Do Facts Speak For Themselves?
(Analyzing Primary Sources)

Judith Karavlan
Arsenal Middle School

Overview
Rationale
Objectives
Strategies
Classroom Activities
Annotated Bibliography/Resources
Appendices
Standards

Overview

This curriculum unit targets eighth grade students studying United States History.  The purpose of this unit is to show how the forces of migration affected towns, specifically Boston, Massachusetts and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The unit is designed in two parts.  The first section, the Boston Massacre, can be used during the study of the American Revolution, while the second part, the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, can be used during the study of immigrant labor in the late 1800’s.  The purpose of this unit is to help our students to analyze historical events using primary sources.  In doing this, the unit creates a broad based investigative and challenging learning environment.  Through this curriculum unit students will be assisted in meeting educational standards in communication and citizenship. 

     Students generally discover that they enjoy history when they become active learners.  My students are usually eager to solve historical problems themselves rather than simply being told about the past.  To accomplish this, students will recreate Captain Preston’s trial to find out what really happened at the Boston Massacre.  Since Irish immigrants whose ancestors had known British ‘tyranny’ firsthand reinforced the Bostonians’ belief that the British were heartless tyrants who terrorized a peaceful town, students will need to question and analyze the testimony given at the trial.

     As much as possible, I have tried to let the evidence speak for itself.  Primary sources were chosen from various types of evidence:  works of art, first-person accounts, trial transcripts, statistics, maps, letters, court decisions, speeches, political cartons, and newspaper accounts.

Rationale

Many students like to think that facts speak for themselves.  This is especially tempting when analyzing an incident like the Boston Massacre or the Homestead Steel Strike.  However, discovering what really happened, even when there are eyewitnesses, is never quite that easy.  Witnesses may be confused at the time, they may see only part of the incident, see only what they want to see, or have some reason to lie.  Therefore, students must learn to scrutinize the testimony of witnesses. Through this curriculum unit, students will reconstruct events in history, such as Captain Thomas Preston’s murder trial for the Boston Massacre. What really happened on that March 5^th, 1770, evening in Boston?  Was Preston guilty as charged?  Only by reconstructing the event will students be able to answer that question. 

     Through the exercise on the Homestead Steel Strike, students will see how the United States changed significantly in the years following the Civil War.  While Americans migrated to the west, industrialization also altered the face of the country.  Once a nation of farmers, the United States quickly became a nation of cities.  This land of new opportunities attracted immigrants from all over the world.  Using their observation skills, students will see that the immigrant workers benefited from industrial growth, but also had to endure difficult working conditions and loss of control over their own lives. 

The Boston Massacre

The town of Boston was on edge the first weeks of 1770.  Tension had been building since the early 1760s because the forces of migration, change, and maturation increasingly affected the town.  The protest against the Stamp Act had been particularly bitter there, and men such as Sam Adams were encouraging their fellow Bostonians to be even bolder in their objection.  In response, in 1768 the British government ordered two regiments of soldiers to Boston to restore order and enforce the laws of Parliament.

     Instead of bringing calm to Boston, the presence of soldiers only increased tensions.  Incidents between Bostonians and redcoats were common on the streets and in taverns.  Known British sympathizers and informers were harassed, and Crown officials were openly insulted.  Boston seemed to be a powder keg just waiting for a spark to set off an explosion.

     On the chilly evening of March 5, 1770, a small group of apprentices began taunting a British sentry in front of the Boston Custom House.  Pushed to the breaking point by this badgering, the soldier hit one of his tormenters with his musket.  Soon a crowd of fifty or sixty gathered around the frightened soldier, triggering him to call for help.  The officer of the day, Captain Thomas Preston, and seven British soldiers rushed to the Custom House to protect the sentry.

     Upon arriving at the Custom House, Captain Preston must have sensed how risky his position was.  The crowd had mushroomed to more than one hundred.  Efforts by Preston and others to calm the crowd proved useless.  The crowd surrounded Preston and his men as it had the lone sentry.   Escape was now nearly impossible.

    What happened next is the subject of great controversy.  One of the soldiers fired his musket into the crowd, and the others followed, one by one.  The colonists scattered, leaving fire dead and six wounded.  Preston and his men quickly returned to their barracks, where they were placed under house arrest.  They were later taken to jail and charged with murder.

     Captain Preston’s trial began on October 24, 1770.  John Adams, Josiah Quincy, and Robert Auchmuty agreed to defend Preston, even though the first two were devoted Patriots.  They believed that the captain was entitled to a fair trial and did their best to defend him.  The trial lasted for four days, an unusually long trial for the times.  It took the jury only three hours to reach a verdict of not guilty. (Zobel, p. 297)

   Students will be use portions of the evidence given at the murder trial of Captain Thomas Preston to reconstruct what actually happened on March 5, 1770, evening in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892

The history of American labor has been a turbulent one.  Tens of thousands of people have been arrested, injured, or even killed in strikes that have pitted employees against management and often government.  The history of the Pittsburgh area is studded with labor disputes – many of them bitterly contested and of long duration - over questions of wages, hours, working conditions, and union recognition.

     The early strikes were relatively peaceful.  But after the steady growth and expansion of industries in the 1840s and 50s, the conflicts between employers and workers became sharper.  Typical of the harsh confrontation between labor and capital was the 1892 strike of 3,800 steel workers at Homestead, Pennsylvania.

     When Andrew Carnegie purchased the Homestead Steel Works in 1883, he rapidly built it into a vast steel empire that set the pace for industrial America and the world.  Jobs in the Homestead Works drew thousands of immigrants from Europe.  There they had earned what amounted in the New World to about 25 cents a day.  In the Pittsburgh mills, their wage was 15 cents for the hour.  Thus they made in a day seven times as much as they did in their old country.  It was natural that they were content with what they believed was a large income.

     The same cannot be said about their working conditions.  They worked a daily 12-hour shift, often seven days a week without rest.  If working conditions were poor, living conditions were not much better.  The majority of the steel hands lived in unstable shanties, ramshackle cottages, and filthy, overcrowded tenements with primitive sanitation and toilet facilities.

     To improve their conditions, skilled workers in iron and steel fashioned a strong union in 1876, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers of America.  In June of 1896, Henry Clay Frick set out to smash the Union.  Andrew Carnegie held majority control in the Carnegie Steel Company, but its direction lay in the hands of 41-year-old Henry Clay Frick.

     Frick was determined to cut costs in a brutally competitive industry.  Two ways were clear:  separate wages from productivity and introduce new technological processes to increase output and decrease the number of workers needed.  Frick began his attack by firing every one of the 3,800 employees of the mill.  Then he announced that a new non-union work force would be hired as individuals.  Wages, which were very high, were to be reduced.

     Angered by Frick’s action, the union steelworkers armed themselves with rifles, surrounded the mill, and vowed to shoot anybody who entered the premises without their permission.  To recapture his property, Frick decided to hire a private army of gunfighters, the Pinkerton Detective Agency of Chicago.  Frick’s strategy for recapturing the steel mill depended on surprise.  Frick’s plan called for an amphibious landing under cover of darkness.

     On July 6^th, the strikers discovered that two barges carrying the detested Pinkerton agents were being towed up the Monongahela River to Homestead.  By the time the Pinkertons swung toward shore, several thousand men, women, and children had swarmed down to the shoreline of the mill property.

     The townspeople fired at the barges with small cannons, they hurled dynamite sticks against them, poured oil in the river and lit it, shot at the Pinkertons with revolvers and rifles, and threw stones.  The battle went on the whole day.  The Pinkertons, unable to land, gave up and surrendered their arms.  As the surrendered Pinkerton men marched between the lines of the enraged strikers and their families the excitement of the workers mounted; the pledge to allow the Pinkertons to move away in peace was forgotten; the strikers threw themselves on the surrendered men and let their anger flow.

     The confrontation between townsfolk and Pinkerton Agents claimed the lives of at least ten men.  In the months that followed, 167 strikers were indicted for crimes ranging from murder to aggravated riot.  During the same period, hundreds of new workers, called scabs by the striking workers were hired to take the place of the striking workers.  The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers ceased to exist after hundreds of non-union workers poured into Homestead from all points of the compass (Serrin).

     Students will examine various pieces of evidence:  testimonies given in the House of Representatives by a variety of individuals involved in the battle between Pinkertons and steelworkers, newspaper articles, illustrations and editorial cartoons.  Students will read and analyze each series separately.  What emotional factors were they able to identify on both sides of the argument?  Students will learn to scrutinize the testimony of witnesses.  Students will also use the same critical thinking to evaluate what the author or artist was trying to convey through his work, as they do in evaluating personal accounts.  How might these images or impressions have influenced people of that time?

     The Pittsburgh Teacher’s Institute seminar, “A Restless People:  Americans on the Move, 1760-1900”, run by Dr. Joan Gundersen and Dr. Elisabeth Roark helped in several ways.  First, forces of migration affected areas such as Boston and Pittsburgh by creating problems, change and maturation.  With the seminar leaders’ help, I will be able to guide the students in determining the impact migration had on those communities.  Secondly, since I will have students investigate and use personal accounts, works of art and photographs to tell part of the story; the seminar’s use of art in telling the story of migration will be very helpful.  After analyzing and interpreting their information, students will present their findings in various forms (performance, power point presentation, exhibits or papers).  Students will grow academically and intellectually as they integrate the arts, economics, sciences and other disciplines into a historical presentation.  Researching enhances reading, comprehension, critical thinking and problem-solving skills while fostering pride in each student’s heritage and in our nation’s history and place in the world.

Objectives  

Through this unit students will be able to use effective research and information management skills, including locating primary sources of information.   Students will then read and use a variety of methods to make sense of various kinds of complex texts such as:  testimonies, newspaper articles, editorials, art work, speeches, cartoons and letters.  While working in cooperative groups, students will demonstrate that they can work effectively with others.  Through their various group projects, students will demonstrate an understanding of major events, cultures, groups and individuals in the historical development of Pennsylvania and the United States.   Finally, students will also analyze and make critical judgments about all forms of communication, separating fact from opinion, recognizing propaganda, stereotypes and statements of bias, recognizing inconsistencies and judging the validity of evidence.

Strategies

Students are given a variety of primary source material on a particular historical event.  Each type of historical evidence is combined with an introduction to help students understand the historical context of the problem.  As much as possible, I will try to let the evidence speak for itself and avoid leading students to one particular interpretation or another.  Students are given suggestions for studying and analyzing the evidence.  Students are then encouraged to reconstruct the event, role-play, and debate, create posters, or editorial cartoons to be evaluated. 

Classroom Activities

The Boston Massacre:

Suggestions for studying and analyzing evidence:

On March 5, 1770, both the crowd and the soldiers acted uncharacteristically.  The result was the tragedy that colonists dubbed the “Boston Massacre.”  Why did the crowd and the soldiers behave as they did?  Discovering what really happened, even when there are eyewitnesses, is never quite that easy.  The testimony of witnesses must be carefully scrutinized, for both what the witnesses mean to tell us and other pertinent information as well. 

     John Adams, in his closing speech, spoke of the problems with eyewitness testimonies.

          The witnesses are confident that they know the prisoners at the barr,

          and that they were present…however, it is apparent, that witnesses are

          liable to make mistakes, by a single example.  Mr. Bass, who is a very

          honest man, and of good character, swears positively that the tall man

          was at the right that night, and was the first that fired; and I am sure

          you are satisfied by this time, by many circumstances, that he is totally

          mistaken in this matter…(Boston Massacre Files, p.1)

     Neither Captain Thomas Preston nor the soldiers testified at the captain’s murder trial because English legal custom prohibited defendants in criminal cases from testifying in their own behalf.  One week after the massacre, however, in a sworn deposition Captain Preston gave his side of the story.  Although the deposition was not introduced at the trial and therefore the jury was not aware of what Preston himself had said, students will have a portion of his disposition to examine. 

     No transcript of Preston’s trial survives.  The trial testimony included in this unit comes from an anonymous person’s summary of what each person said, the notes of Robert Treat Paine (a lawyer for the prosecution), and one witness’s reconstruction of what his testimony and the cross-examination had been.  Paine’s notes, and one witness’s recollections are acceptable substitutes because probably all three people were present in the courtroom and the accounts tend to corroborate one another.

Day One

Students will be introduced to the Boston Massacre by reading a news article on the event in the Boston Gazette dated Monday, March 12, 1770 (see “Day One: 1770 News Article”).  The teacher will lead the students in analyzing this primary source.  Who was the intended audience?  What was the purpose of this news article?  Is this article reliable?  With the teacher’s guidance, students will develop research questions concerning the event as stated in the news article.  Students will compare and contrast their findings after examining the testimony dispositions given at Captain Preston’s trial.  Were the students on target or fooled by the so called ‘eyewitness’?

Day Two

Students will work in cooperative groups using Captain Preston’s disposition and evidence from the murder trial to reconstruct the scene itself:  the actual order in which the events occurred and where the various participants were standing.  (Students should look for corroborating testimony.)

     Each cooperative group will be given a rough sketch of the scene of the Boston Massacre (see fig.1).  Students will need to create a key designating participants involved in the massacre and reconstruct the scene from their evidence.  A list of possible questions will be given to each group to stimulate their discussion:

1.      Where were the soldiers standing?

2.      Where was Captain Preston standing?

3.      Which eyewitnesses were closest to Preston?

4.      Where were the other witnesses?

(Don’t forget that this event took place around 9 P.M.)

Rubrics will be used to evaluate work cooperative group work.

Day Three

Cooperative groups will work on recreating the murder trial of Captain Thomas Preston.  After the students are settled into their groups, the instructor will pass out their roles and allow them to decide within a group what role each one will play in Preston’s mock trial. Those students in a group that did not receive a specific role to play in the trial will serve as the ‘Director’ and will be responsible for helping their group through their performance.

     Each cooperative group will also be given their character’s actual testimony from the trial.  Students will be given time to read their testimony for the reenactment.  During this time the instructor should float around the room and guide students.  Students will practice their parts in preparation for the trial, which will take place on day four. 

Day Four

Students will role-play Captain Thomas Preston’s murder trial with the entire class acting as the jury.  Since students will be using the actual testimony, the audience (class) will be encouraged to take notes using a chart that is supplied with eyewitnesses’ names.  After weighing the eyewitnesses’ evidence, each student will write a narrative explaining what they believe really happened on that chilly evening of March 5,1770 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Boston Massacre Worksheet

March 12, 1770

Deposition of Captain Thomas Preston

…The mob still increased and were outrageous, striking their clubs or bludgeons one against another, and calling out, come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, G-d damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not, and much more language was used.  At this time I was between the soldiers and the mob, parleying with, and endeavoring all in my power to persuade them to retire peaceably, but to no purpose.  They advanced to the points of the bayonets, struck some of them and even the muzzles of the pieces, and seemed to be endeavoring to close with the soldiers.  On which some well-behaved persons asked me if the guns were charged.  I replied yes.  They then asked me if I intended to order the men to fire.  I answered no, by no means, observing to them that I was advanced before the muzzles of the men’s pieces, and must fall a sacrifice if they fired; that the soldiers were upon those circumstances would prove me to be no officer. While I was thus speaking, one of the soldiers having received a severe blow with a stick, stepped a little on one side and instantly fired, on which turning to and asking him why he fired without orders, I was struck with a club on my arm, which for some time deprived me of the use of it, which blow had it been placed on my head, most probably would have destroyed me.

     On this a general attack was made on the men by a great number of heavy clubs and snowballs being thrown at them, by which all our lives were in imminent danger, some persons at the same time from behind calling out, damn your bloods-why don't you fire. Instantly three or four of the soldiers fired, one after another, and directly after three more in the same confusion and hurry. The mob then ran away, except three unhappy men who instantly expired, in which number was Mr. Gray at whose rope-walk the prior quarrels took place; one more is since dead, three others are dangerously, and four slightly wounded. The whole of this melancholy affair was transacted in almost 20 minutes. On my asking the soldiers why they fired without orders, they said they heard the word fire and supposed it came from me. This might be the case as many of the mob called out fire, fire, but I assured the men that I gave no such order; that my words were, don't fire, stop your firing. In short, it was scarcely possible for the soldiers to know who said fire, or don't fire, or stop your firing…

Source:  http://www.bostonmassacre.net/trial/acct-preston2.htm

Nathaniel Fosdick

Hearing the Bells ring for fire I supposed I went out and came down by the Main Guard. Saw some Soldiers fixing their Bayonets on. Passed on. Went down to the Sentinel. Perceived something pass me behind. Turned round and saw the Soldiers coming down. They bid me stand out of the way and dammed my blood. I told them I should not for any man. The party drew up round the Sentinel, faced about and charged their Bayonets. I saw an Officer and said if there was any disturbance between the Soldiers and the People there was the Officer present who could settle it soon. I heard no Orders given to load, but in about two minutes after the Captain step'd across the Gutter. Spoke to two Men I don't know who then went back behind his men. Between the 4th and 5th men on the right. I then heard the word fire and the first Gun went off: In about 2 minutes the second and then several others. The Captain had a Sword in his hand. Was dressed in his Regimentals. Had no Surtout on. I saw nothing thrown nor any blows given at all. The first man on the right who fired after attempting to push the People slipped down and drop'd his Gun out of his hand. The Person who stepd in between the 4th and 5th Men I look upon it gave the orders to fire. His back was to me. I shall always think it was him. The Officer had a Wig on. I was in such a situation that I am as well satisfied there were no blows given as that the word fire was spoken.

Richard Palmes

Somebody there said there was a Rumpus in King Street. I went down. When I had got there I saw Capt. Preston at the head of 7 or 8 Soldiers at the Customhouse drawn up, their Guns breast high and Bayonets fixed. Found Theodore Bliss talking with the Captain. I heard him say why don't you fire or words to that effect. The Captain answered I know not what and Bliss said God damn you why don't you fire. I was close behind Bliss. They were both in the front. Then I step'd immediately between them and put my left hand in a familiar manner on the Captains right shoulder to speak to him. Mr. John Hickling then looking over my shoulder I said to Preston are your Soldiers Guns loaded. He answered with powder and ball. Sir I hope you don’t intend the Soldiers shall fire on the Inhabitants. He said by no means. The instant he spoke I saw something resembling Snow or Ice strike the Grenadier on the Captains right hand being the only one then at his right. He instantly stepd one foot back and fired the first Gun. I had then my hand on the Captains shoulder. After the Gun went off I heard the word fire. The Captain and I stood in front about half between the breech and muzzle of the Guns. I don’t know who gave the word fire. I was then looking on the Soldier who fired. The word was given loud. The Captain might have given the word and I not distinguish it. After the word fire in about 6 or 7 seconds the Grenadier on the Captains left fired and then the others one after another. The Captain stood still till the second Gun was fired. After tha