Most every day I walk by the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, past the graves of the “victims of the Boston Massacre” and find myself musing on the events of March 5, 1770. On that cold, otherwise calm moonlit night, musket fire erupted in King Street. Three men were killed immediately. Two died several days later. All now lie under the same headstone here.
We have all seen Paul Revere’s engraving of Captain Thomas Preston, sword raised, standing behind his troops seemingly commanding the disciplined, perfectly lined men to fire together into a well-dressed, unarmed, small, and non-confrontational crowd of innocent Boston citizens. Smoke rises peacefully from a nearby chimney while in the foreground, a small, forlorn dog stands with his back to the blood and gore of those dead and dying on the pavement.
But that’s not how the day’s events occurred.
In his 2017 book Boston’s Massacre, University of Utah historian Eric Hinderaker revisits what Revere called “the bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street.” Hinderaker’s book is well written and does an excellent job of organizing and exploring the events leading up to the infamous shooting.
British victory in the French and Indian War had doubled the size of England’s dominion in America. Great Britain now sought to reorganize and administer all her colonial possessions. The Stamp Acts were a means of raising revenue for the defense of British possessions. But the taxes and reorganization administered were deeply resented by the colonies who had long been used to running their own affairs—and been used to a blind eye being turned toward their lucrative smuggling.
Antipathy to the Stamp Act rose to an extreme in Boston. Thomas Hutchinson, then the chief justice of the highest court in Massachusetts—and no friend of the Stamp Act—had his Boston house gutted by an angry mob in August 1765. The mob more or less dismantled it brick by brick while his furniture and possessions were stolen or smashed in the streets. Hinderaker estimates $300,000 to $450,000 damage in today’s money.
The opposition to the Stamp Act was led in Boston by the Sons of Liberty, a group organized by Samuel Adams, whose propaganda operation was described by his cousin John Adams as “a political engine.”
Two insurgencies seemed to be working simultaneously in America—the revolt of the colonies against imperial reorganization and another democratic one against vested interests and local governing cliques by people hoping to rise in the new world.
Meanwhile, Parliament approved of new tax laws for the colonies—the Townshend Acts—and the unrest continued. As there was no police force in those days, British troops were sent to Boston “to suppress radical activity,” Hinderaker writes.
By 1770, soldiers were the only means of maintaining civil order in Boston, yet as Hutchinson—by this point the acting governor—recognized, soldiers spread around a town where they were outnumbered by residents five to one could be disastrous. All the while the Sons of Liberty were busy fanning the flames. There is no definitive evidence that Samuel Adams and his fellow agitators plotted the events of March 5, 1770, but it’s a good bet.
It was a violent mob, harassing and attacking a British sentry, that prompted the British troops to fire their fatal blasts. In the ensuing trial, more than 200 eyewitnesses gave testimony. John Adams, to his good credit, represented the British soldiers as their defense lawyer and defended the reputation of the town from notoriety as a place of lawlessness. He also represented an opinion that violence was getting out of hand. And he may well have ignored evidence that could have pointed to charges of treason against his cousin. John Adams’s successful defense of Captain Thomas Preston and his troops was made possible by laying the blame on a mob of outsiders, led by a half-Indian and black named Crispus Attucks and “Irish teagues.”
Hinderaker calls the Boston Massacre “the sin qua non of the American Revolution as we know it.” But by the end of 1770 things appeared to calm—bringing, as Hutchinson put it, “a surprising change in the temper of the people,” with “the crests of our late incendiaries . . . much fallen.’’
The true indispensable moment of the revolution would come with the Boston Tea Party 1773. That event destroyed several thousand pounds of tea at a cost of half a million dollars yet was nonviolent. It led to the closure of the port of Boston, galvanizing the support of the other colonies for Boston. John Adams called the event “sublime” and thought it marked “an epoch in history.” From today’s vantage, that sounds about right.
Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy, Massachusetts.
