An Oration; Delivered March 5, 1774, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March 1770.
Boston: Printed by Edes and Gill, in Queen Street, 1774.
Price: $9,500.00
About the item
First edition. [3]-20pp. Lacks the half title. 1 vols. 4to. Unstitched. Paper losses in top margin affecting headlines restored, repaired tears at gutter, other conservation. Early owner's crude annotations on title and final page. Evans 13314; Adams, American Independence 117a; ESTC W21489; Sabin 30177; Church 1104.
Item #326712
To "perpetuate the memory of that wanton and bloody massacre to all Generations", Bostonians fanned the flames of Revolution by holding an oration each year on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. In 1774, just a few months after the December 1773 Boston Tea Party and with Boston facing punishment under the Intolerable Acts beginning with the Boston Port Act passed at the end of March 1774, John Hancock's fiery oration was published.
Authorship of the oration has been attributed to Samuel Adams, to Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren, and to Samuel Cooper. Adams notes that "in all probability a number of Boston radicals had a hand in its composition." On the verso of the titlepage, the Committee appointed to request publication of the address is listed, including Samuel and John Adams, Warren and Church.
In his impassioned commemoration address, Hancock exhorted his audience to take up arms against the British troops, recalling "the inhuman, unprovoked murders of the fifth of March" and that "the Troops of George the Third have cross'd the wide atlantick, not to engage an enemy, but to assist a band of traitors in Trampling on the rights and liberties of his most loyal subjects in America." Hancock strikes a strongly inflammatory tone: "Let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children 'till tears of pity glisten in their eyes, and boiling passions shake their tender frames ... I conjure you by all that is dear, by all that is honourable, by all that is sacred, not only that you pray, but that you act; that, if necessary, ye fight, and even die... Break in sunder, with noble disdain, the bonds with which the Philistines have bound you..."
The oration was widely printed, including two Boston editions as well as editions in Newport, New Haven and Philadelphia. The first edition is scarce in commerce.
