Nicolas Lampert's, ‘A People's Art History of the United
States’, writes that the first person to die in the Boston Massacre of March
1770 was a former slave named Crispus Attucks. Attucks had been part of an
enormous multi-racial, working-class group that confronted the British with the
tools they had available - snowballs and wooden bats. Paul Revere published
what became the most popular image of the incident, an engraving called The
Bloody Massacre. It was wildly inaccurate. "Revere," Lampert writes,
"depicted the crowd as passive, turning a working class mob into a respectable
assortment of men and women. Worst of all, he depicts Attucks as someone he
wasn't a white man. Revere's engraving was designed as anti-British propaganda
that fell in line with how wealthy colonial elites wanted to portray the
revolution: a revolt that was led by an educated, white, male leadership that
had rallied the colonial population against the unjust policies of the British
Parliament and its use of force."
Lampert adds, the image traveled up and down the East coast
- and to Europe - and was likely the only thing most people saw or heard about
the brawl. This, he writes, "obscured the class tensions that existed in
colonial America," and completely erased Attucks since, apparently, Revere
was unwilling to allow a non-white rebel to become a revolutionary martyr.
Revere, alongside John Quincy Adams, were overtly
antagonistic toward those who led the anti-British fightback, dubbing them
"a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and molattoes [sic], Irish
Teagues, and out landish [sic] Jack Tarrs."
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