“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams
S1003
3 - 4 December 1770
Mather Brown
On March 05, 1770, what began as a street brawl between colonists and a lone British soldier but quickly escalated into a chaotic incident where nine British soldiers shot into a crowd of 300-400 people who were harassing them verbally and throwing projectiles.
The tension arose because more than 2,000 British soldiers occupied the city of 16,000 colonists to enforce unpopular British tax laws like the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts. On the frigid evening of March 5, Private Hugh White was guarding the Custom House when angry colonists surrounded him, pelted him with snowballs, ice, and stones. When reinforcements led by Captain Thomas Preston arrived, the situation escalated.
Paul Revere's engraving "The Bloody Massacre in King-Street" was produced just three weeks after the Boston Massacre and became probably the most effective piece of war propaganda in American history.
However, it was not an accurate depiction of the actual event - it showed an orderly line of British soldiers firing into an American crowd on what appeared to be orders from their officer.
Revere's engraving was deliberately biased, adding the fictional name "Butcher's Hall" above the Custom House and portrayed the soldiers as callous murderers firing on innocent civilians. But the intended effect occurred, as the image was widely distributed and helped anti-British sentiment throughout the colonies.
John Adams, despite being a patriot, agreed to defend the British soldiers and Captain Preston because he believed everyone was entitled to a fair defense and that he had learned enough about the case to believe there was a legitimate defense. He felt the events were not as clear-cut as some patriots wanted to make them out to be.
As Adams wrote in 1770:
At this time I had more Business at the Bar, than any Man in the Province: My health was feeble: I was throwing away as bright prospects [as] any Man ever had before him: and had devoted myself to endless labour and Anxiety if not to infamy and to death, and that for nothing, except, what indeed was and ought to be all in all, a sense of duty.
In the Evening I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my Apprehensions: That excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, burst into a flood of Tears, but said she was very sensible of all the Danger to her and to our Children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence.
Three years later, on March 5, 1773, John Adams wrote:
I have Reason to remember that fatal Night. The Part I took in Defence of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough.
It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.
This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.
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