# Both sides printed a single meaning onto a fight that was still a trial

Case studies

  Both sides printed a single meaning onto a fight that was still a trial
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From Franklin's cut-up snake in 1754 to the coffin woodcuts of 1770, colonial printers tried to make one picture stand for the crisis. John Adams then

When1754–1783ActorColonial and patriot printers and writers…Full record at propagandaarchive.org

## What it said

Join, or Die

Words on the woodcut in Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 May 1754, as recorded on the FRAME case study. The snake is cut into eight pieces labeled for South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and "N.E." Delaware and Georgia are absent.

The text above the cut warned of "the Destruction of the British Interest, Trade and Plantations in America." In 1754 that was a call to unite the colonies against the French, not yet a call to leave the empire. The snake came back in the one-issue Constitutional Courant of September 1765, during the Stamp Act crisis, with a false imprint rather than the printer's name.

After soldiers fired on King Street in Boston on 5 March 1770, the Boston Gazette of 12 March set the funeral story under coffin cuts marked with the initials of the dead, skulls and crossbones. Paul Revere advertised his engraving The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street. On 29 March Henry Pelham wrote to Revere accusing him of copying Pelham's design, The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, before Pelham's own print could appear.

## Who made it and why

Printers, engravers, and town committees made these sheets, not a ministry. Franklin was a colonial politician as well as a printer. Edes and Gill published the Boston Gazette. Revere was a silversmith selling a picture. The town of Boston sent A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre with depositions to London. A rival Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance carried the army's depositions. Each side wanted London, and the other colonies, to inherit one reading before the trial.

Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Crispus Attucks died the night of the shooting. Patrick Carr died days later. Captain Thomas Preston commanded the soldiers of the 29th Regiment on the street.

## What it got right or wrong

The dead were real. A picture titled "massacre" decides, in the caption, the question a jury is for. Revere's print takes the town's view and freezes it. Pelham's complaint is a reminder that the famous plate was also a race to publish. The soldiers' Fair Account is the other freeze. Neither pamphlet is the trial.

The trial is the part a propagandist cannot stand. John Adams, Josiah Quincy Jr., and Robert Auchmuty defended Preston and the soldiers. Preston was acquitted in October 1770. Six of eight soldiers were acquitted. Hugh Montgomery and Matthew Kilroy were convicted of manslaughter, pleaded benefit of clergy, and were branded on the thumb. Civilians accused of firing from the Custom House were acquitted in December. That record is in the legal papers and in the histories the archive cites (Zobel; Wroth and Zobel). The brand and the acquittals are less printable than a coffin. They are what a republic is supposed to prefer to a woodcut.

## Speech stays free even when it is a weapon

These sheets are why speech stays free even when it is a weapon. The patriots' press was partisan, sometimes false in its certainty, and essential. The loyalist press, including James Rivington's New-York Gazetteer, answered in kind. A false imprint on the Constitutional Courant is the discreditable move: hiding the printer. Naming him is the American habit worth keeping.

Adams at the defense table is the other habit. He later had no love for the policy of the troops, and he still treated the accused as men the law had to hear. That is due process before the Constitution had a Fifth Amendment to cite. The libertarian reading of this decade is not that the patriots were always accurate. It is that they argued in public, and that when blood was on the street the answer they owed themselves was a jury, not only an engraving. Paine's Common Sense (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776) and Chalmers's answer, Plain Truth, printed by the same Bell, show the argument still running in pamphlets six years later. The reply got a printer. That is the standard.

## Its legacy

Join or Die is now a logo. It began as a specific cut, in a specific gazette, about a union the colonial assemblies then declined to adopt at Albany. The massacre print is now a standalone icon. It began as one side's filing. Use them as evidence of how Americans learned to fight with type. Do not use them as a substitute for the verdict.

## Sources

- FRAME case study "Join or Die to the Boston Massacre: patriot and loyalist print, 1754-1783," citing the Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 May 1754; the Boston Gazette, 12 March 1770; Pelham to Revere, 29 March 1770 (Brigham 1954); the trial outcomes (Zobel 1970; Wroth and Zobel 1965); A Short Narrative (1770) and A Fair Account (1770); Paine and Chalmers, both R. Bell, 1776.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/american-revolution-prints/