In 1764, the Boston lawyer and firebrand James Otis transcended his local reputation and parochial interests to publish the first major pamphlet of the revolutionary era. In a theme that would come to define the American Revolution, Otis argued against taxing measures on the basis of colonists’ natural rights. But in another theme that would not take hold with the same tenacity, Otis was led to ask: “Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of christian hair, as ’tis called by those whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument? Can any logical inference in favour of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or a short face?” (Otis 29).
Otis was among the cadre of colonial Americans whose call to freedom did not ignore those who were unfree in the American colonies. A growing antislavery movement existed in secular and religious circles in the decades before the American Revolution and included such resolute patriots as Virginian Arthur Lee, Bostonians John Allen, Nathaniel Appleton, William Gordon, and Philadelphians Benjamin Rush and Thomas Paine. Antislavery sentiment was also heard in private patriot circles. In a long-remembered letter to John Adams, newly arrived in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, Abigail Adams wrote: “I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province… It always appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me—fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have” (Adams Family 1:161–62).
Antislavery activity in Massachusetts had been responsible for attempts at antislavery legislation in 1767, 1771, and 1777. Although not successful in Massachusetts, antislavery legislation of some degree was passed in several colonies, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, before independence, and there was a veritable rush to abolition by the end of the Revolution. Accompanied by a vigorous public debate, eight northern states abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804, Vermont not even waiting for the conclusion of the war (G. Moore, Zilversmit).
But neither the existence of antislavery activity during the revolutionary period nor antislavery legislation at the end of the Revolution should be equated with the position of the patriots or their propaganda. Indeed, those patriots who had voiced antislavery sentiment were not among the leaders of the larger antislavery movement, choosing to subsume their antislavery activities to other forms of participation in the American Revolution. The survival of abolitionist thought into the new republic had more to do with the ability of its nonpatriot adherents to keep the flame alive than with the approval of patriots or the support given to antislavery by the propagandists of the American Revolution.
Antislavery did not become a patriot cause. Instead, revolutionary propagandists chose to transform slavery into a metaphor to represent the level at which the British regarded the American colonists. As a result of this metaphor, I suggest that the legacy of American revolutionary propaganda vis-à-vis slavery was not a commitment to abolition at the earliest opportunity, a traditional defense given for the compromises of the founding fathers (Rossiter 231), but rather helped transfer into the new republic long-standing white attitudes toward black colonists. Despite the early successes of abolition in northern states, it needs to be considered that the patriot use of slavery as a propaganda vehicle encouraged, and even legitimized, white American prejudices toward black Americans and may have served to delay a national solution to the American institution of slavery. Unable to reconcile slavery and the American Revolution, Americans of the new nation fell back upon old attitudes. As Duncan J. MacLeod writes, “The tension between Revolutionary beliefs and the practice of slavery produced a distinctive view of the character of the Negro, to the extent that it seemed to be the very nexus of the problem” (12).
By 1769, just five years after Otis had published his opening salvo, the early tocsin that included abolition in the Whig argument was already being stilled. By that year, Otis, in face of his increasing mental instability, was losing his position as Boston’s leading radical. The passionate argument—“the flame of fire,” as John Adams put it (Life and Works 10:247)—had become an embarrassment. Three months later he was wondering at his friend’s sanity. “He rambles and wanders like a Ship without an Helm” (Adams, Diary 1:3523). In face of Otis’s dissipating influence, Samuel Adams emerged from the second-in-command post to the leadership of Boston’s radical cadre. Accompanying Adams’s rise was the disappearance of abolition from the patriot agenda. The issue of slavery would still have its role in the propaganda efforts of the patriot press, but not in ways Otis and other patriot antislavery adherents may have wished.
Sam Adams was the single most important individual in establishing the Revolution’s public voice. The ideology of the American Revolution had many authors, but it was Sam Adams who shaped public opinion in the most direct methods—drawing to his influence men of similar beliefs, establishing a chain of command from the gentlemen’s circle of leadership to the burgher leaders of the Sons of Liberty, drafting the Massachusetts Circular Letter, establishing the Committees of Correspondence, and, the subject of this work, orchestrating the newspaper press. Indeed, whether one considers the American Revolution as representative of radical change, a continuation of elite dominance, or the introduction of a middle-class meritocracy, one thing is clear: the role of persuasion and argument. Historic changes in government, including the Glorious Revolution that the American Whigs so admired, have been most often put in place by military coups, secret cabals, or the terror of the moment. The American Revolution was not put to a plebiscite, but no other revolution gave a larger role to argument and persuasion. The American revolutionaries sought popular support by means high and low. Ideological argument replete with classic allusion coexisted alongside propaganda that ranged from insinuation to intimidation. As Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. summarized, “From the inception of the controversy the patriots exhibited extraordinary skills in manipulating public opinion, playing upon the emotions of the ignorant as well as the minds of the educated” (Prelude 20). This work explores the relationship of the revolutionary press under Sam Adams’s direction to the issue of slavery. Did the patriot press play on the “emotions of the ignorant and the minds of the educated” when it came to the issue? How did the Boston Gazette, the patriots’ premiere organ of propaganda, answer the frequent charge that Americans were calling for freedom while denying it to others?
The absence of a patriot public discussion on slavery was noted in the nineteenth century. “The silence of the popular leaders on this question [slavery] is remarkable. It was ignored as a political issue in general politics, though emancipation was fully advocated in pamphlets and newspapers” (Frothingham, Rise 570). While modern historians, including David Brion Davis, argue that the economic necessity of slavery made abolition an improbable cause for a movement that sought to establish a united “American system” (256), it is proposed here that under Sam Adams’s direction, the propaganda of the American revolution did not simply ignore the question for fear of offending the South but constructed slavery into a lever promoting revolutionary action. The metaphor of slavery, so popular in the revolutionary decades, cannot be considered simply a reference to political writing of a previous time, but carried with it understandings that were anchored in the reality of American slavery and colonial attitudes toward black colonists. Its influence was furthered by decisions of the revolutionary circle—the selective reporting of the Somerset decision, the refusal to support antislavery in Massachusetts or elsewhere in active ways, the refusal, even, to engage in the antislavery discussion, and the continued portrayal of blacks and slaves along familiar lines. Given the level of sophistication of revolutionary propaganda as a whole, this was not an accidental accumulation but can only be considered as part of the overall campaign.
This work appears in a much different period than its two notable predecessors, Philip Davidson’s Propaganda and the American Revolution in 1941 and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s 1957 study, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776. Both books came from a Progressive tradition, calling on a paradigm established by Charles Beard at the beginning of the century that “organized American history around a restless sea of conflicting material interests” (Rodgers 12). Indeed, an emphasis on the role of propaganda would seem most suited to a tradition that interprets history in terms of conflict and its accompanying anxiety. I suggest, however, that the study of propaganda is not an either-or proposition that ignores ideology in favor of conspiracy and economic determinism. Certainly, it is in the name of ideology that propaganda derives its power for those whom it affects, the men and women who seek larger worlds to explain the social, economic, and political dislocations that lead to the call for the absolute break of revolution. As a shaper of views in vulnerable times, propaganda plays a role in the formation of a nation’s ideology. Recording the history of the new nation in the early national period, David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren, both ardent Whigs, set the stage for subsequent historians to adopt the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre as spontaneous expressions of American ideology rather than contrived events. We might also consider that the refusal of Americans in the new nation to accept the Constitution without the accompanying assurance of a bill of rights cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Revolution that turned on the issues the Bill of Rights subsequently encapsulated. That the Bill of Rights did not provide for the equality of black Americans may also be considered the legacy of a revolutionary rhetoric that refused to address the subject. In 1790, the Boston Gazette observed, “The publisher of a newspaper is highly responsible to God and his country, for the sentiments which he propagates among the body of a people” (BG 11/15/90). It was an odd note of caution emanating from what had been the patriots’ most radical rag, which, in the revolutionary decades, had been most interested in the revolutionary efficacy of its message rather than long-term consequences.
The works of Davidson and Schlesinger appeared when consensus history was dominant, but the fact that Davidson’s book was published at the time of the United States’ entry into World War II and Schlesinger’s book arrived amidst the tensions of the Cold War suggests their acceptance was a prelude to a changing historiography. In breaking new ground, however, neither Davidson nor Schlesinger noted the slavery discussion of the period, even as a backdrop to the revolutionary world. Nor was slavery addressed in a 1980 collection of essays devoted to the revolutionary press (Bailyn and Hench). In contrast, this work calls on an exploding body of work on black life and slavery in the age of revolution (Berlin and Hoffman; D. Davis; Essig; P. Foner; Frey; Genovese; Horton and Horton; Jordan; Mullin; Piersen) that now carries forward the previously lone voices of Aptheker and Quarles. Moreover, as post-Progressive historians took center stage, revolutionary history began to build upon the work of Carl Bridenbaugh’s benchmark work, Cities in Revolt Urban Life in America, to include new emphasis on the lives of artisans and “lower-sorts.” This was not just bottom-up history, focusing attention on groups of people who had been overlooked or underrated (although that was part of the movement), but gave discussion to the tensions of the times in economic, social, philosophical, and religious terms (Bonomi; Greene; Heimert; Heimert and Miller; Hodges and Brown; Kerber; Lemisch; May; Nash; Olton; Rosswurm; Ryerson). The work of this generation of historians is of particular interest for a study of propaganda that must consider that social and economic unease is the traditional seedbed for propaganda of many sorts. I have been able to continue the study of propaganda first articulated by Davidson and Schlesinger because of this new body of scholarship and an approach to history that does not ignore the less definable factors of myth, symbol, and social psychology (Jordan; Wood, “Conspiracy”; Zuckerman).
Foremost among the contextual settings that this work takes into account is the consideration of racial attitudes in colonial Boston. Even though black inhabitants composed a relatively small proportion of Boston’s total residents, fewer than a thousand black colonists out of a total population of sixteen thousand, the suspicions of white Bostonians toward black Bostonians were reflected in both the legal system and in everyday practice. In fact, it is probably a mistake to compare Boston’s race relations to other cities and colonies as this assumes a judgmental continuum, with the West Indies and South Carolina representing one end while positioning the Northeast, including Boston, as the most enlightened. Such a continuum takes the attention off Boston in terms of the racial attitudes that were to imbue, as I argue, the revolutionary propaganda that emanated from the city and its radical circle. Prompted by its own particular culture and history, Bostonians held perceptions toward blacks and slaves that could intercept with those of other colonies but by no means were simply the lighter end of the racial continuum. As Boston’s propagandists marketed their own view of the world and attached it to the revolutionary cause, included in this export were specific views of black colonists.
This work thus begins with an overview of news items that appeared in the Boston press in the years before the Revolution. Attempting to explore attitudes is no easy task, and to assume that portrayals of black colonists in news items automatically represented the overall views of readers is to tread dangerous ground. However, colonial readers traditionally expected a range of views in their newspapers and were able to receive it by the colonial practice of reprinting news stories verbatim from other publications, domestic and British. By providing the sources of the items, colonial printers expected their readers to put information into the context of their origination points. This colonial printing practice served to provide for the dispersal of a variety of political views, and, not incidentally, made it possible for early radical propaganda to appear in newspapers that were not radical themselves. The practice failed, however, when it came to news and information about black colonists. Long before the revolutionary decades, the Boston newspapers reflected a narrow public environment for an understanding of black colonists. In the public arena provided by the Boston newspapers, definitions of black worthiness seldom exceeded the definitions set out by the slave advertising. Indeed, given that newspapers published information of black colonists in terms of crime and conspiracy, it was the slave advertising, usually seeking to sell slaves on the basis of merit, that provided the positive public view. But even here, Bostonians seemed unable to give more than grudging approval. “Negroes will do” a Boston slave advertisement noted in a stretch of accommodation (BG 12/2/72). If we are to judge by the public world of its colonial press, Boston recognized no black heroes, no black talents, and made no statements of black worth outside of occasional for-sale advertisements.
One explanation for the lack of counterweight is the colony’s obsession with conspiracy. As Gordon S. Wood has noted, colonists were products of “the great era of conspiratorial fears and imagined intrigues” (“Conspiracy” 407). There surely could be no better lookouts at the entrance gates of conspiracy than the Massachusetts colonists, the products of a Stuart England who coupled the maintenance of freedom with their ability to heed early warning signs of those who would bring it down. Facade of any sort was regarded suspiciously: plain dress, unostentatious living, and unadorned worship were to be reflections of ambitions of purity; churchgoers were exhorted to forgo temptation in its many disguises; even language was to be plain. Beauty was to be found in order—“the order of things as they are, not as they appear,” as Perry Miller put it (Miller and Johnson 1:62). But what could be said about men and women whose very color was one of God’s warning signs, whose Africanisms were demonstrative, and whose arrival had been involuntary? Insured perpetual difference by physiognomy, black colonists had little chance to overcome Puritan distrust, no matter how much they met standards of behavioral virtue set down by their Boston overseers. Against this backdrop, the news stories that never failed to report news of black revolt, including those of household servants, were likely to be seen not as logical outcomes of enslavement but rather as evidence of the treasonable hearts that could exist behind the most pleasant of miens.
Samuel Adams was a recipient of such cultural biases, proudly so, as indicated by way he signed his first essay, “The Puritan.” Moreover, the revolutionary propagandists found conspiracy a useful theme in building opposition to Great Britain and mitigated against any impulse to overcome these same attitudes on the basis that they impinged upon the understanding of black colonists.
While Adams and his circle called upon ancient Puritan fears in their reification of conspiracy theory, it should also be considered that Adams’s call to return to an earlier time of Puritan history, as exemplified by suspicion of things foreign, appeared in the unstable economic decades that preceded the American Revolution, which, for Boston, had been a way of life even when other colonial cities were prospering. After 1763, the economic downturn was accompanied by a stratification of colonial society. Taverns, social clubs, even churches, in Boston and elsewhere, split along class lines. As white colonists were finding fewer opportunities to achieve the “decent competency” of former times, their society was also shutting doors on the basis of predetermined assessments. Artisans, losing traditional positions of authority and leadership, found themselves in danger of being clumped with the “lower sorts.” One of Adams’s brilliant moves as a propagandist was to harness the sense of liminality occasioned by the drop in artisanal status by bringing into the revolutionary column artisans and small merchants who could exercise the traditional leadership of their class as members of the Sons of Liberty and the Loyall Nine.
Two of these men brought to the cause were John Gill and Benjamin Edes, the printers of the radicals’ Boston Gazette. Like other members of the revolutionary generation, Adams and Edes shared a personal knowledge of what it was like to drop to second-class status. Under the revolutionary banner, Benjamin Edes, like Adams, was able to replicate the leadership that his father had exercised in the preceding generation. Adams also translated concerns with status into revolutionary propaganda by his unceasing drumbeat that Great Britain did not treat American colonists with the respect and status due them. Inevitably, concern of status, real and imagined, would intersect with the American bondsman as the ultimate example of life without status.
As modern history tells us—Germany’s Weimar Republic being the classic example—a society in which substantial numbers of inhabitants experience economic and social decline does not bode well for its least accepted members. In the revolutionary decades, Bostonian black colonists labored yet under an even more conspicuous burden, not only representing the danger of conspiracy but increasingly providing the example of the bottom rung that could seem leeringly close to white colonists in economic or social declension. How far would Americans have to descend to satisfy British prerogatives? To the level of slavery, the propagandists answered in their favorite metaphor. To white colonists, who may have viewed themselves just scrapingly above that status, it was a metaphor less anchored in the political dialogue of the previous century than in the reality of actual slavery that, if not observed in their daily lives, was brought to them weekly by the slave marketplace provided by the colonial newspaper. If we are to look to U.S. history, North and South, we see that when the economic status of whites begins a decline to the economic status of poor blacks, black and white groups do not bond to defeat common enemies but further stratify along lines of color. From Bacon’s Rebellion into the modern world, whiteness has taken on increased value in hard times. There was nothing in Boston’s colonial culture that was likely to prevent that trajectory.
Finally, Adams and his circle of propagandists operated in a city in which attention to the reality of slavery had been focused by two fronts: Boston’s antislavery activists and events of the time that involved black colonists. In a city whose religious history was not always useful to the perceptions of black colonists, Boston’s religious leaders had nonetheless articulated antislavery concerns from Samuel Sewall’s famous call in 1700. Neither Boston’s antislavery activists, however, nor those of other colonies found they could dent the increasing patriot control of the colonial press. Turning to printers associated with the British loyalism to make their case, antislavery activists found themselves cornered: to be antislavery was not only to be out of step with patriot ideology but to be considered pro-British. Isolated by the propagandists, the antislavery clerics, the Quaker pamphleteers, and the voices of the black colonists were never able to establish themselves either on or as a patriot beachhead. Scholars of the slavery discussion have often equated the lack of broad-based discussion to the lack of a significant antislavery movement. “Lacking widespread opposition to slavery, its defense was usually sporadic and local,” Larry R. Tise writes in this vein (16). There indeed may not have been widespread opposition to slavery in the American colonies, but an active and intercolonial movement did exist. The limitations of its discussion had most to do with patriot refusal to include it on the patriot agenda.
This early curtain of silence put in high relief the public representation of black colonists in ways that reinforced long-held attitudes. In Boston, as antislavery activists were writing and campaigning for legislative redress mostly behind the scenes, the Boston press continued to forge a public world of black violence, at home and abroad. Notable occurrences in Boston’s prerevolutionary era were the execution of two domestic servants in a poisoning plot against a Charlestown resident in 1755 and the execution of a slave in the next decade for the rape of a Worcester woman, an event coinciding with the British occupation of Boston and British rumors of slave insurrection. Occurring at the peak of this racial discord, the “whitening” of Crispus Attucks in Paul Revere’s famous print of the Boston Massacre was to express the history of a colonial city whose intersections with race had been longstanding and complicated.
Nonetheless, the history of the city cannot lead to the automatic assumption that Adams and his circle invented issues of racial beliefs for use as American revolutionary propaganda. What can be pointed up is the charged racial atmosphere that existed at a time when radical leaders were composing the propagandistic messages. Adams and his circle did not have to invent racial motivation in their revolutionary propaganda but could instead take advantage of that charged atmosphere to advance revolutionary propaganda along intercolonial lines. This book attempts to illustrate that Adams and his circle utilized assumed racial attitudes in underreporting, selective reporting, and remaining silent on issues related to black colonists.
Adams and his circle were skilled in the techniques of propaganda that seek to influence by the means at its command, including selective information, misinformation, and campaigns and slogans that do not hesitate to call upon the inchoate feelings that may be hardly understood by those who carry them. The status of slaves, the assumption of particular colonial attitudes toward slaves, and instigation of fear that continued British rule would result in a mythic reversal of power in which slaves would occupy, literally and figuratively, the place previously occupied by white Americans advanced the overall themes of American propaganda. Yet readers will find no patriot essays calling for the continued subjugation of black colonists as a theme of the revolutionary press.
As Adams was the inheritor of Puritan attitudes that impinged upon views of black colonists, Adams was also the inheritor of a mature political press tradition from both sides of the water. Like conspiracy, the revolutionary generation viewed revolutionary propaganda as a Jacob’s coat of many colors. Adams’s skills had been honed on Massachusetts political controversies from the days of the Independent Advertiser (Boyer), when to expose a hand was to draw direct fire. Despite the invention of the grand events, the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, Adams was as skilled in the use of silence, subtlety, and innuendo, all of which would have particular relevance for the propagandistic message when it came to the issue of slavery.
In his early days as a propagandist, Adams had followed the example of the British Craftsman as the model for his anti-excise tax campaign of the 1740s (Boyer), but it would be John Wilkes’s North Britons campaign in the 1760s that would teach him most about the use of what we might now call “hot buttons,” bringing to the fore deeply buried fears that would have relevance for the Whig campaign as it touched upon the slave issue. In a campaign that would be closely followed by an American audience, the North Briton sounded the theme that the king’s close advisor Lord Bute could not be trusted because, as a Scotsman, he could be expected to plot for the return of England to Scottish, that is, Catholic, domination. Indeed, the first and primary objection to Lord Bute was “He is a Scot… from the time of that of the Stuarts, of ever odious memory, first mounted the throne, the Scots have over-ran the land” (NB 1/22/63). The conniving of Scotsmen knew no bounds, and Bute was charged with a sexual liaison with the Queen Mother to gain influence in the royal household. The scurrility and charges grew bolder until artifice and sarcasm had been replaced by a frontal attack on Bute as a Scotsman and his accompanying “attachment to France,” that is, Catholicism, and the dread implications for the overthrow of the Glorious Revolution.
The generation that responded so readily to Wilkes’s propaganda was less than a quarter of a century removed from the Battle of Culloden and its promise to end the threat of Catholic domination in the British Isles. The undertow simmering in British popular consciousness since that time, the fear to which Wilkite propaganda so clearly attached itself, was that Catholicism might reappear. To a nation glorying in its British nationalism as the flower of protestantism, the fear of Catholicism in high places was to pose the threat of national extinction. It was no disadvantage to British politicians that the “Stuart bogey,” as one historian labeled the fear of a Catholic monarchy (Brewer 172), lacked the hard edges of literal truth. Indeed, its amorphous nature worked to enhance the propaganda of Wilkes and his coeditor, Charles Churchill, who found that the idea of renewed Stuart ascendancy could ignite popular fear whenever its boggy underside was hauled forth.
Adams’s essays in his early political campaigns were quick to stir the fear of Catholicism as the example of ongoing conspiracy. After the conclusion of the French and Indian War ended the French threat on colonial soil, attacks on “popery” lessened. What I suggest replaced Catholicism as the simmering undertow of colonial fear was the debasement represented by slavery. The “Stuart bogey” carried less weight, even in anti-Catholic New England, than an American bogey with a black face. While Boston’s annual and unruly “Pope’s Day Parade” proclaimed Bostonian freedom from Catholic hegemony, it cannot go unnoticed that the devil’s imp was in blackface. Indeed, the black colonist could be viewed to have many of the characteristics of the Roman Catholic— the desire for exotic dress, a private language, a secret world of rite, a conspiratorial bent, and a potent sexual nature that could remove white identity from succeeding generations. The fear of “popery” provided ready and fertile ground for Bostonian attitudes toward black colonists.
There were also lessons of implementation to be learned from the Wilkes episode and a man described as “a propagandist whose skills fell little short of genius” (Brewer 166). In 1768, preparing to return from exile to certain imprisonment, Wilkes put in place a campaign that sought popular appeal from all classes and resulted in making him a hero across the British world. In this second stage of the saga, Wilkes’s popularity soared as he came to personify increasingly lofty principles. Indeed, the higher the principle, the broader the appeal to “the middling and inferior class of people,” as he put it (Brewer 168). Calling for “law and liberty,” a new slogan for the time, Wilkes turned himself from a partisan politician into the persecuted Everyman: the honest citizen standing up to the encroachments of arbitrary government. “Law and liberty” did not supplant the famous “Forty Five” that was reinvigorated by Wilkes’s imprisonment, causing William Franklin to complain to his father, “The nonsense about No. 45 is almost as much attended to in the Colonies as in England” (Franklin, Papers 16:5).
As in England, the American popularity of the slogans, notably “45,” served to expand meanings beyond immediate political ends into a fanciful, optimistic message of faith in popular power and was imitated in the American campaign. Similarly, Wilkes’s ability to pull to his support men and women who interpreted the slogans as meaningful to their own concerns was to be adapted to American propaganda. By the culmination of the Wilkite controversies, American radicals had developed a pantheon of slogans—“taxation without representation,” “join or die,” “Boston Tea Party,” and the use of the word “slavery” to represent “slavery” to Great Britain. Use of the metaphor of slavery gave first evidence that the issue of real slavery was not to have a part in the revolutionary messages. Upon this base, the metaphor of slavery, patriot propagandists constructed a movement that had as example the level to which white Americans could sink at British hands.