Flurry of bloodshed
A snowball fight on the frozen streets of Boston helped to kickstart the American War of Independence, writes John Vincent.
On a cold, snowy night in early March 1770 a crowd of American colonists gather at the Customs House in Boston and begin taunting British soldiers guarding the building. Captain Thomas Preston responds by ordering his men to fix bayonets and join the guard outside. The patriots, angry at the occupation of their city by British troops sent there in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation, start throwing snowballs and other objects and Private Hugh Montgomery is hit, leading him to fire at the crowd.
What starts as a relatively minor street brawl snowballs – literally – into chaotic, bloody slaughter. When the smoke clears, five colonists lay dead or dying and three more are injured in what many historians regard as the first fatalities of the American War of Independence. Two British soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and had their thumbs branded with an M for murder.
American patriot Paul Revere (17341816), immortalised in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride, made a provocative engraving of the incident, depicting British soldiers lining up like an organised army to suppress an idealised representation of the colonist uprising. Copies were distributed throughout the colonies and helped reinforce American hatred of British rule.
Now a fine and rare copy of Revere’s contemporary interpretation of the scene has surfaced at a $9m Americana sale at Christie’s, New York. The iconic image, The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston, on March 1770 by a Party of the 29th Regt, realised a record $412,500 (about £301,000).
The American Revolution began five years later when British troops from Boston skirmished with American militiamen at the battles of Lexington and Concord. In March 1776, British forces evacuated Boston following General George Washington’s successful placement of fortifications and cannon on Dorchester Heights and the bloodless liberation brought an end to the hated eight-year British occupation of the city. For the victory, Washington, commander of the Continental Army, was presented with the first medal ever awarded by the Continental Congress but it would be another five years before the Revolutionary War came to an end with the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia. A few words on Paul Revere, who had 16 children. Longfellow’s poem, published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly, transformed him from a relatively obscure figure into a national folk hero. As a result, most people know him only for his famous late-night ride to Lexington, carrying the news that regular troops were about to march into the countryside north-west of Boston and planned to arrest patriots Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
The poem begins:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventyfive;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
■ At the same Christie’s sale, a portrait of George Washington by Lancashireborn painter James Sharples (17511811), realised an auction record of $325,000 (about £235,000).