colonists that they could indiscriminately cross any boundary, including race.

Boston continued to simmer with resentment and frustration. For the radicals, the frustration was increased anew by Scottish printer, John Mein, whom the Whigs found unmanageable. Irascible and hot-tempered, Mein was not to be so easily squashed when a Gazette writer, thought to be James Otis, called him a Jacobin. Mein demanded to know the author; Edes refused and provided a public explanation in an effort to discredit Mein. Mein arrived at the Gazette office, could not find Edes, and took on the unsuspecting John Gill. The ensuing fisticuffs led to a lawsuit and trial in which Mein was fined (Alden, “John Mein”).

But Mein was determined to have the last word. In February and March of 1769, as Boston continued to boil with racial discord, Mein helped connect antislavery to Tory sympathy when he published two antislavery essays (BC 2/27; 3/2/69). By August, Mein’s Toryism reached new heights with a series of attacks on the nonimportation agreement, culminating in the publication of the names of merchants who had broken faith. At this juncture, the end of October, Mein was quite literally run out of Boston by a mob gathered for the purpose, saving his life perhaps by brandishing a pistol (Schlesinger, “Propaganda”). The importance of Mein as a Tory sympathizer not incidentally connected to antislavery is suggested by the journal of the young Boston printer John Boyle, who had heretofore ignored the occupation and any of the events as related by the Journal. “This Mein had been concerned with one Mr. Fleming, another Scotchman, in printing an infamous News-paper, in which he made it his business to scandalize some of the most worthy characters in Town. Those who signalized themselves as Advocates of Liberty were sure of being aspersed” (Boyle 201).

Mein’s departure was followed by the death of the youth in the confrontation over the nonimportation agreements, the public funeral, and the numerous exchanges between city toughs and soldiers leading to the event on a snowy King Street of March 5, 1770. At this juncture—the execution of Arthur, the comments of Captain Wilson, the antislavery proposals, and Mein’s refusal to abide by the radicals’ standards of behavior all in recent memory—the Boston Massacre brought to the forefront of the revolutionary movement the role of black colonists. Was Crispus Attucks to be a hero, one of the innocents cut down in King Street? Or a rowdy who helped provoke the attack? Could there be an innocent with a tawny skin? Should he be remembered at all? And at what cost?

In an act of transformation, Adams’s invention of the “Boston Massacre” moved American opposition to the British occupation from an image of Boston street rowdies into a grander realm, an episode that could only reverberate with Old Testament connotations of the slaughter of innocents. Adams left behind the homely, day-by-day telling that had characterized the Journal and lifted circumstances that were hardly heroic on either side into a lofty, quasireligious plane, producing, as Schlesinger described it, folk heroes out of “street loafers and hoodlums” (Schlesinger, Prelude 21). Now, with this larger-than-life event, the Boston Gazette came back to center stage.

The Stamp Act had provided the radicals with important lessons in the elevation of political opposition into the issues of rule. Integral to the lessons was the expression of opposition in symbolic rather than specific terms. In actual fact, the Stamp Act proposed specific consequences and its implementation would have carried severe economic consequences (Wesdager). The Whig propagandists, however, seeking a broad audience, chose to emphasize the act as an example of the interference of colonial rights rather than its economic consequences to the narrower band of the colonial elite. Under Otis’s and Adams’s leadership, a host of metaphoric devices, including various uses of death motifs and the symbolic public burnings of stamped paper, provided the aura of public virtue and worked to cross lines of rank, wealth, geography, and parochial interest. In the Stamp Act opposition, Boston radicals also demonstrated that the best propaganda was a combination of the related word and representative deed. In highly wrought language, the Gazette compared Stamp Act agent Andrew Oliver, New England born and bred, to a plantation slave driver who sought to curry favor with his white masters by driving fellow slaves (BG 8/19/65). The point was made dramatically when Oliver underwent a mock lynching when Edes and his Sons of Liberty compatriots from the artillery company strung his effigy from the “Liberty Tree” next to a real boot as a connection to the suspect Scottish betrayer, Lord Bute (Gordon 1:175). Like the decomposing body of a real lynching—as in the body of the executed slave exhibited from the gibbet on Charlestown Common—the effigy provided a striking example of what could happen to those who betrayed their own.

The use of Boston’s Liberty Tree—one of many designated as symbols of immortality and regeneration—as a focal point for public involvement was a small beginning in Adams’s use of mythology that intersected with Puritan history. As Dirk Hoerder notes, violence itself was a symbol, intended to purify not to punish and to provide warning to others (Hoerder 81). Boston crowds had long used violence as warnings, sometimes to higher classes for exceeding norms, but crowd violence seldom resulted in death. “Mobbish Boston” was no invention of the revolutionary generation. Crowd action had been a common occurrence in Massachusetts; Hoerder counts fifty prerevolutionary episodes (40).

Because crowds were seen to have purpose, they were not adverse to direction. Adams, Otis’s lieutenant during the Stamp Act crisis, was behind efforts in directing the Loyall Nine to organize the crowds who met stamp collectors at the various colonial wharves in an imitation of a spontaneous gathering (Maier, From Resistance). In related actions, stamped paper was burned, mock gallows were erected, and effigies were hanged—all symbols undergirded by warnings of violent ends, like an Edwardsian sermon, for those who did not comply.

Revolutionary propaganda was also largely conducted along lines of inversion, an appropriate metaphor for the world turning upside down. The death of five individuals in suspect circumstances was hardly the stuff of a “massacre” any more than overturning sufficient tea into the Boston Harbor so that ships could not move was a “tea party.” The use of thanksgiving days and fasting days were adapted to propagandistic purposes in the various memorial days that surrounded the opposition to the Stamp Act. The public nature of Calvinist punishment found transformation into the street theater of the representational lynching of Lord Bute on the “Liberty Tree,” the public burnings of confiscated tea around the colonies, and the tarring and feathering of suspected Tories. As Peter Shaw writes, “The rituals of revolution have been accurately described as reversed ceremonies of legitimacy. But the ceremonies of legitimacy were themselves ambiguous” (221). Like the revolutionary slogans, ambiguity was useful, permitting individual constructions within a revolutionary ether. Tarring and feathering, for example, was a ritual of multiple meanings, one of which was connected to white understandings of blackness. As Peter Oliver described the practice, “First, strip a Person naked, then heat the Tar until it is thin, & Pour it upon the naked Flesh, or rub it over with a Tar Brush… [a]fter which, sprinkle decently upon the Tar, whilst it is yet warm as many Feather as will stick to it” (Oliver 94). Given the understandings of black as evil, the coat of white feathers, often supplied by female supporters from bed pillows, suggested ephemerality. The real stickiness was the layer of black tar to the skin, indicating that, for traitors, whiteness was the facade.

Adams’s ability to invent the significant event arguably made the Adams propaganda the most powerful lever in drawing popular support to the American Revolution. Joseph Greenleaf’s attacks on Hutchinson, for example, were more libelous than those of Adams, but Greenleaf remains a minor figure in the propaganda war because his arsenal did not go beyond an attacking pen. By contrast, Adams attached his pen to an event that was aimed at demonstrating proof of a larger issue, a familiar way of thinking for Bostonians who believed God communicated by external means. The Journal of the Times offered its proof by piling one instance upon another; the Boston Massacre offered a shorter route. As Adams and his organizers were able to move the Stamp Act beyond an unpopular revenue-raising issue into a discussion of parliamentary law and natural rights, Adams’s arsenal turned the events of the Boston Massacre into proof that the Mother Country cared so little for her American colonies that her own soldiers would shoot without cause.

For Adams’s most resounding propagandistic success, the first step was to call the event a “massacre,” an enlargement of the event beyond the facts of the situation, and, some may argue, even a reversal. So naming the event was not an Adams original, however. During the Wilkes episode the previous year— the object of intense patriot attention—taunted soldiers fired upon demonstrators outside Wilkes’s London prison. Several individuals were killed, including a young man. In the resulting days of rioting, the shooting became known as “The Massacre of St. George’s Field,” and the youth was given a public funeral. The trial of the soldier blamed for the young man’s death also received notice in the Boston press (BNL 10/27/68).

The patriots had already put the Wilkite propaganda to use. When a Boston boy was shot during a radical-inspired protest against a merchant importing English goods less than two weeks before the Massacre, the attending physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, declared the act murder (BG 2/26/70) and the patriots assembled a great crowd at the Liberty Tree to escort the body to burial. The patriot response to the subsequent event of March 5 was clearly aimed at escalating crowd attitudes, but the attachment of the panegyric “Boston Massacre” suggested the ultimate aim was its use as a unifying symbol, perhaps to serve the patriot cause as much as the Stamp Act. The Massacre, however, was no Stamp Act; it did not affect all colonies, its implications for parliamentary rule were unclear, and it was a localized event of suspect circumstances. It should be noted, however, that outside Boston the initial response to the Massacre lacked the incendiary spark of the Stamp Act. In at least six colonies, newspapers reflected no particular pattern of outrage or interest as a result of the Massacre (Smith), not only suggesting that British troops on American soil carried different meanings in different colonies but also indicating that Massachusetts’s culture of public rite was not so readily adopted by other colonies. The lack of immediate response to the Massacre put particular pressure that the eventual trial of the British soldiers make a place for the Massacre in colonial consciousness.

As the events of the Massacre unfolded, Adams was faced with how to define Crispus Attucks, a free black of Indian and African ancestry, a seaman, distressed by the economic downturn, who was not surprisingly a member of the angry crowd and the first of the fallen heroes. Here was an opportunity not only to continue the theme of the virtuous nature of colonial Americans but to include people of color in that perception.

The Whig account of the Massacre first came at the hands of James Bowdoin, whose propagandistic efforts had heretofore been in connection with his membership on the Massachusetts Executive Council. In that capacity, Bowdoin had consistently given council papers a propagandistic slant and made them available for newspaper publication (Walett). In his pamphlet account of the Massacre, Attucks’s name was listed prominently as a victim: “Crispus Attucks, a molatto, killed on the spot, two balls entering his breast.” Also clearly noted was Captain Wilson’s involvement in “exciting the negroes of the town to take away their masters lives and property and repair to the army for protection, which was fully proved against him” (Bowdoin 11).

But months later, at the conclusion of the trials of Captain Thomas Preston and the British soldiers, Adams was not so anxious to identify Attucks by race. He was simply “Mr. Attucks,” another innocent who was “leaning upon his stick when he fell, which certainly was not a threatening posture” (BG 12/31/70). The use of “Mr.” can be interpreted to mean that, as a dead hero, Attucks had earned the right to be addressed with a note of respect, or its use can suggest that Adams expected readers, particularly outside of Boston, to assume the courtesy title indicated Attucks was white. In Boston, certainly, Attucks’s race was no mystery. As a six-foot-two free black, Attucks was an easily recognizable figure in the city, although probably more known by his free name, Michael Johnson. Nonetheless, Nathaniel Emmons, the Congregational New Divinity minister from Franklin, had no problem recalling him by his old slave name. Emmons was a lifelong opponent to slavery, but Attucks elicited no sympathy. “I stood with Parson Byles on the corner of what are now School and Washington streets and watched the funeral procession of Crispus Attucks, that half Indian, half negro, and altogether rowdy, who should have been strangled long before he was born” (Eaton 146). The use of a courtesy title was not likely to change Emmons’s perception and suggests the Adams account was aimed at the intercolonial audience that the Gazette had been developing by way of Journal of the Times.

The confusion over Attucks’s race was further complicated by Revere’s famous illustration in which Attucks is portrayed as white. One interpretation of the engraving is provided by Barbara Lacey, who writes that a whitened Attucks indicated his death “is viewed as equal to that of the others who died.” That earned equality is similarly represented on the broadside “where Attucks’ coffin stands side by side with those of the three other slain patriots” (Lacey 163). In that interpretation, Attucks’s sacrifice is comparable to the whitening that Slotkin addresses in the conversion experience of blacks; Attucks’s death in the patriot cause permits his elevation to a higher status, which is represented by the absence of his dark skin, as if exterior and interior were finally to mesh. Coming long after the publication of the engraving, the use of the courtesy title could also be explained by the same rationale.

The argument that Attucks was represented as someone who had been elevated into honorary whitehood can be further supported by an examination of the skin colors in the Revere engraving in which three of the British soldiers have been given darkened complexions. We know that Revere, in order to rush the print to the public, commandeered the work of Henry Pelham, and Pelham’s print, published after Revere’s, indicates the same darkened hues, indicating the original darkening was likely at Pelham’s hand. However the portrayals came about, the frequent copies of the print in the revolutionary period include the darkened British soldiers. The darkened visages are particularly noticeable in the engraving made by the British craftsman, William Bingle, for the cover of James Bowdoin’s pamphlet (Brigham, Revere’s Engravings: Plate 19), which had been sped to England on a ship the patriots had quickly engaged so theirs would be first news of the Massacre. Since Bowdoin is clear that Attucks was a “molatto,” the darkened faces of the British soldiers may have served as a parallel to Attucks’s whitening, suggesting that it was the British who were the real “savages” in the situation.

The darkened complexions disappear early in the national period. By that time, most white Americans were probably unaware of Attucks’s racial background, which was reintroduced when antislavery activists backed the publication of William C. Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. In the frontispiece to this work, Attucks’s race is clear; indeed, he has lost any obvious Indian heritage in this portrayal, now the fallen hero at the center of a cluster of concerned patriots (Nell).

Attucks was no hero in John Adams’s account as chief defense counsel at the trials of both Captain Preston and the subsequent group trial of the British soldiers. Called as a defense witness, the slave Andrew insisted Attucks had provoked the melee. At both trials, Andrew’s master, Oliver Wendell, affirmed that Andrew was trustworthy. Nor did Andrew’s testimony stand alone; he was one of three black witnesses and several white witnesses who helped the defense present the event as a disorderly mob seeking trouble.

Adams was not to leave it at that, however. Instead, he provided a summing up in terms of racial and ethnic stereotypes. To make his point that the American colonies were ruled by law and order, Adams argued that the shootings had been instigated by outsiders, “a motly rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.” Jurors only needed to look at two of those who were killed to see what kind of mob it was: the Irishman Patrick Carr and the mulatto Crispus Attucks. In an early linking of immigrant Irish and American blacks into what would become the “black Irish” concept of the nineteenth century, Adams characterized both men as outside agitators, the kind of men that the colonies, and Boston in particular, had been forced to tolerate: “And it is in this manner, this town has been often treated; a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprises, at the head of such a rabble of negroes, etc., as they can collect together. [Attucks] whose very looks was enough to terrify any person, [who] had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down. [It was Attucks] to whose mad behavior, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night is chiefly to be ascribed” (Kidder 257–58).

Given the Tory nature of the juries, the defense would have won however Attucks and Carr were portrayed. Not-guilty verdicts were rendered in both trials for all but two of the soldiers, who were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter (Zobel 241–94). But in his closing argument, in a few lines, Adams managed to limn several colonial perceptions of black colonists—physical strength, proclivity to violence, and the danger inherent when blacks joined with colony unacceptables. Colonists outside of the jury box might logically infer that the loyalist jury (only two members of the jury were from Boston) took the testimony of the black witnesses more seriously than the white ones and provided another indication of British carelessness toward its colonies.

The trials were far from a loss for the radicals, who had overwhelmingly demonstrated their respect for the process of law even in the face of a packed jury. Nonetheless, writing in the Gazette, Adams sought to fix blame and, like his cousin John, found it in racial stereotypes. “Andrew a Negro—a Fellow of a lively imagination indeed!” Adams wrote, and suggested that the lively imagination led to his invention of stories, including this one. Stirring the pot of New Englanders’ fear of slave conspiracy, Adams further suggested that the master did not know his servant as well as he thought and emphasized the theme that blacks were not to be trusted by returning to the Captain Wilson incident: “It is well-known that the Negroes of this town have been familiar with the soldiers; and that some of them have been tampered with to cut their master’s throats; I hope Andrew is not one of these” (BG 1/7/71). The comment, according to Hiller Zobel, a historian of the Massacre, demonstrated “the radicals’ true position on racial matters” (284).

Not surprisingly, the version put forward by the Adamses lingered. The first issue of Isaiah Thomas’s radical-inspired Massachusetts Spy carried the following:

As Negroes and L--rs in judgement agree!

No wonder that vice with her airs is so free!

Device and low cunning do commonly stand!

Related in friendship and join hand in hand

Experience doth teach us that poor black and white!

When blended together, as one, will unite!

(MS 3/7/71)

The Massacre itself would be celebrated in ritualistic ways for the next thirteen years (Ritter), only to be replaced by July Fourth as Independence Day.

Adams’s ability to use the blunderbuss event did not negate his continued use of the techniques pioneered by the Journal of the Times. In fact, the use of both strategies indicates how the Gazette was able to marry the overstatements of what we usually recognize as propaganda with the older tradition of the impartial colonial newspaper. In the Gazette, both large and small events carried implications beyond the facts of the event. This technique was not surprising given Edes and Gill’s experience with the didacticism of congregational sermonizing, in which all events, big and small, were indicative of God’s plan. Congregational ministers often preached in homely metaphor, but, as their congregations knew, the devil, quite literally, lurked in the detail.

As congregational ministers assumed a universality of existing beliefs, the Gazette—as Adams’s remarks about Andrew indicate—was not shy in calling on the body of attitudes toward black colonists assumed to be held by most white colonists. The Gazette did not have to argue the appropriateness for the secondary place for the colonies’ black population but rather legitimized the colonial attitudes that already supported that ranking. This could often be done by a writing style that called upon the readers’ involvement to complete the thought, thus avoiding the necessity of debate. A well-placed phrase, ostensibly impartial, could nonetheless play on the perceived prejudices of the reader. In the Somerset decision, explored next, the Gazette gave just thirty-nine words for the decision considered to be the foundation of the British abolition movement.

Less momentously, an example of a minimalist approach occurred again in 1775, certainly a period of heightened propaganda. The item seemed innocuous enough: “Cambridge, August 28, 1775—We are informed that the Negroes in Boston were lately summoned to at Faneuil Hall, for the purpose of choosing out of their body a certain number to be employed cleaning the streets; in which meeting Joshua Loring, Esq. presided as Moderate. The well known Caesar Merriam opposed the measure, for which he was committed to prison, and continued the street were all cleaned” (BG 8/26/75).

Examined in the context of the Gazette as an instrument of propaganda, the flat tone of the half dozen lines establishes standards for the reader. It is the ordinariness of the tone that tells the reader that it is appropriate for Caesar Merriman to be put in prison for failing to clean the streets. Were the same half dozen lines to appear in a Quaker publication, for example, the interpretation might be different—the ordinariness of the tone might provide shock value for readers who held opposite attitudes. But the Gazette never established any context for its news of blacks and slaves that recognized the possibility of change in the position of blacks and slaves in colonial society, even at a time in which those attitudes existed in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

In Massachusetts the campaign for the abolition of slavery, was not reflected in the Boston Gazette. In one instance, the Gazette published a letter whose writer called for the colony to forbid the importation of slaves (BG 6/15/72), a patriot stance encouraged by the Somerset decision and not necessarily attended by any promise of freedom to the slaves already in the colonies. The paper was silent on the occasion of the several slave petitions that sought representation to the Assembly, even though Adams was presiding officer. By 1771, however, Massachusetts’s antislavery activists had again managed to bring an antislavery bill to the Assembly. In his account of the bill’s progress to John Adams, James Warren, a member of Boston’s radical circle, wrote, “If passed into an Act it should have a bad effect on the Union of the Colonies.” He also noted, “A Letter to Congress on that subject was proposed and reported, but I endeavord [sic] to divert that, suppossing [sic] it would embarrass and perhaps be attended with worst consequences that passing the Act” (Warren-Adams Letters 1:356).

Altogether, the Boston Gazette encapsulated a range of techniques to extend its message. Among these were the use of the colonial exchange newspapers to relay its message out, although no contrary messages traveled inward; Adams’s hyperbolic essays and his invention and extension of significant events; the use of rhetorical language and slogans; and the utilization of the power of the printer, who extended patriot themes through the choices of selection and silence. Moreover, the printers of the Gazette used typeface and placement of stories to convey importance. At a time when most insertions were set in type and placed in the frame as they came to hand, the Boston Gazette reserved the front page for Adams’s essays. The first announcement of the Boston Massacre was accompanied by crude replications of coffins, each bearing the initials of one of the dead. The annual memorialization further expanded typographical display.

The point here is to emphasize that nothing in the Boston Gazette, this premiere organ of patriot propaganda that influenced the entire patriot message, was left to chance. Whether front page or backstairs, in homegrown essays or in selections from other publications, the contents of the Gazette advanced an agenda that sought separation from Great Britain. Information about blacks and slaves that appeared in the Gazette, and, also important, information that did not, was directed by this overall purpose. Set within the framework of the rhetoric of slavery, the role of blacks and slaves as established by the Boston Gazette gave illustration to the reality of loss of power. In its choices, the Gazette called upon the colonial and Puritan fear of conspiracy and the conflation of blackness and crime, both situated within the context that did not challenge the institution of slavery. Moreover, the difficulty of blacks and slaves in gaining acceptance in the New England world of demonstrated virtue, and the continued representation of slaves in negative ways served to maintain the rationale that enslavement was a product of the enslaved.

In 1772, however, the British abolition movement challenged these various rationales in a famous case that was to underpin the subsequent abolition movement in Great Britain. That it did not have the same affect in the American colonies may be in part explained by how the Boston Gazette chose to present the event.

CHAPTER THREEFlames for the Cause

CHAPTER THREE

Flames for the Cause