The following is a guest post by Sara W. Duke, Curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Arts, Prints and Photographs Division.
As a curator of historical prints, one of the first questions I ask myself is, “Why does this print exist?” It is an essential question to ask when trying to use pictures to explain the past.
Take, for example, the Boston Tea Party, which occurred when angry colonists, dressed as American Indians, destroyed 342 chests of tea on December 16, 1773 to protest recent tax hikes imposed by the British Parliament. For nearly a century, the only contemporary depictions of the reaction to the Boston Tea Party that the Library of Congress had to offer researchers were those created in England for a British audience. An example is the mezzotint print attributed to Philip Dawe, The Bostonians in Distress, which was published in London in the wake of the Intolerable Acts, which the British Parliament passed to punish Boston.
One of the Intolerable Acts was the Boston Port Act, enacted by the British Parliament on March 31, 1774 which closed the port to everything except food and fuel. However, the print was published several months later in London, on December 16, 1774.
When The Bostonians in Distress appeared on the British market, it reflected wishful thinking and may have served as pro-government propaganda to encourage the British populace to see the expense of military intervention in the colonies as effective and worthwhile. The British image shows a starving city surrounded on all sides by the British Army and Navy and depicts a few rough British sailors offering fish and kindling in exchange for “Promises” from the colonists. The cartoonist quotes Psalm 107, further giving the British god-like power over the transgressions of Massachusetts.