The Boston Massacre is the name commonly given to the killing of five civilians by British troops on March 5, 1770, which became a cause celebre among pro-independence groups and helped eventually to spark the American Revolutionary War. Colonists were already resentful of the Townshend Acts. Tensions caused by the heavy military presence in Boston led to brawls between soldiers and civilians, and eventually to troops shooting their muskets into a riotous crowd.

The incident

The incident began on King Street when a young wigmaker's apprentice named Edward Garrick called out to a British officer, Captain John Goldfinch, that he was late paying his barber's bill. Goldfinch had in fact settled his account that day, but did not reply to the boy. When Garrick remained quite vocal in his complaints an hour later, the British sentry outside the customs house, Private Hugh White, called the boy over and clubbed him on the head. Garrick's companions yelled at the sentry, and a British sergeant chased them away. The apprentices returned with more locals, shouting insults at the sentry and throwing snowballs and litter. White sent a messenger to the Main Guard for reinforcements. The Officer of the Day, Captain Thomas Preston, dispatched a corporal and six privates, all grenadiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot, and followed soon after. The mob grew in size and continued throwing stones, sticks, and chunks of ice. A group of sailors and dockworkers came carrying large sticks of firewood and pushed to the front of the crowd, directly confronting the soldiers. In the midst of the commotion, Private Hugh Montgomery was struck down onto the ground by a thrown club. He fired his musket into the air and — as he later admitted to one of his defense attorneys — yelled "Fire!" All but one of the other soldiers shot their weapons into the crowd. Three Americans — ropemaker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, and a mulatto sailor, Crispus Attucks — died instantly. Seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick, struck by a ricocheting musket ball at the back of the crowd, died the next day. Thirty-year-old Irish immigrant Patrick Carr died two weeks later. Six more men were injured. To keep the peace, the next day royal authorities agreed to remove all troops from the center of town to a fort on a harbor island.

Contemporary depictions

The event was depicted by a young Boston artist, Henry Pelham, half-brother of the celebrated portrait painter John Singleton Copley. Boston silversmith and engraver Paul Revere closely copied Pelham's image, and thus often gets credit for it. Pelham and Revere added several inflammatory details, such as Captain Preston ordering his men to fire and another musket shooting out of the window of the customs office, labeled "Butcher's Hall." Another discrepancy arose because of how artist Christian Remick hand-colored some prints: the bright blue sky does not accord with the quarter moon or dark shadows on the left side of the image. Some copies of the print show a man with two chest wounds and a somewhat darker face, matching descriptions of Attucks; others show no victim as a person of color.

Trial of the soldiers

Captain Preston and the soldiers were arrested and scheduled for trial in a Suffolk County court. John Adams, Josiah Quincy II, and Robert Auchmuty acted as the defense attorneys, with Sampson Salter Blowers helping by investigating the jury pool. Massachusetts Solicitor General Samuel Quincy and private attorney Robert Treat Paine, hired by the town of Boston, handled the prosecution. To let passions settle, the trial was delayed for months, unusual in that period, and the jurymen were all chosen from towns outside Boston. (There is also some evidence that in Preston's trial the defense managed to seat jurymen who politically leaned toward the royal government.)

Tried on his own, Preston was acquitted after the jury was not convinced that he had ordered the troops to fire. In the second trial, prosecutors had to prove each man's guilt because one unidentified soldier had not fired his weapon at all, and was therefore not guilty of murder or manslaughter. The jury acquitted six of the soldiers. Two privates, Montgomery and Matthew Killroy, were found guilty of manslaughter; this was a capital crime, but under benefit of the clergy the actual punishment was being branded on the thumb rather than hanged. The jury's decisions suggest that they believed the soldiers had felt threatened by the crowd. Patrick Carr, the fifth victim, corroborated this with deathbed testimony delivered to defense attorney John Adams.

Historical significance

Samuel Adams and his Whig colleagues dubbed the killings "the Boston Massacre" and used it for propaganda purposes. They argued that the significance lay not in the small number of deaths, but in the British government's policy of maintaining a standing army and using troops to enforce laws enacted by Parliament over the objections of local legislatures. The public funeral of the first four men to die was, at the time, one of the largest gatherings on the North American continent. From 1771 to 1783, Boston commissioned public orations on the event's anniversary to keep its memory fresh. The American Declaration of Independence referred to the Massacre in its complaints about "Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us" and "protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States." John Adams, however, called his defense of the soldiers in the Boston Massacre "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested acts of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country," though he too recognised the historic importance of the event, later describing it as "the foundation of independent America."

The site of the massacre is marked today by a cobblestone ring on the traffic island at the Devonshire and State Street intersection in front of the Old State House.

1770 | American Revolution | Political repression in the United States

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