Musicking the Revolution: Paul Revere, Phillis Wheatley, and the Boston Massacre

Abstract

When Paul Revere published a broadside memorializing the 1770 Boston Massacre, he borrowed artwork that had been loaned to him by Henry Pelham, the young half-brother to the American painter John Singleton Copley. In spite of the fame of that broadside image in the history of the American Revolution, virtually no attention has been paid to the poem Revere printed on the broadside. This article analyzes the character, prosody, and verbal imagery of that poetry and its antecedents, including poems by the African-born enslaved Boston poet Phillis Wheatley, and suggests a previously unsuspected musical background in the form of the ballad tune “Fortune my foe” that was famous in both Britain and America.