America 250
My theme running through this series on the highlights and lowlights of American history as we approach this land’s 250th birthday has been contradictions. This country was, is, and always will be a stewpot of contradictions.
The box score thus far:
- Contradiction No. 1 — Fleeing from, and then embracing, religious intolerance
- Contradiction No. 2 — All Men Are Created Equal
- Contradiction No. 3 — New World women
- Contradiction No. 4 — “We the People” really means just a few of us
Now then, let’s explore today’s contradiction.
Contradiction No. 5: The Boston Massacre, a memorabilia bonanza
On March 5, 1770, an incident occurred on a Boston street presaging an eerily similar event that took place about 120 years later in Chicago, the Haymarket Riot. The events were alike in many ways except for the spin put on each by elementary school history teachers and politicians running for office by wrapping themselves in the flag. (Or humping the flag as You-Know-Who has done.) The Boston Massacre comes down to us as a righteous demonstration by the plucky, spirited, determined revolutionaries who’d soon announce to the world that there was a new nation, eventually to be called the United States of America. The Haymarket Riot is positioned as an anarchistic, Marxist mob of alien terrorists whose bloodthirst resulted in the deaths of policemen.
In Heat.
For the three years since the Townsend Act had been enacted and its taxes imposed, lots of city folk in the American Colonies had been expressing themselves hotly in opposition. Their rage had spread, first, throughout the northern Colonies and then even down to Virginia. The British didn’t care for those rumblings. Britain sent over a contingent of soldiers to the Colonies to remind the hotheads who was boss. In Boston, the outnumbered British soldiers routinely were harassed and sometimes assaulted by civilians.
The soldiers (really, that era’s policemen) were getting itchy. And scared.
That late Monday afternoon in 1770, a crowd of 400-500 Bostonians surrounded a squad of nine British soldiers on the ironically named King Street. They shouted at and spit on the soldiers. Then some in the crowd started throwing snowballs. Next came stones and bricks. The soldiers panicked. One of them, perhaps accidentally, fired his musket. His cohorts reacted by shooting into the crowd.
When the smoke cleared, five civilians were dead.
The Boston Massacre became the ideal rallying point around which colonial revolutionary fervor would swirl for the next few years, until 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was issued.
Now, here’s the quintessentially American aspect of the aftermath. Paul Revere was a Boston artisan working in silver and copper. His silverware and engraved plates were hot commodities around the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time. Immediately after the Boston Massacre, he began pumping out scads of commemorative items depicting the Massacre, listing the names of the victims, and so forth. Suddenly, has silver- and coppersmithing were in demand throughout the Colonies. He became an “industrialist.”
Revere even branched out into printing. His numbered print, “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston on March 5, 1770 by a party of the 29th Regiment,” sold all over the Colonies. In fact, an original copy of it to this day can fetch upward of $200,000 at auction.
Paul Revere print.
Revolutionary swag — now that‘s American.
●