Note: It’s
a re-run. Deal with it.
It
was a miserable night in Boston. What else would you expect on March 5 in the
midst of the Little Ice Age which
chilled Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America for nearly two centuries? A nasty wind whipped across the harbor, a few
flakes of snow would sting exposed fresh.
Old snow and ice was pushed up against buildings turning gray with the
soot from a few thousand hearth fires.
A
lone English soldier, Private Hugh White
of the 29th Regiment of Foot had the
bad luck to draw sentry duty outside
of the Customs House on Kings Street that night. The building was a symbol of unfair taxation without representation and
oppression to the people of the city.
Customs collectors had been harassed for attempting to enforce the
unpopular Townsend Duties and for
seizing ships of leading merchants like John
Hancock for smuggling, a
mainstay of the local economy. So the
building needed protection.
The
bright red coat of an English
private soldier, while colorful, was entirely unsuitable for the harsh New England winter. Private White undoubtedly shivered in misery.
His life was made worse by the taunting
of local toughs, mostly apprentices and day laborers loitering about. One of them, a wig maker’s apprentice, Edward Garrick mocked a passing British
officer, Captain-Lieutenant John
Goldfinch, for not paying a bill due his master. Goldfinch ignored the jeers and in fact had
settled his account that very afternoon.
But White scolded Garrick for insulting an officer. The two exchanged heated words. White struck Garrick with the butt of his
musket. A small crowd gathered and began pelting the soldier with snow and ice
balls.
When
White leveled his musket against his taunters, Henry Knox, a corpulent 19 year old bookseller warned him not to
shoot because, “if he fire, he must die.”
White refrained from shooting but the crowd on the street grew as church
bells rang in alarm. Some one thought to
send to nearby barracks for reinforcements for the now besieged White who had
retreated to the steps of the Custom House with the door at his back.
Things
were about to go from bad to worse.
Four
regiments of troops were sent to Boston in 1768, more than were ever stationed
there when its very existence was threatened by possible invasion during the French and Indian Wars, after the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned
the Crown for relief from the
Townsend Duties and circulated letters of other colonial legislatures asking
for support in the protest. The Collector of Customs for the port of Boston
officially asked for troops to protect him after some of his officers were man
handled and abused.
Four
regiments were dispatched as a show of force.
That was about 4,000 men plus the wives and children of many of them,
officers and enlisted alike, servants,
and the inevitable hangers on to any army.
The city of Boston boasted only 16,000 residents and a few thousand more
resided in nearby villages. Such a large
force deployed among so few civilians, most of them hostile to their presence,
led to inevitable friction.
Although
two of the regiments had been withdrawn, soldiers of the remaining two were
involved in a number of incidents over that winter. In addition to hostility to the policy that
dispatched them, minor personal disputes like the Captains late payment to a
wig maker, irked the population. So did
the inevitable attention to the local girls by the soldiers, which was often
returned by lasses enamored of a dashing uniform.
A
serious bone of contention was the employment of off duty soldiers at the rope walk, Boston’s biggest industrial
concern and a main employer of unskilled and casual labor. The soldiers were working for less than
locals and costing many of them jobs. Wives
of several soldiers publicly scolded colonists.
That very afternoon one had promised that the troops would wet their
bayonets on trouble makers.
Back
at the Customs House, White was finally relieved by corporal and six private
soldiers under the personal command of Captain
Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch who declined to trust a junior
lieutenant with the sensitive assignment.
As they drew close to the Customs House where the angry crowd had grown
to over a hundred, Knox again warned the Captain of the awful consequences if
his men fired. Preston reportedly told
him, “I am aware of it.”
Once
at the Customs House Preston had his men load and prime their muskets and form
a semi-circle in front of Private White and the Door. They faced a crowd now swollen by further reinforcements,
many of them armed with cudgels and brick bats.
In the very front of the mob, just feet away from Captain Preston
who took up a position in front of his men, was a dark skinned man named Crispus Atticus.
Not
much is known about Atticus, not even whether he was a slave, an escaped slave,
or a freeman. He made his living as a
sailor on coastal traders and on the
docks. He was described as mulato but was known to have both African and Native American Wampanoag ancestry.
Although there were not many Blacks in Boston, their presence was not
that unusual. They mixed casually and
freely with the lowest classes of White Bostonians—the day laborers, indentured
servants, and apprentice boys.
As
Atticus and the crowd pressed forward, Preston had his men level their muskets
but ordered them to hold their fire. He
ordered the mob to disband. They
responded with taunts of “go ahead and fire.”
Preston said they would not except on his order and made the point of
standing in front of his men’s guns.
From
out of the crowd someone hit Private Hugh Montgomery in the arm with
a clump of ice or in other accounts he was struck by a cudgel. Montgomery fell to the ground, although he
may simply have lost his footing on the ice, and lost his musket. He grabbed the gun and scrambled to his
feet. Enraged, he leveled his gun at the
nearest man, Atticus and fired yelling “Damn you, fire!” to his fellow
soldiers.
Atticus
crumpled to the ground mortally wounded.
There was a pause of a few seconds and then a ragged, un-coordinated
volley went off from the troops. The
only order Preston gave was a desperate order to cease fire.
Eleven
men were hit by fire indicating that some may have been injured by the same
round or that some soldiers had time to re-load and fire. In addition to
Atticus rope maker Samuel Gray,
mariner James Caldwel died on the
cobblestones. Seventeen year old ivory
turner apprentice Samuel Maverick
standing near the rear of the crowd was struck by a ricocheting fragment was
struck and died a few hours later. Patrick
Carr, an Irish immigrant died of
his wounds two weeks later.
The
crowd retreated to near-by streets but continued to grow. Preston called out the entire regiment for
protection and withdrew his squad to the Backaches.
An
angry mob descended on the near-by State
House which was ringed with troops for protection. Massachusetts born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the crowd by
addressing them from the relative safety of a balcony. He promised a through and prompt investigation. After a few hours the crowd drifted away.
Local
malcontents, becoming known loosely as Patriots
were quick to use the slaughter to raise a hue and cry against the Townsend
Duties and to the onerous virtual military occupation of their city. Two virtually identical engravings purporting
to accurately portray the shooting were rushed to publication. The most famous, engraved by Paul Revere, the master silver and
coppersmith, iron foundry man, bell caster,
and master of all trades, after a drawing by Henry Pelham was published in the Boston Gazette and then
re-issued in sometimes hand colored prints which made Revere and the printer a
good deal of money.
With
public opinion inflamed, the two regiments in the city were
withdrawn to Castle William on an
island in the harbor. Had they not been,
“they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion,
should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would,”
according to Secretary of State Andrew
Oliver. By May General Thomas Gage, in command of troops in the colonies, decided
that the presence of the 29th Regiment was counterproductive to good order, had
the regiment removed from Massachusetts entirely.
Meanwhile
at the end of March Captain Preston, the men in his rescue squad, Pvt. White
and four civilian employees of the Customs House, who some had charged fired
out the windows of the building were indicted for murder and manslaughter.
Gov.
Hutchinson managed by hook or by crook to delay the start of the trial for
nearly a year to let inflamed passions died down. Patriots took that time to organize the
publication of an account of the event, A
Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, which although banned from
circulation in the city, inflamed passions across the Colonies, and even earned
sympathy when it was reprinted in London.
Despite
the delay, it looked like it would be very difficult for Captain Preston and
the soldiers to get a fair trial in Massachusetts. All of the leading local lawyers had refused
to take their cases. John Adams, a leading Patriot, a man
with boundless political ambition, and first cousin to rabble-rouser-in-chief Samuel Adams, agreed to take on the
case, despite howls of protest from his political allies.
It
was a great choice. Assisted by his
cousin Josiah Quincy, another
Patriot, and Loyalist Robert Auchmuty
quickly obtained a not verdict in the first trial. Captain Preston was shown by the testimony of
multiple witnesses to have never ordered the troops to fire and to have tried to
get them under control. That was in
October.
In
November the cases of the enlisted soldiers proved dicer. They had, after all, fired lethal round
without orders. Adam’s pled straight up
self-defense. He told the jury that the
men were under by the mob, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.” Appealing to the class prejudice of the
land-owning pool of eligible jurors, Adams won acquittal on murder charges for
all of the defendants, and only two were convicted of manslaughter.
Privates
Montgomery and Kilroy still faced the death penalty at the sentencing on
December 14, they “prayed the benefit of clergy, a remnant of Medieval law in
which the essentially claimed exemption from punishment on the grounds that
they were “clergy” who could read a Bible
verse. The two were branded on
the thumb and released.
By
the time the civilians were up for trial in December, enthusiasm for continuing
the case against them, which was weak and based on the testimony of one servant
easily proven to be false.
Whatever
the outcome of the trial, the events of March 5 helped set the stage for the American Revolution.
By the way the
term Boston Massacre was not applied
to the bloody ruckus until long after the fact.
Like another iconic event, the
so-called Boston Tea Party it got
its name during the brief national enthusiasm generated by the 50th anniversaries of important Revolutionary and
pre-revolutionary events. And like the
Tea Party it was soon imbued with a lot of romantic myth and nonsense.
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