Boston Massacre

BOSTON MASSACRE. 5 March 1770. Increasing friction between British soldiers of the Boston Garrison and local citizens created conditions ripe for confrontation. On Friday, 2 March 1770, an exchange of insults between workmen and an off-duty soldier seeking employment at Grey's ropewalk led to a small riot. Tempers did not cool over the weekend, and by Monday evening, 5 March, bands of soldiers and civilians roamed the moonlit streets looking for trouble. About 9 p.m. a sentry of the Twenty-nineth Regiment at the Customs House in King Street was so taunted and menaced by a crowd of about sixty young men and boys that, fearing for his life, he loaded his musket and called for help from the nearby Main Guard. Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the day, led a corporal and seven soldiers to rescue the sentry. Although the soldiers had fixed bayonets and eventually also loaded their muskets, the crowd continued to taunt and press in on them, apparently led by Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and native American descent. Finally, one nervous soldier pulled his trigger and the rest followed. The British gunshots killed three men, including Attucks, and wounded eight others, two mortally. With the crowd stunned and the soldiers reloading and preparing to fire again, Preston ordered his men back to the Main Guard. No one in the crowd made any attempt to retaliate or to follow the soldiers.

The incident created an uproar in Boston, and it was only with great difficulty that imperial officials, including Governor Thomas Hutchinson, managed to quiet the town. Preston and his men were arrested and charged with murder, the Twenty-nineth Regiment was withdrawn to Castle William, and the Fourteenth Regiment was confined to barracks. The radicals claimed that the "massacre" was the inevitable result of having British troops garrisoned in a town of peace-loving citizens, and used the incident to demonstrate to other colonies the evils of increased imperial control. They turned the incident into a propaganda victory, greatly aided by Paul Revere's engraving, which depicted the soldiers as a group of leering, blood-thirsty killers firing into an innocent gathering of Boston citizens. Allegations that Samuel Adams provoked the entire incident to inflame the people and animate the resistance cannot be proven.

Because of fears that Captain Preston and his men could not get a fair trial in Boston, King George III expressed his willingness to pardon the men if they were convicted. But the trial (in late October 1770) turned into a shrewdly orchestrated demonstration of the rectitude of the radical cause. With the approbation of the radical leaders, three leading Boston attorneys (Robert Auchmuty, John Adams, and Josiah Quincy, Jr.) carefully picked a jury, emphasized the uncertainties in eyewitness testimony, and claimed the soldiers had fired in self-defense. They managed to get Preston and six soldiers acquitted of all charges. Two soldiers whom everyone agreed had fired their muskets were convicted of man-slaughter, but they were released after pleading the benefit of clergy and being branded on the hand.

Patriot propaganda in 1770 viewed the five men killed in the "massacre" as martyrs to the cause of American liberty. Opinions in subsequent years have varied. When the Massachusetts General Assembly voted in 1887 to erect a memorial to the victims, members of the Massachusetts Historical Society protested, resolving that "nothing but a misapprehension of the event styled the 'Boston massacre' can lead to classifying these persons with those entitled to grateful recognition at the public expense" (Alden, p. 184). Whether the members objected more to memorializing riotous behavior or to the social standing of the victims is not known.

SEE ALSO Adams, John; Adams, Samuel; Attucks, Crispus; Boston Garrison.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alden, John Richard. General Gage in America, being Principally a History of His Role in the American Revolution. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1948.

Wroth, L. Kinvin, and Hiller B. Zobel, eds. The Legal Papers of John Adams. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965.

Zobel, Hiller B. The Boston Massacre. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky