Boston Massacre Propaganda

Was the Boston Massacre Really a Massacre?
The Boston Massacre should not have been categorized as a massacre on the grounds that the British were acting solely in self-defense, propaganda was utilized to mislead the colonists of the facts, and the term massacre inaccurately describes the event. Although the British soldiers fired on the colonists, the Boston Massacre was simply the result of the colonists relentlessly provoking the British, making the soldiers’ actions self-defense and therefore, not a massacre. What started out as mild verbal attacks from the colonists, soon turned into full-scale physical assault. Some colonists such as Paul Revere attempted to promote the idea that the British were to blame for this event through use

Many forms of propaganda were used to publicize this idea, such as Paul Revere’s depictions of the massacre and of the landing of the British troops. In his portrayal of the massacre, he used a manner of imagery to make the colonists appear to be victims of the British. For example, he deliberately had the soldiers standing in fighting formation with their weapons drawn and the colonists defenseless and disoriented, when in reality the colonists were the ones who provoked the soldiers by use of weapons like clubs, ice, rocks, and wooden planks (Revere 1). Paul Revere also used such symbolism in his engraving of the landing of the British troops in Boston. In this work, he had the title, “The Town of Boston in New England and British Ships of War,” at the top, which would suggest that the soldiers had arrived for the sole purpose of starting a war with the colonists, when in fact they had come to protect them (Revere 2). These examples show how propaganda was used at that time to alter the colonists perception of the event and lead them to believe that the soldiers had massacred the colonists. Propaganda incorrectly promoted the affair as a massacre when in reality, the situation does not fit the phrase

Due to the use of propaganda, people were led to believe that the British soldiers were to blame for the massacre when in reality, that was not the case. The soldiers were acting solely in self-defense which made their actions justified and therefore, under the circumstances, not a massacre. During the Boston Massacre, only five people were killed as a last resort to stop the mobs advances on the soldiers. So, the Boston Massacre can not be accurately described as a massacre, since a massacre consists of the unnecessary killing of a large number of people. All things considered, the event known today as the Boston Massacre was not truly a massacre at