The boston massacre answer key

THE BOSTON MASSACRE

On March 5, 1770, after being harassed for two years during their occupation of Boston, British soldiers finally lost control, firing into a mob of rioting Americans, killing several of them, including Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and sailor, the first African American patriot killed. The aftermath of this “massacre” led to what eventually became the American Revolution. The importance of the event grew, as it was used for political purposes, to stoke the fires of rebellion in the colonists, and to show the British in the most unflattering light.

The Boston Massacre gathers together the most important primary documents pertaining to the incident, along with images, anchored together with a succinct yet thorough introduction, to give students of the Revolutionary period access to the events of the massacre as they unfolded. Included are newspaper stories, the official transcript of the trial, letters, and maps of the area, as well as consideration of how the massacre is remembered today.

Neil L. York is Mary Lou Fulton Professor of History at Brigham Young University in Utah. He is the author of Turning the World Upside Down: The War of American Independence and the Problem of Empire.

THE BOSTON MASSACRE A HISTORY WITH DOCUMENTS

NEIL L. YORK

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data York, Neil Longley. The Boston Massacre : a history with documents / Neil L. York.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Boston Massacre, 1770. 2. Boston Massacre, 1770—Sources. I. Title. E215.4.Y67 2010 973.3′113—dc22 2009052416

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To Carole

Ever and Always

CONTENTS

Illustrations ix Chronology x Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii

Part I: Context 1

Introduction: With Blood “Running Like Water” 3

Part II: Documents 49

1 American Rights Asserted 51 2 London’s Response 55 3 A Governor’s Lament 58 4 A Bostonian’s Protest 64 5 Parliament’s Frustrations with Massachusetts 69 6 Unintimidated Massachusetts Legislators 73 7 A British Soldier’s Complaint 79 8 A Martyr is Made 83 9 A Most Shocking Scene 87

10 Revere’s Rendering 94 11 Hutchinson Under Pressure 97 12 Gage Reports to Hillsborough 102 13 Preston Pleads His Case to Pitt 108 14 Boston Counters Preston 114

15 Gage’s Hands Tied 118 16 An Eyewitness Account 121 17 Coroner’s Inquest for Crispus Attucks 123 18 Grand Jury Indictment 126 19 A Short Narrative 129 20 A Fair Account 145 21 Additional Observations 158 22 Town Leaders and the Battle for Public Opinion 166 23 The Soldiers’ Appeal for a Single Trial 173 24 Questions About the Court Record 176 25 A Judge’s Directions to Jurors 187 26 The Short Narrative View Reaffirmed 205 27 The Trial Outcomes Defended 210 28 Annual Commemoration 215 29 A Problematical Reminiscence 222 30 Monument to the Fallen 227 31 A More Balanced View 235

Notes 239 Suggested Reading 250 Index 252

viii • Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Soldier of the 29th Regiment, c. 1770 12 2 Landing of the British troops in Boston, 1768 17 3 Map of Boston, c. 1774 18–19 4 State (King) Street, Boston 22 5 Paul Revere’s engraving of the massacre 31 6 Alonzo Chappel’s version of the massacre 36 7 Howard Pyle’s version of the massacre 38 8 John Bufford’s version of the massacre 40 9 Larry Rivers’s version of the massacre 43

10 Samuel Adams 65 11 Victims’ grave in the Old Granary 84 Document 10 Paul Revere’s drawing of the massacre scene 96 12 Thomas Hutchinson 98 13 James Bowdoin 115 Document 17 Standard form for coroner’s inquest into the death

of Crispus Attucks 125 Document 23 The soldiers’ request for a separate trial 175 14 Bullet fired at Edward Payne 177 15 Monument on Boston Common 229 16 Current site of the massacre commemorative circle 236

CHRONOLOGY

1767 June Parliament passes the Townshend Revenue Act

November Customs commissioners arrive in Boston

1768 June Liberty incident in Boston

September Delegates from Massachusetts towns meet at extra-legal convention in Boston

October Arrival of the 14th and 29th regiments, from Halifax, Nova Scotia

November Arrival of most of the 64th and 65th regiments, from Ireland

1769 June 64th and 65th regiments leave Boston

August Governor Francis Bernard leaves Boston

1770 February Incident leading to the death of Christopher Seider and arrest of Ebenezer Richardson

March 5 The massacre; three die that night, two mortally wounded, another half-dozen wounded less seriously

6–26 Arrest and indictment of nine soldiers and four civilians for murder

8 Public funeral for Attucks, Caldwell, Gray, and Maverick

1770 11 29th Regiment withdrawn to Castle Island in (contd) Boston harbor

12–24 Depositions taken for A Short Narrative and A Fair Account

14 14th Regiment also removed to Castle Island; Patrick Carr dies

17 Patrick Carr buried with other four slain

April Richardson convicted of murdering Seider; Repeal of the Townshend Revenue Act, except the duty on tea

June 29th Regiment leaves Castle Island for New Jersey

September Accused soldiers and civilians arraigned for murder

October 24–30 Preston trial and acquittal

November 27– Soldiers’ trial; six acquitted; two (Kilroy and December 5 Montgomery) convicted of manslaughter

December 12 Civilians’ trial; all four acquitted

14 Kilroy and Montgomery branded on their left hands

1771 April 2 James Lovell delivers the first annual massacre oration

1772 March 5 Dr. James Warren, second annual massacre oration

August 14th Regiment leaves Castle Island for the West Indies

1773 March 5 Dr. Benjamin Church, third annual oration

May Parliament passes the Tea Act

December 16 The Boston Tea Party

1774 March 5 John Hancock, fourth annual oration

1775 March 6 Dr. Joseph Warren, fifth annual oration

April 19 Fighting at Lexington and Concord

Chronology • xi

1776 March 5 Peter Thacher, sixth annual oration (in Watertown)

17 British and loyalists evacuate Boston

1777 March 5 Benjamin Hichborn, seventh annual oration

1778 March 5 Jonathan Austin, eighth annual oration

1779 March 5 William Tudor, ninth annual oration

1780 March 6 Jonathan Mason, tenth annual oration

1781 March 5 Thomas Dawes, eleventh annual oration

1782 March 5 George Richards Minot, twelfth annual oration

1783 March 5 Dr. Thomas Welsh, thirteenth annual oration

1887 Circle of paving stones set in State Street (formerly King Street) to mark the massacre site

1888 November Massacre Monument erected on Boston Common

1906 Attucks, Caldwell, Carr, Gray, and Maverick, along with Seider, reinterred under new marker in the Granary burying ground

1951 Official designation of Boston’s Freedom Trail

1960s Circle of paving stones moved to present location, after street intersection reconfigured

xii • Chronology

PREFACE

Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre is an iconic image. I suspect that most Americans have seen it somewhere—reproduced in a book, enlarged to a poster, or even reduced to a postcard. They would no doubt recognize it if they saw it again. They most likely would not remember when they saw it first, they might not know the details of what it depicts, but they do know that it shows British soldiers firing on American civilians and that it is somehow connected with the American Revolution. A few might even know that Revere’s graphic representation was done for political purposes and that there are questions about its accuracy. Beyond that they may not give it much thought.

Revere’s visual image is a document from the past, just the same as a written text. Working with texts is the stock in trade of professional his- torians. Sadly, over the years I have seen a lack of interest in such things among my students, even among history majors—those, ironically enough, planning to teach, perhaps even write, history. Document anthologies for classroom use are less common than they once were, largely, I fear, because students dislike reading the documents inside. I have heard the groans of those who would rather not deal with Revolutionary Era writing. Most enjoy reading the Declaration of Independence but, stylistically, that text is pithy and direct—hardly typical of the age. Revolutionary Americans trying to make their case against what they considered British oppression more commonly wrote very long and sometimes turgid sentences, with many dependent clauses. Their arguments have to be read closely and patiently, not something that comes naturally to those who “twitter” their text messages.

Robin Winks, a respected historian who took an interest in mystery writers as well as actual cases of espionage, once suggested that the historian ought to be considered a type of detective. Even if his characterization resonated with historians, it probably did not among those outside the profession who see little connection between the dynamic crime scene investigators of prime-time television and stodgy scholars poring over manuscripts in archives. Since the crime-solving techniques of television detectives are all too often unerring as well as unbelievably rapid, that is probably just as well. Even so, the real-world parallels do exist, as historians, like detectives, painstakingly attempt to uncover evidence that will stand as proof in the cases they attempt to make.

With the exception of a few visiting stints elsewhere, I have taught history at the same university for over thirty years, the same university I attended as an undergraduate. The courses that I teach as a professor are similar to the courses that I took as a student, in the sense that they are more or less divided into two categories: content and methodology. It is a division typical of many university history departments. Although it is a distinction that can be pedagogically useful, it is a distinction that is also somewhat artificial, even dangerously specious. Evaluating content requires methodological skill—including the sleuthing skill of a detective—and that skill is best honed when it is applied to some specific historical problem. I find myself most comfortable discussing theoretical issues involving the nature of his- torical inquiry when I can tie them to a particular place in time, a particular sequence of events, a particular set of participants. More often than not that means exploring some aspect of Revolutionary American history. All but a few of the books and articles I have written are tied to that period, even those that also venture off into related aspects of British or Irish politics.

My research over the years has taken me past remnants of the Boston Massacre, whether it be in the document collections at various libraries and archives or even when walking the streets of Boston. What makes the Boston Massacre interesting in historical terms is that it played a role in the coming of the American Revolution. What makes it interesting historiographically—that is to say, what makes it helpful in learning about the nature and practice of historical research and writing—is that we know so little about it.

What follows is my attempt to bring together methodology and content, in a way appealing to those who are not yet and may never be historians, but on a sufficiently sophisticated level that it will not seem too elementary for those who are already in the profession. My introductory essay is intended to lay the groundwork for a wide range of possible readers, from students taking a historical methodology course to others in a U.S. history survey to

xiv • Preface

still others in a specialized course on Revolutionary America to those who themselves teach such courses.

Although I pose explicit questions here and there, most often I leave the questions implicit. Nothing kills an engaged reading and creative thinking faster than a fixed set of questions, as if those questions and no others should be asked. Some of the documentary excerpts are quite brief; a few are rather long. In some instances I made editorial emendations, but nothing that changed the essence of the text. The record is fragmentary enough and I did not want to fragment it further by excising this passage or that from a document.

The difficulties associated with reconstructing the Boston Massacre are common enough to all historians, whatever their chosen field of study. The event itself is gone; only fragments remain, in an artifact here, a written source there. Gaps in the historical record are inescapable, whether docu- mentation is rich and thick or thin and poor. In some ways the differences that separate historians are merely echoes of what divided those they study—over who did what, and how, and most especially why. I gathered the documents printed here with that connection in mind. They exemplify the disputes leading to imperial crisis; they also show the difficulty of attempting to recapture a moment now gone, never to occur again.

Given the incomplete, hit-or-miss nature of the historical record—given, indeed, the fallibility of those who compiled that record as well as those who later seek to interpret it—historical truths are by definition relative. The real past departed with the people who lived it. We can, as the noted historian Fred Anderson put it, “speak of” those people but we cannot “speak for” them. This is a creed that history professors preach to their students and yet it is a creed they sometimes violate when they engage in their own work. I wince when I encounter a review by a historian that calls some book “definitive.” I have a similar reaction to well-intentioned acknowledgments where, after others are thanked, a historian states that whatever errors remain in the book are his or hers alone. Because there can be no last word, there can be no definitive account. Likewise, errors are endemic to the enterprise; they can be minimized but they cannot be wholly eliminated.

One final comment: the reader should imagine the word “massacre” in parentheses virtually wherever I use it in the pages that follow. Boston “Massacre,” written repeatedly, strikes me as both tedious and tendentious. The bloody affair involving soldiers and civilians in Boston on the evening of March 5, 1770, was—and was not—a massacre. That it could and could not be, simultaneously, is merely one reason to study this famous event, now a signpost on the road to Revolutionary America. Contradiction, irony, even paradox are inescapable in any examination of the historical past, and markedly so here.

Preface • xv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My fascination with Boston dates back many years, to when I was a boy from California visiting grandparents in Massachusetts. Much as I enjoyed seeing the Red Sox at Fenway, I enjoyed even more being in a city where people crossed the street seemingly wherever and whenever they chose. Even today, for me, no trip to Boston is complete without a fair amount of jaywalking— latent revolutionary tendencies brought to the surface.

Those trips have become more or less annual over the last decade, and each time I have met insightful, kindhearted people who have helped with my research. My most recent visit, for this book, brought me into contact with John Bell, “proprietor” of a uniquely informative blog, “Boston 1775.” There is no better example of how the Internet can be used to explore the past, including aspects of the massacre. John put me in touch with Charlie Bahne, author of a widely read guide to the Freedom Trail, which barely scratches the surface of what Charlie knows about Revolutionary Boston. Others who proved indispensable were Adele Barbato of the Bostonian Society, Anne Bentley of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Sean Casey, Ron Grim, and Christine Murphy of the Boston Public Library. Recent trips usually include comparing historical notes with Professor Dan Coquillette, who splits his time between the law schools at Boston College and Harvard. That did not happen this past year but Dan’s essays had already guided me through the legal world of the men involved with the massacre trials. Closer to home, I benefited immensely from conversations with Professor Eric Hinderaker of the University of Utah, who is completing his own book on the massacre.

This book exists because Kimberly Guinta of Routledge invited me to write it. Matthew Kopel, her editorial colleague there, ably saw the manu- script through to production. Philip Parr, Belinda Wakefield, and Maggie Lindsey-Jones and her team at Keystroke took it from there. Most travel costs and reproduction fees for the illustrations were covered by funds provided generously to me as a Mary Lou Fulton Professor in my college. David Magleby has been a most supportive college dean, with this book and others. Department chair Shawn Miller and department secretary Julie Radle have likewise smoothed my way.

To all of the good folks above and others unnamed here who lent their assistance—dozens, at the very least—I offer profound thanks. It is the convention in acknowledgments like this to absolve from blame for the final result any who offered aid. If only it were that simple.

xviii • Acknowledgments

PART

CONTEXT

I

INTRODUCTION With Blood “Running Like Water”

“The 5th of March 1770, ought to be an eternal warning to this nation,” advised John Adams, because “on that night the foundation of American independence was laid.”1 Adams was referring to the Boston Massacre, some sixteen years after the fact. He had not witnessed the event but less than an hour later he passed by the spot where it occurred. Sharing the concern of those who wanted reason and justice, not passion and mob violence, to prevail, he agreed to represent nine British soldiers charged with murder- ing five innocent civilians there. That he and his fellow lawyers for the defense were largely successful—seven acquittals and two convictions, those convictions for manslaughter, not murder—was a source of lasting pride to him. “Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Execution of the Quakers or Witches, anciently,” he reminisced; therefore, “as the Evidence was, the Verdict was exactly right.” Even so, in the very next sentence he also wrote: “This however is no reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre.”2

Adams’s apparent inconsistency—calling the event a massacre and yet contending that the soldiers who did the killing were not guilty of murder— says much about this confused moment in time. By law there had been no massacre; rather, there had been an unfortunate incident, pitting soldiers against civilians. But most Bostonians called it a massacre before the sol- diers were prosecuted and it remained just that in their minds after the trials ended, legal outcome notwithstanding. To this day law bows to opinion on the matter. Whatever sense of justice—or injustice—that popular memory has formed about the massacre has less to do with what transpired in the courtroom than with the informal trial that occurred outside it.

Although memory of the massacre has been shaped and reshaped over the past two centuries, for most Americans it still assumes a form that John Adams would recognize and most likely find generally acceptable. Adams lived a very long time—ninety-one years—so he had many opportunities to comment on the Revolutionary America that he helped make. Looking back as the citizen of an independent republic rather than as a subject of the British crown, he singled out turning points that led to that change in identity. Thus his settling on the massacre as the foundation for future inde- pendence. But then again he pointed to other events for the same reason, one a decade earlier, when “the child independence was born,” or much earlier still, when Massachusetts was first colonized.3 This shifting about was not because Adams’s recollections were unusually faulty or his memory unnaturally selective. Adams had entered politics to defend American rights in the British empire and, before 1775, he did not intend to leave that empire to form a new nation. With the advantage of hindsight he thought he could see how one led inexorably to the other, for him and for thousands more who joined him as revolutionaries.

Adams once claimed that the massacre was more important to the American revolutionary movement than the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Burgoyne’s defeat, or Cornwallis’s surrender.4 Whether it truly was or not is debatable, at best. Nevertheless, there was indeed a direct link between the events of March 5, 1770 and July 4, 1776, which some astute observers in Britain and the colonies had foreseen and yet seemed unable to prevent.

IMPERIAL AUTHORITY AND PROVINCIAL AUTONOMY Boston’s massacre is a perfect example of how difficult it can be to dis- tinguish cause from effect. The massacre became both simultaneously, as the effect of prior events and the cause of others that would follow. Likewise the massacre resulted from developments peculiar to Boston and developments that could be traced elsewhere in the British empire, as colonies and mother country clashed over nagging questions—of respon- sibility and right, of liberty and authority, of supremacy and subordination. These questions had been raised from the earliest days of settlement, though they were addressed sporadically and rarely answered to anyone’s lasting satisfaction. Added to these issues were concerns less obviously political, pitting merchants wanting to expand their overseas trade network against imperial authorities trying to contain their activities. Equally as real, if less tangible, was the problem of colonists living in societies of their own making, with transatlantic attachments that, for many, weakened with time.

4 • Context

Eighteenth-century Britain lay claim to an overseas empire produced by a consistent underlying logic, but it had not been built according to a careful blueprint. That logic had been neatly expressed by Richard Hakluyt and other promoters a generation before Boston, founded in 1630, even existed.5

In their minds overseas empire was a matter of necessity, not choice, if the then still lowly England wanted to survive in a perennial balance of power competition that pitted one ambitious nation against another. Colonies stimulated trade, trade generated wealth, wealth produced power, and power enabled a nation to dominate its rivals—with Spain’s rise to international prominence as proof. For that to happen in England the men behind imperial expansion believed that exports should exceed imports to preserve what they considered a favorable balance of trade. The resulting profits would fill public and private coffers, enabling investors to expand their operations and generate even more wealth, while also enabling govern- ment to field troops and launch fleets to protect and expand the nation’s investments.

The mercantilistic notion that underlay empire-building—the idea that colonies existed to benefit their mother country and that the wealth they produced should work to the mother country’s advantage—appears simple enough but it did not, in and of itself, dictate any prescribed set of policies. Hakluyt contended that Elizabethan England, just venturing out into the Atlantic, ought to have a blue water navy to protect the merchant vessels carrying trade goods between mother country and colonies, with com- petitors being kept from sharing the wealth and power carried on that transoceanic highway. How that objective was to be reached through actual policy proved complicated. Hakluyt’s vision of England as master of over- seas empire was necessarily vague. It was one thing to say that every colony ought to complement the general view; it was quite another to adapt each colony to its particular circumstances while keeping that general view in sight.

From the beginning some colonies fit into the imperial patchwork better than others. All of the colonies founded on the mainland of North America that joined Massachusetts in revolting against the empire in 1775, from Virginia as the first settled in 1607 to Georgia as the last in 1733, had one thing in common: charters from the crown stating the conditions under which they were to be developed. Virtually every one of those charters guaranteed colonists the “rights of Englishmen.” They did not, however, necessarily stipulate what those rights were. Nor did London treat those charters as fundamental law, the equivalent of constitutions. They were granted by the crown and could be vacated through a legal proceeding or simply be set aside—instances of both occurred over the decades. Though some colonies were guaranteed a representative assembly, even

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 5

those with that guarantee did not have specified what sort of legislation fell within provincial purview and what remained the domain of crown and Parliament. All too often colonial assemblies ended up in an adversarial relationship with Whitehall and Westminster. But that was the result of reality coming into conflict with the ideal, because the original expecta- tion among English expansionists was that colonial governors, assemblies, and courts would work in concert, not at cross-purposes, with imperial authorities in London.

Free trade promises extended to the earliest adventurers for English overseas empire like John Cabot were retracted once that empire took on real importance and the New World began to assume a larger role in English strategic thinking. What became the navigation system—acts of Parliament intended to control the flow of trade goods within the empire —first emerged during the Cromwellian interregnum in the 1650s.6 A further elaboration came with restoration of the monarchy when Charles II took the throne in 1660, showing that, on a most basic level, Cavalier and Roundhead had not been so far apart in their imperial designs. Nor did the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 change things much when James II was turned out in favor of his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William. They ended the failed experiment in imperial reorganization that had come just a few years before with the Dominion of New England—never to be attempted again—but they did not reject the mercantilistic thinking that underlay it.7 Even as they allowed the Dominion to be dismantled they revamped the administrative agencies set up to act as watchdogs over colonial affairs. With their concurrence, Parliament added to navigation acts that already restricted trade to English (broadened to include colonial) vessels and expanded the list of enumerated articles—goods that had to come from within the system or be banned.8

Smuggling ran rampant through the now far-flung empire, even in England itself, so imperial administrators felt pressured to tighten enforce- ment and reduce the revenue, both public and private, lost to illicit trade.9

Hence by century’s end the customs inspectors that patrolled colonial docks and searched colonial warehouses as officers of the Treasury in London, and vice-admiralty judges who heard smuggling cases in the colonies as an extension of the Admiralty court system in England.

Vice-admiralty courts in the colonies underscored the Catch-22 of imperial enforcement: allowing trade to follow its own course meant that money seeped out to commercial rivals and potential enemies like France or Spain; attempts to force trade into certain channels might curtail the smuggling, but at a substantial political as well as financial loss. Vice- admiralty justices were royal appointees who acted as judge and jury

6 • Context

combined in the trials of accused smugglers. They shared jurisdiction with common-law courts in the colonies, where local juries decided innocence or guilt, in some instances in trials presided over by judges who were elected by the freemen of the colony. Because convictions for smuggling were rare in those common-law courts, customs collectors and inspectors took cases to the vice-admiralty courts whenever they could. The number of convic- tions did increase and revenue brought from the auction of confiscated ships and cargoes helped defray the increased costs of imperial administration brought by the new posts, but smuggling continued apace and local resent- ment burned deep. What to London might have appeared an unavoidable adjustment to local circumstance—bringing lawbreakers to justice—could, in colonial eyes, have been seen as an attempt to circumvent legal custom— the sanctity of a jury trial—in order to achieve the desired political and financial outcome.10

Even in colonies like Rhode Island, where all the highest offices were elective, governors and judges were supposed to be representatives of the crown as well as the people, symbols of imperial power as well as of provincial authority. It was a dual identity that could be difficult to maintain in time of crisis. The same was true even in colonies like Massachusetts where, since the replacement charter granted in 1691, the governor was a crown appointee. He was nonetheless expected to serve the people of the colony as well as the monarch who appointed him. The inherent challenge of serving two masters became especially daunting when imperial and provincial interests, in theory convergent, in practice diverged.

SOLDIERS AMONG CIVILIANS The history of the British empire proves that appearances can be deceiving. Just when the empire seemed to be growing stronger it could actually be weakening from within. Such was the case in 1763, after Britain had finally beaten France in the fourth of a series of wars dating back to 1689. In the first three conflicts North America was a military sideshow. The most important fighting began and ended in Europe, and European considera- tions came first in the negotiations leading to peace. The last conflict, remembered as the French and Indian War on this side of the Atlantic, would be different. North American concerns were at the diplomatic and military core, determining when and how the fighting would be conducted and what would be needed to end it.

British army and naval forces had been stationed in the colonies during all three of the earlier conflicts. They were deployed on a much larger scale this time around. Relations with the colonists were often strained, allies at odds with each other occasionally illustrating the old adage about

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 7

familiarity breeding contempt. British naval officers who felt that they were acting within the law when they sent out press gangs to “recruit” sailors along the colonial waterfront found that locals were convinced they did not. On occasion the locals even drove the “recruiters” back to their ships. British army officers who thought they were within their rights in issuing commands to the local militia and requisitioning supplies from local provisioners found that they too ran afoul of accepted practice. Supplies could be slow in coming or not provided at all. General Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the combined British and colonial forces, was typical of the regular army officer who disliked working with provincial leaders, who, from his perspective, put colony over empire. Theirs was hardly a smooth working relationship. Likewise for his predecessors in the early stages of the war.

With the fall of New France and the French eliminated as the primary enemy to the north and west after 1763, colonies and mother country only had each other left to blame for whatever problems of empire might remain. As a French diplomat observed to an English friend:

You are happy in the cession of Canada: we, perhaps, ought to think ourselves happy that you have acquired it. Delivered from a neighbour whom they have always feared, your other colonies will soon discover, that they stand no longer in need of your protection. You will call on them to contribute toward supporting the burthen which they have helped to bring on you, they will answer you by shaking off all dependence.11

It was a perceptive, even prophetic, observation. Before being relieved of command Amherst had recommended that a sizeable contingent of regulars be kept on in the colonies, primarily for “frontier” duty in an arc from the Ohio country through Canada to Nova Scotia, but also in case they were needed closer to the seaboard “to retain the Inhabitants of our antient Provinces in a State of Constitutional Dependance upon Great Britain.”12

That no troops would be so deployed for another five years—and then to Boston, thus setting the scene for the massacre—is less important than the fact that such use had been contemplated before the postwar surge of legislation that prompted it even passed Parliament.

Colonists who resented the presence of professional soldiers among them came by that feeling honestly, the result of experience reinforcing inheritance. Cromwell’s “New Model Army” during the Civil War not- withstanding, England had had no true standing army until after the restoration of the monarchy. The 1689 Bill of Rights would proclaim “That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against law.”13 Even then the

8 • Context

army’s existence was problematical, legal in the sense that the crown asked for it and Parliament funded it, but perhaps unconstitutional because it went against ancient custom.14

Cromwell had sent soldiers briefly to Virginia in the 1650s and regulars were in the expedition that seized New Netherland from the Dutch in the 1660s. Nonetheless the first redcoats in the mainland colonies long enough to get a taste of the suspicions that could lead to resentment did not arrive until January 1677. They had been sent out to quell civil unrest among white settlers, not separate Indians from whites on the frontier. Those troops—a full regiment, with artillery—had been dispatched by London once it received word of Bacon’s rebellion. By the time they arrived in Virginia, Bacon was dead and order had been restored. Virginians met Colonel Herbert Jeffreys and his men with that combination of “hostility or indifference” that would mark local reaction virtually every time the colonists found regulars stationed among them.

Just over two decades later, in April 1689, the hostility was even more pronounced, this time in Massachusetts. There irate Bostonians seized and imprisoned officials of the Dominion of New England in a “bloodless coup.”15 Those officials included not only the governor, Edmund Andros, but officers in the army and Royal Navy, and officials in the customs service. Disaffected town and province leaders had formed a council of safety to take charge, Boston’s militia had mustered to the beat of their drum, and ultimately Andros and the others chose to surrender peaceably rather than resist. Upon hearing of what had happened in Boston, dissident New Yorkers did the same with imperial officials posted there. Like their Boston counterparts, they claimed to be acting in the names of William and Mary, the new monarchs. Neither could be sure of London’s reaction. The rebellious colonists knew that William and Mary had landed in England and that James II abdicated his throne on their approach. They could not yet know if William and Mary had established their legitimacy, nor could they know what the new monarchs would do with the Dominion of New England.

Fortunately for peace within the empire, William and Mary did not reestablish the Dominion. Interestingly enough, the end of the Dominion did not spell an end to the careers of men who held office in it. Andros would return as governor of Virginia. His lieutenant governor in the Dominion, Francis Nicholson, would also hold that post, as well as the governorship of Maryland. Customs official Edward Randolph also returned, with a promotion, to the new post of surveyor general of the customs. Andros and Nicholson were both professional soldiers but that did not prevent their holding civilian posts in the empire—indeed, Jeffreys had temporarily acted as governor of Virginia during his stay.

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 9

So, when Massachusetts patriots complained in 1774 that General Thomas Gage had been made their governor while he still acted as commander-in- chief of British army forces in North America, what they protested as a dangerous innovation was in fact a revival of an old tradition. After all, Andros’s full title in the Dominion had been governor, captain-general, and vice-admiral. Andros’s civilian successor under a Massachusetts freed from the Dominion had the same ceremonial title bestowed on him. The empire had never been solely a commercial entity, with trade as its only concern; it had also been an extension of English (and after 1707, with the union of the English and Scottish parliaments, British) power, so there were times over the decades when colonies bore aspects of garrison government.16

Soldiers and sailors came and went; military officers held significant posts; the navigation system had its strategic as well as its trade component.

That the Royal Navy and eventually the army would be asked to help guarantee the integrity of that system in response to widespread smuggling should not be all that surprising.17 “We observe with concern that through Neglect, Connivance and Fraud,” complained the Treasury in October 1763, that “not only the Revenue is impaired, but the Commerce of the Colonies is diverted from its natural Course and the salutary Provisions of many wise Laws to secure it to the Mother Country are in great Measure defeated.”18

Legislation commencing the next year to tighten enforcement essentially activated what had long lain dormant. Many colonists would contend that smuggling had restored trade to, not diverted it from, its “natural Course.” Accordingly, they did not think the navigation laws “wise” at all. The stage for transatlantic confrontation was being set.

The resulting legislation—which included the controversial Stamp Act of 1765—was not, as some historians would have it, intended to pay off the national debt. No one charged with running the empire was that naive. The debt had effectively doubled because of the French and Indian War, from some £75 million to roughly £140 million. Prewar income from all sources had been approximately £10 million per year. Annual spending had ranged close to £8 million. Combined with £5 million in annual interest on the debt, that put total yearly expenses at £13 million, which meant that unless crown and Parliament found new sources of revenue, Britain would spin into an endless cycle of deficit spending. Imperial authorities designed new laws to increase revenue through the navigation system so that intake could keep better pace with outflow. Since colonists on the mainland of North America were the most direct beneficiaries of French expulsion, and since they were taxed locally at a considerably lower rate than Britons, crown and Parliament determined that they ought to carry a larger share of the financial burden. Total cost for keeping troops in the colonies—which at projected full strength (never achieved) would number

10 • Context

ten thousand men in twenty regiments, was estimated to be roughly £400,000 per year. George Grenville and the solid parliamentary majority backing his program hoped that new laws like the Sugar and Stamp acts would be combined with tighter enforcement of older laws long on the books to produce about half that amount.19 Even that was too much for those who felt that London went about its fundraising programs unconsti- tutionally, even tyrannically.

But in London the prevailing view was that the navigation system could not continue as before. Costs, primarily in the form of salaries for customs agents and vice-admiralty judges, had already grown to exceed revenue by four to one—meaning that, ironically, a supposed source of income was actually a financial drain. Even without the new military expenditures, costs would rise again as new customs agents took up their posts and new vice-admiralty courts were formed, those courts empowered to prosecute violations of the Stamp Act as well as infractions of more traditional navigation acts. Estimates of losses due to congenital colonial smuggling ran into tens of thousands of pounds every year. Included in those losses was trade with the French, the ostensible enemy. Not surprisingly imperial accountants supported parliamentary attempts at behavior modification, if those changes could alter the revenue-to-spending ratio and improve the bottom line.

What looked perfectly logical and fiscally responsible in London did not appear so logical or responsible on the far side of the Atlantic. From a financial standpoint most Americans took their own experience with taxes as their frame of reference, not tax rates in Britain. They based their sense of equity on provincial, not imperial, conditions. Nor did it help that the increased taxes were for spending they did not endorse, whether it be for troops on the frontier who could be used to enforce a new policy that checked farther westward expansion or civilian officials on the seaboard who were sent out to collect taxes on trade goods. Besides, higher taxes are rarely popular at any time; they were particularly galling in the wake of a post- war economic downturn. Moreover, keen colonial observers knew that Whitehall and Westminster had a political agenda behind the financial plan: a desire to remind them of their subordinate place in the empire.

The likelihood that troops would be dispatched increased with oppo- sition to a spate of new acts passed by Parliament in 1767, known collectively as the Townshend Program. Colonial belief in a reciprocal empire, where the restrictions of the navigation system were justified as working for the greater good of the whole, had always been tenuous. Shaken during the Stamp Act crisis, that belief was shaken again with the Townshend Program.20

In yet another of those ironies that marked the coming revolution, this new program, named for Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend, was

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 11

implemented during the ministry of William Pitt, long thought by colonists to be a defender of their rights. But Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, had dis- engaged himself from parliamentary affairs and Townshend held sway. Pitt and Townshend, like virtually every public man in Britain, believed that the colonies were subordinate components of empire and that Parliament was supreme within that setting. They supported the navigation system and were convinced the colonies needed to carry more of the financial weight of empire. Nonetheless Pitt and a few others like him believed that Parliament did not have the authority to tax the colonists directly. Albeit Townshend and a comfortable majority disagreed with Pitt over the ques- tion of authority, a fair number could accept the need to placate the colonists for practical purposes.

12 • Context

Figure 1 A private in the 29th Regiment, c. 1770, as depicted by the noted artist Don Troiani. His uniform mixes elements of a pre-1768 warrant with changes made after the regiment arrived in Boston. The red regimental coat, lined in yellow, dates from before the change; his white woolen waistcoat and breeches date from after. The socket-style bayonet in his belt scabbard, with a seventeen- inch, triangular blade, was designed for the standard Brown Bess musket in his hands. This so-called “land pattern” version was just under five feet long and weighed nearly 10 pounds. The private wears an older-style cocked hat. That the eight enlisted men arrested with Preston were members of the 29th’s grenadier company does not necessarily mean that they wore their foot-high bearskin caps on the night of March 5, 1770. As Mr. Troiani notes, they did not always wear those caps for routine duties and Paul Revere—who, after all, knew the troops and their uniforms well—shows them in tricorns in his engraving. Painting by Don Troiani, www.historicalimagebank. com.

Parliament had asserted itself in the Stamp Act crisis with the Declaratory Act of March 1766, which stated that it had the authority to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”21 Nowhere is the word “tax” used—by intention, not oversight. The Declaratory Act, like so much else that became law for the empire, had a dual purpose: to dominate and conciliate simul- taneously, to confront crisis and yet at the same time avoid it. Its pairing with repeal of the Stamp Act had not been a coincidence. Even though most British politicians disliked American protests and disagreed with American assertions of right, they wanted the empire to function smoothly and if that meant finding some point at which business—public and private— could be pursued without increased political friction, so much the better. Townshend’s legislative program ought to be understood in that context and not be explained away as the manifestation of one man’s quirkiness or even duplicity. Even Townshend’s desire to create a civil list to pay the salaries of governors and some other imperial officials from the increased revenues, thus freeing them from dependence on colonial legislatures, had antecedents going back decades. All of the components to Townshend’s program passed handily through the Lords and the Commons, to be endorsed by George III.

BOSTON AS FOCAL POINT Townshend, like Grenville before him, knew full well that there was no good reason to pass legislation if it were not accompanied by stricter enforce- ment: hence our need to view the individual acts that he advocated as part of a legislative package. A new revenue statute covering tea, paper, glass, lead, and painters’ colors imported into the colonies stood at the center. Supporting legislation surrounded it, one an act that strengthened the vice- admiralty system, reorganizing existing courts and adding new ones with both original and appellate jurisdiction. Another act created an American- based board of customs that would be composed of five commissioners sent out from London to reside in Boston, where they would coordinate the efforts of customs officials posted throughout the colonies.22 “The oppres- sions the officers of the Revenue labour under in America have lately grown to such an enormous height,” Henry Hulton, one of the commissioners, sighed, “that it is become impossible for them to do their duty, not only from the outrage of Mobs, but for fear also of vexatious Suits, Verdicts, & Judgments in the Provincial Courts, and even of Criminal Prosecutions.”23

Sending Hulton and his four colleagues would not change any of that. Just the opposite; their presence only added to the general resentment, and that in colonies that still had their own legislatures and common-law courts and therefore their own notions of what was legal and just. Many of the

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 13

people they served saw smuggling as a fair response to oppressive legislation imposed from afar. They were particularly aggrieved that tea had been included among the five newly taxed imports in order to prop up the finan- cially troubled East India Company. Nor did it help that Townshend—like many of his parliamentary colleagues—was an investor in that company. That he was is no proof of corruption; rather, it is just one indicator of the difficulty of separating private interest from public good. What is incontestable is that, in the grand scheme of things and in London, the fate of the East India Company mattered more than the preferences of some disgruntled colonists on the mainland of North America.

Smuggling increased along with efforts to curtail it—a volatile, poten- tially dangerous, situation. Resentment spilled over with the Liberty incident of June 1768. Wealthy Boston merchant John Hancock owned the Liberty; in the eyes of customs officials Hancock was nothing more than a successful smuggler, whose rise in local and provincial politics proved all the more irritating. They looked for an excuse to go after him and the master of the Liberty provided it by unloading his cargo before he received proper clearance. Customs officials ordered that the Liberty be seized. As Hancock’s vessel was towed away from the dock by a British warship, a crowd set upon the customs officials, who were foolish enough to linger too long at the scene. Beaten, frightened, those officials fled to Castle William, on an island in the harbor. They entreated Governor Francis Bernard to request that troops be dispatched to restore the peace and enable them to perform their duties.24

Like the eventual massacre, the Liberty incident became both cause and effect. It resulted from pent-up hostility pitting imperial officials against local residents and it led to even more serious confrontations. Although the hostility had been growing with each new postwar act of Parliament intended to raise revenue and control trade, that hostility went back at least to the war itself, when soldiers, sailors, and imperial officials bumped up against uncooperative civilians. Those aggravations cannot be written off as some sort of temperament peculiar to Boston. New Yorkers had shown a similar tendency with the small number of troops stationed among them, just as a function of their town being the army headquarters for North America. There were the usual brawls, of course. More serious in its impli- cations, New York’s legislature had refused to provide for the troops as directed by the 1765 Quartering Act that had been introduced as part of Grenville’s program. So recalcitrant were they that the governor, Henry Moore, ended the session and sent the legislators home.25

Wisely or not, Parliament mixed in the affair by endorsing Moore’s actions and stipulating that the legislature not be reconvened until compli- ance could be secured. It thereby deepened local resentment and generated

14 • Context

sympathetic responses elsewhere in the colonies. John Dickinson, the wealthy lawyer and landowner who cast himself as a simple “Pennsylvania Farmer” in a dozen widely reprinted “letters,” presented the New York dispute as part of a larger constitutional crisis in the empire. He contended that any act of Parliament requiring a colony to house or otherwise provide for regular troops within its borders was a form of taxation and therefore unjustifiable—as unjustifiable, he added, as the entire vice-admiralty system because it encroached on the common law. Parliament’s suspending act he condemned as a blow to constitutional liberty. Even though Moore had the authority to prorogue the legislature, Parliament, Dickinson contended, had no authority to interfere in the dispute.

Dickinson blended these complaints with his condemnation of Townshend’s new duties as unconstitutional, a “most dangerous innova- tion,”26 because they were intended to raise revenue, not simply regulate trade. That made what Townshend did every bit as bad as what Grenville had attempted with his Stamp Act. To acquiesce in such an abuse of authority, Dickinson told readers, would be tantamount to voluntarily becoming slaves. As Dickinson saw it, the constitutionality or unconsti- tutionality of any parliamentary act depended on the intentions behind it. By arguing intent, Dickinson went well beyond the taxation versus legislation distinction that some on both sides of the Atlantic had made, moving into a realm where elusive answers to hard questions could become utterly impossible to find.

Two considerations ought to be kept in mind here. First, Dickinson’s linkage of the otherwise unconnected lent itself to conspiratorial fears: among colonists who imputed the worst motives to imperial administrators and parliamentary leaders, and among a growing number of Britons who viewed colonial dissent in the same light.27 Dickinson is often labeled a conservative and he later dragged his feet when it came to declaring inde- pendence. Even so, despite his call for conciliation on both sides and despite his disdain for “inflammatory measures” by either, he also warned that “whoever seriously considers the matter must perceive that a dreadful stroke is aimed at the liberty of these colonies.”28 That was hardly the language to check the spread of conspiracy theories.

Second, Dickinson’s view was at once formative and reflective, playing a part, notably, in the Massachusetts legislature’s February 1768 resolution on rights in the empire that was circulated to other colonial assemblies, hoping that they would endorse them. That in turn prompted the Earl of Hillsborough, first in the new office of secretary of state for American affairs, to instruct governors not to countenance such resolutions and to prorogue those legislatures who did. Bernard took that tack with the Massachusetts General Court when the lower house refused to rescind its letter. To the

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 15

general public, the men behind the letter were already heroes; Bernard turned them into political martyrs.29

Hillsborough and others in key positions of power in London had started talking about using troops to quell colonial disturbances months before they learned of the Liberty affair—because of what Dickinson wrote to such popular acclaim, because of what transpired in the Massachusetts lower house, because of warnings from Governor Bernard and General Gage to Whitehall that it would lose what little control it had left if it did not act decisively, because of the repeated attempts to intimidate imperial officials, because of countless small incidents that were now having a larger cumulative effect. And because in so many minds Boston had been at the center of civil disobedience since the Stamp Act crisis, because Boston had had a reputation for being a problem child in the imperial family since the first generation of Puritan divines who founded it, Whitehall decided that the troops would go there, not to Philadelphia, the home of John Dickinson, nor to New York City, where the local legislators had thumbed their noses at the army.30 It would prove to be a singularly poor choice.

Governor Bernard disingenuously distanced himself from that decision.31

Anticipating how violent local reaction could be to the news that troops were coming, he was emphatic that he had not requested that they be sent. While technically that may have been true, it was not true in any meaningful sense. Bernard, more than perhaps anyone else in the colonies, had given credence to the notion that Massachusetts was becoming ungovernable because Boston was a law unto itself, and until Boston was controlled, no imperial official could do the king’s bidding or uphold acts of Parliament.32 Bernard wanted the troops close by; he just did not want to be blamed for their being sent. He fooled no one among his political opponents in Boston.

And yet Bernard’s fears for the future of imperial authority were not groundless. When the Boston town meeting heard that troops were on the way it called upon other Massachusetts towns to send delegates to a special convention—in Boston itself, right under Bernard’s nose. Over two hundred delegates from nearly one hundred towns throughout the province came

16 • Context

Figure 2 (opposite) Paul Revere’s engraving of the troops landing at the long wharf in Boston on October 1, 1768. King Street started where the wharf ended, and led to the town house. Faneuil Hall is the second prominent structure to the right. Hancock’s dock, with buildings on it and ships around it, is also to the right. Christian Remick designed the scene and then colored it on paper after Revere did the engraving work on a copper plate. Revere printed the engraving after—and because of—the massacre, although he had had something like it in the works before then, and Remick had first done his drawing as early as the previous October. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 3 Boston, c. 1774, by John Hinton. A great advantage of this map is that important structures are easy to find on it. The town house is marked (A) on King Street, as the thoroughfare extends from the long wharf. Faneuil Hall is also identifiable (G), as are the court house and jail (M). Dock Square is just to the left of Faneuil Hall; Murray’s barracks sat between Dock Square and Hanover Street. John Adams lived on Queen Street, just past the town house; Edes and Gill printed the Boston Gazette just a few doors farther along from Adams (near the 8). Hutchinson’s house was in north Boston (near the H). King’s Chapel, Boston’s Anglican church, is at C; the Old South congregational meeting house is at I, with the congregational First Church or

“Old Brick” meeting house at B. Both sections of the “Old Wharf” shown on the map were apparently no longer standing in 1770. The Liberty Tree is placed incorrectly on the Common; it was actually down near the intersection of Newberry (Newbury) and Essex streets (whereas the “Great Elm” was indeed on the Common). The great disadvantage of this map is that it gives no sense of the hustle and bustle of the town, with many people crammed into a small amount of space where streets are here drawn so neatly. Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center of the Boston Public Library.

that September. They broke no law by meeting. Their gathering was extra- legal rather than illegal, held in a political gray area that would prove to be essential to what evolved into the revolutionary movement. Individual delegates reaffirmed their rights and condemned the stationing of regulars among them. Some resolved to stop the troops from landing, even if it cost their lives. Formally the convention did not resolve to do much of any- thing. The first troops arrived as it adjourned—two regiments from nearby Halifax, Nova Scotia, with another two from Ireland soon to follow. Perhaps with discretion being the better part of valor, the people of Boston chose to do nothing; perhaps the reality of facing regular troops, supported by the guns of the Royal Navy, sank in; perhaps there were those who under- stood that they could better cast themselves as victims, and the imperial authorities as victimizers, if they could be seen as taking the high moral ground. So, on October 1, 1768, the regulars came ashore at the long wharf and paraded up King Street, colors flying and drums beating, past sullen, mostly silent, and—for the moment—unresisting townsfolk.

The Quartering Act, passed in 1765, was still in effect and what had bothered New Yorkers would also irritate Bostonians, but on a larger scale because many more troops were involved and they were posted there for a different reason.33 The act did not oblige private residents to house soldiers in their homes or in any building on their property then in use. There had been those in Parliament who wanted to include private dwellings, but they were outvoted by others who disliked the implications for Britain—and any perceived assault on the 1689 Bill of Rights—even if they did not ordinarily sympathize with colonial protests. But the act was still problematic because it put pressure on both local and provincial officials to accommodate soldiers in their midst at a time when they saw no need for their presence— indeed, when their presence seemed to be a violation of fundamental rights. The owners of unoccupied private buildings would be compensated for their use and reimbursed for various expenses incurred in providing for the troops, but imperial authorities expected the province to absorb those costs as a public expense. The province would reimburse private parties, but would itself receive no reimbursement from London. Warehouse owners who did not want to rent to the army, even if the premises were unoccupied, local constables who were expected to assist in the process, even members of the general population who were not directly involved, could join the ranks of the disgruntled.

Violence in the wake of the regulars’ arrival in Boston did not surprise Benjamin Franklin when it finally erupted. He had not always guessed right when it came to colonial reaction to imperial policy—failing to anticipate, for example, the vehement adverse response to the Stamp Act—but he well understood the deep-seated antipathy to professional soldiers. Residing

20 • Context

in London and called upon to testify before the House of Commons in February 1766 as an expert witness, Franklin had predicted that British troops sent to pacify American civilians would “not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”34 Franklin spoke with the Stamp Act in mind, knowing that a frustrated Grenville had contemplated sending soldiers to enforce it. Angered by the protest against his program, at that point Grenville was confident that the regulars would serve as both symbolic and real proof of parliamentary supremacy and British sovereignty. He later changed his mind. Not convinced that Townshend had chosen the right legislative course, he did not think the timing for a show of force was right in 1768. Perhaps Franklin’s words had found their mark.

The men of the 14th and 29th regiments who marched proudly up the long wharf found themselves in a town that was essentially self-governing, virtually autonomous from provincial or imperial control. Sixteen thousand people were crowded onto part of a peninsula that sprouted above a narrow neck jutting from the mainland. Boston’s east side in particular could be a bustling, jostling place—a seaport with busy docks, wharves, warehouses, and shops. The town meeting ran local affairs, with freemen voting for those who would represent them in the lower house of the General Court, various town officers, and, most importantly, the selectmen who acted as an executive committee on town business. Many of those who rose to power in the province did so first through the town, Samuel Adams perhaps fore- most among them. Political caucuses like the Loyal Nine and political action groups like the Sons of Liberty played a role in shaping Revolutionary Boston, though none rivaled the town meeting in importance.35 Merchants, wealthy and middling, dockworkers, even apprentices formed their own ad hoc groups as well, which only compounded the problems of social control in the event of a political dispute. Imperial officials found this situation difficult to accept and yet they made no significant attempt to change it until 1774. By then it was far too late.

Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, commander of the newly arrived troops, got his first taste of town power almost immediately. Governor Bernard wanted the troops billeted in the town proper. Town leaders, pointing to the wording of the 1765 Quartering Act, objected that all avail- able barracks should be filled first and there were hundreds of empty beds at Castle William—over two miles away across the harbor but technically within the town’s limits. The governor’s Council, which doubled as the upper house of the General Court, concurred with the town. That it, the lower house, and the town meeting routinely agreed on political issues was part and parcel of the imperial dispute. When Bernard arrived as governor in 1760 the Council sided with him as often as it went against him. An Englishman, he had already spent years in the colonies as governor of

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 21

New Jersey. With the Stamp Act crisis and subsequent events, he found himself losing the Council’s support. Instead, on questions pitting provincial over imperial preferences the General Court presented a more united front, with the town’s backing—and vice versa. It had not always been that way but disputes with London drove them closer together. Bernard became so alienated and isolated that he had been looking to put Massachusetts behind him ever since.

It did not help that Bernard told Dalrymple he could bivouac at least some of his troops in the town house36 on King Street and nearby Faneuil Hall—temporarily, anyway—until more permanent accommodations could be located. Given the wording of the Quartering Act, there was never a question of imposing them on private homeowners or the owners of other buildings without compensation. Bernard thought that Dalrymple could also put some of his men in the manufactory house, built at public expense

22 • Context

Figure 4 Charles Coleman’s twentieth-century painting of the Old State House and State Street, when they were still the town house and King Street. Coleman’s rendition of the surrounding buildings and their facades may not be terribly accurate, but, from the angle that he took, it shows proportions nicely, notably the size of people in relation to structures, and the distance from the custom house, on the right, to the town house at the center. The First Church or “Old Brick” meeting house is to the left rear; the cupola of the court house and jail are visible to the right, opposite. Courtesy of the Bostonian Society/Old State House Museum.

over a decade before to teach the textiles trade to the poor. That experiment in job-training had ended but there were still some tenants who paid rent and others who exercised squatter’s rights. Bernard wanted them all evicted; town officials countered that the building belonged to the town, not the province, and they disagreed with his plan. A sheriff and deputies that Bernard sent to clear the building were pushed back by those inside. Soldiers sent by Dalrymple surrounded the building but did not otherwise interfere. Crowds jeered and taunted them. The impasse lasted a couple of weeks, until other arrangements had been made. This was not an auspicious beginning.

It took over a month but Dalrymple moved the men in the town house and Faneuil Hall to other quarters. He also got those camping in tents on the Common indoors before the onset of winter—and in time to house the 64th and 65th regiments when they arrived from Ireland in November as well. But his troops were not in formal cantonment. They were scattered about town, in rented space, the enlisted men in converted warehouses, the officers usually with better accommodations in boarding houses as well as private residences. This was not a situation conducive to effective control or proper discipline.

Initially Dalrymple was more concerned with desertion than he was with the snide remarks and irritating behavior of the locals. He had to post a guard on the Neck, not to control civilian traffic, but to catch deserters, who would disappear into the countryside if they could. Confrontations erupted between soldiers and civilians: fist fights, lawsuits, the usual fare—not unexpected when nearly two thousand regulars lived in close proximity to people who were ambivalent at best about their presence among them. Not every Bostonian objected to the troops’ presence, not least because of the cash they brought into the local economy. But enough townsmen were aggravated that relations were never smooth and there was a constant campaign in the press to have the troops removed.37 Some off-duty soldiers sought part-time civilian jobs to supplement their pay. That put them in competition with local workers, which may have made those workers sympathetic to political and constitutional arguments that otherwise held little appeal. “Here Americans you may behold some of the first fruits springing up from that root of bitterness a standing army,” one piece harangued readers. “Troops are quartered upon us in a time of peace, on pretence of preserving order in a town that was as orderly before their arrival as any one large town in the whole extent of his Majesty’s domin- ions.”38 The lower house of the General Court protested formally that “the experience of ages is sufficient to convince, that the military power is ever dangerous, and subversive of free constitutions.”39

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 23

THE MASSACRE The direst predictions did not come true, so within six months London decided that the 64th and 65th regiments could be better used back in Ireland. Bernard (soon to depart town himself), the customs commis- sioners, other imperial officials, and even some well-heeled locals did not want any of them to leave, however—despite the fact that the soldiers had very little to do, besides guarding a few buildings and policing each other. They were not an army of occupation and there was no martial law. They did not even displace the local constables. They were not to be called out unless there was a public disturbance of some sort and then only at the request of a local official.

The rules had been established in a Riot Act passed by the General Court in 1751, which was adapted from the 1714 Riot Act for England still in force there. Once any group of a dozen or more men “arm’d with clubs or other weapons” or a group of fifty or more unarmed men had “riotously or tumultuously assembled,” they could be ordered to disperse. In both statutes the authorized officials included justices of the peace and sheriffs; in the Massachusetts version a militia officer could do so as well. Citing “our sovereign lord the king” as authority, that official could command “all persons assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business.” The crowd had one hour from that point to disperse. If it had not dispersed by then, deadly force could be used by those who in effect were deputized by the official in charge—which implicitly could include regular soldiers. If any in the crowd were killed, those who slew them would be “indemnified and held guiltless.”40

But then there was this pressing question: how likely was it that any town official would use the Riot Act to empower the soldiers to act as policemen? The act had not been used to protect the customs commissioners during the Liberty riot, before the troops landed. Then the town militia would have been mobilized to disperse the crowd—and no doubt some of the militia- men were themselves part of that very crowd. Bernard and other imperial officials knew that it was as unlikely—even if for different reasons—that any local official would call on the regulars for help but, as they saw it, it was better to have the soldiers around than not there at all. They might cause the unruly to think twice before starting trouble; then again, their very presence could be the cause of trouble. If nothing else, soldiers—like other men—had the right of self-defense and could kill in order to save their own lives. Before the night of March 5, 1770 that last extremity had never been reached—not even close to it, really.

What is notable is that bringing regular troops to Boston had not changed the balance of power within the town. Customs collectors were still often

24 • Context

afraid to do their jobs and Bernard could not promise them effective protection. The soldiers themselves often felt victimized, since local justices of the peace rarely found in their favor when they took their civil disputes with Bostonians to court or found themselves the subject of minor criminal prosecutions.41 Thus, rather than think of Boston as an occupied town, with a mental image of soldiers on every street corner, it would be more accurate to think of those who were supposedly in control as increasingly powerless and themselves under siege. Imperial authority was all but impotent and the price of trying to change that dynamic might well have been higher than anyone was willing to pay.

Hutchinson and the others may have decided to avoid a disturbance of the public peace. Perhaps in a sense they hid behind the law, choosing to accept the social circumstances rather than try to use the law to alter them. In effect they accommodated themselves to a situation they wished they could change but feared they could not. It was not the first time; nor would it be the last, as the aftermath to the massacre shows.

Even though customs officials did not collect the Townshend duties zeal- ously, the law was on the books and Townshend had called for the creation of a civil list to pay the salaries of imperial officials from its proceeds. He therefore managed to link colonial political and economic issues, which stoked deepening resentment and growing fear that worse lay ahead. It was in this heightened state of anxiety that Ebenezer Richardson became a lightning rod for local fury. Richardson, a minor employee of and some- time informant for the customs service, fired into a crowd that gathered around his house, thereby killing Christopher Seider, a boy of eleven or twelve. The incident occurred in February 1770, with a trial scheduled for April. Seider became a martyr to many in town, an incarnation of the innocent suffering at the hands of lawless power—a tenuous connection, but no less real for it. Protesters against unpopular imperial policies turned his funeral into a grand spectacle that only served to keep people on edge.42

Meanwhile, the recurring affrays between soldiers and civilians took on more symbolic importance as tensions heightened in the town. On Friday, March 2, an off-duty soldier from the 29th Regiment got into a fight at John Gray’s ropewalk. When he returned from his barracks with some friends to try to even the score, they too were pummeled and chased off. Tempers simmered over the weekend and flared the following Monday, March 5. Some who were involved in the fisticuffs at the ropewalk would meet again with more deadly consequences later that day.43

What happened was a point of contention then and remains so now. Any account that smooths over contradictions and fills in gaps defeats the purpose of revisiting the massacre. The gaps and contradictions are indispensable reminders of the difficulty of reconstructing the past from a

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 25

fragmentary record—a universal problem in historical explanation rather than something unique to the massacre.44

What can be said without much danger of controversy is that what happened on King Street that evening was part of a larger disturbance that began hours before. Soldiers and civilians in search of trouble found it and there were dozens of confrontations involving just one or two on either side, or a cluster from both. No firearms and only occasionally edged weapons were used in these earlier incidents. Most used cudgels and canes, staves and fists. Men roamed about, crowds formed then dissolved, with eruptions first on one street or adjoining alleyway, then another.

In the midst of all of this a lone sentry stood guard outside the custom house on King Street. It was by then a cold, moonlit night, with a solid coat of snow on the ground and icicles hanging from the eaves of the buildings lining both sides of the street. The sentry apparently exchanged insults with a passing apprentice, sharp words related to a purportedly unpaid bill owed by a British officer to another apprentice—on such small personal disputes could larger political events turn in the tension-filled town. The sentry struck the apprentice with the butt of his musket. Other young men clustered about and taunted the sentry; a crowd began to gather, including adult Bostonians drawn by the commotion. The sentry called for help from the main guard that was within sight up the street, across from the town house.

Officer of the day Captain Thomas Preston could see what was brewing from the main guard station, just fifty paces or so away. He formed a relief party, with bayonets fixed but guns not loaded, pushed through the growing crowd to the sentry, but then could not get back out. They formed a rough semicircle, with the custom house at their backs. The crowd pressed in, the soldiers loaded their muskets, shoving and shouting increased, one shot rang out, then others in a ragged volley. Civilians fell in the snow. The soldiers reloaded and stood their ground as the dead and wounded were carried off, and most of the crowd scattered.

Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell all perished on King Street. Samuel Maverick died a few hours later after being carried to his mother’s home. Patrick Carr, who was shot through the hip and had part of his spine torn away, lingered, most painfully, until March 14. A half-dozen more were wounded, some quite seriously.45

As men who had been in the crowd removed the killed and wounded from the bloody scene, lingering townsfolk warned Preston that enraged locals numbering in the thousands would converge on King Street to exact their revenge. He knew before he set forth with his relief party that troops could not perform any police functions unless authorized by the proper civilian authorities. He also believed that the danger faced by the sentry

26 • Context

overrode those considerations if threats had indeed been made against his life. In his subsequent trial, much would hinge on whether he could prove after the fact that the sentry’s life had truly been in mortal peril and that, once he and his men arrived, their peril was as great.

Common law encompassed the right of self-defense but taking a life —committing either a “justifiable” or an “excusable” homicide—could be difficult either to justify or to excuse, doubly so for soldiers who had gone among civilians.46 Preston successfully took the sentry, Private Hugh White, under his protection, though by going to White he precipitated the clash that left three civilians dead and more than twice that number wounded, two of them mortally. He and his men were, by contrast, virtually unscathed.

Even though deciding against leaving a reinforced detail outside the custom house, Preston had no intention of fleeing back to the main guard station and closing the door behind him. He marched his party back up the street, ordered more soldiers out and formed them in ranks, muskets loaded and primed, bayonets fixed, facing out between the main guard and the town house. He had mustered most of the 29th Regiment, billeted not far away on Brattle Street. The 14th Regiment remained in other barracks but under arms. Preston notified Dalrymple, commander of the 14th Regiment and overall commander of the regulars in Boston, of his dispositions, as well as Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Carr, his immediate superior. He could guess that the threat that thousands were gathering to kill him and every man with him was just so much bluster, borne of the fear and frustration of the moment. But he also knew that there could be hundreds coming for him, that they would probably be armed with muskets and pistols—not just the canes and clubs of the earlier crowd—and that what was already an ugly incident could become decidedly uglier if seven hundred scattered regulars, with no clear line of defense, were pitted against Bostonians and neighboring townsmen.

But aside from some scuffling here and there, no further incident occurred. Summoned from his home in the north end, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, filling in for the departed (and never to return) Bernard, rushed to the scene. He managed to calm the threatening crowd, then persuaded the soldiers to return to barracks and the crowd to disperse when he promised that the soldiers involved would be identified, arrested, and subjected to provincial law.

Preston surrendered himself some time after midnight. Eight soldiers identified as having been with him (the sentry White included) turned themselves in the next morning. Perhaps one hundred townsmen milled about in the wee hours before dawn as local magistrates interviewed Preston and a few who claimed to be eyewitnesses. The rest of the townsfolk

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 27

had gone home, possibly even to bed. In other words, a modicum of trust remained.47 No doubt it had been a near thing—a very near thing. But it appears that for every British soldier itching for a fight or every local tough looking to let slip the dogs of war, there were even more looking for an excuse not to shed any more blood. That sentiment would only grow stronger between the massacre and the trials.

THE TRIALS Hutchinson convened his council—eight members attending—the morning after the massacre, the first of what would be two meetings that day. William Dalrymple and Maurice Carr joined them for the second meeting, as did Captain Benjamin Caldwell of HMS Rose, the only warship then in the harbor. At the same moment that they met in the town house the selectmen convened a town meeting in Faneuil Hall. The town demanded that all of the troops—both the 14th and the 29th regiments—be removed from the town proper to Castle William. Indicative of a confused chain of command, Hutchinson replied that he could not order the troops out. Dalrymple at first wanted his men to be confined to barracks, at most; eventually he consented to the demands of the town, backed by Hutchinson’s own council.48

Within less than a week the 29th Regiment had departed for the castle and the 14th followed in short order. The day after the council meeting town selectmen again called upon Hutchinson, this time in their capacity as militia officers: Colonel Joshua Henshaw, Colonel Joseph Jackson, and Major John Ruddock. They wanted him to authorize them to form a militia watch to secure the town and prevent any further disturbances while the regulars prepared to transfer to the castle. Convinced that they did not need Hutchinson’s permission to patrol their own town, they had already formed an impromptu watch the night before.49

Hutchinson probably felt as much pressure from this courtesy call as he did in dealing with the British military. Dalrymple and Carr had gone along to preserve the public peace. They did not believe Preston guilty of anything prosecutable and were convinced that the townsmen were using the incident as a pretext to get the troops out of the province altogether. Hutchinson told his visitors to do as they thought best, but unofficially, as town leaders, not militia officers. He did not want it said in London that he had raised the militia to show the king’s soldiers the way out of the king’s province. Presumably he calmed Dalrymple, who for the next several days had to look at musket-toting townsmen patrolling the streets while his men paced in their barracks. When the last troops left for the castle—at a fairly leisurely pace, unmarred by any incident—the patrols ended, as if to underscore the town meeting’s claim that the troops had been the source of trouble, not

28 • Context

the means to end it. Peace had been restored; it would not be broken again any time soon.

Hutchinson still feared for the worst. “Our people are as infatuated as they were in the times of the Witchcraft,” he lamented.50 “I have only the Shadow of Power,” he complained to Hillsborough; “the authority of government is gone in all matters wherein the Controversy between the Kingdom and the Colonies is concerned.”51 Preston had not helped matters. Upon his arrest he had spoken well of the town. After a little time in jail he spoke more harshly in an account that he sent privately to London, only for it to find its way back to the Boston press.52 Gage, who initially approved complete withdrawal to the castle, changed his mind and urged Dalyrmple to delay transferring the 14th Regiment as long as he could, then returned to his original stance. He could shrug his shoulders, telling him- self it was too late to do anything differently—whether it was the soldiers being removed from town or Preston and the eight soldiers being held in jail. Preston and the others, the general realized, were beyond his reach once they surrendered themselves to civilian authorities. Besides, they may well have broken Massachusetts law so they could justifiably face a trial before the province’s Superior Court.53

Hutchinson bought Preston and the enlisted men some breathing space by seeing to it that any forthcoming trial was postponed, hoping that, with time, calmer heads would prevail. Thus a judicial term ended in June with no trial. So too the term scheduled to begin in August. Preston was not arraigned until September and finally tried in October. Still anticipating disaster, Hutchinson had made arrangements with imperial authorities to intercede should Preston—or the others—be found guilty. Ready to use the excuse that the king’s pleasure ought to be known before anyone was executed, Hutchinson could hand down a reprieve and await a royal pardon, then try to slip the condemned out of the province altogether.54

Hillsborough, the American secretary, admonished Hutchinson to do all of this “in a prudent and constitutional” manner and not add to the “phrenzy” that the king’s men thought gripped Boston.55 Whether he would have been able to do so is moot. The point is that he did not even have to make the attempt. During the months between the incident and the trials a rough type of justice was already being worked out, though what seems obvious now was hardly apparent then.

It was not apparent then because the coroner’s inquests had been completed, indictments had been issued, and a full-blown war of words had erupted between those who felt the soldiers were guilty of murder and those who believed they had acted in self-defense. The inquests determined that the five dead fell from bullets fired by soldiers of the 29th Regiment. The most irate of them ruled that the victims had been slain “wilfully

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 29

and feloniously” and another stipulated that the killing had occurred at Preston’s order.56

The first four to die were interred together at town expense on March 8 in the Old Granary burying ground, all eulogized as “unhappy Victims” of a “bloody Massacre.” Shops throughout Boston and neighboring towns closed and church bells tolled for the late Thursday afternoon proceed- ings. Each body rode in its own hearse, those in the procession so numerous that they walked six abreast, the “principal Gentry” following behind in carriages. One observer guessed that some ten thousand participated as mourners or onlookers.57 The four deceased had become martyrs in the cause of freedom, victims of the tyranny of standing armies. Patrick Carr, who died on the 14th, ultimately joined them, literally in their crypt and figuratively in the local memory. The town fittingly gave the Irishman his own procession on St. Patrick’s Day.58

Both funeral cortèges passed through King Street, within hearing distance of the town jail where Preston and the eight enlisted men awaited their fate. They were joined, but briefly, by four civilians once the Suffolk County grand jury began looking into the case after it convened on March 13, as depositions were being taken. Some alleged that muskets had been fired from the custom house as well as from the street, and that these four men were in the custom house at the time of the incident. Roughly two weeks later the grand jury handed down its indictment, naming the thirteen men then in custody. All were accused of “not having the Fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the devil and their own wicked arts,” so that “with force and arms feloniously” they “wilfully and of their malice aforethought” committed murder.59 Potentially, if one were found guilty, all could be convicted as accomplices and face the same sentence. If it was for murder, they could be hanged.

The stage had been set for retributive justice, swift and sure. But the legal outcome would be neither swift nor sure. As months passed with still no trial, all of the parties to the larger dispute stood by their initial reactions. In this interim a press battle ensued that widened the rhetorical divide. Few at the time could have predicted that, paradoxically, the press battle would help defuse tensions by acting as a court of public opinion that operated independently from a court of law. Already convinced that they knew what had happened on King Street, townsmen were more concerned that nothing

30 • Context

Figure 5 (opposite) Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the massacre. It is actually one of three produced within a few months of the event. Henry Pelham’s came first, then Revere’s, then one by clockmaker Jonathan Mulliken of Newburyport. Mulliken appears to have based his engraving on Revere’s, and Revere based his on Pelham’s, although

Revere sold his to the public first. Pelham was an artist as well as an engraver, and had shown Revere his depiction of the massacre. Irate when Revere produced a version based on it, he composed a caustic note to the silversmith. Whether he actually sent it—and Revere’s response, if he did—is not clear. Revere had been the subject of a portrait by Pelham’s half-brother, John Singleton Copley, some months before. Revere added “Butcher’s Hall” above the custom house sign and had a gun barrel firing out one of the windows. There are other, minor, differences as well between the Revere and Pelham engravings. All three images featured a dog in the foreground, perhaps following the eighteenth-century artistic convention of the cur as mute witness. All three also compressed the action, showing civilians removing bodies as the soldiers are firing— which, of course, was not the case. Christian Remick is thought to have been the colorist for Revere’s version, the red blood of the victims matching the red coats of the soldiers. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

in court contradict their opinion that a crime had been committed than they were with seeing someone executed for it.

Within two weeks of printing its first version of the “massacre” (on March 12) the Boston Gazette description was joined in a broadside to Paul Revere’s now famous engraving. It shows troops taking deliberate aim on unarmed men, an officer behind them, sword raised, giving the command to fire. In the background a gun barrel protrudes from an upstairs window of the custom house, enveloped in smoke by the general discharge and adding to the carnage below.60

As if the Boston Gazette account and Revere’s engraving were not dis- turbing enough to Hutchinson, town leaders, acting on their own, had justices of the peace take depositions that they collated and printed as A Short Narrative of The horrid Massacre.61 This account would stand as the town’s brief before the bar of public opinion and soon became more important than any argument eventually made in court. Designed to shape popular opinion, it did as intended, much to Hutchinson’s dismay. “I should have attempted to suppress the proceeding if there was any sort of authority to back or join me but there is none,” he grumbled self- pityingly.62 Hutchinson believed that he had had little choice but to endorse what the town had initiated—the taking of depositions, not the tenor of what the deponents said, although he worried that readers of the Short Narrative would not make the distinction. Everywhere the Short Narrative went it included his endorsement: “I do hereby certify” that the deposi- tions were executed in “full faith and credit” and that they should therefore have standing “both in Court and without”—words that must have made him wince every time he saw them.63 Just as Dalrymple grumbled about removing the troops and then removed them, Hutchinson groused about endorsing the depositions and then endorsed them. Political realism and a desire to avoid further bloodshed trumped insistence on rightful authority or proper order.

Benjamin Edes and John Gill, publishers of the Boston Gazette, printed A Short Narrative at town expense. The town meeting resolved not to circu- late it locally—for the time being, that is—so that potential jurors for “the unhappy Persons now in Custody for Trial” would not be subjected to “undue Bias.”64 Town leaders probably mixed a genuine sense of fairness with a concern that A Short Narrative not be the cause of a change of venue, should defense lawyers contend that the local jury pool had been tainted. What is more, the real battle for public opinion was not going to take place in Boston, where the town meeting’s view could be expected to prevail, but in the Massachusetts countryside and elsewhere in the colonies and even on the far side of the Atlantic. While town leaders held most copies of A Short Narrative in reserve, they sent nearly forty to London

32 • Context

with the hope of influencing imperial policy, starting with removal of the troops altogether from the province and a reconsideration of recent changes in the navigation system brought as part of the Townshend Program. Appending a letter to the Duke of Richmond, considered a friend to their cause, town leaders condemned the “execrable deed” and insisted “that a full and just representation of it should be made to persons of character, in order to frustrate the designs of certain men” who have been “plotting the ruin of our constitution and liberties.”65

They no doubt thought Hutchinson one of those plotters. Town- appointed justices of the peace took the last deposition for A Short Narrative on March 24 and the pamphlet did not go to press until the end of the month. Naturally none of this could be done in secret, so Hutchinson moved quickly and had a justice of the peace more sympathetic to his cause gather another set of depositions. He rushed them off to London in the care of customs commissioner John Robinson. But Hutchinson lost whatever advantage he might have gained by his quick action because A Fair Account was not actually in print until copies of A Short Narrative had arrived in London. As in the Short Narrative, a long introduction designed to shape readers’ impressions preceded the depositions. 66 The Fair Account provided little detail on what supposedly happened on King Street, its cause-and- effect associations being every bit as loose as those in the Short Narrative.

Tempers showed on both sides. Before A Fair Account even appeared in print the Boston town meeting felt compelled to issue Additional Observations to bolster A Short Narrative.67 It took an even harsher tone. No additional blood had been shed, however. The sniping remained verbal, the rhetorical battle acting as a surrogate for physical confrontation. Protesting Bostonians charged that they were being tyrannized; imperial officials countered that they were being victimized. Both pointed to the massacre as proof of their assertions, but with a lessening sense of urgency. No soldiers remained in the town proper; no mobs roamed the streets. Time was enabling them to solidify their opposing views, but without much pressure to prove which, if either, was right. The test would be whether what happened in court disrupted the process.

All of this occurred over the summer and into the fall, to the eve of Preston’s trial. During these months Preston and the eight enlisted men remained in jail. The four civilians had been allowed to post bonds on the promise of returning for trial.68 Town leaders did not wage a sustained campaign to keep the civilians’ names or those of the soldiers in the press and before the public eye. They did not need to use such tactics to achieve their ends. Not only had the soldiers gone to Castle William and been shown to be subject to local law, the 29th Regiment had been removed to New Jersey and it was evident that the 14th Regiment would not be returning

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 33

to town. In their absence customs collectors were again too intimidated to pursue their jobs vigorously.

When Preston and the other soldiers were finally arraigned and prepared for trial, Boston remained calm. Not so the enlisted men. Learning that they would be tried separately from—and after—Preston, three of them petitioned the Superior Court to have their trials joined. “We only desire to Open the truth before our Captains face for it is very hard he being a Gentleman should have more chance for to save his life than we poor men that is Obliged to obey his command,” they pled.69 Quite perceptively they feared that if he were cleared of the charge of ordering them to fire, they would have to bear responsibility for the lives lost on King Street. Their request denied, they must have awaited trial with great trepidation, trepidation that only increased with Preston’s acquittal and the delay in trying the four civilians—which they had no reason to think would work to their advantage.

But virtually no one demanded a blood atonement. The soldiers’ trial began in late November and went as smoothly and uneventfully as Preston’s the month before. There was no convincing proof that Preston had ordered anyone to fire at any time. On the contrary, the preponderance of evidence seemed to prove that he had done what he could to avoid any bloodshed, even at risk to his own life, by stepping between his men and the crowd. “The behaviour of the People was remarkably decent during the whole Trial,” a surprised and relieved Hutchinson wrote to Hillsborough after Preston was set free, and “in general they are satisfied with his acquittal.” That made Hutchinson optimistic for the enlisted men, too. “From the Evidence which appeared upon Capt Preston’s Trial there is room to expect that, at most, they can be found Guilty of Manslaughter only and some of the Court seems to think it a justifiable homicide.”70 Hutchinson hoped for too much on the matter of justifiable homicide; he guessed more accurately on the question of manslaughter.

Almost immediately after his arrest Preston had asked Josiah Quincy Jr. to represent him and the enlisted men. Apparently Quincy agreed to do it if John Adams would join him, which Adams did. Both men had become involved in politics through the town meeting and were much more likely to side with the town against Hutchinson should there be a dispute between imperial authority and local power, including stationing soldiers among civilians. Quincy made sure that Preston knew this. And yet both these men of Boston were also committed to the idea of justice, which meant that what was determined by law should stand apart from and be above what is preferred politically—which was Preston’s source of hope. Quincy’s father warned him that he was afraid taking the case would destroy his political career. The soldiers, Quincy responded, were entitled “by the laws of God

34 • Context

and man” to “counsel and aid.” He was determined to do his duty and in this circumstance it was to assure that Preston and the other soldiers received a fair trial.71 Adams was committed to the same ideals. Recall that years later he wrote: “as the Evidence was, the Verdict was exactly right.”72 The prosecution would have to prove its case. Presumption of innocence and the rules of evidence required it.

Robert Treat Paine, hired by the town, and acting solicitor general Samuel Quincy, Josiah Jr.’s older brother, served as prosecutors in the soldiers’ trial. Of the thirty-two witnesses they called, only eleven had given depositions printed in the Short Narrative—now circulating freely around Boston—and those eleven were hardly the most inflammatory. They offered relatively mild criticism of the soldiers, as did the testimony of the others brought forward for the first time in the trial. Seven months had passed and still no witness could say unequivocally that he saw this soldier shoot that civilian; rather, courtroom testimony for the prosecution asserted little more than that the eight accused had been on King Street that night and that the provocations they received were not life-threatening. Those testimonies more or less complemented Samuel Quincy’s opening argument, which sounded almost apologetic for trying anyone over the “melancholy event”— pointedly not the “horrid massacre”—carefully chosen words for a difficult- to-argue case.73

In his summation before the defense called its witnesses, Samuel Quincy concentrated on Private Matthew Kilroy, arguing that witnesses established he had shot Samuel Gray. Actually, they did not; Quincy made inferential leaps in his argument, possibly because he felt that he needed to establish one individual’s guilt before contending that all involved were equally guilty. Evidence proving that another private, Hugh Montgomery, shot Attucks was even shakier. Proof that anyone in particular could be held respon- sible for a fatal shot was almost non-existent, except for the fact that five men died from gunshot wounds and only the soldiers had fired weapons that night on King Street. But Quincy, who—unlike his younger brother— was not all that sympathetic to the town meeting view of things, had his prosecutorial duty to perform, so perform it he did. “Here Gentlemen,” Quincy stressed with Kilroy, “if any there can be, is evidence . . . of a heart desperately wicked, and bent upon mischief, the true characteristic of a wilful malicious murderer.” All who acted with him, whatever their motives may have been, were equally responsible. It only remained for the jurors to determine “what species of homicide” had been committed. Still, except for his diatribe against Kilroy, Samuel Quincy had not been all that hard on the soldiers nor had he connected any but Kilroy and Montgomery to the deaths of the five victims.74 Whether by personal preference, weak evidence, or even a combination of the two, he left the defense a wide opening.

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 35

Josiah Quincy Jr. tried to push through it. He and John Adams, joined by Sampson Salter Blowers, relied more on witnesses speaking publicly for the first time than on depositions from the Fair Account or on witnesses from Preston’s trial repeating or adding to their testimony there. Contrary to the bitter allegations in the Short Narrative or the more measured charges leveled by the prosecution in court, the defense wanted to show that the soldiers had been attacked by a mob that intended them mortal harm. Had they committed homicides? Yes, but they did so in self-defense, making their actions justifiable or excusable; certainly they could be convicted of nothing worse than manslaughter. Under the circumstances, first Quincy and then Adams emphasized in their closing arguments, murder convictions were

36 • Context

Figure 6 Alonzo Chappel’s version of the massacre, first printed in John Frederick Schroeder’s Life and Times of Washington (1857). It was a quite familiar image for over a century; it is much less so now. Chappel was already a successful portraitist when he painted the massacre but was just beginning a career of doing images that could be turned into engravings for books and magazines, something he would continue for the next thirty years. In his depiction of the massacre he seemed less interested in the event itself than the dramatic arrangement of the elements in his scene, from the grenadier at the center-right and town house to the rear, juxtaposed with the action occurring to each side. The mixing of the historical with the artistic can also be seen in F. Luis Mora’s rendition, first used in Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. history as it was serialized in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1901, which seems to be an homage to Francisco Goya’s firing squad and victims in The Third of May 1808.

unthinkable. “If any reasonable man, in the situation of one of these soldiers, would have had reason to believe in the time of it, that people came with an intention to kill him,” Adams stressed to the jurors, “whether you have this satisfaction now, or not in your own minds, they were justifiable, at least excusable in firing.”75

Jurors returned with verdicts that, consciously or not, followed the recommendation of Edmund Trowbridge in his instructions to them. One of the four judges presiding on the bench, for this trial as for Preston’s, Trowbridge advised them that, in effect, an all-or-nothing principle could be applied: if one was innocent, all could be innocent; if one was guilty, all might be guilty. If the soldiers had truly struggled to save their lives, they could be found innocent. If, in that struggle, a civilian was slain who had no part in it—Samuel Maverick, for example—they were still not guilty. If, by contrast, they were not in mortal peril and one had taken deliberate aim and killed a civilian anyway, then they could all be convicted, regardless of how the other civilians died and the individual soldiers’ roles in those deaths. Moreover, there were other alternatives: all could be convicted of manslaughter or some could be found guilty while others could be acquitted altogether. Concurring with the prosecution, Trowbridge suggested that the evidence showed Montgomery had fired first and killed Crispus Attucks, and that Kilroy had slain Samuel Gray. But he steered the jury toward manslaughter and away from murder.76

And so the jurors decided. At first Hutchinson did not see how they could acquit six and convict two on a reduced charge. “The Jury must be excused for not fully comprehending the law of Evidence,” Hutchinson wrote to Hillsborough, because “as far as I have received it here was no room for distinction between them.” But then on second thought he decided that the men of Suffolk County had done well. “These are pretty good distinctions for an American jury,” he concluded.77

Manslaughter was a felony, a capital offense, but executions for it had become exceedingly rare. Pleading benefit of the clergy, an archaic concept perpetuated for just such ticklish legal situations, Montgomery and Kilroy were released after each was, following English practice, “burnt with a hot iron in the brawn of the left thumb.”78 Had they been wrongly convicted? Perhaps, but both were probably relieved soon to put Boston behind them. Gaps in the courtroom testimony notwithstanding, there is little doubt that they fired their muskets and it is likely that their bullets hit someone, possibly the very two men they were convicted of shooting.

Trowbridge’s instructions may not have been judicious in the strictly legal sense but they provided the perfect solution politically. There was more involved here than the age-old problem of balancing what the law requires with what justice demands. Pleased as Hutchinson’s opponents were with

With Blood “Running Like Water” • 37

Figure 7 Howard Pyle’s illustration of the massacre, done for Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay “The British Yoke,” which appeared in the August 1883 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Higginson traced the origins of the American Revolution back to the first generation of Massachusetts settlers, juxtaposing their desire for freedom with England’s attempt to control them. Imperial policy, Higginson contended, was driven more by ignorance than malice, a failure to see that colonial pride in the transatlantic connection could easily turn to resentment if Americans believed they were being treated badly. Higginson devoted but part of one sentence to the massacre; Pyle, on his way to becoming one of the great book and magazine illustrators of his day, gave it added emphasis. His soldiers seem to underscore the hauteur that lay behind British acts, as they looked disdainfully on the mob they had driven back. Technically, Pyle got much wrong, from the street’s layout to the British uniforms; psychologically, he probably got it right for his readers: British villains, American victims.

the result of their fight for public opinion, someone needed to be guilty of something in order for that victory to be sustained. Contending that all of the accused went free because of some sort of vast conspiracy orchestrated from London or closer to home by Hutchinson would have worn thin quickly, particularly because it was known that Joseph Mayo, jury foreman, was sympathetic to the town’s view.79 This is not to say that the jurors consciously contrived their verdict to produce the desired result. Never- theless, judges, counsel, and jurors looked for a way out of this political minefield. Montgomery and Kilroy became casualties as they threaded their way through it, but at least they survived the ordeal—unlike the five slain on King Street.80