“Paul Revere’s Pictures of the Massacre” in Boston, 9 Mar.

On Saturday, 9 March, I’ll speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Paul Revere Chapter, about “Paul Revere’s Pictures of the Boston Massacre.”

Here’s the description we came up with:

Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre is famous, but he didn’t design that image. He did, however, produce three additional visual depictions of what happened on March 5, 1770. This talk will dive deep into Revere’s pictures of the fatal violence on King Street and explore what they tell us about the event and its political implications.

Here, as a taste, is the first picture that Revere produced to illustrate the Massacre: a “woodcut” of four coffins representing the first four deaths, carved for the Edes and Gill print shop and used in the Boston Gazette and broadsides.

Revere must have made this image after Crispus Attucks’s real initials became known; in the first week that big corpse was called “Michael Johnson.”

The scythe, hourglass, and “Æ. 17” on Samuel Maverick’s coffin signal his youth—he was only seventeen when he was killed, cut down too soon.

This D.A.R. chapter meeting will take place at the Fenway Community Center, 1282 Boylston Street in Boston. The gathering will start at 11:00 A.M., and I’m scheduled to speak at noon. People who aren’t D.A.R. or S.A.R. members are welcome (but might expect to be recruited as potential members). There will be refreshments and books for sale afterward.

A Map of the Massacre to Explore

I mentioned this in a comment a few days back, but thought it deserved more space.

The Boston Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts department has just made a digitized image of its overhead view of the Boston Massacre, credited to Paul Revere, available to everyone here.

The Town House (now called the Old State House) is at the upper center. The arc of circles at the right middle represents the soldiers in front of the Customs house.

As for the victims, they are laid out and labeled, with full sketches for the first four:

• 1 (looking like a J), A – Crispus Attucks
• 2, G – Samuel Gray
• 3, C – James Caldwell
• 4, G – Samuel Maverick, apprentice to Isaac Greenwood
• 5 – no initial, and kind of crossed out, in front of the Exchange Tavern
• 6, P – Robert Patterson or David Parker
• 7, P – David Parker or Robert Patterson [Not helpful here, Paul]
• 8, P — Edward Payne, standing in his own doorway
• 9, M – Christopher Monk

In addition, there’s one circle marked M without a number, a possible circle at upper right with neither number nor initial, and three victims without locations: Patrick Carr, John Green, and John Clark.

It might seem to make more sense for “4, G” to be John Green and one “M” or an unlabeled circle to be Samuel Maverick, but we know Maverick was shot at the back of the crowd where that “4, G” body is shown. Revere knew the Greenwood family in the North End, so he surely heard of the apprentice’s death on the morning of 6 March. On the other hand, he used the boy’s own initials, not the master’s, when he engraved a woodcut of four coffins for the Boston Gazette a few days later.

(For Charles Bahne’s analysis of this image in 2013, see this post.)

This diagram also labels the streets and alleys leading off of King Street, plus many of the shops and houses in that part of central Boston. We can thus get a sense of this neighborhood, with the homes of some high-powered businessmen like Edward Payne and Thomas Marshall, and shops that catered to them.

One theory suggests that Revere created this picture for use in one of the trials that followed the Massacre. There’s no mention of such a map in the court records, however, and we have unusually good documentation of those proceedings. Furthermore, by the time those trials started, Patrick Carr had died, so he should have been shown as well.

Another interesting detail is that some of the sketches of dying people resemble figures in Henry Pelham’s engraving of the Massacre, which we know Revere got his hands on and copied by the end of March. Did Pelham or Revere sketch miniature versions of the those figures on this view to create more drama than circles could impart?

Colonial Comics, and a Panel about History in Panels

This blog entry is brought to you in part by Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750, a new anthology of historical comics edited by Jason Rodriguez with assistance from A. Dave Lewis and myself.

As yesterday’s Boston Globe reported, this book will be published by Fulcrum next month, and the first copies will debut at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (M.I.C.E.) in Cambridge on Saturday.

What’s more, Colonial Comics is in part brought to you by this blog. Boston 1775 readers know my interest in how the Revolution has been portrayed in comics, including these complaints about schoolbooks on the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s ride. Those essays caught the eye of a local comics creator named Dave Marshall. His website clued me in to the Boston Comics Roundtable. And because I became active in that group, Jason Rodriguez invited me to join his editing team.

The first volume of Colonial Comics covers the British settlement of New England and how those colonies developed. I helped to vet story ideas, identify historians to collaborate with, and collect sources and visual references for some of the contributors.

As a writer I collaborated with artist Joel Christian Gill on this story of the first Samuel Maverick introducing chattel slavery to Massachusetts, based on the account I quoted way back here.

I also got to work closely with three writer-artists and see them bring their stories to life:

• E. J. Barnes on Thomas Morton’s colony at “Merry Mount,” a short-lived alternative to the Puritans.
• Sarah Winifred Searle on Mary Huntress, a New Hampshire woman caught up in a court battle over cheese.
• Dan Mazur on the Rev. John Williams and his daughter Eunice, captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield.

Other stories in the book cover the Pilgrims, John Winthrop of New London, the bloody Pequot War, Newport’s early Jewish population, and much more.

The team is now working on further volumes, one covering New England from 1750 to the start of the Revolutionary War (which is of course my favorite period) and another on early Virginia and the mid-Atlantic. The goal is to create entertaining, eye-opening stories that are historically solid enough to introduce students to important themes in this period of American history.

To launch the first volume of Colonial Comics, there will be a panel discussion at M.I.C.E. about history comics. The panelists will be E. J. Barnes, Ellen Crenshaw, Eleri Harris, Dave Ortega, and Jason Rodriguez, and I’ll moderate. That hour-long discussion will start at 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, 4 October, in Lesley’s University Hall, near Porter Square, Cambridge. All of M.I.C.E. is free and open to the public, so please check it out!

Charles Bahne on the Scene of the Massacre

As we approach the anniversary of the Boston Massacre on 5 March, Charles Bahne, author of The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail, kindly shared this essay analyzing what may be our earliest visual source on the question: What did the Boston Massacre look like?

Besides the depositions and testimony given by eyewitnesses to the Boston Massacre, we have two contemporary pictorial depictions of the incident. Better known of the two is the copperplate print of “The Bloody Massacre”, “Engrav’d Printed & Sold by Paul Revere, Boston.” As discussed here, Revere’s print of the Massacre was copied—some say plagiarized—from an almost identical image by Henry Pelham.

The Revere/Pelham print is an accurate portrayal of the setting for the Massacre — the buildings, the starry night with its crescent moon, the overall streetscape. But its depiction of the events is far less accurate; issued as part of the radicals’ propaganda efforts, it contains some deliberate distortions. And to compress the entire action into one image, the perspective was foreshortened, placing the victims in much closer proximity than they really were.

For a more accurate depiction, we look to the above image, also attributed to Paul Revere, but with less certainty, since it’s unsigned. (Mellen Chamberlain, who gave this document to the Boston Public Library, said that the handwriting matched Revere’s.) Unlike the more famous print, which was fairly widely distributed, this image existed only in manuscript and wasn’t circulated publicly until over a century later.

We’re looking at a plan or map of the action that evening, drawn from an overhead perspective. North is at right, west at top. In the upper center the Town House (Old State House) is prominently marked. Rows of buildings line either side of King Street (State Street), with other streets branching off to right and left.

But while this plan is a more accurate portrayal of the Massacre events, it also has its limitations. Four bodies lie in the street, some drawn in intricate detail, along with six circles, which apparently show the injured townsfolk. That makes a total of ten victims, but eleven people were actually shot—five dead and six wounded.

At extreme upper right is a seventh circle, unlabeled by the artist and unnoticed by any earlier commentator. Could this be the eleventh victim, or is it something else entirely, being so remote from the rest of the action?

All four bodies, and five of the circles for the wounded, are labeled with letters. Two letters clearly match the names of the slain: A for Attucks and G for Gray. But the other two bodies are marked C and G, only a partial match with the other martyrs, Caldwell, Carr, and Maverick. The circles are labeled with three Ps and two Ms; the six wounded citizens were Payne, Patterson, Parker, Monk, Clark, and Green.

Some discrepancy may have been caused by the belated deaths of Patrick Carr and Samuel Maverick. Was one of them considered wounded, rather than killed, when the plan was drawn?

Still, there are just nine letters in this plan. With eleven known victims, we’re missing two Cs; while a G and an M appear to have been switched between the injured (Green) and the deceased (Maverick).

At lower right, in front of the Custom House, stands a curved line of seven soldiers—not the eight who were actually there. Some historians have theorized, partly on the basis of this plan, that one of the regulars may have stood behind the others, not in line with his colleagues.

Unfortunately, the meaning of the letters, numbers, and circles must remain a matter of speculation. If a key to the plan was created, it’s been lost. Some say that a key was written on the back of the paper, which has since been glued to a board, permanently obscuring whatever it may once have said.

In their recent books about the Massacre, Neil York and Richard Archer both attempt to match the bodies and circles with the names of the fallen citizens—and they disagree. (Neil York consulted with me on this, and cites me in his book.)

The bottom line is that we know with some certainty where Crispus Attucks and Samuel Gray fell, next to the soldiers, and where Edward Payne was hit, standing on his doorstep at lower left. James Caldwell is one of the other bodies shown on the plan, probably the prominent one in the middle of the intersection. As for the other victims, we can only guess who fell where.

TOMORROW: How the scene looks today.

Memories of Samuel Maverick

Samuel Maverick was the youngest person to die in the Boston Massacre: only seventeen years old. Printers Edes and Gill of the Boston Gazette and their engraver Paul Revere highlighted Maverick’s youth in the woodcut to the left by decorating his coffin with a sickle and hourglass—symbols that he’d been cut down before his time.

I recently wrote a short script about Maverick’s death, which forced me to reconcile the three overlapping but different accounts of what he was doing before the shooting.

First, keg-maker Jonathan Carey provided a few details at the trial of the British soldiers:

Did you know young Maverick, who was killed by the firing in King street, on the 5th of March?

Yes, very well.

Did you see him that night?

He was at my house that night at supper with some young lads, and when the bells rung, as we all thought for fire, he run out in order to go to it.

Maverick wasn’t one of Carey’s apprentices, however. He worked for ivory carver and dentist Isaac Greenwood, and bunked with Greenwood’s son John.

In a 1922 publication of John Greenwood’s memoir, editor Isaac Greenwood (yes relation) included what is apparently that family’s memory of how Maverick went to his death:

Isaac Greenwood, Jr., the elder brother of John..., was a witness of the massacre, being then in his twelfth year.

Attracted by the ringing of bells, indicating a fire, Maverick and Greenwood were proceeding along hand in hand when, in King Street, Samuel left his companion and joined in the popular tumult about some soldiers at the custom-house. In the volley which ensued Maverick fell just as he was throwing up his arms and shouting, “Fire away, you d—— lobster-backs!”

The word “lobsterbacks” might well be an anachronism, and a sign that details of this tale had changed before it was written down, but its core can easily fit with Carey’s testimony from 1770.

Finally, William H. Sumner felt he was doing a great service to history when he put into his A History of East Boston an account of Maverick’s death that he’d heard from a son of Joseph Mountfort (1750-1838):

He, with Samuel Maverick, Peter C. Brooks, Samuel and Thomas Carey, were playing marbles in the house of Mr. Carey, at the head of Gardner’s wharf, near Cross street, at the time the bells rang the alarm, and were thereby attracted to State street before the British troops fired.

Here they observed that a tumult had arisen between some men and boys and the soldiers. Angry words were being exchanged, and missiles of various kinds were thrown. Some one threw pieces of ice, when the soldiers, exasperated by the boldness and taunts of their rebel opponents, discharged their guns at the crowd.

Young Maverick cried out to his relative Mountfort, “Joe! I am shot!” and ran down Exchange street, then called Royal Exchange lane, to Dock square, where he fell to the ground, and was conveyed to his mother’s house. He died the next morning. At that time the widow [Mary] Maverick kept a genteel boarding-house in Union street, at the corner of Salt lane.

It is not a little singular, that Mr. Mountfort’s name does not appear among the witnesses examined at the trial. . . . Yet, there can be no doubt as to the authenticity of Mr. Mountfort’s narrative. The writer has it from his son, Judge Napoleon B. Mountfort, of New York [1800-1883], who is well informed on the subject.

As Hiller B. Zobel pointed out in The Boston Massacre, Peter Chardon Brooks was only three years old and living in Medford in 1770. So he was very unlikely to have been playing marbles with the seventeen-year-old Maverick on the 5th of March.

Sumner got the impression that Joseph Mountfort was a “relative” of Samuel Maverick. I believe that became true only later, when Mountfort married Maverick’s first cousin Mary Gyles.

The Mountfort family seems to have been earnest in putting their ancestor on the scene of patriotic events. His name doesn’t appear on the earliest and most reliable list of men involved in the Boston Tea Party, but it surfaces in Samuel A. Drake’s Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1876). Mountfort did not, however, make the roll in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves (1884).

Nonetheless, the Mountfort family tradition does seem accurate in putting Maverick at the Carey house. I’m just not convinced that Mountfort was really there, too. This may be what I call a “grandmother’s tale”—a historical tale that older relatives embroider for children as a private entertainment or special lesson, yet is so vivid that the children grow up believing that every detail is true, that their relatives were in the thick of history, and that the tale should go into history books.

Curiously, the editor of John Greenwood’s memoir theorized that Greenwood and Mountfort encountered each other as prisoners of war, with Mountfort (remembered by the Greenwood family as “Mumford”) spilling hot soup on Greenwood. It was a small world.

The “Maverick” Heritage

At last week’s vice-presidential debate, one point of disagreement was over the term “maverick.” That was one of the many terms Sarah Palin dropped repeatedly, and toward the end Joe Biden jumped on it and disputed John McCain’s claim to the label, given his overall voting record. Yesterday’s New York Times reported yet another dispute over the term:

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Indeed, the Mavericks of Texas have been making this complaint for a month, noting the progressive twentieth-century politicians in the family. Their statements acknowledge S. A. Maverick’s slaveholding and support for secession, but skip how some of his neighbors and political opponents suggested his cattle-friendly policy was designed to let him claim any unbranded wandering cow as his property. Other internet folks argue that “maverick” didn’t become a compliment until Americans started to associate it with charming James Garner in 1957.

I’m going to address the Boston side of the Maverick heritage. There are two significant Samuel Mavericks in colonial history. One was an apprentice killed at the Boston Massacre in 1770.

The other was one of Massachusetts Bay’s earliest English settlers, proprietor of trading posts and farms on islands in Boston harbor and then along the Piscataqua from 1624 to about 1676. That Samuel Maverick was also one of New England’s earliest slaveholders. Even before Massachusetts law explicitly allowed slavery, he was keeping people from Africa imprisoned on his island and forcing them to have children. In Two Voyages to New-England, Maverick’s visitor John Josselyn wrote:

The Second of October [1638], about 9 of the clock in the morning, Mr. Mavericks Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang her very loud and shrill…and willingly would have expressed her grief in English. . . . Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield by persuasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house, he commanded him, will’d she nill’d she, to go to bed with her.

Boston’s first Samuel Maverick was undoubtedly a maverick: adhering to the Church of England in the midst of Puritans, defending Thomas Morton’s rules-breaking Mare Mount settlement, complaining to London about the local government. He spoke up for the rights of a religious minority (which he belonged to). But I can’t find how Maverick championed the “rights of indentured servants,” and he obviously oppressed enslaved servants.

I think being a political “maverick” matters only if one is serving the people and the country well; there’s no honor in standing out just for the sake of one’s self-image as a contrarian. And, as Maureen Dowd wrote in the same issue of the Times, “True mavericks don’t brand themselves.”

Another Cut at the Massacre

To show off and sell its useful but expensive Archive of Americana digital databases, the Readex company offers a few online samples, including this broadside about the Boston Massacre titled “Poem in memory of the (never to be forgotten) Fifth of March, 1770.” Click on the picture here to go to the appropriate page, and click on the picture there to download a PDF version.

I first saw this document reproduced on the wall of the Old State House Museum. The Readex version is a scan from a microfilm photograph of an imperfectly preserved printing, so it’s not pretty. In fact, I’m not sure it’s legible. Here’s my best guess at the second stanza:

Look into king-street: there with weeping eyes
Regard O Boston’s sons—there hear the cries!
There see the men lie in their wallow’d gore!
There see their bodies, which fierce bullets tore!

So as poetry it’s not readable, either.

Still, it’s possible to spot some interesting details.

• At the top is a line of five coffins for the five people killed on King Street, whose names are also listed after the title. Like the dark borders, this was an obvious sign of morning.
• Within the text another coffin appears, representing the death of Christopher Seider eleven days before the Massacre.
• Seider’s coffin, like the one above marked “S.M.” for Samuel Maverick, has a scythe on it as well as a skull and crossbones. I believe that was supposed to symbolize that these boys had been cut down too soon: Seider at nearly age eleven, Maverick at seventeen.
• The poem mentions another badly wounded boy, Christopher Monk, in the tenth stanza. He survived for several years, but people blamed his disability and early death on his wounds.
• Stanza 8 calls for punishment of Ebenezer Richardson, who shot Seider. However, the poem doesn’t complain that he’s been convicted and not punished, which probably dates it to mid-1770.
  

Finally, this specimen of propaganda and the printing art was “Sold next to the Writing-School, in Queen-Street,” so Boston’s schoolboys probably got a good chance to cogitate upon it.

The First Newspaper Reports on the Massacre

In colonial Boston, some newspapers published each Monday, and some each Thursday. Because the Boston Massacre occurred on a Monday evening, the first press reports appeared on Thursday the 8th—237 years ago today. The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter listed the casualties this way:

Mr. Samuel Gray, Ropemaker, killed on the Spot, the Ball entred his Head broke the Skull.

A Mollatto Man, named Johnson, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonging to New-Providence, and was here in order to go for North-Carolina, killed on the Spot, two Balls entering his Breast.

Mr. James Caldwell, Mate of Capt. Morton’s Vessel, killed on the Spot, two balls entering his Breast.

Mr. Samuel Maverick, a promising Youth of 17 Years of Age, Son of the Widow Maverick, and an Apprentice to Mr. Greenwood, Joiner, mortally wounded, a Ball went through his Belly, and came out at his Back: He died the next Morning.

A Lad named Christopher Monk, about 17 Years of Age, an Apprentice to Mr. Walker, Shipwright; Mortally wounded, a Ball entered his Side and came out of his Back; apprehended he will die.

A Lad named John Clark, about 17 Years of Age, whose Parents live at Medford, and an Apprentice to Capt. Samuel Howard of this Town; Mortally wounded, a Ball entered just above his Groin and came out at his Hip, on the opposite side, apprehended he will die.

Mr. Edward Payne, of this Town, Merchant, standing at his Entry Door, received a Ball in his Arm, and shattered some of the Bones.

Mr. John Green, Taylor, coming up Leverett’s Lane, received a Ball just under his Hip, and lodged in the under Part of his Thigh, which was extracted.

Mr. Robert Patterson, a Seafaring Man, who was the Person that had his Trowsers shot thro’ in [Ebenezer] Richardson’s affair, wounded; a Ball went thro’ his right Arm.

Mr. Patrick Cole, about 30 Years of Age, who work’d with Mr. Field Leather- Breeches-maker in Queen-Street, wounded, a Ball entered near his Hip and went out at his Side.

A Lad named David Parker, an Apprentice to Mr. Eddy the Wheelwright, wounded, a Ball entered his Thigh.

What seems off about this list? Well, for one thing, though people expected apprentices Christopher Monk and John Clark to die shortly, neither did. Monk remained disabled by his wound for several years before dying, so he’s not memorialized among the standard five Massacre victims.

The Boston Gazette, published the same day, ran a similar list, emphasizing the three wounded apprentices ahead the working-men. The Gazette also gave different names for two men. The first was Patrick Carr, an Irish-born laborer I’ll have more to say about soon. While the two apprentices survived, Carr turned out to have been mortally wounded.

The Gazette also reported the one name people today are most likely to connect to the Boston Massacre: Crispus Attucks. Apparently he was living in Boston under the alias “Michael Johnson,” the name on the coroner’s report on his death (now in the collections of the Old State House Museum). Both the News-Letter and the Boston Chronicle reported the mulatto sailor’s name as Johnson. But the Boston Gazette had the name that appeared on all the subsequent legal proceedings, the name that’s come down in history.

Oddly enough, however, the News-Letter and Gazette had the same description of the man’s history: born in Framingham, working as a sailor out of the Bahamas, in Boston between voyages. Both identified him as mulatto, and therefore didn’t grant him the honorific title of “Mr.” In the 1850s historians found a newspaper ad that implied Attucks had escaped from slavery in Framingham twenty years before, which would explain why he used an alias while back in his home province. But how Bostonians discovered the history of that dead man, and how details reached one newspaper before the others, is still a gnawing mystery.

Revolutionary History Makes the Boston Globe

A couple of articles touching on Revolutionary history have appeared this month in regional sections of the Boston Globe.

On 9 November, the paper reported on The Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War, a five-volume set co-edited by Lexington resident Richard A. Ryerson, formerly of the Adams Papers and now affiliated with the David Library in Pennsylvania. The publisher’s catalog copy states that the encyclopedia offers

hard-to-find documents such as Anne Hulton’s “Letter from a Boston Loyalist” and Joseph Martin Plumb’s account of the mutiny on May 25, 1780

Uh, guys, that Continental private’s name was Joseph Plumb Martin. And folks can find a passage from one of Hulton’s several letters, published in 1927, here at Boston 1775.

On the front page of the Globe’s 12 November City Weekly section was an article about discussions in Cambridge on whether to preserve the Lechmere name for the square and T station at the east end of the city. Developers of the nearby NorthPoint BuilDings had lobbied for “Lechmere at NorthPoint,” which sounds like an email address. In October the city council voted to retain the historical name.

Then someone—who? the article doesn't say—pointed out that Richard Lechmere was a Loyalist and a slaveholder. So why should his name remain? Some councilors still prefer the traditional name for tradition’s sake. A couple have suggested that the area be named after James, an enslaved worker who sued Lechmere for his freedom in 1769. (Of course, “James Square” would sound like a tribute to Harvard’s William James and his family, and perhaps not all parts of the city would like that.) It’s not clear whether this issue really has legs, or whether the newspaper correspondent was simply raising a provocative question about our history.

Lechmere isn’t the only T stop named for a neighborhood that, in turn, was named for a slave-holding family. In mid-1700s Massachusetts, owning a very big estate went together with owning enslaved workers, and folks used the names of those big estates to designate local landmarks. It’s easy to dig up connections to slavery in the Boylston, Quincy, and Ruggles families, for example.

Probably the T station with the starkest connection to slavery is Maverick on the Blue Line. Samuel Maverick was a very early settler on Boston's harbor islands. He kept slaves in 1639, even before Massachusetts law recognized the institution. In Two Voyages to New-England, John Josselyn wrote that an African woman

came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang her very loud and shrill…and willingly would have expressed her grief in English. . . . Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield by persuasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house, he commanded him, will’d she nill’d she, to go to bed with her.

Lechmere appears to have been far less tyrannical. He and James worked out a settlement that gave the worker his freedom and £2. (Some later writers treated the argument filed by James’s lawyer, Jonathan Sewall, as a precedent for Massachusetts’s ending of slavery in 1783, and thus as evidence of Massachusetts’s moral high ground on slavery altogether, but no provincial court had actually adopted that argument or its language. The parties came to an agreement themselves.)

On the question of institutions named for slaveholders and their defenders, such as Calhoun College at Yale, I’ve long felt it wise to keep those names as a reminder of how pervasive and seductive slavery was.

Thanks to Graeme Marsden and Robert C. Mitchell for calling these articles to my attention.

Boston boys and their ghosts

On the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere displayed a picture of Christopher “Seider’s pale ghost” in a window of his new home in the North End. Gentlemen orating about the Massacre invoked the ghosts of the five people killed at that event. But for many young Bostonians, ghosts weren’t just metaphors, but quite real.

“The people of New England at that time pretty generally believed in hobgoblins and spirits, that is the children at least did,” North End boy John Greenwood (born 1760) later wrote in his memoir. Greenwood discussed this belief in the context of the region’s old Puritan tales:

While I was at school the [political] troubles commenced, and I recollect very well of hearing the superstitious accounts which were circulated around: people were certain a war was about to take place, for a great blazing comet had appeared and armies of soldiery had been seen fighting in the clouds overhead; and it was said that the day of judgment was at hand, when the moon would turn into blood and the world be set on fire. These dismal stories became so often repeated that the boys thought nothing of them, considering that such events must come in the course of nature. For my part, all I wished was that a church which stood by the side of my father’s garden would fall on me at the time these terrible things happened, and crush me to death at once, so as to be out of pain quick.

Benjamin Russell (born 1761) certainly believed in ghosts one memorable night before the Revolutionary War, as he later told his printing colleague Joseph T. Buckingham:

It was a part of my duty as an assistant in the domestic affairs of the family, to have the care of the cow. One evening, after it was quite dark, I was driving the cow to her pasturage,—the common. Passing by the burial-ground, adjoining the Stone Chapel, I saw several lights that appeared to be springing from the earth, among the graves and immediately sinking again to the ground, or expiring. . . . I left the cow to find her way to the common, or wherever else she pleased, and ran home.

Russell’s father led him back to the graveyard and showed him that the lights came from “a sexton, up to his shoulders in a grave, throwing out, as he proceeded in digging, bones and fragments of rotten coffins. The phosphorus in the decaying wood, blended with the peculiar state of the atmosphere, presented the appearance that had completely unstrung my nerves.”

As for Greenwood, he actually hoped to see one particular ghost in 1770:

I remember what is called the ‘Boston Massacre,’ when the British troops fired upon the inhabitants and killed seven [actually five] of them, one of whom was my father’s apprentice, a lad eighteen years of age, named Samuel Maverick. I was his bedfellow, and after his death I used to go to bed in the dark on purpose to see his spirit, for I was so fond of him and he of me that I was sure it would not hurt me.