Boston Massacre

The Issue

The killing of five colonists by British soldiers on the night of March 5, 1770, ignited a firestorm of protest in Boston. Calling the killings a "massacre," colonists opposed to the troops' presence in the city denounced their actions as "savage" and "barbaric." Those who supported British authority in the colonies defended the soldiers, arguing that the colonists had hurled stones and other objects at them and goaded them to fire.

National Archives and Records Administration

On the snowy evening of March 5, 1770, a large crowd of angry Bostonians confronted a lone British sentry in front of the Customs House on King Street. As the crowd grew in both numbers and hostility, the beleaguered soldier called for reinforcements from the nearby barracks. A small detachment of British troops, led by Captain Thomas Preston, soon came to the guard's aid. By this point the crowd had turned into a hostile mob. Brickbats and other projectiles, as well as taunts and threats, flew at the soldiers as they arrayed themselves in a defensive line. One of them was knocked down on the ice by a club hurled from the crowd. A shot rang out. Soldiers, with bayonets fixed, began to skirmish with townspeople. More shots were fired. Confusion reigned, as shouts and gunfire mixed with the blur of people running in every direction to create a chaotic scene. Within minutes, the din subsided as the troops reformed their line and withdrew to the barracks while the crowd dispersed. But five dead or dying townsmen lay in the street. The argument between colonists and British over the nature of colonial rights and liberties now had a body count. Quickly the recriminations began, as Boston's patriots—who labeled the events of the

Filed Under: Civil Liberties • Politics and Government • 1761-1812: Revolution and New Nation

Boston "Massacre" Were British Soldiers or American Colonists to Blame?

night of March 5, 1770, a "massacre"—and loyalists both realized their struggle had entered a potentially grim new phase.

• Arguments that British Soldiers Were to Blame for the "Massacre": Many residents of Boston, Massachusetts, who opposed the troops'

presence from the beginning and thus were predisposed against them,

blamed the events of March 5 on the soldiers. The "Sons of Liberty,"

and others associated with Boston's "patriot" faction, believed that the

soldiers' decision to fire was indefensible. No matter how threatening

the crowd appeared, they argued, the use of weapons on unarmed

civilians ran counter to common decency as well as the letter of the

law. Furthermore, they believed, the King Street tragedy was the

inevitable outcome of the British government's policies toward the

colonies over the last several years. New taxes and restrictions upon

trade had been levied on the colonists without their consent, violating

the colonists' rights as Englishmen. The Sons of Liberty led the

resistance in Boston to these ominous new directives, organizing

public demonstrations and political remonstrances. The response of

the British authorities was to station troops in the city. In the patriots'

estimation, a "standing army" was nothing more than the instrument of

tyranny. Relations between townspeople and soldiers started poorly

and deteriorated rapidly. Critics of British policy argued that these

tensions were the logical result of an armed presence among a liberty-

loving populace. The events of March 5 were the natural outcome of

tyrannical policies and military provocation—a combustible mix among

people that zealously guarded their liberties. It was not a matter of if,

but rather when, violence would erupt.

• Arguments that American Colonists Were to Blame for the "Massacre": Boston's loyalists—those who supported British

authority—were themselves horrified by the events of March 5, but

believed the real tragedy lay in the fact that they had been eminently

avoidable. The British guard was merely performing his duty at the

Customs House; it was the hostility and growing numbers of the mob

that escalated the situation. British officers, as well as civilian

authorities, had repeatedly implored the crowd to disperse. Rather than

obey, however, the townspeople—many of whom were drunk—seemed

bent upon provoking some sort of incident. Insolence and provocation

had marked the behavior of the patriot faction and the Sons of Liberty

toward His Majesty's troops, traits that were on full display during that

evening's chaos. When the crowd began hurling stones and other

objects at the solders, striking and injuring some of them, it was no

surprise that shots were fired. The troops were not part of some plan to

attack Bostonians, they were only acting in self-defense when faced

with a rapidly escalating threat to their lives. The real culprits were

those who instigated the menacing crowd, not the soldiers who found

themselves in a confusing and threatening situation and acted as

anyone would in those circumstances. The rabble-rousing tactics of

the Sons of Liberty, according to the loyalists, had sown the seeds for

this harvest of violence. The organizers of the unlawful resistance to

British authority were themselves culpable for the clash of March 5 and

the resulting deaths.

Background

The year 1763 marked the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, a signal victory for Britain over its imperial rival, France. Americans throughout the thirteen colonies, including Bostonians, celebrated the triumph in which they believed they had played a significant role. Postwar expectations were optimistic. Colonists believed the expulsion of France from the North American interior would open the long-coveted lands of the Ohio River Valley to English settlement, easing the overcrowding in New England. The heavy taxes levied by individual colonies to finance the war effort were no longer necessary, and colonists assumed their financial burdens would now be considerably lighter. The colonies' economic picture had seldom been this bright, as local farmers and merchants saw their incomes skyrocket from the demands of the wartime market. But this rosy climate was short-lived. The British government found itself facing an enormous financial crisis, as the imperial debt reached unprecedented levels from financing a global war against France. Native Americans led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac rose against the British in the Ohio Valley, a rebellion which took nearly two years to suppress. George Grenville, prime minister of Great Britain, implemented a new colonial policy with the goal of producing the much-needed revenue to both service the British debt and pay for the continuing military presence needed in the colonies. Grenville's logic was simple: The war had been started in America and fought to defend the American colonists, thus they ought to bear their fair share of its costs.

Legislation reflecting this logic quickly issued from Grenville's ministry, through Parliament, and to the colonies. The Proclamation of 1763 issued by King George forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in order to prevent future clashes between Europeans and Natives and thus obviate the need for a military presence in the Ohio Valley. Beginning with the 1764 Revenue Act—commonly known as the Sugar Act—Grenville reversed the tenor of the past century of British commercial legislation. Prior to 1763, its aim had been to regulate colonial trade. Now, however, the primary purpose of these measures was to extract revenue from colonial commerce. This distinction was a crucial one, and it alarmed many colonists who feared the economic implications of this increased taxation. Adding to colonists' trepidation was the commitment to renewed enforcement of the notoriously lax system of customs collection. New taxes, combined with toughened collection measures, were the heart of Grenville's revenue program.

The Sugar Act reflected this new emphasis through its tough anti-smuggling measures. Targeting molasses imports, the law affected New England more than any other region, given the importance of rum distillation in its economy. Those accused of illegally importing molasses—or not paying the proper duty—would be tried for smuggling in an Admiralty Court. This was a clear break with long-held precedent, which allowed for accused smugglers to receive jury trials in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts, and no local jury would convict for smuggling, given its prevalence and importance in the city's commerce. Admiralty Courts, however, had no jury, and the nearest one to Boston was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 400 miles away. Thus, would-be smugglers (of which Boston had many) now ran a far more significant risk of legal and financial penalties than before, and were deprived of a jury trial—which was commonly assumed to be a fundamental right of English citizens. Customs collectors also made use of Writs of Assistance, which were wartime customs measures designed to clamp down on illegal trade by their grant of extraordinary powers of search and seizure to customs officials. Their continued use in peacetime further rankled Boston's mercantile community. Coming on the heels of the dismaying Proclamation of 1763, the tougher customs measures surrounding the Sugar Act seemed an ominous portent to many Bostonians.

Colonists protesting the Stamp Act. Passed by the British Parliament in 1765, the Stamp Act aimed to raise revenue by requiring colonists to purchase stamps for a wide array of items. Colonists condemned the law, and after widespread protest, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766.

Library of Congress

Concerns over more vigorous revenue extraction and increasing threats to colonial liberties reached a crescendo with the Stamp Act in March 1765. Designed to produce revenue by requiring a tax stamp to be purchased for a variety of paper goods (ranging from legal documents to newspapers to playing cards), the law sparked furious reaction throughout the colonies. Its opponents argued that the Stamp Act represented "taxation without representation." English political tradition held that taxes could be levied only by bodies that represented "the people," and thus possessed their consent. Because Parliament contained no representatives from the thirteen colonies, they contended, laws such as the Stamp Act violated this fundamental right of all Britons. Protests against the law ranged from the formal— newspaper editorials, petitions from colonial legislatures, and the resolutions of a "Stamp Act Congress" which convened in New York City—to more unofficial, but more powerful, expressions of popular discontent. Mob action against officials identified with the act's enforcement erupted throughout the colonies, and many of the agents charged with executing the Stamp Act resigned their posts under pressure before the law even took effect on November 1, 1765. In Boston, crowd action reached an even higher intensity. In late August, effigies of stamp agents were hung from a large oak on Boston Common— dubbed the "Liberty Tree"—which became the gathering point for a large mob that destroyed several buildings identified with loyalists. The structure intended to serve as the stamp office was torn down, its boards providing kindling for a raucous bonfire celebration. Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson, seen by the Stamp Act's opponents as the chief representative of British authority in the colony, barely escaped his residence before it was destroyed and its contents looted by the crowd. Given the scope of colonial resistance, it was clear to the Grenville ministry that enforcement of the Stamp Act would be problematic, and it proved a dead letter from the start. Parliament repealed the law in March 1766. In the din of colonial celebration that ensued, another measure—the Declaratory Act—which accompanied the Stamp Act's repeal passed virtually unnoticed. But the Declaratory Act's assertion that the colonies and their people were subject to Parliamentary authority "in all cases whatsoever" signaled that the debate between the colonies and Britain over taxation and governance was far from over.

It was in Boston, Massachusetts, that this debate would unfold most visibly. During the furor over the Stamp Act, a group calling itself the Sons of Liberty emerged, and the hand of its leadership was evident in both the August 1765 crowd actions and the continuing resistance to the authority of the colony's executives. These executives—Governor Francis Bernard and Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson (also chief justice of the colony's supreme court)—and their allies found themselves facing a growing segment of the town's population that seemed to grow more obstreperous, defiant, and politically radical by the day. In the aftermath of the Stamp Act's repeal, the Sons of Liberty and the "patriots" who followed them possessed both brimming confidence and a sense of momentum.

The Troops Come to Boston

As the debate over taxation, representation, and the rights of Englishmen continued between Britain and its colonies, so too did the struggle for power in Boston between the Hutchinson-

A vigorous advocate of tightening imperial control over the colonies, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend drafted a series of laws in 1767 known as the Townshend Acts that raised taxes on many products colonists imported from England.

Joshua Reynolds

Bernard loyalists and the Sons of Liberty, led by the prominent artisans and skilled propagandists Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, along with James Otis, a noted lawyer and politician. The lower house of the colony's legislature became the hotbed of support for the Sons of Liberty faction; Samuel Adams was elected House clerk in 1766. The House struggled against the "Tories," as loyalists were called, for supremacy in Boston and in the colony at large. For two years following the Stamp Act's repeal, the loyalists were able to take advantage of a lack of controversy to win back converts from the town's mercantile community. As the Sons of Liberty—also called the "Whigs"—struggled to maintain the momentum gathered in the protests of 1765, there was a growing sense that the danger to English liberties posed by Grenville's legislative program was fading. The Grenville ministry fell out of power in 1766, and many colonists interpreted this political shift as a vindication of colonial principles.

The Massachusetts standoff was interrupted by a new series of laws from Parliament, the Townshend Acts of 1767. Named for their author and chancellor of the exchequer Charles Townshend, a vigorous advocate of tightening imperial control, the laws sought to produce revenue, further reform customs collection, and solidify British authority over the recalcitrant colonies. A new Board of Customs for the colonies was created, based in Boston, and charged with administering the collection of tax revenue throughout the colonies. Some of this revenue would go to pay the salaries of imperial officials, formerly paid by the colonial assemblies, thus placing these officials beyond colonists' economic control. These reforms were necessitated by the range of new import duties the Townshend Acts placed on numerous commodities that were significant parts of colonial commerce, such as glass, lead, paper, paint, wine, and tea. This beefed-up system would accomplish two important objectives: The necessary revenue would be collected, and the way in which it was collected would reinforce British political authority over the colonies. In the post– Stamp Act climate of political suspicion, colonists reacted swiftly and vehemently, as the Townshend Acts seemed to display a continued British willingness to deprive the colonists of their liberties. Throughout the colonies, political and economic resistance flared as pamphlets and editorials proliferated, boycotts were urged, and rioters took to the streets.

Citizens of Massachusetts took the lead in this resistance, and Bostonians led the resistance in Massachusetts. In early 1768, after several weeks of debate, the colonial assembly issued a "circular letter" to other colonial legislatures that declared the Townshend Acts destructive to colonial liberties in both their provisions and the fact that colonists were not represented in Parliament, and urged the colonies to ignore the law. This open defiance was too much for British officials, and colonial governors were ordered to dissolve the assemblies if they threatened to endorse the Massachusetts missive. Governor Bernard was ordered to demand a repeal of the circular letter and to dissolve the assembly should it refuse. As expected, the Massachusetts lawmakers refused, and thus Bernard dismissed the legislature. Outside the channels of formal politics, broad-based popular movements arose, including one led by the Boston radicals, to boycott British goods—that is, refuse to buy products imported from Britain—until the acts were repealed. Around the same time the circular letter was issued, the Boston Town Meeting voted its approval of a nonimportation agreement that was subsequently endorsed by more than two dozen towns throughout Massachusetts.

The Sons of Liberty played a prominent role in orchestrating protests against the Townshend Acts, including the popular demonstrations that enforced nonimportation. The pressures of

the crowd were more then enough for many reluctant merchants to abandon their sale of British manufactures in the name of patriotic resistance to tyranny. As this pressure increased, however, popular protest assumed a more menacing cast to Boston's loyalists. Law and order were under siege, they believed, when businessmen were subjected to the whims of "king mob" and its violent agenda. Many loyalists, including Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson himself, began to privately express the need for increased police power on the part of the government, perhaps even from the military. Governor Bernard, however, resisted calls for troops, believing that the introduction of British soldiers into Boston would exacerbate already dangerous levels of tension in the city. Bernard's hesitance was overcome, however, by repeated threats of harm to customs officials in the city and their resulting fears for the safety of their persons and families. These threats seemed to materialize in convincing fashion on June 10, 1768. Customs officials in Boston Harbor had seized the sloop Liberty, owned by prominent merchant John Hancock, suspecting that it carried a cargo of smuggled Madeira wine. Shortly thereafter, a sizable crowd attacked the customs officials guarding the ship, locked them in the customs office, and forcibly unloaded Hancock's cargo. The threats uttered by the crowd to the customs commissioners convinced them that they were no longer safe in Boston, and they took refuge at Castle William, a harbor fortification safely outside of town.

The Liberty riot was the last straw for Governor Bernard. Writing to the British ministry—as he was making plans to resign his position and return to England—Bernard called for troops to be sent to Boston in order "to rescue the Government out of the hands of a trained mob." The ministry needed no convincing, having already received numerous pleas from the customs commissioners for military support over the past several months. Thus, at twelve noon on October 1, 1768, the first soldiers of the two British regiments sent from Halifax under the command of General Thomas Gage disembarked from their vessel in Boston Harbor and began to march into town.

Escalating Tensions

The soldiers' arrival in Boston did not precipitate the bloodbath that many on both sides of the conflict feared it might. Part of the reason for this was the significant show of force that General Gage's soldiers made, marching in formation with fifes and drums blaring to their barracks near Boston Common. It was one thing to declaim against British authority, or to participate in the harassment of unpopular customs officials and their informants—it was another matter entirely to demonstrate against British authority under the watchful eye of two regiments of His Majesty's Army. By late fall 1768, 4,000 British regulars were billeted in Boston. This was far more than a token force: These 4,000 soldiers were encamped in a city whose population totaled only 20,000 people. Given the strength of the British military presence, the Sons of Liberty and patriot partisans adopted a wait-and-see attitude, though verbal and written denunciations of the troops' presence in the city erupted frequently. Particularly busy was Samuel Adams, the driving force behind Boston's resistance, who penned numerous letters to government officials in both the colonies and England as well as a spate of newspaper editorials denouncing the presence of a "standing army" in Boston. [See Colonial Fears of a "Standing Army"]

Colonial leader Samuel Adams played an important role in pre-Revolutionary Boston. His incendiary newspaper articles and political activism both before and after the "massacre" helped stir up support for American independence.

John Singleton Copley/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Adams's masterstroke appeared on October 13, 1768, with the first issue of A Journal of the Times. The Journal was a chronicle of the depredations supposedly visited upon Bostonians by the "despicable," "bloody- backed" redcoats, who, according to the Journal's sensational reportage, never missed an opportunity to assault or steal from the innocent townspeople, especially women. [See Articles, A Journal of the Times, 1768, 1769 (primary source)] Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson decried Adams's propaganda, insisting to correspondents that "Nine tenths of the Journal is either absolutely false or grossly misrepresented." But protests of this type did not quell the ardor of the Journal's contributors, which included Adams, Otis, and other notable Sons of Liberty. Each week, they composed a number of lurid accounts of the soldiers' bad behavior (most of them were indeed exaggerated to some degree), and sent them off to be printed in New York, from where the Journal would be distributed throughout the colonies, as well as to England itself. Even though much of its material was only loosely based in truth, the Journal was an effective instrument of propaganda that served to convince other colonists that what was occurring in Boston—the oppression of everyday citizens by a tyrannical "standing army"—was of import to all the colonies, and that Bostonians were on the front lines of the struggle for English liberties in the face of an

arbitrary and corrupt regime.

In Boston itself, the Journal of the Times was only the most visible reflection of increasing tensions. While the Sons of Liberty were able to keep opposition to the troops' presence stoked to a fever pitch, their other major initiative—a nonimportation agreement to protest the Townshend Acts—was fizzling in the face of merchants' reluctance to subscribe to such an arrangement. Sensing that cracks were showing in their coalition, Adams and other opposition leaders attempted to suppress accounts of how ineffective the nonimportation agreement had become. Out of these efforts came mob attacks on two Tory newspaper editors in October 1769. One barely escaped a crowd threatening to kill him, while the other ended up tarred, feathered, and paraded through the main thoroughfares of the city.

These assaults were illustrative of the increasing level of violence that had come to characterize the clash between Patriot and Tory ideologies in Boston. A few weeks earlier, on September 5, 1769, at the British Coffee House—a well-known Tory establishment in Boston—a brawl broke out involving customs officer John Robinson and James Otis; Otis was severely beaten, and within months he declined into dementia and insanity. The following February, however, saw the most tragic outcome thus far. On February 22, 1770, Ebenezer Richardson, a notorious and widely disliked customs informant, was attacked by a mob while defending a merchant's shop from their demonstration. Richardson fled to his house, and shot at his pursuers from a second-story window. The bullet found 11-year-old Christopher Seider, who died from his wound later that night. The Boston Radicals now had a martyr—young Seider's tragic death was blamed upon the feckless violence of the customs officials and their informants. Richardson barely escaped being lynched on the spot and was arrested for murder. Seider's funeral was an elaborately staged affair, choreographed by the Sons of Liberty and its radical leadership as an emotional rebuke to the Tories and their military henchmen. Thousands of Bostonians lined the streets as Seider's casket was carried past; as a propaganda statement, the affair was a tremendous success. But, more ominously, the trend over the last several months had been one of increasing violence. It was becoming evident that collisions between representatives of "the people" and of governmental authority were more likely to end in bloodshed than any other outcome. This was particularly the case where British soldiers were involved.

"Massacre"

Tensions between troops and townspeople in Boston had increased along with the city's generally hostile tone throughout late 1769 and early 1770. In addition to the strong ideological aversion many Bostonians had toward a "standing army" in their midst, there were also more tangible reasons for friction between the two groups. The enlisted ranks of the British army were filled with the dregs of society; drunkenness, carousing, and petty crime accompanied the regiments when they came to Boston. The harsh discipline of army life (petty offenses could bring dozens of lashes, for example), appalling to the townspeople, also lent a general air of violence to the army's presence. To supplement the meager pay of a private soldier, many of the troops took part-time work. But jobs were scarce in late-1760s Boston, and troops willing to work for lower wages became an irritating source of competition for many of Boston's lower classes, who felt the pinch of hard times and scarce wages. It was hardly surprising that the ideological, social, and economic tensions that surrounded the soldiers' presence in Boston would boil over at some point. All that was needed was a catalyst.

That catalyst came in the form of an ill-fated request for an outhouse cleaning. On March 2, 1770, several workers were braiding rope at John Gray's ropewalks on the Boston wharf. Cordwaining was the type of work that British soldiers often used to earn extra money, and that day, Patrick Walker, a soldier in the Twenty-ninth Regiment, went to the ropewalks to inquire about a job. One of the ropemakers asked Walker if he was looking for work, to which Walker replied in the affirmative. "Well," came the response, "then go clean my shithouse." From there, the exchange grew heated and eventually blows were exchanged. Walker retreated to his barracks, but soon returned with several more soldiers. More workers came from other areas of the ropewalks, while more soldiers came forth from the barracks, and a general melee ensued. After a while, the soldiers were driven back to their quarters, where a corporal managed to dissuade them from sallying forth once more. The crowd of dockworkers was dispersed by a justice of the peace who lived nearby. But this anticlimactic end to the fight did not signal a return to peace. Over the next two days, more confrontations between townsmen and soldiers occurred throughout Boston. A general sense of unease pervaded the city on the weekend of March 3–4 as rumors flew regarding a reckoning between townsmen and soldiers to take place the following Monday.

Monday, March 5, was another cold day in what had proven to be a long winter in Boston; over a foot of snow and ice lay packed on the ground, as the weather had been too cold for a thaw. The cold temperatures were in decided contrast to the heated tempers that had been on display in the town. Officers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment had written to Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson expressing their concern about the escalating violence shown toward their men, but Hutchinson was not in a position to cool Bostonians' tempers. While Hutchinson and members of the Governor's Council, a group of advisers elected by lawmakers, deliberated, though, the Sons of Liberty had taken direct action. Over the weekend, handbills had been posted along many of Boston's streets, "signed" by members of the British garrison, promising an attack on the townspeople. Clearly a forgery—why would British soldiers publicly avow an impending attack on the town?—the broadsides still had their intended effect, as tensions remained just below the boiling point.

The evening of the March 5 was clear and cold; the snow and ice on the streets reflected brightly in the light of the moon in its first quarter. This made the convergence at King, Queen, and Cornhill Streets at the Town House square an illuminated scene as Private Hugh White took his post as sentry just outside the Customs House. While White stood shivering in the cold, spending much of his time huddled in the small guardhouse, ominous portents began to unfold. According to their later testimony, at about 8:00 P.M., several young men near Dock Square were warned by a tall stranger in a wig and red cloak that the vengeful soldiers were beginning to fan out in the streets and assault townspeople by hitting them with muskets and cutting off their ears. Some of the men wandered toward a nearby tavern, but others went to meet the soldiers. No one was able to identify the stranger, and his provocative efforts remain one of the unexplained elements of that night's events. Yet, given the climate created by the last few days' events, such provocation was probably not necessary to produce the type of encounter which eventually ensued on King Street.

Private White's shift as sentry quickly became an eventful one. A group of youths gathered near his post, and it was not long before snowballs and chunks of ice began to whirl toward him. This was not something White, or any of the other British soldiers, had not encountered before. But that did not lessen the irritation of being pelted with icy projectiles on a cold

evening. White brandished his musket at the boys, ordering them to be on their way. The boys refused, and began to hurl taunts as well as snowballs toward the hapless White. At that moment, the bells at the First Church—across the square from White and his interlocutors—began to toll. To Bostonians, the ringing of church bells at night meant that fire had broken out somewhere in the city, and that the able-bodied were to turn out and help fight the blaze. There was no fire that night, however; the pealing of the bells simply meant that more and more townspeople were now hurrying toward King Street with a sense of urgency and alarm. When they saw the confrontation between White and the crowd of boys, they rushed to join.

As White watched in alarm, the throng before him grew in both its numbers and threatening aspect. He sent a servant rushing up the street to the barracks where the remainder of the guard detail was stationed and waited for reinforcements in what was becoming a more untenable position by the minute. As the bells tolled, the crowd grew from tens to hundreds in what must have seemed like an instant to the beleaguered White. Now, brickbats, clubs, and cobblestones accompanied the snowballs and ice that were being thrown at the sentry as the crowd grew even more belligerent. Taunts and catcalls emanated from its ranks: "Fire, and be damned!" "The lobster dare not fire!" The crowd received much of its courage from its assumption that the soldiers would be powerless to retaliate against them. It was well-known that English law prohibited soldiers from firing upon civilians without the express order of a civil magistrate. Thus, the members of the mob surging forward into the Customs House square were sure that, despite White's brandishing of his musket, he was powerless to fire upon them, lest he be executed as well. What the townspeople ignored, however, was the corollary to that injunction: Soldiers could not fire upon civilians unless expressly ordered, except in cases of self-defense where their lives or health were immediately threatened. This ignorance would have tragic results as the mob escalated its threats to the sentry, acting under a mistaken belief in its invulnerability.

Reinforcements soon arrived to aid White. Departing from different locations, Captain Thomas Preston and seven more soldiers both got to the square at about the same time. After an unsuccessful attempt to march his party through the crowd back to the barracks, Preston formed the eight soldiers in a defensive position between the sentry post and the Customs House. Shouting for the crowd to disperse, Preston underscored the seriousness of his order by telling his men to load their muskets and fix bayonets. The situation, by this point, had deteriorated into absolute chaos. The church bells continued to ring, the crowd swarmed to and fro throughout the square as men in the back clambered over others to get a better view of the proceedings. The mob pressed even further toward the soldiers; challenging them to fire or to put down their guns and fight, they struck at the musket barrels and bayonets with stout pieces of wood. The cacophony could be heard for blocks, yet no civil official arrived at the scene to restore order—not that any would have been successful in doing so.

The nervous and embattled soldiers faced a crowd of more than 300 to 400 Bostonians, according to later testimony. With the situation growing worse, and no sense that relief was forthcoming, the troops felt themselves to be in significant danger. Thus, it was not a matter of if, but when, they would use their weapons to defend themselves. As the standoff continued, someone in the crowd hurled a cudgel at the soldiers, hitting Private Hugh Montgomery squarely in the face. Bloodied and dazed, Montgomery toppled to the ice from the impact. As the enraged and frightened soldier regained his footing, he roared "Damn you, fire!" and shot into the crowd. The shot rang out through the din, and for an instant, the action seemed to pause. But the suspense quickly ended, and additional shots rang out from Preston's formation. Within a minute or two, the firing stopped as the soldiers began to reload their muskets. The crowd, which had dispersed somewhat, began to reform as well. But Preston, regaining his composure, ordered his men to lower their weapons and not to fire under any circumstance. He quickly formed them into a line, and was able to march back to the main guard house without opposition. When they arrived, Preston ordered the drummers to beat a general alarm, which would form all of the soldiers in the city into their regiments, and he deployed his entire regiment in front of the barracks. Clearly, he expected retaliation from the townspeople. Only the arrival of Acting Governor Hutchinson was able to restore order; he exhorted the crowd from the balcony of the Town House to return to their homes, averring that the soldiers would be returned to their barracks as well. The violence was over, but the town remained on edge, with townspeople seething, as one anonymous pamphleteer wrote, over the "butchery" of the "Horrid Massacre" by the King's troops.

When Preston marched his force away from King Street, he left behind four dead bodies and six more wounded. One more man was mortally wounded in the confrontation, and had crawled away from the scene only to die within a few hours. Four of those killed had been

participants in the various confrontations between troops and townspeople. Crispus Attucks— also called Michael Johnson—was the first man to fall; the half-Indian half–African-American was a well-known leader of one of the factions of street-fighting toughs that had escalated the confrontation on that night. [See Who Was Crispus Attucks?] Another, Samuel Gray, was a notorious brawler (and proprietor of the ropewalks where the fight between Patrick Walker and the ropemakers had occurred three days earlier). James Caldwell and Patrick Carr were also regular members of the Boston crowd, and had seen their share of fights with the British troops. The fifth person killed was a young apprentice, Samuel Maverick, who was hit by a ricocheting bullet as he fled the King Street imbroglio. The level of violence stunned townsman and soldier alike. Yet things could have been much worse—Hutchinson soon found out that express riders had stood ready to call for reinforcements from the countryside. The events of March 5, as bloody as they were, might well have developed into a general clash between colonists and soldiers where deaths would have been measured in the dozens.

Gravestone in the Old Granary Burial Ground in Boston of Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, Crispus Attucks, and Patrick Carr, all of whom died in the "massacre" of March 5, 1770. Also buried here is Christopher Seider, an 11-year-old boy—his name and age are incorrectly engraved—who was shot and killed by a customs informant the month before.

Swampyank

Arguments that British Soldiers Were to Blame for the "Massacre"

The patriots' reaction to the events of March 5, 1770, was swift and condemnatory. Perhaps nothing summed up the Sons of Liberty's indictment of the British soldiers so thoroughly as the engraving produced by silversmith Paul Revere—also a member of the Sons' leadership. With the title "The Bloody Massacre," the engraving depicted an orderly line of smiling British soldiers firing point-blank into an unarmed and docile crowd as their officer stood behind them, sword raised in the traditional command to open fire. [See Paul Revere, "The Bloody

Massacre," March 1770 (primary source)] A brief verse at the bottom of the picture reinforced the message: "Unhappy Boston! See they Sons Deplore/Thy hallowed Walks besmeared with guiltless Gore./While faithless P-----n [Preston] and his savage Bands/With murderous Rancour stretch their bloody hands/Like fierce Barbarians grimacing o'er their Prey,/Approve the carnage and enjoy the Day." The point was clear: "barbaric" British soldiers had eagerly slaughtered innocent Bostonians, and given the chance, would do so again.

Revere's engraving was only the most visible expression of the widespread belief that the soldiers' firing into the crowd was no accidental occurrence. Of course, this argument went, the conditions for such a tragic encounter had been created the moment the troops marched into Boston in October 1768. The soldiers' presence had turned Boston into a garrison town; according to A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1770, the very fact that a "standing army" had been placed in Boston "in time of peace" was proof of the conspiracy against colonial liberties that existed in some quarters of the British government, and was supported by minions in Massachusetts itself. [See A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, 1770 (primary source)] By this logic, it was a virtual guarantee that if the colonists continued to advocate for their liberties, the resulting action would be heavy-handed and despotic—that's what standing armies were for. The "original sin" that produced the massacre then, was the introduction of soldiers into Boston in the first place. For this, Governor Bernard, and then his successor Hutchinson, bore much of the blame.

But long-term factors only told part of the story. For Boston's anti-Tory partisans, disturbing questions remained about the events of March 5. Why had Captain Preston ordered his men to load their muskets with powder and shot? Crowds and troops had skirmished before; it was not as if this was an unfamiliar situation for the guards. What had changed enough to order the use of live ammunition? The law forbade British soldiers from firing upon civilians, except with express permission from a civil magistrate, none of which had been given on March 5. Preston's decision to order his men to load and present their muskets seemed, in this light, to be a fateful one that virtually guaranteed a tragic outcome. Many townspeople testified that they had heard Preston give the order to fire before the first shot rang out, an accusation which Preston steadfastly denied. But others argued that even if he had not ordered his men to fire, there had been a sufficient interval of time between the first shot and subsequent volley for Preston to have ordered his men to hold their fire and stand down. The fact that he did not do so was, in this view, as damning as if he had ordered his men to shoot. In the climate of outrage that followed the shootings on King Street, many Bostonians were convinced by these arguments that the blood of innocent Bostonians lay squarely upon the soldiers' hands.

Arguments that American Colonists Were to Blame for the "Massacre"

Not all Bostonians saw things as the radicals did. While the events of March 5, 1770, were certainly reprehensible and tragic, the label "massacre" hardly seemed justified. After all, the mob that surrounded sentry Hugh White, and eventually his fellow soldiers, had become increasingly menacing. Soldiers did not abdicate their right to self-defense when they placed themselves under civilian authority. As Captain Thomas Preston asserted in the deposition he gave on March 12, the mob itself was responsible for the escalation of events toward their tragic climax. [See Captain Thomas Preston, Deposition, March 12, 1770 (primary source)]

John Adams, cousin of Samuel Adams and one of the lawyers who defended Preston during his murder trial in October 1770, observed that the mob was no more than a "motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars." At the trial, witness after witness testified to the raucous actions of the crown and how it had baited the soldiers. "People were calling them Lobsters, daring 'em to fire, saying damn you why don't you fire," said Newton Prince, an African-American member of the South Church who was at the Custom House Square that night. [See Boston Massacre Trials, Testimony, October 24– 30, 1770 (primary source)] "The People whilst striking on the Guns cried fire, damn you fire. I have heard no Orders given to fire, only the people in general cried fire."

Captain Preston and his men were faced with an increasingly ominous situation, Adams asserted in his closing argument to the jury, as "the multitude was shouting and huzzaing, and threatening life, the bells ringing, the mob whistling, screaming and rending like an Indian yell, the people from all quarters throwing every species of rubbish they could pick up in the streets" [See John Adams, Closing Argument in Preston Trial, October 27, 1770 (primary source)] In such circumstances, could Preston and his men be blamed for feeling as if their very lives were in danger? Even though the sentiments of John Adams (who would later serve

as U.S. president from 1797 to 1801) lay with the Sons of Liberty, he was compelled to recognize the dangerous character of such a large, uncontrolled, violent mob.

Other defenders of the British took Adams's arguments and extended them further: If the mob's visage was so threatening, what had gotten it that way? Numerous provocations by townspeople against the soldiers—such as the events at Gray's ropewalks on March 2—were emblematic of the soldiers' travails. Stationed in Boston to restore order from the reign of "king mob," the troops themselves became the target of the Sons of Liberty's unlawful demonstrations. The scurrilous Journal of the Times, defenders charged, added fuel to the fire with its collection of half-truths, innuendos, and outright falsehoods. It seemed, Boston's friends of government believed, that the Sons of Liberty would stoop as low as necessary in order to accomplish their seditious aims. Some took this argument even further, arguing that the events of March 5 had been deliberately planned by the Sons' leadership. Faced with a flagging nonimportation movement and declining public support for their schemes, this theory went, the Sons' leaders—particularly Samuel Adams—sought to provoke a confrontation between the soldiers and townspeople that would inflame public opinion and increase support for the radicals. This was not as far-fetched as it might have seemed, the proponents of this conspiracy theory argued. How else could one explain the spate of obviously false handbills that had gone up throughout the city in the days before March 5, promising an attack by the troops? Clearly, they were planted by the Sons of Liberty to inflame the populace against the soldiers. And who was the mysterious red-cloaked figure who had harangued Bostonians in the hours before the shootings, claiming that the troops were about town, beating citizens with their muskets and cutting off their ears with cutlasses? Conveniently, he disappeared before the crowd arrived on King Street—but perhaps his wild tales had inflamed that crowd nonetheless. Additionally, who was it that began to ring the church bells when the confrontation between Private White and the rowdy boys seemed about to wane? It was the bells' peals that led to the surge of people into the Customs House square, and thus the tragic escalation of the situation. The soldiers' defenders argued that these events could not have been coincidence—they fit together too neatly to have been happenstance. Rather, they reflected the existence of a larger plan to ignite a confrontation between townspeople and the soldiers. Both groups were pawns in a larger scheme, therefore the soldiers could not be held culpable for defending themselves in an increasingly dangerous situation over which they had no control.

Outcome and Impact

On March 6, 1770, the day after the "massacre," Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson called an emergency meeting of the Governor's Council, which was visited by a delegation led by Samuel Adams. Speaking for the Sons of Liberty, Adams demanded that Hutchinson remove the troops from the city, placing them instead at Castle William, out in Boston Harbor. Adams's demand presented Hutchinson with a dilemma—if he refused, the possibility for further violence was very real; if he acceded, royal authority in Massachusetts would be demonstrably prostrate before the Sons of Liberty and their trained mob. Hutchinson attempted to sidestep these unpalatable alternatives by pointing out that he was not authorized to remove the troops; only their commanding officer, Colonel William Dalrymple, was. But Dalrymple then fell into the patriots' hands. He offered to remove the Twenty-ninth Regiment to Castle William, since it seemed to be the unit that most offended the townspeople. Adams fired back that if Dalrymple was empowered to move one regiment, certainly he could move two. Hutchinson called a recess until the afternoon, but the damage had already been done; when the Council reconvened, arrangements were made to remove both regiments of troops from Boston as a frustrated Hutchinson was powerless to undo the damage done by Dalrymple's concession to the radicals.

But Hutchinson was able to prevail in the other area of contention in the aftermath of the "massacre." Despite the urgings of Samuel Adams and his compatriots for an immediate trial of Preston and his soldiers, Hutchinson realized that doing so would further inflame a town already at fever pitch and virtually guarantee the conviction of Preston and his men for murder. The ensuing spectacle of the hanging of a King's officer was too much for Hutchinson to contemplate, and he was able to delay the trial until October, allowing time for emotions to cool on both sides. In the ensuing interval, the radical leadership also came to the conclusion that the execution of royal soldiers would be counterproductive. Additionally, they feared, a vigorous prosecution of Preston and his men would open the door for unflattering testimony about the events of March 5 that would surely paint Boston's citizenry in a negative light and thus threaten the reservoir of sympathy and solidarity from other colonies for the Sons of Liberty. Better to let things lie as they were, the Sons' leadership decided, and preserve the memory of the "massacre" in the public consciousness as it had already been shaped by the

patriots.

Thus, it was not surprising that two prominent Boston patriots—John Adams and Josiah Quincy—were selected to defend Preston and the eight British soldiers, all of whom were charged with murder. Aided by a lackluster effort from the prosecution, Adams and Quincy were able to both prevent damaging testimony from emerging during the trial in the fall and win the acquittal of Preston and most of his men. Two privates were convicted of manslaughter—a lesser charge than murder—but the court permitted both to "plead clergy" (a legal custom dating from medieval times that allowed them to escape the death penalty, though they were each branded on the thumb to keep them from exercising that right again). With these verdicts, the Sons of Liberty were able to present Boston as a place where justice prevailed, even in the most controversial of cases, as well as avoid making any British martyrs out of the "Boston Massacre."

Despite these objectives, however, Samuel Adams railed against the verdicts in a number of anonymous editorials that decried the lack of justice against the "blood thirsty" soldiers who had shown such "Savage barbarity" on March 5. But fewer colonists followed Adams's lead this time. In the aftermath of the "massacre" and the subsequent trials, the tensions in Boston diminished significantly. Much of this reduction was due to the removal of the troops to Castle William. Additionally, news had arrived in April 1770 of the repeal of almost all of the hated Townshend Acts (save the duty on tea). But there was also a marked weariness toward protest in the town, as if the violence of March 5 had sapped some of Boston's will for resistance. A calm settled into the town's political climate, as Adams and his supporters found it more and more difficult to stoke patriot resistance in the absence of tangible affronts from the British. Hutchinson was relieved at what he hoped was a permanent rapprochement. Subsequent years would prove this hope illusory, but for the immediate time being, the aftermath of the "Boston Massacre" saw many Bostonians entertain sober second thoughts about resistance to authority and the methods with which they had done so.

What if the British soldiers had not fired their weapons on March 5, 1770?

The question is an intriguing one: what would have happened if Captain Thomas Preston had not ordered his men to load their muskets, and thus no shots would have rang out on King Street on that fateful night of March 5, 1770? Certainly, one of the most notorious incidents on the road to the American Revolution might not have occurred at all, and the patriot cause would have been denied one of its most valuable sources of effective propaganda. At first blush, it seems that had the British not fired into the crowd of townspeople in the Customs House square, tragedy would have been avoided and five lives would have been spared. Perhaps this would have lengthened the process by which Bostonians—and "patriots" throughout the American colonies—moved toward embracing independence, or would have prevented it from occurring at all. But further investigation of this question throws doubt upon that hypothesis. The clash of ideologies, and the rising level of violence that accompanied it, involved larger issues of liberty and power, and would not have been stemmed if the Boston Massacre had not occurred.

Indeed, if the British soldiers had not fired, it is far from certain that tragedy would have been avoided. Given the size and state of the mob that confronted the soldiers, and the clubs they wielded and projectiles they threw, the chances of injury and death for the soldiers were significant. Indeed, Private Hugh Montgomery was wounded in the head by the cudgel that knocked him to the ice. Captain Preston was knocked by another club in the arm, a blow that missed his head only because his attacker slipped on the ice. As the church bells kept ringing, the crowd kept growing in size. It is an eminently plausible assumption that significant harm or death would have occurred for the British soldiers when the increasing tempo and ferocity of attacks from the crowd is considered. Perhaps, then, the "Boston Massacre" would have been an appellation fixed on the events of March 5 by Boston's Tories, as they condemned the lawless "rabble" of the patriot movement for killing members of His Majesty's forces. Whether or not the British soldiers fired their muskets into the crowd, the events of March 5 were such that tragedy was almost guaranteed. The combination of outnumbered soldiers, hundreds of riled townspeople, the absence of civil authority, and a climate of tension and anger that had steadily been increasing was sufficiently volatile to produce a violent outcome in some form. Even if violence had somehow been avoided, the larger issues and debates that informed that volatile climate would have remained, demonstrating their power to drive the colonies and Britain further and further apart.

Citation Information ( MLA )

Gannon, Kevin M. “Boston "Massacre".” Issues & Controversies in American History. Infobase Learning, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 20 May 2018. <http://icah.infobaselearning.com/icahfullarticle.aspx?ID=134874>.

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