Paul Revere's Engraving
Within three weeks of the shooting, silversmith Paul Revere had produced an engraving called "The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a Party of the 29th Regt." The image spread through the colonies faster than any written account could have. It was copied, printed, and distributed everywhere.
Revere's engraving was not an accurate depiction of what happened. In the image, the soldiers stand in a neat, disciplined line, firing on command into a crowd of well-dressed, orderly citizens. A sign above the Custom House is labeled "Butcher's Hall." The sky is clear, the scene is orderly, and the soldiers clearly appear to be the aggressors. None of this matched what witnesses actually described. The real scene was chaotic, the crowd was pressing against the soldiers, and the victims were working men, not gentlemen.
But accuracy was not the point. The engraving was designed to tell a story that would make people angry. It showed British soldiers as cold-blooded killers and colonists as innocent victims. It worked. Copies of the image appeared in homes and meeting halls from New Hampshire to Georgia.
What the Engraving Got Wrong
Revere's image showed soldiers firing in a neat line on a clear night into a passive crowd. Eyewitness accounts described a chaotic scene with the crowd throwing objects and pressing against the soldiers. The building was labeled "Butcher's Hall" when it was actually the Custom House. The victims were shown as well-dressed men, not the sailors and workers they actually were.
Newspapers and Patriot Messaging
The word "massacre" itself was a choice. A massacre suggests the deliberate slaughter of innocent people. Calling what happened on King Street a massacre was a political decision by Patriot leaders like Samuel Adams, who understood that language could shape how people felt about an event just as powerfully as the event itself.
Boston newspapers published account after account of the killings, each one more outraged than the last. A pamphlet called A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston was put together by a committee of Bostonians and distributed throughout the colonies. It collected depositions from witnesses and presented the event entirely from the colonists' point of view. Any evidence that the soldiers might have been frightened or provoked was left out.
Samuel Adams was especially skilled at this kind of work. He made sure that the story of the massacre reached every colony and that it was told in a way that pointed blame squarely at the British military and the Parliament that had sent the troops. He organized the funeral procession for the victims as a public display of mourning that tens of thousands of people attended.
Media and Public Opinion
One of the most important results of the massacre was how it brought colonists together. Before 1770, the thirteen colonies were still quite separate from each other. People thought of themselves as Virginians or Massachusetts men more than as Americans. The massacre gave them a shared story and a shared enemy.
Images like Revere's engraving worked the way political advertising works today. They simplified a complicated situation into a clear moral picture. They told viewers who was good and who was bad without requiring them to read long documents or understand legal arguments. The emotional power of a visual image was something the Patriots understood very well.
The lesson of the massacre for colonial leaders was that controlling the story of an event could be just as important as the event itself. Samuel Adams and other Patriot writers made sure that the British side of the story was heard as little as possible. When soldiers were put on trial, Adams worried that acquittals would undercut his narrative. It is no coincidence that the man who worked hardest to use the massacre as propaganda also made sure that accurate records of it were distributed to every colony.
Primary Sources Used on This Page
- Paul Revere engraving, "The Bloody Massacre" (Library of Congress)
- A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston