Was the Boston Massacre just a narrative promoted by *conservative* Patriots?

Since American conservatives like to pose as the guardians of patriotism – to the exclusion of liberals, leftists, Wokeists, the Trans Menace and whoever else they’re hating on at the moment – they sometimes find it a challenge to celebrate the American Revolution as a revolution.

Of course, when it came to Trump sending a cop-killing crowd of armed supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, even Republican Members of Congress who were there that day dutifully find ways to defend the mob action. And the “patriot militia” types who attacked the Capitol and their supporters were obviously happy to identify the mob’s actions with those of the American Revolution, because of the latter’s iconic status in American patriotic narratives.

A more honest analogy for January 6 would be the storming of Fort Sumter in 1861 by pro-slavery traitors determined to make the entire United States a slave republic. An 1861 Currier & Ives print of the time commemorated that event:

The basic stodgy conservative version of the Revolution – as opposed to others like the crassly neo-Confederate ones – is that it was a conservative revolution. Of course, conservative normally means anything but revolutionary. To use a polite definition, respectable conservatism is historically committed to “making haste slowly.” The Medicis of Italy adopted in the 16th century adopted that as a slogan and used images of a sailing tortoise to symbolize it:

So, to anoint the American Revolution as conservative, they have to ignore most of what the Revolution was about and portray it as just another American war against foreigners, in this case fought for the cause of low taxes on businesses and the preservation of slavery. Magna Carta, democracy, natural rights are just a lot of blah, blah, blah in that version.

Then there is the Pure White version of ghouls like Stephen Miller, in which the American Revolution was just one more great achievement of White Civilization. And as I write this, I immediately regret letting my mind focus on what Stephen Miller’s version of the American Revolution might be. Actually, since he’s a big fan of raw colonialism, he probably thinks the Revolution will all its blah-blah about freedom and rule of law and basic rights was a horrible tragedy for the White Race.

But here I want to mention an example of a conservative spin on the Boson Massacre in particular, which hopefully will push the thought of Stephen Miller out of my head for a while.

Historian Peter Messer published a scholarly article in 2017 on “the creation of the Boston massacre.” (1) The point of his argument is that the Boston Massacre wasn’t really a massacre. It was just that a bunch of lowlife colonials with no firearms, including the dark-skinned mulatto Crispus Attucks, were calling the pore redcoats names and even throwing snowballs at them, and so those British soldier boys had no choice but to murder five of them on the spot. (Messer doesn’t put it quite that crassly. But that’s a fair description of his claim.)

But he makes the convoluted argument that it was the Patriot leaders of the Sons of Liberty group in Boston that invented the narrative of a “massacre.” The Sons of Liberty was a American-patriotic group formed as part of the opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 which created a new financial burden on the colonies to finance British colonial occupiers. Samuel Adams was the most famous among the group’s leaders. (1)

In his argument, the Sons of Liberty wanted to position themselves as something like the “Sensible Moderates” who were holding the rowdy radicals in check. The concept of sensibly moderate revolutionaries is kind of a strange one. But a popular argument among conservatives over the last 2 ½ centuries that the American Revolution was actually a conservative one. The concept of a Conservative Revolution was a favorite concept among German reactionaries like Carl Schmitt in the early part of the 20th century.

In Messer’s argument, the supposedly moderate Sons of Liberty used the violent actions of the redcoats to create the narrative of a “Boston Massacre” as a way to discredit the unruly rabble while positioning themselves as the responsible moderates who were constructively opposing the British. As he explains it, “how people remembered the deadly events of March 5th became important because versions of the events had begun to circulate that, for better or worse, identified the unruly actions of the crowd as the cause of the troops being removed from Boston.”

Messer winds up arguing:

In short, the patriots’ [i.e., partisans of the supposedly “moderate” Sons of Liberty] account of the events on March 5th created the Massacre. In the process, they equated legitimate authority with the power of observation and reason and portrayed the crowd’s violent actions as, at best, a false form of power or, at worst, an invitation to disaster.

In the end, Messer’s version seems similar to the kind of argument the “Progressive” historian Charles Beard (1874-1948) made in his account, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). It made a seemingly “left” argument that the 18th-century American capitalists arranged the Constitution to cement the power of the wealthy and suppress popular democratic impulses. In effect, promoted an image that the Revolution and the Constitution were a kind of cynical elite racket, downplaying the substantive class dynamics and the liberating historical effect of the kind of liberal democracy that the early United States represented. The United States of 1790 would not qualify today as a liberal democracy. But at the time, it was radical democracy in the world context of the time. And was widely understood as such.

Neil Longley York in 2009 presented a much more informative and sensible description of events and also of how the contemporary narratives of the events were constructed. (2) This is much more helpful than a contorted argument that the Boston Massacre wasn’t really a massacre – even though British troops gunned down civilians in the middle of a town when they were in no mortal danger - and portraying it as a massacre was a clever ruse by conservative Sons of Liberty leaders to discredit the unwashed masses of ordinary patriots.

York writes, "Later generations of Americans have remembered the 'massacre' more or less as the aggrieved Bostonians intended they should, as indeed those Bostonians themselves viewed it. To that extent, memory has been preserved rather than skewed with time.”

And he notes:

Even John Adams [a defense counsel for the accused British soldiers and later second the US President] went along with the "massacre" notion, saying on the one hand that convicting the soldiers of murder would have been a travesty of justice but on the other that calling the incident a "massacre" was acceptable because the soldiers should never have been in Boston in the first place.

Notes:

(1) Messer, Peter (2017): “A scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti, as must astonish thePublic”: TheCreation of the Boston Massacre. New England Quarterly 90:4, 502-539. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/26405884?seq=1>

(2) York, Neil Longley (2009): Rival Truths, Political Accommodation, and the Boston "Massacre". Massachusetts Historical Review (MHR) 11, 57-95. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40345980>