Blood in the Snow
Rope-Makers and Redcoats ∙ An Apprentice’s Plight ∙ A Damned Rascally Scoundrel Lobster Son of a Bitch ∙ A Town in Search of Blood ∙ Captain Preston’s Rescue Operation ∙ A Horrid Massacre ∙ Sam Adams’ Regiments ∙ John Adams and Redcoats on Trial ∙ A Day of Infamy
Rope-Makers and Redcoats
Christopher Seider's untimely death set off a conflagration. In the weeks following his burial, fights between patriots and Tories, and between soldiers and civilians, inexorably escalated. By and large the most resentful Bostonians were the rough-and-tumble artisans and day laborers, most of whom were young men with primal energy who fancied drink after drink of rum at waterfront taverns and who lived for a good scrape in the dockyards. Their bitterness towards the redcoats was economic rather than ideological: the British soldiers sought to supplement their measly pay by taking on odd jobs and manual labor, and they were willing to work at cut-rate wages. These redcoats worked for pennies on the dollar, as much as twenty percent less than what civilian laborers needed to live. As tensions in Boston amped up, fights between embittered laborers and hot-blooded redcoats amped up, as well.
On Friday 2 March 1770, Patrick Walker, an off-duty soldier of the 29th Regiment, took a stroll along the Boston waterfront. As he passed in front of Gray’s Ropewalk, a Boston rope-maker named William Green spied him while braiding fibers on an outdoor ‘ropewalk’ (a rope-making machine). He called out to Private Walker, asking if he wanted work. Walker replied that he did. Green smirked and retorted, ‘Then go and clean my shithouse!’ The riled Walker didn’t break a stride in confronting the smug rope-maker and striking him hard. Green’s coworkers couldn’t abide by this affront, so they leaped to Green’s defense, pummeling Walker. The redcoat beat a hurried retreat, but he wasn’t gone long: he returned with eight or nine fellow soldiers, all armed with clubs. Walker demanded the rope-makers to come out and fight them. The rope-workers, who outnumbered the redcoats, were more than happy to oblige, and they rushed the soldiers with thick slats as weapons, forcing another retreat. An eyewitness recounted that the soldiers ‘very speedily returned to the ropewalk, reinforced to the number of thirty or forty, and headed by a tall negro drummer.’
‘You black rascal!’ a rope-maker called out. ‘What have you to do with white people’s quarrels?’
‘I suppose I may look on,’ he coolly replied – and he did, as the redcoats were bested again.
More fights erupted the next day, with fighters wielding clubs and cutlasses. In another scuffle between rope-makers and redcoats, a private of the 29th Regiment received a fractured skull and a broken arm.
That night, a rope-maker complained to his landlord that a group of soldiers was ‘dogging’ him. A Bostonian named Benjamin Burdick confronted a soldier lurking in the street and demanded to know what he was about; the soldier replied, ‘I’m pumping shit.’ Burdick ordered him to bugger off, to which the soldier replied with a curse. Burdick struck him with a stick until he indeed buggered off. The next day, a Sunday, the streets were quiet for the Sabbath – but rumors were running around town that the soldiers of the 29th, whose ill-fated fight at Gray’s Ropewalk had become the subject of much banter, were planning vengeance the next day. Bostonians girded themselves up for a showdown. Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Carr, commander of the 29th, told acting governor Hutchinson he was worried about the escalation of both the frequency and violence of the encounters between citizens and soldiers. If nothing tempered the fire, there’d be hell to pay.
A Snowy Night at the Customs House
On Monday 5 March 1770, the town of Boston held its collective breath. Were reprisals coming? And if so, when? Citizens glared at squads of patrolling redcoats, and many lingered close to the army barracks, keeping a cagey eye on the redcoats’ comings and goings. Come nightfall the streets were lit by the moon and its reflection off a heavy coat of foot-deep snow and ice; torches and oil lamps offered paltry light to the dark-draped streets. Boston lie in the grip of winter, the bay frozen with eight inches of ice, and most citizens stayed indoors, warming themselves safe and sound by fires in their hearths – but the slippery streets weren’t empty. As British sentries curled frostbitten toes and shivered in timber-built guard-boxes, roving bands of civilians prowled the streets and took up preordained locations throughout town. If the redcoats wanted a confrontation, the citizens would be prepared. One bystander said that ‘parties of soldiers were also driving about the streets, as if the one and the other had something more ordinary upon their minds.’ Some historians have speculated – and not only recently, but as early as the infamous ‘Massacre Trials’ themselves – that the atmosphere and coming events of the night of 5 March were orchestrated by undercover patriots such as Samuel Adams; but on the night in question, patriot leaders mingled with the crowds, encouraging the mobs to return to their homes. This has led most historians to believe that the events of 5 March weren’t the work of patriots but of ‘the mob,’ an inexorable explosion of pent-up fury and resentment. The upper echelon of the Sons of Liberty constantly struggled against the lower orders to determine who would ‘lead’ the protest against tyranny, and they didn’t want the mob dictating the issues nor the responses. But on the night of 5 March, the mob held the high ground – and they were determined to make a night of it.
The night’s focal point would be the custom house (pictured here as it stands today), the headquarters of the commissioners of customs and the place where they stored their records. Nearby was the town house, located at the center of Boston, where the governor and his council met. Just south of the town house was the Main Guard, the headquarters of the British army in Boston. Two small brass fieldpieces flanked the front door, and two sentries occupied guard boxes on either side. The custom house was about forty yards away, at the corner of King Street and the Royal Exchange Lane, and near it was a timber-built guard box where Private Hugh White had been stationed. In the deep darkness of the night, his breath fogged before his eyes, he stamped his feet to ward off frostbite, and he shivered, for not even his thick uniform could shield him from the fierce New England chill. A voice belonging to a wigmaker’s apprentice named Edward Gerrish called out to him from the darkness, condemning Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch as ‘a stingy, shifty fellow’ for refusing to pay Gerrish’s master for a wig. White, who couldn’t see the provocateur in the darkness, insisted that Goldfinch was a gentleman and would pay every cent. The disembodied voice guffawed. ‘There are no gentlemen in the 29th Regiment!’ Private White dared the man to show his face, and when Gerrish stepped up to the sentry box to oblige him, White struck him under the ear with the butt of his musket. A stunned Gerrish cried out in pain and surprise and fled, slipping over the icy street. A nearby redcoat sergeant, who witnessed the altercation, gave chase. Gerrish dove into his master’s wig-making shop; the sergeant lunged after him, slashing with his bayonet but only managing to get the steel stuck into a shudder. White abandoned his post to back up the sergeant, and together they pushed into the store to find Gerrish cowering. White struck the enfeebled apprentice, but then two more citizens joined the scene, one of them calling White a ‘bloody back.’ As White turned to face his new opponent, Bostonians began to leech from the woodwork. White and the sergeant decided to abandon the wigmaker’s shop. White retreated to his post, and the sergeant disappeared into anonymity; some historians believe that the sergeant headed to the warmth of the barracks while othersspeculate he joined a roving party of soldiers to continue harassing citizens in another part of town. Regardless of the sergeant’s whereabouts, Private White was left alone in the sentry box – and a crowd, infuriated at news of Gerrish’s treatment, was growing, and they didn’t mean to play nice: they came armed with clubs and brickbats and dismantled planks hewn from a demolished butcher’s stall.
The crowd hurled nasty epithets, cursing him and shouting obscenities. White fixed his bayonet, loaded his musket, and struck the musket butt on the ground as the crowd shouted, ‘Fire, damn you, fire! Fire and be damned! You coward, you dare not fire!’ The Boston bookseller Henry Knox shouldered his way to the sentry box, and meeting White eye-to-eye, he warned the private that if he fired his musket he would certainly ‘die for it.’ The soldier cursed the growing crowd, threatening, ‘If they molest me, I’ll fire!’ Fire bells began ringing nearby; to this day, no one knows who set off the false alarm, but the tolling bells were taken up throughout the town. Citizens flooded from the warm hearths of their homes, carrying bags to shuttle property from burning buildings and leather water bags to carry water to douse the flames. Pump engines, stationed at strategic places around the city in case of an emergency, were manhandled by firemen and pushed up and down the streets as theytried to locate the fire. As people came out of their homes, the crowd around the sentry box inevitably grew – along with the heckling and catcalls. ‘You sentinel!’ the crowd shrieked. ‘You damned rascally scoundrel lobster son of a bitch!’ White threatened to ‘run them through’ if they kept up it, at which point people in the crowd began throwing hard-packed snowballs, icicles, and clumps of jagged ice hewn from frozen gutters. These wasn’t a schoolboy snowball fight, for these missiles could cause serious injury.
White, fearing for his safety, abandoned the sentry box and retreated to the custom house steps. He tried forcing the door, but it was locked. He hammered on the door, demanded to be let inside, but no response came. As the crowd closed in around him, he pressed his back to the locked door and tried to ward off the crowd. The town watchman, Edward Langford, approached White placidly and tried to bolster his morale: ‘These tormentors are only boys. They can do you no harm.’ By this point close to a hundred men and boys had closed in on Private White; many had been drawn out by the fire alarm, but when discovering there was no fire, they added their numbers to the throng antagonizing White. The half-drunk Sam Gray, shuffling through the streets intent on helping put out a fire, was stopped by his acquaintance Benjamin Davis, who told him, ‘There’s no fire! It’s the soldiers fighting!’ Gray did an about-face towards King Street. ‘I’m glad of it,’ he said. ‘I’ll knock some of them on the head!’ The fiery patriot Dr. Thomas Young, at the intersection of Royal Exchange Lane and King Street, fruitlessly implored those rushing to join the crowd to return home. Private White, hemmed in and pummeled with painful globs of ice and snow, aimed his musket at the crowd and shouted for help from the nearby Main Guard.
Private White's plight wasn't the only drama of the evening; as the unlucky redcoat fended off the mob at the custom house, Bostonians and redcoats faced off elsewhere throughout town. The town itself seemed to itch for violence. At Murray’s sugar house, the main barracks for the 14th Regiment, a crowd of citizens armed with clubs and staves and various weapons gathered before the front gate. Soldiers watched from the windows as a handful of British officers inside the gate warily eyed the growing crowd.
A Bostonian called out, ‘Why don’t you keep your soldiers in the barracks?’
‘We’re doing our best,’ one of the officers promised him.
‘Are the inhabitants to be knocked down in the streets?’ the man challenged. ‘Are they to be murdered in this manner? You know the town has been used ill. We did not send for you! We will not have you here!’
The officers tried to mollify the crowd, and then they received a blessed reprieve: the crowd began to break up as citizens were drawn towards King Street where the sounds of shouts and hollers came drifting over the rooftops and down the cramped alleys. The soldiers who’d watched from the sugar house windows didn’t know what was afoot deeper in town, but they knew well enough that it involved redcoats. They couldn’t stomach the thought of staying put as the violent mob descended on their own. They demanded to be allowed to go after the crowd, but the officers refused. Control must be maintained. One soldier rushed out of the gate, knelt in the street, and aimed his musket down Boylston’s Alley where citizens still gathered. ‘God damn your blood!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll make a lane through you all!’ The mortified civilians turned to face down the musket barrel, but before the enraged soldier could make good on his promise, two officers tackled him to the ground. They seized his musket and manhandled him back to the barracks – just in time for another soldier to rush out, screaming obscenities at the citizens and pointing his weapon at another group of people near the barracks. Another officer interceded this time, beating him down with the flat of his sword and disarming him.
At Cornhill Street, a night patrol of soldiers was surrounded by a mob, and they held off the rioters with a fire shovel. Captain Goldfinch – the very same who’d been degraded by Gerrish – arrived, and the mob demanded he order his soldiers back to their quarters. They threw ice-laced snowballs, and Goldfinch led the patrol back to their barracks. Elsewhere, a Boston merchant and supporter of nonimportation Richard Palmes confronted an officer for allowing his men to be outside the barracks in light of the tense atmosphere.
‘Pray, do you mean to tell us our duty?’ the officer asked.
‘I do not,’ Palmes replied, ‘only to remind you of it.’
Redcoats weren’t the only ones feeling the wrath of the mob: the Tory merchant William Jackson had his house windows pelted with clumps of ice. The mob dispersed only after a moderate patriot, Andrew Cazneau, upbraided them for their activities.
The Boston Massacre
Forty yards from Private White and the custom house, the twenty-year-old Lieutenant James Basset, appointed officer of the Main Guard, heard White’s cry for reinforcements and carried them to Captain Charles Preston of the 29th Regiment. Preston, a no-nonsense, forty-year-old Irishman with a repute for bravery and known as ‘a sober honest man and a good officer’, had been named Captain of the Day at the Main Guard. Preston faced a dilemma: one of his men, Private White, was in hot water, but if he sent a squad of soldiers to rescue him, he risked escalation. The rescue party might be viewed as further provocation, and his squad would be outnumbered; if things went south, they wouldn’t be able to stand their ground for long. He also knew he had no legal right to defend the custom house unless called to do so by a civilian official. As he wrestled with the dilemma, the fact that one of his men was surrounded by a violent mob overweighed all other concerns: first and foremosthe had a duty to White, and he would see it through. He buckled on his sword, put on his hat, and stepped into the guardroom. He ordered Lieutenant Basset to turn out the guard. When the guard was formed, Basset asked Preston for his orders. Preston told him, ‘Take six or seven men and go down to the assistance of the sentry.’ As Basset prepared to march out, Preston decided he couldn’t put such a critical assignment into the hands of an experienced officer – especially given the violent propensities of the mob and the need for the soldiers to maintain discipline – and informed Basset he would be personally leading the excursion. Around nine that evening, he and the relief party left the Main Guard and began their double-time march towards the beleaguered Private White. The party consisted of Captain Preston, Corporal Wemms, and Privates Carroll, Killroy, Warren, Montgomery, Hartegan, and McCauley. All but Corporal Wemms were grenadiers.
The squad marched in a column of twos with bayonets fixed, slipping and sliding on the moonlit street. Corporal Wemms, at the head of the column, slipped on a patch of ice and tumbled into Nathaniel Fosdick.
Fosdick spun around. ‘Why are you pushing me?’ he demanded.
‘Damn your blood and stand out of our way!’ Wemms spat.
‘I will not,’ Fosdick growled. ‘I am doing no harm to any man, and I will not stand aside for anyone.’
The column didn’t press the issue: they gave way to Fosdick’s right and left and marched past on either side of him, leaving him watching their tails as they drew nearer the custom house. Halfway to the growing crowd, Henry Knox – ho had been trying to calm the nerves of both White and the mob – saw Preston coming and hurried to meet him. He grabbed him by the coat to get his attention. ‘For God’s sake,’ he told the Captain, ‘take care of your men. If they fire, they die.’
‘I am sensible of it,’ Preston replied.
As the squad reached the mob, the privates derided those in the crowd. ‘Where are the damned buggers? Where are your Liberty Boys?’ The crowd made room for the squad to reach the relieved White, and when they did, Preston ordered his men to load their muskets. They charged their firing pans and rammed cartridges home. Preston ordered White to fall in line with the squad, and he began the attempt to march back to the Main Guard – but their exit was blocked by the crowd, which had circled around them. The soldiers, unable to penetrate through the crowd – now even more worked up with the arrival of more redcoats – formed an arc extending from a hitching post at the corner of the custom house to White’s abandoned sentry box. Many in the crowd recognized some of the newcomers, for some soldiers of the 29th had been present in the back-and-forth scuffling at Gray’s Ropewalk. That episode had never seen its conclusion, and parties on both sides had scores to settle. Preston, aware of this, dreaded what could come next. He stepped in front of his men, so that if they were unnerved or mad enough to fire, they’d in effect be shooting him first. He hoped that his position in front of the men would not only keep his rattled soldiers from shooting but show the crowd that he didn’t intend them to fire.
For fifteen minutes, the nine redcoats endured belittling words, raunchy epithets, and hurled snowballs, clumps of sharp ice, and loose stones pried from the street. Captain Preston tried to get the crowd to calm and disperse, but his words were lost over the din. Church bells continued to toll, adding to the clamor. The redcoats kept their muskets half-cocked and the barrels pointed low but towards the crowd. Historian Page Smith captures the night’s confusion: ‘The noise, the shouting and clatter, the ring of bells, the throbbing movement of the crowd as those in back pressed forward and those in front tried to prevent themselves from being pressed against the points of the soldiers’ bayonets, the efforts of bolder spirits to gain a place in the front ranks and of the more prudent to withdraw – all this presented a picture of hopeless confusion. It must also be remembered this took place with no more illumination than the moon and such fitful light as might be provided by torches and lamps.’
The crowd screamed, ‘Damn you, sons of bitches, fire! You can’t kill us all!’
A chorus of Kill them! Kill them! Kill the bastards! made an ominous melody.
Hecklers ran along the face of the soldiers, lightly touching each musket with a stick and daring the rattled soldiers to fire, as if they were western Native Americans counting coup. Nathaniel Fosdick, who had been shoved by Corporal Wemms, grabbed a stick and threatened a soldier with it, only to be jabbed in the chest and arm with a bayonet hard enough to draw blood.
Private White spied Jane Whitehouse, who lived near his quarters off Royal Exchange Lane, in the front ranks of the crowd. He pushed her aside, hissing, ‘Go home or you’ll be killed!’ The young Joseph Hinkley, scared witless, felt a warm hand on his back. Sam Gray, still tipsy from drink, assured him, ‘Do not run, my lad, they dare not fire.’ As the hecklers drew closer, the troops responded by swinging their guns like clubs. George Hewes received a hard blow to the shoulder. Preston ordered the mob to disperse, to which someone replied that they ‘were in the king’s highway, and had as good a right to be there’ as the soldiers. James Murray, Justice of the Peace, appeared to read the Riot Act, but the crowd drove him off with snowballs. By now three to four hundred men and boys encircled the beleaguered redcoats in front of the custom house.
Theodore Bliss shouldered his way through the crowd to confront Preston. ‘Are your men loaded?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Preston replied.
‘Are they loaded with ball? Are they going to fire?’
‘They cannot fire without my orders,’ Preston reassured him.
The merchant Richard Palmes fought his way to Preston. ‘I hope you do not intend they shall fire upon the inhabitants.’
‘By no means, by no means,’ Preston said. ‘Besides, I’m standing in front of my men. If I ordered them to open fire, I must fall a sacrifice! My giving the word “fire” under these circumstances would prove me no officer.’
Then, behind the soldiers, a voice called out, ‘Fire! By God! I’ll stand by you whilst I have a drop of blood! Fire!’ That very moment, Private Hugh Montgomery was hit by a piece of wood or ice, lost his balance, and slipped on the ice-caked street. When he got to his feet, he raised his musket, and urged on all sides to fire – except by Captain Preston, who had now moved to the rear of his men, perhaps to determine who was countermanding his orders – he pressed his trigger. His musket flamed in the darkness, blinding peoples’ eyes; the smoke billowed out across the cold crowd; and the people, for but a moment, were gripped in the quiet of shock – and then all hell broke loose.
Indeed, most of the crowd didn’t believe it, convinced that the redcoats were shooting blanks.
Though bodies lie on the street, their first thought was that they were discarded clothes.
One shocked Bostonian expressed his disbelief that the redcoats would dare fire solid shot into the crowd, testifying later that he thought the people ‘had been scared and run away, and left their greatcoats behind them.’
The soldiers frantically reloaded their muskets as Preston struggled to regain control. He vehemently cursed them for firing without orders, but they insisted he had given the order. The crowd surged forward again, this time to gather the bodies of the dead and wounded, and the soldiers raised their muskets back up, fearing they were about to be engulfed in a wave of blood-hungry citizens. Preston ran along the line, shoving up their barrels, shouting, ‘Stop firing! DO NOT FIRE!’ Benjamin Burdick, who had struck a redcoat on the street two days earlier, confidently stepped up to the line of soldiers. He walked the line, looking each of them in the eye. ‘I want to see some faces that I may swear to another day,’ he growled. Preston turned at Burdick’s words, and the two men stared each other down before Preston coolly replied, ‘Perhaps, sir, you may.’
A Town in Search of Blood
Boston held its breath to see what came next. Crowds numbering over a thousand roamed the streets, probing for redcoats upon whom to exact vengeance. George Hewes reported how he went home to arm himself with a cane, and on his way back to the town house around one that morning, he encountered eight or nine soldiers of the 29th Regiment, all armed with clubs or cutlasses. One of the soldiers asked him how he fared; Hewes replied that he was faring badly, since he saw his townsmen shot. ‘Is it not a dreadful thing?’ he asked the soldier. The soldier replied that it was a fine thing and that Hewes would see more of it. A Sergeant Chambers tore the cane from Hewes’ hands, telling him he had no right to carry it. ‘I’ve as good a right to carry a cane as you have to carry clubs!’ he seethed.
If the people were planning on exacting vengeance on Captain Preston and his squad, they were sore out of luck: Preston wasted no time after the shooting in beating a quick retreat to the Main Guard, where he turned out all the soldiers and placed them in ‘street firings,’ a military formation designed to stand firm against rioters. Dread overcame him when he heard rumors that up to five thousand enraged Bostonians were preparing to attack the Main Guard (in reality, the crowd numbered just over a thousand). He heard drums beating in town to call out the militia, and the cry ‘To arms! To arms!’ floated over the rooftops and down the streets. The church bells continued to toll as Preston ordered his drummer to beat ‘To arms,’ alerting the whole Boston garrison. Upon hearing word of the call to arms, British officers scattered throughout the city attempted to reach their rendezvous. While most made it, others were waylaid by fuming citizens. Lieutenant Ross of the 14th was beaten with a stick; two ensigns suffered a similar fate; and Captain Goldfinch was surrounded, struck in the face, and could only grit his teeth as he was stripped of his sword.
Panicked citizens sought out acting governor Hutchinson. He was mortified upon hearing what had happened in front of the custom house, and that mortification deepened when he was told that ‘unless [he] went out immediately, the whole town would be in arms and the most bloody scene would follow that had ever been known in America.’ Hutchinson and two loyal friends immediately made for the town house, but mobs dogged their every step. At Dock Square, a crowd of armed citizens challenged him. When he identified himself and commanded they return to their homes, they threatened his life. Hutchinson didn’t belabor the point: he and his friends made a quick escape and circled around through Pierce’s Alley, past the blood-spattered snow on King Street, until they reached the Main Guard and the soldiers of the 29th spread out in ‘street firings,’ muskets held taught and at the ready. The staunch Tory Joseph Belknap, who’d accompanied Hutchinson, announced Hutchinson’s presence and asked for an officer. The soldiers shouted at them to bugger off. Isaac Pierce, another member of Hutchinson’s expedition, dared expose himself before the firing line. Muskets trailed him as he went to the front gate to talk with Preston. He pointed into the shadowy street, where Hutchinson and the others stood half-concealed in shadow. ‘There is His Honor, the Commander in Chief.’
‘Where?’ Preston asked.
‘There,’ Isaac hissed, ‘and you’re presenting your firelocks at him!’
Preston waved them forward. Hutchinson and Belknap emerged from the shadows, and Hutchinson lambasted the captain. ‘How came you to fire without orders from a civil magistrate?!’
‘I was obliged to do so, to save my sentry,’ Preston said – not willing to make his men the scapegoat.
‘Then you have murdered three or four men to save your sentry!’ Pierce snarled.
‘These soldiers ought not to be here,’ Hutchinson warned.
Though Hutchinson likely meant that the soldiers shouldn’t be assembled in a provocative firing line, Preston took his comment to mean that the soldiers shouldn’t be in Boston. ‘It’s not in my power to order them away,’ he said. Preston suggested they step through the gate and talk inside the Main Guard, but Hutchinson balked at being seen ‘conniving’ with the very men who had reportedly slain several citizens in cold blood. Belknap suggested they talk at the town house. Preston and a cadre of soldiers marched to the town house with Hutchinson, Belknap, and Pierce. By the time they got there, several patriots leaders had gathered to intercept them. Will Molineux was among them, and he pleaded with Hutchinson to order the redcoats back to their barracks; nothing good could come from further encounters.
Hutchinson didn’t oblige Molineux, hoping instead to calm the peoples’ nerves by addressing them personally. By this point a vast throng had surrounded the town house, eager to get at Captain Preston and to see the course the acting governor would take. Hutchinson strode out onto the balcony overlooking King Street and expressed his dismay over the night’s events. He promised a full investigation would be made and the guilty parties punished. After encouraging the people to return to their homes, he affirmed that ‘the law shall have its course. I will live and die by the law.’ Some in the crowd booed him, but most began to head home. Hutchinson turned to return inside when a hotheaded patriot pushed his way through the crowd, shouting that they wouldn’t leave until the soldiers were ordered back to their barracks. Molineux took the opportunity to plead the same to Hutchinson once more. Hutchinson suggested to Lieutenant Colonel Carr, the senior British officer present, that the soldiers retire to their barracks. Though not under orders to do so, Carr obliged: the soldiers were formed up and marched off, not to resume street firings but to be sequestered in their barracks. The crowd began to slip away.
Hutchinson summoned the justices of the peace and Colonel Dalrymple, commanding officer of the British forces, and they gathered with him in the town house. Hutchinson ordered the justices to begin collecting evidence; that very night, so early in the morning, witnesses were hunted down and testimony recorded. Warrants were issued for arrests, and at two in the morning the weary Preston surrendered himself to the constables. He stood before the justices, who heard testimony from witnesses who swore up and down that they’d heard Preston give the order to fire. With such damning testimony on the books, they led him to the jail. The next morning the seven soldiers of the rescue squad, plus Private White, appeared before the justices and joined their captain in jail.
That morning, Tuesday 6 March, the selectmen of Boston gathered with Hutchinson at the town house and demanded that he send the troops packing to the island barracks on Castle William. At the same time, a Boston town meeting convened at Faneuil Hall. People filled the hall to the rafters, and the crowds stretched outside and down the street. Nearly three thousand people turned out to participate in what could be the most momentous impromptu meeting yet, in which they determined how to proceed in the wake of a vicious slaughter. Patriot leaders allowed lower class folk to participate, much to the chagrin of more propertied conservatives. Those who protested were shouted down by men who argued ‘that if [the lower classes] had no property they had liberty, and their posterity might have property.’ A four-man delegation comprised of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Will Molineux, and Deacon Phillips was tasked with delivering a strongly-worded message to acting governor Hutchinson: ‘Nothing can rationally be expected to restore the peace of the town and prevent blood and carnage but the immediate removal of troops.’ The delegation carried the message to the town house, but Hutchinson – despite the urgings of his council – refused to give such an order, even adding that those who desired to send the troops from Boston were guilty of high treason. Hutchinson couldn’t stomach the thought of acceding to the demands of the citizens gathered in an illegal meeting at Faneuil Hall; his acquiescence could very well be viewed in England as a betrayal of the crown. Colonel Dalrymple offered a compromise: what if the 29th – the regiment involved in the ‘horrid massacre’ – were dispatched to Castle William while the 14th continued its occupation in the town?
In the afternoon the Faneuil Hall meeting reconvened, but so many people tried to attend that the meeting had to be moved to Old South Church with its accommodating balconies. Hutchinson’s compromise was brought to the table, but Samuel Adams scoffed at this half-measure. The people of Boston wouldn’t budge: the regiments had to go. Meanwhile, Hutchinson was in another meeting with his council. One of his council members, Royall Tyler, implored Hutchinson to comply to their demands. He pointed out that the men requesting the removal of troops weren’t the blood-thirsty ‘mobbers’ of the previous night, ‘not such people as had formerly pulled down [your] house,’ but people ‘of the best character among us – men of estates and men of religion.’ This didn’t persuade Hutchinson, but the next piece of news moved him closer to acquiescence: Tyler reported that that the patriots were planning to muster ten thousand militia and drive out the redcoats, ‘even should it be called a rebellion.’ Tyler wasn’t bluffing: express riders had already been sent to neighboring Massachusetts towns, and militia captains were given orders to muster their men and prepare to move on Boston at a moment’s notice. Tyler reported that they could arrive within twenty-four hours, and an additional ten thousand could arrive the next day. Several other council members backed up Tyler, insisting that unless the troops were removed, ‘they were sure the night which was coming on would be the most terrible that had ever been seen in America.’ Hutchinson’s brother-in-law Andrew Oliver, secretary of the colony, put it to him bluntly: Hutchinson had two choices, either order both regiments to Castle William or ‘quit the government.’ Hutchinson’s determination crumbled, and when he gave the order to Colonel Dalrymple, the British commander shrugged. ‘What else could you do?’ he mused.
When news of Hutchinson’s decision reached the Old South Church, the news ‘gave great joy to the inhabitants… and a general satisfaction, so that they went from the meeting very peaceably to their habitations.’ Dalrymple didn’t like the idea of ordering the regiments to Castle William without the approval of his senior officer, so he dispatched a frenetic message to Thomas Gage. Gage knew better than to oppose the decision – he knew Boston was rapt to turning into a wildfire that could engulf the rest of the colony – and on 10 March 1770 the 29th Regiment packed its bags and began the long walk to the wharves. Will Molineux accompanied the British redcoats on their march, ostensibly to protect them ‘from the indignations of the people.’ Those people crammed the streets, gawking and hooting and catcalling as the beaten troopers stepped onto barges and longboats to be ferried to the island fortress. On 14 March the 14th Regiment followed. Both regiments came to be known to the colonists as ‘Sam Adams’ Regiments’ for the instrumental role he played in arguing forcefully for their departure, though in England the 29th Regiment had a more apt nickname: ‘The Vein-Openers,’ for the role they played in the so-called Boston Massacre.
The day of the funerals for those killed on 5 March was as somber as a holiday: Boston shops were closed and church bells tolled not only in Boston but also in the surrounding countryside. Thousands of people lined the streets as the four hearses rolled by (Patrick Carr, the fifth casualty of the night, didn’t succumb to his wounds until after the funeral). Twelve hundred men and women partook in the procession that led the caskets around the Liberty Tree and to the Old Granary Burial Ground. The loyalist Reverend Mather Byles, watching the procession, remarked to a friend, ‘They call me a brainless Tory. But tell me, which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not one mile away?’
John Adams and Redcoats on Trial
The morning after the 'massacre,' a Boston merchant named James Forest stepped into John Adams’ office with tears streaming down his face. He begged Adams to act as counsel for his friend Captain Preston; Forest couldn’t find a lawyer willing to represent the captain for fear of inciting the people’s wrath. Forest had petitioned Adams’ lawyer friend Josiah Quincy with the same proposition, but Quincy said he would only represent Preston if Adams joined him. Adams agreed tolink hands with Quincy in Preston’s defense, adding that ‘counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free country.’ He accepted a retainer of one guinea for his services in defense of not only Preston but also the other soldiers involved in the shooting.
The fact that the two lawyers defending the soldiers of the 29th were ardent patriots struck many as ironic. The young, warm-tempered Josiah Quincy had been given the nickname ‘Wilkes’ in honor of his political radicalism and the fact that he, like John Wilkes across the Great Pond, was cross-eyed. When Josiah’s father chewed him out for ‘becoming an advocate for those criminals who are charged with the murder of their fellow citizens,’ Quincy replied that every man charged with a crime had a right to legal counsel. He sought to placate his disgruntled father by telling him that he’d taken the case only after being ‘advised and urged to undertake it by an Adams, a Hancock, a Molineux, a Cushing, a Henshaw, a Pemberton, a Warren, a Cooper, and a Phillips’ – basically a ‘who’s who’ of Boston’s patriot leadership. It may come as a surprise that the high-rolling patriots encouraged Preston’s defense, but a fair trial was the best defense of their political convictions. As historian Page Smith notes, ‘[The] patriot leaders wished to vindicate the city of Boston before the bar of public opinion; their friends in England had already warned them of the unfavorable reaction they might expect, even among their allies on the other side of the ocean, if there was any indication that Preston and the soldiers had been sacrificed to popular prejudices and the law abused. There was also the fact that the whole colonial case against the authority of Parliament rested, after all, on legal and constitutional grounds. The generation of men who fashioned the revolution had a veneration for the law that in most ages has been reserved for the deity. From all this, it followed that defense and prosecution had a common interest in a trial that would manifestly result in a fair verdict.’ Though Adams feared incurring the peoples’ anger and losing the good reputation he’d earned over the last few years, the opposite was the reality: his standing in the community actually increased. This isn’t to say that he had no detractors, for many of the less level-headed and vitriolic patriots saw him as a quasi-traitor to the cause. For his own part, Adams saw his responsibility as a validation of the patriot cause. Like many of the leading patriots, he feared that the emotionally-charged actions of the mob could undercut a more systematic approach to the political crisis that could yield better fruit. When he declared that ‘freedom wouldn’t be won in defiance of the dictates of humanity and the rule of law,’ he was speaking from a deep-rooted conviction that all Englishmen – even the despised redcoats! – deserved a fair trial. To deny them this right would be to show up the ‘American Cause’ as a sham.
The grand jury impaneled on 13 March, three days after the 29th Regiment departed for Castle William and a day before the 14th followed suit. Jonathan Sewall, despite loyalist sympathies, read the indictments against Preston and the soldiers. Each indictment employed flowery language to hone in on the savagery of their alleged crime against each life lost: ‘Not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil and their own wicked hearts… did with force and arms feloniously, willfully and of malice forethought assault one Crispus Attucks, then and there being in the peace of God and of the said Lord the King.’ Sewall read the indictment for each victim of the night’s shooting. The indictments being read, the soldiers returned to their imprisonment, and the prosecution and defense began scheming to have the trial go their own ways. John Adams, for once, agreed with acting governor Hutchinson: both wanted to delay the trial as long as possible, hoping the inexorable advance of time would dampen indignant passions. They received help in this from two fronts: first, Sewall had his own reasons for delaying the trial (as a loyalist, he didn’t want fiery tempers to condemn the men to death), so he found reasons to leave Boston on other duties; second, the trial of Richardson and Wilmot – whose actions in the face of a patriot mob had led to the death of Christopher Seider – was on the docket before the trial of the redcoats. This first trial underwent its own delays, which only served to push the ‘big’ trial further back. Preston’s trial wouldn’t take place until October that year, and in the meantime Adams was derided by the most fervent hot-blooded patriots.
The patriot press advocated a hurried trial, and patriot preachers bemoaned the delay and decreed that blood must be spilled for blood. A new gallows had been built to service justice against the redcoats. Many threats to break Preston from jail and lynch him in the streets unnerved not only the prisoners but also their jailers. Doctor Benjamin Church lambasted the soldiers as ‘brutal banditti… grinning furies gloating over their carnage.’ He declared that they deserved to ‘have their bones piled up in the Common as a monument to Massachusetts bravery.’ Firebrand patriots petitioned for Preston’s trial to be sped up, but Hutchinson dodged their blows, much to Adams’ relief. When the autumn of 1770 rolled around, and Richardson and Wilmot’s trial concluded, the time for the trial of Preston and his redcoats arrived. Captain Preston would be tried before the other soldiers; he was in the dock for 29 October.
Preston faced a nerve-wracking dilemma: his defense would argue to the jury that he hadn’t ordered his men to fire, but if that were the case, then his soldiers fired without orders. Thus if Preston were acquitted, his soldiers would be damned. Adams and Quincy had a plan: they would, on the one hand, argue that Preston did not, in fact, order his men to fire; on the other hand, they would make the case that the soldiers fired either out of justifiable self-defense or from a misplaced belief that Preston had ordered them to fire. This, they thought, was the best strategy for getting not only Preston but also his men acquitted. Adams began Preston’s defense by quoting from Hale’s Pleas of the Crown: ‘It is better five guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should die.’ Adams presented evidence for the defense; Robert Treat Paine argued for the prosecution; and then both parties summed up their argument. The jury, which was dominated by Tories (and whom the patriots hadn’t opposed, for their interests lie not necessarily in the condemnation of Preston but in the appearance of a fair trial), acquitted Preston, and he left for Castle William a free man. When the other soldiers went to trial three weeks later on 20 November, Samuel Quincy – Josiah’s brother – opened the case for the prosecution, calling the killings ‘the most melancholy event that has yet taken place on the continent of America.’ Witnesses came forth to give their take on things, and they in turn were cross-examined by the other side. Adams skillfully extracted confessions from one witness that he’d carried a sword with which he was prepared to behead soldiers; another admitted that he’d had his hand on Preston’s shoulder when the anonymous shout to fire was followed by Montgomery’s shot; two slaves affirmed that the order to fire didn’t come from Preston; and other witnesses testified to the grave provocation and threats the beleaguered soldiers had endured up until the shooting. Quincy wanted to emphasize the provocations heaped upon the soldiers, but Adams balked: he didn’t want it to appear that the soldiers had been incited by a calculating mob, but nor did he want to suggest that the mob had been manipulated by political puppeteers. On the latter point, Hutchinson was peculiarly perturbed by reports that a man in a red cloak – such as the one regularly worn by Samuel Adams – had been among the crowd. Adams steered the defense away from belaboring that point, for he didn’t want the patriots to be painted in a bad light. When the time came for closing remarks, Adams stood before the jury and summarized his case:
In the continual vicissitudes of human things, amidst the shocks of fortune and the whirls of passion that take place at certain critical seasons, even in the mildest governments, the people are liable to run into riots and tumults. There are church quakes and state quakes in the moral and political world, as well as earthquakes, storms and tempests in the physical… We have been entertained with a great variety of names to avoid calling the persons who gathered at the custom-house a mob. The plain English is, gentlemen, a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars. And why should we scruple to call such a seat of people a mob? I cannot conceive unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the river to dry up, because there was a mob in Boston on the fifth of March that attacked a party of soldiers. Such things are not new in the world, nor in the British dominions, though they are, comparatively, rarities and novelties in this town…When the multitude was shouting and hazzaing, and threatening life, the bells ringing, the mob whistling, screaming and rending an Indian yell; the people from all quarters throwing every species of rubbish they could pick up in the street… Montgomery in particular smote with a club and knocked down, and as soon as he could rise and take up his firelock, another club from afar struck his breast or shoulder… what could he do? You expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy? Patient as Epictetus while his master was breaking his legs with a cudgel? It is impossible you should find him guilty of murder. You must suppose him devoid of all human passions, if you don’t think him at least provoked, thrown off his guard, and into the furor brevis, by such treatment as this.
It was plenty clear, Adams argued, that Private Montgomery had been assaulted before he opened fire. How much provocation, he wondered, should a man endure before lashing out? Beneath all this rhetoric was an uncomfortable fact: if the patriots wanted to condemn Montgomery for his folly, how then would they be judged for their rioting, their tarring and feathering, and their strident complaints against the crown? If Montgomery were held to the high standard of stoically accepting abuse, what leg, then, did reactionary patriots have to stand on? Should they not embrace a similar stoic attitude in the face of Parliamentary encroachments? If Preston were condemned for reacting against provocation, then certainly the patriots should be condemned likewise! By clamoring for Montgomery’s guilt, the patriots were in, effect, sawing off the branch on which they sat. Adams ended his summary to the jury:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence… To your candor and justice I submit the prisoners and their causes. The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady undeviating course; it will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations and wanton tempers of men… It does not enjoin that which pleases a weak, frail man, but without any regard to persons, commands that which is good and punishes evil in all, whether rich or poor, high or low – ‘tis deaf, inexorable, inflexible.’ On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder, to the clamors of the populace.
The trial lasted two and a half hours before being passed to the jury. When the jury came back after their deliberations, five of the soldiers were acquitted. Two – Privates Montgomery and Killroy – were convicted of manslaughter. These two pled benefit of clergy (available to literate men) and escaped with an M for ‘Murderer’ branded on their thumbs. All soldiers were allowed to rejoin their regiment on Castle William. All the soldiers – except, surprisingly, for Captain Preston – thanked Adams for his services. The patriot Samuel Cooper, minister of Boston’s Brattle Square Church,wrote to Thomas Pownall in England that the trials ought to ‘wipe off the imputation of our being so violent and bloodthirsty a people as not to permit law and justice to take place on the side of unpopular men… I hope our friends on your side of the water will make this kind improvement of them – [the] administration has a very favorable opportunity of adopting gentle methods respecting the colonies.’
Most Bostonians were happy for the trial to have come and gone - but not Sam Adams. He refused to accept the acquittals, and writing under his pseudonym ‘Vindex,’ he layered the columns of the Boston Gazette with hard-hitting editorials in which he presented a distorted and inherently biased interpretation of the evidence ad concluded that the redcoats shouldn’t have been freed but hanged. Despite his haranguing, Bostonians paid him little attention (though they elected both him and his cousin John to the Massachusetts House of Representatives as members of the four-man ‘Boston Seat’). John Adams, musing on the Boston Massacre long after the fact, wrote a friend that ‘On that night [of the Massacre] the foundation of American independence was laid.’ His exact meaning is unclear, but historians believe he meant that the citizens saw their power to force the removal of troops from the city while the British ministry saw that ‘law and order’ couldn’t be upheld by a mere two regiments. If things got worse (as they were wont to do), the ministry would need to dispatch a full-scale occupying force to compel obedience to Parliament’s laws. When colonial and British convictions came to a head, there could be nothing but outright conflict.
The ‘Horrid Massacre’ (as it was then called in Boston newspapers) didn’t pass out of mind with the trials; for years, until it was supplanted by July 4th, the fifth of March was annually commemorated in a solemn day of remembrance. On the anniversary of the shooting, orators preached against British tyranny and rehashed the tenets of American liberty. Bells tolled, pictures were illuminated, and memorial services erupted across the city. Christopher Monk, who’d been permanently crippled by his wounds, became a mainstay of these memorials. One year John Hancock used him as a propaganda piece, drawing the audience’s attention to the ‘miserable Monk’ with his ‘tottering knees, which scarce sustain his wasted body; look on his haggard eyes; mark well the death-like paleness on his fallen cheeks.’ Paul Revere’s engraving of the event, entitled ‘The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street,’ and shown above, was published at the end of March 1770, and it swept the colonies; though his fame skyrocketed with the print, the uncomfortable truth is that he stole it from Henry Pelham. The print was a sensationalized and utterly biased retelling of the event: rather than accurately depicting the chaos of that night, Revere has the British soldiers standing in line and firing a volley on the orders of Captain Preston, whom Revere pictures with a raised sword behind his men (at no point did Preston order his men to fire, nor did he draw his sword).
To this very day, the Boston Massacre is a subject of hot debate. Two questions have become critical for historians: ‘Was the Massacre orchestrated by the patriots?’ and ‘Was it the product of sensationalized propaganda?’ Towards the first question, circumstantial evidence can make the case that the Massacre was preplanned by colonial firebrands. That night witnessed armed citizen gangs throughout the town, including on Boston Neck, far from the confrontation on King Street; did the patriots establish ‘zones’ for roving mobs so that when an altercation took place, they could easily descend upon it no matter its location? Was the mob that harassed Private White on King Street just one of many groups secretly dispatched to antagonize the soldiers to provoke a brawl? These aren’t exclusively modern questions; even John Adams reflected, ‘Endeavors had been systematically pursued for many months by certain busy characters, to excite quarrels, reencounters and combats single or compound in the night between the inhabitants of the lower class and the soldiers, and at all risks to kindle an immortal hatred between them. I suspected that this was the explosion, which had been intentionally wrought up by designing men, who knew what they were aiming at better than the instrument employed. If these poor tools should be prosecuted for any of their illegal conduct, they must be punished. If the soldiers in self-defense should kill any of them they must be tried, and if truth was respected and the law prevailed must be acquitted…’
Some historians argue that what happened on King Street was propagandized into a ‘massacre’ to fit the patriot cause. Their argument is that five deaths is certainly no massacre, and even in our modern, ‘civilized’ United States, these kinds of things happen on a regular basis and no one bats an eye. If it weren’t for patriot newspapers, the argument goes, the encounter on King Street would’ve become just another brawl like all those that preceded it (albeit one with some deaths thrown in the mix). However, as historian Page Smith points out, ‘[The] assumption [made by these critical historians] is that the death of five Bostonians could not have been a genuinely shocking and distressing event for the people of that city. The implication is that the outrage was somehow feigned and used in a quite cold-blooded spirit to achieve certain political ends. But an inevitable question is: What number of deaths would constitute a proper ‘massacre’? When we speak scornfully of Bostonians calling the death of five unimportant people of the ‘lower Class’ a ‘massacre’ we perhaps reveal more about our own attitudes and values than about those of the Bostonians in 1770.’
The day after the redcoats rejoined the 29th as free men, the Queen had a birthday – and it was celebrated by loyalists and patriots both. The Boston militia fired their guns all day long, and in the evening the Concert Hall hosted a ‘very grand assembly’ catering to a ‘who’s who’ of Boston: the military officers from Castle William, Governor Hutchinson (who finally received his official governorship that past spring), the customs commissioners, and ‘all the best people in town’ – which included both loyalists and patriots. For an evening they mingled, talked, laughed, and it was as if the acquittal of the redcoats had ushered in a new stage in colonial and crown relations. For one night, at least, Boston seemed a place of tranquility and harmony. One patriot remarked hopefully that the party – which included ‘very good dancing and good music but very bad wine and punch’ – was the beginning of ‘a general coalition’ that would pave the way ‘so that harmony, peace and friendship will once more be established in Boston.’
But it was not to be so.
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