“We turn over the historic page…”

When we turn over the historic page, and trace the rise and fall of states and empires, the mighty revolutions which have so often varied the face of the world strike our minds with solemn surprise, and we are naturally led to endeavour to search out the causes of such astonishing changes.

That’s the opening of Dr. Joseph Warren’s first oration commemorating the Boston Massacre, delivered on 5 Mar 1772.

That year was the first time Boston had an official Massacre anniversary oration. To be sure, there had been two orations in 1771:

• Dr. Thomas Young spoke on the event’s March anniversary at the Manufactory building. Young’s political and religious radicalism made the town fathers wary of him, but they liked his idea, so…
• The selectmen invited assistant schoolmaster James Lovell to deliver an official oration in April. 

In 1772 Boston succeeded in bringing all those details together, commissioning an oration as part of an official town meeting on the actual 5th of March. That established an annual tradition that lasted until 1783, even through the siege when Boston’s oration had to take place outside Boston.

Warren began his speech, as the passage above suggests, with a deep dive into history, or at least the standard Whig understanding of the British constitution. That government was an ideal mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, the doctor declared, and the Massachusetts provincial constitution worked the same way.

That meant new taxes on the people of Massachusetts had to arise in the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature—not the lower house of Parliament. From there it was a quick jump to the dangers of a standing army, and then:

Language is too feeble to paint the emotions of our souls, when our streets were stained with the BLOOD OF OUR BRETHERN; when our ears were wounded by the groans of the dying, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead. When our alarmed imagination presented to our view our houses wrapt in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery; our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion; our virtuous wives, endeared to us by every tender tie, falling a sacrifice to worse than brutal violence, and perhaps, like the famed Lucretia, distracted with anguish and despair, ending their wretched lives by their own fair hands.

Well, that escalated quickly.

You can read the whole text here, courtesy of biographer Samuel Forman.