Adams Revisits Attucks

In July 1773, John Adams returned to the figure of Crispus Attucks in an odd new way. Adams wrote this passage into his diary:

To Tho. Hutchinson

Sir

You will hear from Us with Astonishment. You ought to hear from Us with Horror. You are chargeable before God and Man, with our Blood.—The Soldiers were but passive Instruments, were Machines, neither moral nor voluntary Agents in our Destruction more than the leaden Pelletts, with which we were wounded.—You was a free Agent. You acted, coolly, deliberately, with all that premeditated Malice, not against Us in Particular but against the People in general, which in the Sight of the Law is an ingredient in the Composition of Murder. You will hear further from Us hereafter.

Chrispus Attucks

Some authors have interpreted this as something Attucks himself wrote. However, since it refers to the shots on King Street and those had killed Attucks immediately, he couldn’t have been the author.

Instead, Adams appears to have adopted the voice of Attucks and the other people killed in 1770 as ghosts, astonishing and horrifying Gov. Hutchinson. The editors of Adams’s papers theorize that Adams was thinking of publishing the letter as a pseudonymous newspaper essay, but no one has found it in print. (Adams’s newspaper essays were usually long and legalistic.)

At the time, Massachusetts Whig politicians were angrily discussing letters that Hutchinson and other friends of the royal government had sent to London over the preceding years, recently leaked by Benjamin Franklin. Adams perceived Hutchinson as conspiring against Massachusetts’s traditional constitution. Hence his accusation in this paragraph that the governor had acted with “premeditated Malice, not against Us in Particular but against the People in general.”

The letter also hints at Adams’s mixed feelings about helping to defend Capt. Thomas Preston and the British soldiers back in 1770. By arguing that those men “were but passive Instruments” in Hutchinson’s conspiracy, he could justify defending them while still treating the government they worked for as oppressive.

“Enough to Terrify Any Person”?

Kellie Carter Jackson at Harvard recently posted an essay at WBUR’s Cognoscenti opinion site invoking the Boston Massacre as a touchstone for some of our current debates about racial stereotypes. Jackson tied John Adams’s method of defending the soldiers in the Massacre trial to recent conflicts that started with a belief that law-abiding black men or boys looked threatening:

When presenting his case, Adams described the men killed as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.” To put this in contemporary language, he was basically describing the men as nothing more than a group of “thugs.” He centered his defense of the British soldiers on the charge that [Crispus] Attucks struck the first blow and led the “dreadful carnage.” Adams concluded the “mad behavior” of Attucks provoked the soldiers’ response, claiming that the group was “under the command of a stout molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person.”

This defense sounds eerily familiar. . . .

Adams emphasizes Attucks’ race several times within his summation. Why would this emphasis be important? Moreover, why is Attucks’s behavior alone singled out? Why, of the several men killed, is Attucks the only one we know? Furthermore, why is Attucks physical description the primary focus of the threat? . . .

It is clear that in over 250 years of history, the racially charged perceptions of black men as bearers of a physique so innately menacing that their “looks” alone are “enough to terrify any person” has not changed. The Attucks case provides an implied precedent that powerfully explains the lack of justice present when whites cite self-defense in criminal cases against black people.

Attucks was in the front ranks of a big, angry, violent crowd. He was carrying a stick of cord wood, and on the way to King Street he’d pressed a similar club into the hands of another man, Patrick Keaton. Witnesses reported him grabbing a soldier’s bayonet and “twitching” it, and shouting, “Kill the dogs! Knock them over!” Adams was right to describe Attucks as threatening because he, and those other guys, were threatening the soldiers.

On the other hand, Adams singled out Attucks from that large crowd and all those other aggressive men. Someone else threw the stick that knocked down Pvt. Edward Montgomery and set off the shooting. Adams clearly played off stereotypes of “negroes and molattoes,” as well as the other social outsiders he named, for the sake of the (all or mostly Irish) solders he was defending.

Furthermore, the evidence that Attucks was threatening just highlights the difference between his behavior and that of the boys and men killed in recent incidents, as Jackson discusses: Trayvon Martin, walking home alone from a store; Jonathan Ferrell, seeking help after an auto accident; and Jordan Davis, sitting in a car with friends. None of them was at the head of a riotous mob or carrying a club.

Jackson is quite right that the stereotype of frightening black males has very old roots. As just one piece of evidence, on 1 Nov 1769 Boston’s selectmen swore in a special new Constable of the Watch with this instruction:

6thly. You are to take up all Negroes Indian and Molatto Slaves that may be absent from their masters House after nine o’Clock at Night and passing the Streets unless they are carrying Lanthorns with light Candles and can give a good and satisfactory Account of their Business that such offenders may be proceeded with according to Law.

Since it was impossible to tell if a person of color was free or enslaved just by appearance, that meant the town watchmen were supposed to stop all blacks and Natives walking at night and demand to know their business.

That was less than a year after Samuel Adams had written to the Boston Gazette objecting to how army sentries were stopping (white) people: “to call upon every one, who passes by, to know Who comes there as the phrase is, I take it to be in the highest degree impertinent, unless they can shew a legal authority for so doing.” But black or Native people, simply by walking outside at night, were seen as threats to the town. Those people didn’t even have to be at the head of a crowd of angry men.

Samuel Adams and the Massacre Victims’ Grave

Here’s another myth about the Boston Massacre that seems to have arisen recently.

Did Samuel Adams have the Massacre victims’ bodies placed in his family tomb?

The monuments in the Granary Burying-Ground to Samuel Adams and to the victims of the Boston Massacre (and Christopher Seider) are near each other. That seems to have given rise to the idea that they mark the same tomb. The Encyclopedia of the Veteran in America (2009) says that “the five victims of the Boston Massacre are buried (in a circle around Adams).” Boston’s Freedom Trail (2011), by Cindi D. Pietrzyk, states that Adams asked for the Massacre victims to be buried in his tomb, as does this webpage from the Freedom Trail.

I don’t think there’s any contemporaneous evidence for either story. In its report on the funeral for the first four Massacre victims to die, the Boston Gazette of 12 Mar 1770 stated that “The Bodies were deposited in one Vault in the middle Burying-Ground.” The Massachusetts Spy for 7 Mar 1771 described a commemoration of the Massacre at Paul Revere’s house in the North End, including a picture of:

the bust of young Seider; and on the front of the pedestal, the names of the five persons murdered by the soldiery on the fifth of March, and all interred in the same grave with him.

There was no mention of Adams in such accounts, nor a mention of the Massacre victims’ bodies when Adams died in 1803.

Many of us like to imagine bodies lying in peace forever, but in fact there’s been a lot of activity in the city burying-grounds. All seven bodies in question have been moved at least once. In 1856 James S. Loring read a paper to the New England Historic Genealogical Society about Adams’s remains, later quoted in the Historical Magazine:

We have the authority of Samuel Adams Wells, his grandson—recorded among the notes to “Consolations of Solicitude,” a collection of poems written by John W. Randall, Esq., for stating that his remains are buried in the Checkley tomb. His first wife was of this family. His bones have been gathered by his grandson into a box, and deposited in a corner of the vault. It is a singular coincidence that this tomb fronts the tomb where it is supposed lie the remains of the victims of the Boston massacre. . . . It appears that the patriotic Samuel Adams was so absorbed in the mighty interests of his country, that he never provided an inch of earth for the interment of his own remains when he should come to die.

Richard Checkley bought that tomb for his family in 1737, five years before his death. It had the Checkley name on the front, providing a landmark for researchers; it was never marked with Adams’s name.

Loring had more to say in The Hundred Boston Orators, a collection of biographical detail and lore reprinted many times in the mid-1800s:

In regard to the location of the site where the victims of the Boston massacre were deposited, the editor has the evidence of the venerable Col. Joseph May, a warden of King’s Chapel, possessing great integrity and a tenacious memory, stated previous to his decease in 1841, and who witnessed their interment, being then ten years of age, and a scholar in the public Latin school. Pointing to the spot which is the site of a tomb once owned by the city, in the rear of the tomb of Deacon Richard Checkley, an apothecary, Col. May stated that was the place where he saw them interred. A beautiful larch-tree flourishes at the side of the city tomb, which is opposite Montgomery-place.

When, during the mayoralty of Jonathan Chapman, an iron fence was erected on the Granary cemetery, in the month of June, 1840, an excavation was made over this spot, for the erection of this city tomb, human bones, and a skull with a bullet-hole perforated through it, were discovered, which probably were remains of these victims; and we have the evidence of the late Martin Smith, sexton of King’s Chapel church, that he assisted in throwing the skull and other bones into the earth near the larch-tree.

One could read the phrase “in the rear of the tomb of Deacon Richard Checkley” to mean the Massacre victims were put in the rear of that vault. But the first quote from Loring shows that he was referring to two adjoining tombs, one behind the other.

Furthermore, the Checkley tomb was opened again in 1898, as reported by the Sons of the American Revolution. It was found to be “perfectly intact,” which could not have been the case if the Massacre victims’ bodies had been excavated from it almost sixty years earlier.

It was around that turn of the century that the Sons of the American Revolution installed the large stones that mark the two burial sites today. The fact that they’re so close to each other is probably just coincidence. As to whether anything of the seven men and boys is left at those spots, that’s another question.

[The photograph above, via TripAdvisor, shows the two stone markers today.]

New Myths of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite differently. It’s been mythologized in many ways, and myths and misconceptions continue to crop up. Here are some that I’ve seen repeated recently.

Did Crispus Attucks work at Gray’s ropewalk?

Boston’s official report on the shooting, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre…, gave a lot of attention to a brawl between soldiers and workers at John Gray’s rope-manufacturing facility on 2 March. That fight involved two soldiers, Mathew Kilroy and William Warren, and one ropemaker, Samuel Gray, who faced off on King Street three days later. Another soldier, John Carroll, was part of a follow-up brawl on 3 March. Thus, the town suggested, those soldiers had not shot in self-defense but out of anger at townspeople, and perhaps at Samuel Gray in particular.

In all that attention to the ropewalk fight, however, no witness identified Crispus Attucks as being involved. Testimony does put a big man of African descent in the brawl: Drummer Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment. But justice of the peace John Hill recalled shouting at Walker, “you black rascal, what have you to do with white people’s quarrels?” That suggests that no man of color like Attucks had been prominent in the fights before. Newspapers described Gray as a ropemaker but Attucks simply as a sailor.

In 2008 I noted a Boston Globe essay that said, “According to lore, Attucks reappeared [in Boston] just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker.” But there’s no evidence for that guess and some to suggest it was mistaken. I suspect people trying to find a tight link between the ropewalk fight and the shooting on King Street assumed Attucks was involved in both, but historical events aren’t always so neat.

Did Attucks work on a whaling ship?

In Traits of the Tea-Party, published in 1835, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher cited an old barber named William Pierce as his source that Attucks “was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor…” But Pierce also told Thatcher that he’d never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he didn’t have inside information.

Boston’s 1770 newspapers directly contradict Pierce. They said Attucks was from Framingham, not Nantucket. They reported Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence [in the Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—meaning he worked on trading voyages to the south rather than hunting whales.

I suspect that Pierce’s memory of Attucks from sixty-five years before had gotten mixed with his memory of the Prince Boston legal case, which did involve a man of African and Native descent, whalers from Nantucket, and a captain named Folger.

TOMORROW: The myth of the tombs.

Commemorating and Considering the Boston Massacre

Wednesday, 5 March, is the 244th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and there are a number of commemorations and discussions of the event coming up.

At 6:30 P.M. that evening, Old South Meeting-House will host a free program with authors Audrey and Frank Peterman speaking on “The Future of Our National Parks.” This talk is co-sponsored by Boston National Historical Park to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. The event description says, “The Petermans will reflect on a few of many Boston stories—including Crispus Attucks, the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, and internationally famous African American poet Phillis Wheatley—that evoke the voices and invite the participation of our diverse communities in the history that shaped our nation.”

On Saturday, 8 March, the Bostonian Society has a full day of activities at the Old State House museum commemorating the Massacre. These include the “Trial of the Century” program at 11:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.: “Watch patriot lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy defend the British soldiers accused of murdering five Bostonians at the Boston Massacre. Audience members are invited to act as witnesses and jurors for this celebrated case.” Tickets will go on sale at 9:00, and are free with Old State House admission.

At 7:00 P.M., the live reenactment of the Massacre will take place outside the Old State House. Some of the region’s best historical reenactors will portray the men of the 29th Regiment and the people of Boston as they move toward their fatal confrontation. I’ll be there as the narrator. This event is outdoors and free. Sight lines aren’t excellent, but being stuck in a crowd is part of the historical experience. Folks can also follow on Twitter through @BostonianSoc and #bostonmassacre.

Next Wednesday, 12 March, at 6:00 P.M., the Old State House will be the site of a talk on “The Legacy of Crispus Attucks in Boston in the Twentieth Century.” Maureen McAleer, a graduate student at Harvard University, will discuss her thesis work on how activists, politicians, and the public have remembered, commemorated, and used Attucks’s name over time. This event is free, but please register on Eventbrite.

Painting the Legend

The Skinner auction house reports that that watercolor I’ve been discussing sold for $39,975, above the estimate. I hope its new owner is pleased with the painting and the little historical mystery it brings.

Thinking about what makes an artifact interesting reminded me of a story I noted back in 2006, right after I started this blog. As reported by National Public Radio and the New Yorker, the story started in 1975 when Alexander McBurney, a doctor in Rhode Island, bought the painting shown here.

A picture of a Revolutionary-era black mariner in uniform is extremely rare, and this images was reproduced in various books over the following decades. For example, in The Unknown American Revolution Gary Nash speculated that a sailor commissioned it after a lucrative privateering voyage.

About 2005 the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York was planning an exhibit on “Fighting for Freedom: Black Patriots and Loyalists.” McBurney sent the canvas out for restoration before loaning it to that exhibit.

But the restoration by Peter Williams revealed that the sailor’s face and brown skin had been painted over a rather ordinary portrait of a Royal Navy officer, probably in the late 1900s. The N.P.R. link includes before-and-after images of the mariner’s hand. The original face was unsalvageable.

Dr. McBurney then asked Williams to restore the canvas to how it looked when he’d bought it, with the face of a fictitious black man. Though he knew that face had no historical authenticity, over the years he’d become fond of it. And he had a much better story.

The Bottom Line on the Pitcairn Painting?

I’ve been discussing this small watercolor painting whose label says it shows Maj. John Pitcairn and was created by Paul Revere. That picture appears to have been first reported in Art in America in December 1922. At that time it was paired with another, also credited to Revere and labeled “A View of South Bridge, Lexington.”

Now I didn’t know Lexington had a significant or picturesque south bridge in the early republic. For someone unaware of local Revolutionary history but playing off the buzzwords of the late-1800s Colonial Revival, “the South Bridge at Lexington” might make a nice bookend with the North Bridge at Concord. That sort of detail keeps me skeptical of the picture’s authenticity, even as I acknowledge that the Massachusetts Magazine and other periodicals published a lot of prints of bridges in the early republic.

In her 1942 biography Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes noted the “charming water-color of Major Pitcairn on horseback” and the bridge painting in a footnote only, saying, “as I cannot feel [they] have been completely verified, I have passed them by.” The pictures have since been in private hands, not in a museum or library, and I don’t know of any more recent author who’s discussed them in connection with Revere or Pitcairn.

When I look into a historical mystery like this painting, I want to find a pretty definite answer. Evidence that the portrait almost certainly was painted by Revere or evidence that it could not have been. But I didn’t find anything so certain. Even the 1810 newspaper scraps inside the frame doesn’t mean the label is accurate. In the end I remain skeptical mostly because of the fact that Revere isn’t known to have painted any other portrait and his engravings don’t show so much illustrative skill as is evident in this picture. But there’s still a lot of ambiguity.

Markets are usually pretty good at dealing with uncertainty, and I think the art market has already factored in the odds that this picture’s label is accurate. In 2012 Christie’s sold a copy of Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre for over $145,000. A print is, by definition, not a unique item. But that one was clearly authentic.

In contrast, the Pitcairn watercolor is said to be the only portrait Revere painted. It’s perhaps the only picture of Maj. Pitcairn near the end of his life by someone who knew him. It’s a unique item. And yet Skinner has estimated its price at only $20-30,000. If we could be definite about its origin, then that price would probably be much, much higher. Or much lower.

As it is, whoever wins this auction will be living with an interesting-looking little picture, and living with the mystery behind it. Which for some people could make for a better story.

What Stands Behind That Watercolor of Maj. Pitcairn?

This is another detail of the watercolor painting that Skinner is offering for sale this weekend, labeled as showing Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines and painted by Paul Revere.

This detail comes from the other side of the painting, or actually from inside the wooden frame. In investigating the picture, the folks at Skinner opened the frame and looked inside. There were scraps of newspaper glued to the wood as part of the matting process, and specialist Joel Bohy kindly sent me an image of them. This is one portion of that photograph.

I’m not an expert on folk art or handwriting. I don’t know the details of British army uniforms like some of the people who commented on Thursday. But by golly, I can search for text in historical databases. So I set out to identify those newspapers.

It would have been so helpful if any of those visible scraps had included a year. Clearly the newspapers weren’t printed in 1774-75, when both Pitcairn and Revere were living in Boston’s North End, because they don’t include the long S.

But, as I wrote on Thursday, I already thought that was an unlikely time for an American to create a portrait of Pitcairn; it seemed more likely that the painting dated from sometime in the early republic, if not the Colonial Revival. So when was that scrap of newspaper printed?

I picked out what I hoped were unusual phrases and words in the visible portions of the scrap and ran those through the search function of Readex’s Early American Newspapers database. Usually I use that resource to search for newspaper coverage in the Revolutionary period, but it extends many decades further as newspapers become more numerous and frequent.

After a bunch of false hits, I narrowed down the search terms to eliminate those that were more common that I’d thought. And I started to get real hits.

The ad at the top of this scrap was a notice from “Sam. Stilwell, Sec’y.” of the Woodstock Glass Manufacturing Society to shareholders for a meeting at his house in May 1810. That item ran many times in the Mercantile Advertiser of New York in the early months of 1810. It was always set the same way in the paper, so the printers were saving that block of type from one issue to the next. (Incidentally, that glass company never seems to have gotten off the ground.)

Below that ad were two more, placed by Benjamin Bailey and Walter Willis, dissolving their partnership with William Osborn and announcing a new partnership between the two of them alone.

Again, those ads ran in the Mercantile Advertiser several times in early 1810. The same text appeared in some other New York papers in the same months, but with different typesetting.

I didn’t find the precise issue of the Mercantile Advertiser in which the glass company’s ad appeared over Bailey and Willis’s ad, but those two matches make clear that scrap of paper came from the year 1810. That was within Revere’s lifetime (he died in 1818). It was also during the peak of the New York career of Duncan Phyfe, said to have owned the watercolor. So it’s quite plausible that Phyfe or his workmen had pages of the Mercantile Advertiser lying around when they framed this painting.

Of course, it’s also plausible that someone trying to create a fake artifact from the Revolution a century or more afterwards found an old business newspaper to slip inside the frame and give it an air of antiquity. But if I were to fake a painting—not that I’ve ever tried that, no, not me—I’d choose scraps of newspaper that had dates on them. Not scraps that would require a not-yet-invented computerized database to identify.

TOMORROW: The Pitcairn watercolor on the market.

The Signature Style of Paul Revere

Yesterday I showed a watercolor painting of a British officer that the Skinner auction house is selling this weekend. And here’s the detail that makes this image so interesting: the words at the bottom of the picture identifying the subject as “Major John Pitcairn” and the artist as “P. Revere.”

I’m skeptical of most things from the Revolution that aren’t clearly contemporaneous, and some that are. I was therefore skeptical about the authenticity of this portrait. As Skinner says, it’s the only known painting credited to Paul Revere. For his engravings he relied on other artists like Christian Remick and Henry Pelham, or he copied prints from Britain. Even that note on the back of this picture’s frame says:

The portrait is a really creditable piece of painting, revealing the facial evidences of individual character, a work that must enhance his artistic reputation, at present resting upon the various engraved Views in which the figures barely escape caricature.

Yet the draftsmanship is neither so competent nor so incompetent as to indicate, at least to these untrained eyes, whether it’s authentic. If George W. Bush can take up painting in retirement, why couldn’t Revere?

On the other hand, if the only thing connecting this artwork to Revere is his signature, I figured I should take a hard look at that. I went looking for other examples of Revere’s signature, and found variations over time.

Here’s how Revere signed the 1767 non-consumption agreement recently digitized at Harvard’s Houghton Library:

The way he wrote his name at the start of his first deposition about the events of 18-19 Apr 1775, digitized by the Massachusetts Historical Society:

His name at the start of the “fair copy” of that deposition, also through the M.H.S.:

And his formal signature on the bottom of that document:

Finally, an 1816 receipt:

In all those signatures, the left leg of the P and R swoops up to the left. Those two capital letters also have a big swoop down from the top—sometimes a huge swoop. Those details also appear in the name on the painting.

However, in the penned signatures above, all the letters after the initial capitals are connected. In contrast, the “P. Revere” on the watercolor is made up of separate letters. And the little R is in a different style from the same letter in all the examples above. In those respects, that label is more like the way Revere added his name to engravings, as shown below in images from the American Antiquarian Society.

But, as you can see, Revere used different lettering styles on different prints. I didn’t try to capture all the variations. Yet another consideration is that Revere had engraved his names on those plates backwards. So it would be natural for him to write his name a little different when he wrote it in pen, even if he was trying to write it as it usually appeared on his engravings.

And, of course, someone else writing Revere’s name on this watercolor could have found similar examples to copy.

In sum, I was hoping to find definitive evidence to confirm or allay my skepticism about this painting, and I didn’t find it in the signature.

TOMORROW: Peeking inside the frame.

When Would Paul Revere Have Painted Major Pitcairn?

This weekend the Skinner auction house is offering this watercolor painting of a British army officer on horseback, which is labeled at the bottom “Major John Pitcairn” and “P. Revere del.” for “Paul Revere drew this.”

According to a typewritten note glued to the back, this picture was owned by the furniture-maker Duncan Phyfe. Thus, this one artifact links three historic names famous during the Colonial Revival.

In his blog post on the painting, Skinner specialist Joel Bohy offered this hypothesis about how the painting came about:

Pitcairn was quartered at a home in Boston that belonged to Francis Shaw, Paul Revere’s neighbor. According to lore, the locals respected Pitcairn at first. Paul Revere may have sketched his portrait during late 1774 or early 1775 in preparation for an engraving. But it seems that before an engraving could be made, a revolution intervened.

I offered a different idea: that the image might date from the early republic. Yes, some sources say that Pitcairn earned the respect of locals in 1774-75, but he was still part of the very unpopular royal military occupation. But after the war that didn’t matter so much. Pitcairn had died at Bunker Hill, and his body was a tourist attraction under the Old North Church, which would certainly have prompted interest in him. That was when people began to say the major wasn’t such a bad guy. In addition, the American print media had expanded, producing new outlets for engravings like the Massachusetts Magazine.

But there doesn’t seem to be a way to date this painting since there’s no evidence of its origin besides that label. It surfaced in the early 1900s in the estate of Phyfe’s grandson.

TOMORROW: Exploring the details.