Boston Massacre Research Articles

Ideologi dan Propaganda dalam Memperkuat Perlawanan di Revolusi Amerika

The American Revolution was a seminal moment in history defined not only by military action but also by the effective use of ideology and propaganda. This research explores the role of Enlightenment ideology and propaganda in strengthening resistance to British colonial rule. Ideas about human rights and government based on the consent of the governed became the philosophical basis for the revolutionary struggle, while propaganda through pamphlets, newspapers, speeches, and visual symbols spread these messages to the wider public. By utilizing effective propaganda, revolutionary leaders succeeded in mobilizing domestic support and attracting international aid, particularly from France. Visual propaganda, such as illustrations of the Boston Massacre and passionate public speeches, played an important role in building solidarity and motivation among the colonists. The findings show that ideology and propaganda are powerful tools in shaping public opinion and mobilizing the masses for revolutionary goals. The American Revolution illustrates how major historical changes often begin with shifts in thought and communication.

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Benjamin L. Carp (bio) Boston Massacre, American Revolution, Violence The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. Pp. 296. Cloth, $30.00.) After a demonstration of Jacques Charles's hot air balloon in Paris in 1783, skeptical observers asked Benjamin Franklin what good the invention might do. "Eh!" Franklin supposedly replied. "Of what use is a new-born baby?" We might ask Serena Zabin a similar question about The Boston Massacre: A Family History: of what use is a family history of the Boston Massacre? Zabin takes a refreshing new look at the residents and relationships of late-colonial Boston as British troops arrived in autumn of 1768. With her rich knowledge of Boston's physical and social geography, she sets the scene in a small but tempestuous town of 16,000 people, where the arrival of "roughly 2,000 men, 380 women, and 500 children" made a difference (67). Zabin shows how they became sociable neighbors and amiable coworkers, how they formed young couples and made newborn babies. These stories are new, because we are accustomed to thinking of the years 1768–70 as a time of tension over a hostile troop presence. Then, on March 5, 1770, a brawl turned into a violent tragedy: the redcoats fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. Zabin offers us a different way of looking at the months preceding that night, and a world that was lost. Other historians emphasize colonial protests and parse the evidence about who provoked the shooting. Zabin's book, instead, concisely notes the politics of the Quartering Act or the machinations of higher officials, and then analyzes "Bostonians' ability to socialize across political hostilities" while hinting at the lessons we might learn (39). Samuel Adams, Crispus Attucks, and Christopher Monk recede from the story. Army wives like Jane Chambers and neighbors like Jane Crothers Whitehouse emerge. The clash over enforcing Parliament's customs duties may have been intractable. The violence was certainly shocking. And the mystery of blame may never be solved, however compelling. Regardless, Zabin asks us to set those questions aside and focus on what ought to matter more: the ways that marginalized people and quotidian exchanges offer a vital context for understanding the full tapestry of early-modern urban life. Soldiers often traveled with families. They courted and married local women. They weren't quite strangers, because they made connections with [End Page 168] townspeople, as did the women and children who arrived with them. They encountered not just radical Liberty Boys, but Boston's men, women, children, free and enslaved, many of whom valued sociability or economic exchange over the divisive issues of the day. Zabin uncovers their sympathy for flogged British soldiers, as civilians shielded deserters. Knowing better than to trust newspapers, Paul Revere's cartoon, or John Adams's self-serving memoirs, she uses warning-out records, church records, and court records to map the integration of army families into every neighborhood in town. And so, she argues, "general threats of violence went hand in hand with neighborly concern" (74). Bostonians wondered about the redcoats: "Should they be thought of as invading soldiers or as sons in law?" (101). The traditional narrative of the American Revolution casts them as the former, but Zabin treats them as the latter. Along the way we learn about sex and marriage, civil and military justice, social welfare, and desertion. Evidence of enmity between soldiers and civilians certainly emerges, but rebel propaganda overemphasized these disagreements. The truer world of Boston in the late 1760s was one of personal connections, including loving connections. In Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia, 2009), Zabin similarly argues that the violence of the New York Conspiracy of 1741 (and its subsequent punishments) was less important than the wider Atlantic world of social relations that the trial records reveal. Zabin's focus on Boston necessitates some sacrifices. While she describes the British soldiers' previous experiences in Cork and Halifax, she makes no comparison to the equally controversial army presence in New York City, where family issues also became central. The Golden...

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Lauren Duval The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 314 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. On a frosty March evening, Jane Crothers—who may have been a bar-maid at Boston’s Royal Exchange Tavern—crossed the street to speak with Private Hugh White, the sentry stationed outside the Custom House. An Irishman who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment in 1759, thirty-year-old White had arrived in Boston a year and a half prior. Tensions occasionally flared between the troops and the local population, but for the most part, he—like many of his fellow soldiers—had found friendship and community in Boston. That evening, as he stood outside the Custom House, he chatted with neighbors, inquiring after their wives and children. A few blocks away, the clamor of angry voices echoed through the snow-covered city. Did the private know the cause, Crothers wanted to know. He did not. Tolling bells abruptly ended their conversation as the square in front of the Custom House flooded with angry, shouting Bostonians, hurling wood and ice. Guns drawn, seven soldiers rushed to Private White’s aid. As she would later testify, Crothers inched closer to the soldiers for protection, giving her a clear view of a man in a dark coat who, she alleged, clapped one of the soldiers on the back and encouraged them to fire—which they did shortly thereafter. Revealing her familiarity with the officers residing in the city, Crothers was “positive the man was not the Captain [Thomas Preston]” (155).1 Her witness testimony would prove key in exonerating Captain Preston from a charge of ordering the troops to fire on civilian inhabitants. This was not the end of Crothers’s engagement with the British army. When, three weeks later, Crothers married Private Joseph Whitehouse of the Fourteenth Regiment, she became an official part of Britain’s military establishment. By the time she testified as a witness for the defense at Captain Preston’s trial the following October, partisan narratives crafted to explain the violence of that night deliberately overlooked the experiences of women such as Crothers who bridged Boston’s military and civilian communities. Instead, as they pointed fingers at one another, Bostonians, lawyers, military officials, and politicians proclaimed that “an enormous gulf separated soldiers and civilians” (207) and that the two populations were—and always had been—separate. But such assertions, Serena Zabin shows in The Boston Massacre: A Family History, are more reflective of political posturing and legal maneuvers than the lived experiences of the men, women, and children who made their lives together in revolutionary Boston. [End Page 198] In her masterful retelling of the events that would become known as the Boston Massacre, Zabin reorients the familiar story of British troops firing into a rowdy crowd around the family ties of women such as Crothers and the neighborly relationships displayed in Private White’s conversations outside the Custom House. “From the moment their guns went off, the spotlight of history has focused its narrow beam on those British soldiers” (137), Zabin writes. But, she contends, there is so much more to the story—“a much wider and richer catalog of . . . events” that includes “women as well as men, friends as well as foes” (150). Focusing on the period from the troops’ 1765 embarkation for the North American colonies through the soldiers’ trials in December 1770, Zabin brings revolutionary Boston to life. British troops and their families, she shows, were enmeshed in Boston’s local community. Residing for nearly four years “on a peninsula hardly bigger than a square mile” (xvi), military families lived in the same neighborhoods, shopped in the same markets, and attended the same churches as civilian inhabitants. In their spare time, soldiers worked in local businesses and forged relationships with their coworkers. They got drunk with their neighbors in Boston’s many taverns, alcohol occasionally inflaming partisan tensions and leading to brawls. Such conflicts were not limited to men; soldiers’ wives, whose domestic and caretaking labors were essential to the functioning of early modern armies, befriended local woman, often socializing—sometimes...

Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

The Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, or What Does It Mean to Need a “Brute” in the Twenty-First Century?

The Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, or What Does It Mean to Need a “Brute” in the Twenty-First Century?

Editorial

Editorial

Late-Humanism and Revolutionary Eloquence: James Lovell and His 1771 Boston Massacre Oration

Abstract This article reconstructs the context of the first Boston Massacre Oration delivered by James Lovell. It argues that Lovell's rhetorical education and oratorical practice were primarily an offshoot of a classicizing renaissance tradition transmitted by the colonial colleges that faded, blurred and was repurposed in the eighteenth century.

A Newfound Empathy

The Boston Massacre occurred on March 5, 1770. Following the death of five Bostonians, both the American colonists and the royal officials in Boston took testimonies and sent them to London. Elected colonial agents issued motions to open debate on Parliament’s accountability in creating an imbalanced relationship between the military and civil authorities in the colonies. Unfortunately, the motions from these colonial agents were voted in the negative, leading to disappointment on both sides of the Atlantic. Two years prior, a similar tragedy happened in England: The Massacre of St. George’s Fields. Scottish soldiers accosted a British mob that had gathered to protest the arrest of MP John Wilkes. From 1768 to 1771, Parliament rejected motions that sought to reconcile the grievances that led to the Massacre of St. George’s Fields. After years of Parliament silencing colonial agents and liberal politicians, the British public began to express a stronger sense of understanding and empathy towards the American colonists, as evident by the outpouring of public support in the months following the Boston Massacre.

The Boston Massacre: A Family History

The Boston Massacre: A Family History

The silence of the ellipses: Why history can’t be about telling our children lies

History textbooks are less likely to be complete renderings of the truth than a series of stories textbook authors (and the many stakeholders who influence them) consider beneficial. Sam Wineburg describes how the process of writing history textbooks often leads to sanitized and inaccurate versions of history. As an example, he describes how the story of Crispus Attucks and the Boston massacre has evolved over time. The goal of historical study, he explains, is not to cultivate love or hate of the country. Rather, it should provide us with the courage needed to look ourselves unflinching in the face, so that we may understand who we were and who we might aspire to become.

Provocation: Phillis Wheatley on the Streets of Revolutionary Boston and in the Atlantic World

Many of the major crowd actions in Boston during the American Revolution—the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the arrival of 4,000 British Troops at Long Wharf in 1768, the murder of Christopher Snider in a street action in 1770, and the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770—took place on or around King Street, the street where Phillis Wheatley lived. As indicated by Wheatley's poems on the King's repeal of the Stamp Act, the murder of Snider, and the Boston Massacre, this essay argues that more so than we have imagined, Wheatley was probably a participant in the street actions on King Street and other crowd actions in Revolutionary Boston during the war.

The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta

Reviewed by: The Writings of Phillis Wheatley ed. by Vincent Carretta April Langley (bio) The Writings of Phillis Wheatley vincent carretta, ed. Oxford University Press, 2019 226 pp. From start to finish, Vincent Carretta's The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (Writings) is the book I wished had been available when I taught my first course of early American literature more than twenty years ago. It is one that will quickly become a standard for instruction at all levels, [End Page 635] from K–12 teachers to undergraduate- and graduate-level professors to postgraduate instructors in early Anglo-, Euro-, and African American literature and history courses. For those instructors most familiar with Carretta's 2001 Penguin Classics version, you will recognize some subtle but important differences: timeline, extended introduction, and prefatory details that bring the most current historical context to her published and variant poetry and her life, freedom, marriage, and death. Of course, of critical significance is Wheatley's 1776 letter to Obour Tanner, discovered in 2005. Far from being a reprint, the 2019 Writings provides the fullest recovery of the early Black revolutionary poet and her works published, to date. Carretta brings the best of all archival and secondary resources available to this text. To begin with, the timeline contextualizes Wheatley for students to gain a better understanding of her works and her position within the political milieux of eighteenth-century Boston as it provides dates for such watershed events in colonial American history as the Seven Years' War, the Stamp Act (passage and repeal), the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Mansfield ruling, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the timeline also locates Wheatley geographically in such a way that instructors and students can consider the cultural and national contexts within which her publications and responses, especially variants, can be analyzed. Importantly, seemingly small details such as John Wheatley's death and the disposition of his estate, having left "PW nothing in his will" (xvii), and Wheatley's marriage, death, and that of her husband John Peters provide a handy reference point that permits quick reviews of dates, names, and publication sources of relevance to the poet's life and works. Writings also provides in one accessible text a correction of previous errors in the Wheatley bio-bibliography, as well as a rich selection of verified sources of Wheatley scholarship from which instructors and students alike can peer into the crevices of the extra textual and companion works as they glean from the insights provided by the diverse scholarly works listed in "Further Reading" section (including but not limited to an excellent supplemental work, Carretta's own Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage [U of Georgia P, 2011]). Indeed, the scholarship identified is as varied as Wheatley's own muses, and instructors will appreciate the foundational works therein as ones that will put students on a secure footing in their study of Wheatley as well as engage them in a deeper learning [End Page 636] experience of the poet's varied use of genres and writing style (e.g., elegiac, neoclassical, biblical paraphrase, occasional, and epistle) to address diverse contemporary and historical issues (personal, political, and religious)—underscoring the truly inclusive nature of Wheatley's Poems and Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—for a twenty-first-century student of American literature. The introduction engages students and enables rich class discussions about prevailing questions in early American literary history with regard to the enslaved African poet's agency and her "network of associations … in London … North American and Britain" (xx) and details the "terms" under which Wheatley "compelled" her manumission (xx), her "business acumen," and "anti-slavery stance" (xxi). Importantly, Writings allows a study of this author that is not so overly laden with references that it obscures the literary works. At the same time, prefatory details about "manuscript versions" and revisions invite consideration of the poet's "developing skill" (xxiii) and her "proto-national" strain. Additionally, insights regarding audience and reception of her published works in publication and prepublication records are invaluable to the novice and expert alike. Such features also offer concise historical, political, religious, and personal contexts...

War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion by John Knight

Reviewed by: War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion by John Knight Ann M. Becker War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion. By John Knight. (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2020. Pp. xii, 294. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-59416-352-4.) War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion by John Knight contains surprising insights into Banastre Tarleton, and it disputes many common misconceptions about this British officer. Knight contends that Tarleton’s reputation as a brutal and vicious soldier is based in many cases on thirdhand reports, generally by his enemies, and that his behavior was not portrayed accurately for political and military purposes. Arguing that the American Revolution “created only two unmitigated villains: Benedict Arnold and Banastre Tarleton,” Knight provides evidence that both reputations were overstated and, in some ways, undeserved (p. x). His focus on Tarleton’s regiment of American Loyalists, the British Legion, provides detail on a relatively unknown group of soldiers, loyal and zealous in defense of the Crown. Soldiers in Tarleton’s regiment were fighting to maintain the rule of law and individual liberty and were not “weak-willed collaborators or treacherous renegades” (p. xi). Opening the book with the scene made famous by the film The Patriot (2000) where civilians were burned alive in a church by Tarleton, Knight [End Page 713] quickly assures the reader that this event never happened. Knight details Tarleton’s background of wealth and privilege, his attractive appearance, and his hotheaded personality, as well as his reputation as an inveterate gambler and carouser. Though British military officers rarely received effective training and suffered under a weak and ambiguous command structure, Tarleton was a talented officer who was an effective leader and an organized commander who had the confidence of his men. His British Legion became one of the most effective and formidable shock troops in the army. Throughout the book, Knight compares Tarleton’s vicious reputation with factual evidence, which contradicts the commonly held idea that the British commander was deliberately cruel. After the battle at Monck’s Corner, an American defeat, atrocities were committed by some in the British Legion, and Tarleton was accused of ordering the release of the guilty troopers. In fact, Tarleton was outraged by the incident and wanted one perpetrator hanged. Knight also explores the so-called Buford’s massacre at the battle of Waxhaws. While the Americans sustained significant losses, Knight argues that much of the carnage was due to serious errors made by the Americans on the field. Knight disputes Colonel Abraham Buford’s official report to the Virginia General Assembly, which claimed that his men were killed “‘after they had laid down their arms’” (p. 97). Two eyewitness accounts supported this assertion; however, these accounts were written well after the battle and are demonstrably unreliable. Banastre Tarleton, in his report to General Henry Clinton, took credit for the victory and acknowledged killing 170 Americans but reported no “irregularities” in the conduct of his men (p. 97). None of the American soldiers claimed that there had been a massacre, and Revolutionary War pension records of the participants do not accuse the British Legion of any improper behavior. Knight believes that “Buford’s later account of the battle seemed geared toward deflecting criticism from himself” due to his having issued “incompetent or confused orders to his men” before he fled the battlefield (p. 102). Nevertheless, Buford became a symbol of the British inhumanity toward the enemy, which created a potent propaganda weapon and the rallying cry, “Remember Tarleton’s Quarter” (p. 103). Given the Americans’ propensity for information warfare, the “Waxhaw massacre” was memorialized in the same way as the “Boston massacre” had been and was used to inflame American passion against the British enemy (p. 104). Knight holds a degree in American history and politics from Warwick University and writes and lectures full-time. War at Saber Point provides a unique view of the relationship between American Loyalists and the British army during the Revolution. It offers a new perspective on the reputation of Banastre Tarleton. Ann M. Becker SUNY Empire State College Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Patriots in the Court of Pandæmonium: People, Paradox, and the Making of American Zealots

AbstractPolitical theorists often interrogate the constitution of “the people” as a formal theoretical problem. They have paid less attention, however, to how this problem confronts actors directly engaged in political crises, not as a problem of formal theory, but as an urgent problem of practice. Between 1771 and 1783, prominent Bostonians delivered passionate orations to memorialize the Boston Massacre on the annual observance of “Massacre Day.” Rather than focusing abstractly on the people as a formal problem, I turn to this neglected political holiday, examining it through the lenses of affect, performance, and narrative, to demonstrate how orators confronted the pressing problem of making a people. Using public rituals and speech to promote an identity that united powerful emotions with political principles, orators negotiated the paradoxical nature of the people by constructing a model of subjectivity, the patriotic zealot, that intensified political differences and motivated extreme political action.

Modes and Moves of Protest

The role of mass protest has been recurrently central yet controversial in the American culture. Central because American history presents a constellation of significant collective protest movements, very different among them but generally symptomatic of a contrast between the people and the state: from the 1775 Boston Massacre and the 1787 Shays’s Rebellion, to the 1863 Draft Riots, but also considering the 1917 Houston Riot or anti-Vietnam war pacifist protests. Controversial, since despite—or because of—its historical persistence, American mass protest has generated a media bias which labelled mobs and crowds as a disruptive popular expression, thus constructing an opposition—practical and rhetorical—between popular subversive tensions, and the so-called middle class “conservative” and self-preserving struggle. During the 20th century, this scenario was significantly influenced by 1968. “The sixties [we]re not fictional”, Stephen King claims in Hearts of Atlantis (1999), in fact “they actually happened”, and had a strong impact on the American culture of protest to the point that their legacy has spread into the post 9/11 era manifestations of dissent. Yet, in the light of this evolution, I believe the very perception of protesting crowds has transformed, producing a narrative in which collectivity functions both as “perpetrator” and “victim”, unlike in the traditional dichotomy. Hence, my purpose is to demonstrate the emergence of this new and historically peculiar connotation of crowds and mobs in America as a result of recent reinterpretations of the history and practice of protest in the 1960s, namely re-thinking the tropes of protest movements of those years, and relocating them in contemporary forms of protest. For this reason, I will concentrate on Nathan Hill’s recent novel, The Nix (2016), and focus on the constant dialogue it establishes between the 1968 modes of protest and the Occupy movement.

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory by Mitch Kachun

Reviewed by: First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory by Mitch Kachun Joanne Pope Melish (bio) KEY WORDS Crispus Attucks, American Revolution, Boston Massacre, Slavery, African American First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory. By Mitch Kachun. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 308. Cloth, $29.95.) Breathes there a soul so dead as never to have heard of Crispus Attucks? Surely not today. Yet as Mitch Kachun explains in First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory, Attucks’s death was not always so familiar. Kachun traces the memory of Attucks as a named participant and, in some versions, the instigator of the 1770 event later called the Boston Massacre. Attucks was unfamiliar to most black Americans until 1840, and Bostonians did not memorialize him with a monument until 1888. Most Americans did not learn of Attucks in school books and fictional treatments until another sixty or seventy years after that. Kachun explains why Attucks’s story was variously forgotten, resurrected, embellished, invoked, or excoriated in particular moments like these in the two and a half centuries that followed his death. Most historians know the same five or six things about the actual Crispus Attucks. He was born somewhere near Natick, Massachusetts, around 1723, probably of Native and African descent, possibly the child of Nancy Peterattucks, and was probably enslaved by William Brown of Framingham. After 1750, he seems to have liberated himself in some way [End Page 340] and begun working as a seaman or dockworker around Boston. He was apparently a large man. Note the relentless ambiguity of this summary of the “facts.” The only absolute certainty in this man’s biography is that he was the first of four men who died in a confrontation with a detachment of British soldiers outside the King Street Custom House in Boston on March 5, 1770; a fifth man died a few days later of wounds sustained in that encounter. All five were interred in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground. That’s it. In the first chapter, Kachun lays out the particulars of Attucks’s origins and fatal 1770 encounter with British troops, as far as they are known or surmised. While John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers charged with the shootings, characterized the mob as “a rabble of negroes &c” and Attucks as the “stout mulatto” who apparently had “undertaken to be the hero of the night” (16), local newspapers portrayed the incident as an unprovoked assault on upright citizens. In this interpretation, and in the commemorations that followed for the next thirteen years, Attucks’s race, and indeed the individuality of any of the victims, disappeared; they were simply virtuous citizens who died resisting tyranny. Yet because Attucks was the only man of color among the five victims, his race and class position made it desirable for some in later generations to disparage him, others to forget him, and yet others to laud his as a noble example. Kachun traces the infinitely malleable public memory of Attucks, and the Boston Massacre itself, in eight chronologically organized chapters. For almost a century, Attucks remained virtually anonymous, and it was not until 1839 that the first surviving reference to him by an African American was recorded—Jehiel C. Beman’s characterization of him as a “colored man by the name of Airtiks” whose death was “the first blood spilt for independence in this country,” published in the Liberator (41). Led by William Cooper Nell, black activists invoked Attucks as an African American hero and patriot to support their antebellum fight for citizenship and suffrage rights. In Boston, they petitioned the state legislature of Massachusetts to erect a monument to his memory, an effort that was unsuccessful then but finally came to fruition in 1888 with biracial support. But the efforts of black activists to mobilize Attucks’s public memory to fight Jim Crow in the 1880s and 1890s, and again in the 1930s, were met with resistance by public officials who feared that lauding the ostensible hero of the Boston Massacre would [End Page 341] seem to sanction mob actions in an era characterized by working-class strikes and violence. Kachun...

Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk

Reviewed by: Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk Dinah Mayo-Bobee (bio) judith l. van buskirk Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution Norman University of Oklahoma Press 2017 312 pp. Although it has taken some time for a vigorously researched study of African American participation in the fight for American independence to appear, Standing in Their Own Light satisfies every anticipation. What we learn about black Americans who supported the Patriot cause is that these men and women have a unique story to tell. Theirs should be considered apart from the history of those who understandably took advantage of Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation inviting slaves to fight for the British in return for freedom. Dunmore presented a crucial opportunity for the enslaved to escape bondage, but hundreds of free and enslaved black Americans chose differently. Yet because Dunmore's efforts are considered a blow against slavery, the African Americans who fought for independence and the creation of a new republic shared a more obscure history (35). Even though some of these men and women are mentioned in scholarly works now and then, their appearances are anecdotal and largely detached from major events of the American Revolution (5, 6). Judith L. Van Buskirk reverses this trend. Along with demonstrating that Revolutionary rhetoric transformed the debate over slavery throughout the thirteen colonies, Van Buskirk introduces readers to hundreds of African Americans who fought for and in many cases died for America's [End Page 262] independence. By bringing their service to light the author enables each one to "stand in their own light and shine for everyone to see" (xiv). Van Buskirk's research demonstrates through these Patriots' own words and actions that liberation from colonial rule and the creation of a new nation were important to black men and women who saw their participation in the Revolutionary War as part of their larger, personal fight against racial injustice and slavery. From the beginning to the end of a well-written and coherently arranged book, Van Buskirk surpasses her goal. Utilizing scores of manuscript collections located in repositories across the country, the book relies on period newspapers, military records, pension applications, government documents, letters, wills, and other primary sources. With the use of these sources, Standing in Their Own Light recreates the world of inequality and systemic racism that necessitated African Americans' fight for equality. The book then places their perspectives in the forefront, including disappointment over the nation's failure to end racial discrimination and slavery (73). One of the study's most important contributions is Van Buskirk's detailed record of the part African Americans played in key events that occurred before, during, and after the Revolution. This includes firsthand accounts of their participation in the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), and the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (1775). In addition, the book provides a comprehensive geographic assessment of the laws and public sentiments that African Americans circumnavigated in order to join militias and the Continental Army or to participate in noncombat roles (18). After spending a great deal of time researching and becoming familiar with these men and their families the author admittedly formed an emotional attachment to many (xiii). Nonetheless, nowhere in the book does the scholarship sacrifice objectivity for sentimentality. Indeed, where a record exists it is pursued, but where there is none or a lead is truncated, the author acknowledges the dead end and moves along. Nor does the book lionize any of the black protagonists or their white supporters beyond the accolades bestowed by contemporaries who fought alongside or witnessed their achievements on or off of the battlefield (5, 11). An objective approach along with a meticulous process of verification and elimination increases the value of Van Buskirk's scholarship and enables us to comb through the lives and service of African Americans in George Washington's military with confidence. [End Page 263] Revolutionary rhetoric had clearly begun to transform African Americans' outlook about their prospects in a new nation long before Washington welcomed them into his fighting forces. After initially issuing...

The African American Experience in the American Revolution

The African American Experience in the American Revolution Jim Piecuch (bio) Alan Gilbert. Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xiii + 369 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $17.50 Judith L. Van Buskirk. Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. xiv + 297 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 The past decade has seen a rejuvenation of interest in the study of African Americans in the American Revolution. Alan Gilbert and Judith L. Van Buskirk continue this trend, offering important new perspectives on the topic in their complementary works. While Gilbert's Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence covers American and British attitudes toward black people and the experiences of African Americans who fought for and against independence, Van Buskirk's Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution focuses on black soldiers who served in the Revolutionary forces, although she acknowledges that the British offered African Americans an alternative that, especially in the southern states, was more attractive than anything offered by the revolutionaries. Van Buskirk fills a major gap in the literature on black Americans' participation in the Revolution. Most studies have devoted the bulk of their attention to African Americans who sought freedom with the British, a topic where sources are more available due in part to the facts that a far larger number of black people opted to stake their futures with the royal army and navy instead of the rebels, that British officials kept better records than did the Americans, and that after winning freedom many former slaves wrote narratives of their wartime experiences, often with the encouragement and assistance of abolitionists in Britain. Van Buskirk notes the lack of sources on the subject of African Americans who fought for the United States, yet manages to produce an excellent account by delving into the pension applications of Revolutionary veterans, carefully sifting to identify black soldiers. She acknowledges that the applications were recorded by white court clerks, which shaped not only [End Page 349] the veterans' statements (for example, no black applicants referred to racist treatment) but were also filtered by the clerks themselves, who may have chosen to rephrase or omit portions of the veterans' testimony. Nevertheless, Van Buskirk's skillful analysis of these documents supplemented by the more familiar accounts of white revolutionaries provides the best study to date on black soldiers' service on behalf of American independence. Before examining African Americans' military service, Van Buskirk briefly reviews the nature of prewar slavery in four colonial regions: South Carolina, Virginia, the Middle Colonies, and Massachusetts. She observes that slaves were held in low regard everywhere, but that southern slavery was particularly harsh. This section is followed by an account of Crispus Attucks, likely a former slave of mixed race who was among the leaders of the protests that resulted in the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was killed in that tumult, and thus became the first black man to die in the colonial struggle with Britain. Van Buskirk goes on to discuss the opportunities presented to black people when war began in 1775. Beginning on the very first day of the conflict, some African Americans took up arms against the British in Massachusetts, while later in the year Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to rebel-owned slaves who would fight for the king. Those African Americans who had taken part in the fighting at Lexington and Concord and remained with the force besieging the British in Boston were transformed from local militiamen into regular soldiers when Congress assumed control of the troops and they became George Washington's Continental Army. This transition created a dilemma for Washington, Congress, and the state governments regarding the service of African Americans because many southern delegates in Congress opposed the idea of arming black men, seeing such an action as a potential threat to the institution of slavery. After much debate, the result was grudging permission for black soldiers already in the army to be allowed to reenlist. Van Buskirk notes that the...

Boston's Massacre

Boston's Massacre