On March 5, 1770, a riot broke out on King Street (now State
Street) in front of the Custom House in Boston. Soldiers fired into the crowd
and killed five civilians. This dramatic event came on the heels of weeks of
upset between colonists and British soldiers occupying the town. Its
reverberations would be felt all the way through the American Revolution.
Red Study at the Gibson House Museum. |
A copy of the famous print of the Boston Massacre, as the
event would come to be known, hangs in the red study at the Gibson House. You might
know the one I’m talking about. It shows a line of soldiers, in red coats with
muskets, firing into a crowd. Three men in the foreground are seen shot and
dying on the street. (This particular copy does not include Crispus Attucks, an African-American man born
into slavery, and a well-known victim of the Massacre.) Well-dressed colonists look on in horror.
Paul Revere produced this illustration just
three weeks after the event, titling it “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in
King Street, Boston.” (He appears to have copied the image from the work of fellow
printer, Henry Pelham, whose similar depiction was published around the same
time.) The print became a famous, and important, piece of propaganda. It did
much to inflame colonial sentiments against the British, even as it depicted an
inaccurate portrayal of the actual event.
Why is there a copy at the Gibson House? This particular
print was produced for the 1876 Centennial (purportedly on original plates from
the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society). It was first owned by
Charlie Gibson’s uncle, Dr. John Collins Warren; Warren gave it to Charlie in
1904.