Boston Massacre

On the evening of 5 March 1770, British soldiers guarding the Custom House on King Street in Boston fired into a hostile crowd, killing five colonists. Called the Incident on King Street in Britain, the shooting was quickly branded a massacre by Boston's Patriot leaders, who used it to rally opinion against British rule. It became one of the best-known episodes on the road to the American Revolution.

Boston, the capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, was a centre of opposition to new taxes imposed by the British Parliament. The Townshend Acts of 1767, which placed duties on British goods imported into the colonies, provoked petitions, boycotts and riots. In response, London ordered troops to the town, and the first of four regiments came ashore on 1 October 1768. Two later left, but the 14th and 29th Regiments of Foot stayed.

Tension sharpened in February 1770, when a customs employee killed Christopher Seider, a boy of about eleven, whose funeral drew huge crowds.

On 5 March a lone sentry, Private Hugh White, struck a young apprentice who had been insulting an officer. A crowd gathered, church bells rang as if for a fire, and more people poured into the street, pelting White with snowballs and other objects. Captain Thomas Preston arrived with a corporal and six privates of the 29th to support him. The soldiers loaded their muskets and formed a half-circle as a crowd estimated at 300 to 400 pressed in around them.

After Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked down by a thrown object, he got up and fired. Following a pause, the others fired too, in a ragged series of shots rather than a volley, and Preston later insisted he had given no order. Eleven men were hit. Three died at once: Samuel Gray, James Caldwell and Crispus Attucks, a man of mixed race who had once been enslaved. Samuel Maverick died the next morning and Patrick Carr two weeks later.

Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson calmed the crowd by promising an inquiry. Preston and his men were arrested, and under pressure from a town meeting both regiments were moved out to Castle Island in the harbour.

Each side rushed to shape the story, especially in London. A pamphlet backed by the Boston town meeting, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, drew on more than 90 depositions and presented the townspeople as innocent victims. The Loyalist reply, based largely on soldiers' testimony, blamed the crowd but appeared too late to have much effect. Most influential of all was an engraving by Henry Pelham, copied and sold by Paul Revere, which showed Preston ordering a disciplined volley into a peaceful crowd.

Wanting to show that the soldiers could get a fair hearing, the future president John Adams, already a prominent Patriot, agreed to defend them. Preston was tried on his own in late October 1770 and acquitted, as the jury was not convinced he had ordered his men to fire. At the second trial, which opened on 27 November, Adams argued that the soldiers had faced a threatening mob and had a right to defend themselves. Six were acquitted. Montgomery and Matthew Kilroy were found guilty of manslaughter, claimed benefit of clergy, and were branded on the thumb instead of being hanged. Four civilians accused of firing from the Custom House were also cleared.

Patriots marked each anniversary as Massacre Day, and John Adams later wrote that the foundations of American independence had been laid that night. Some historians see only a loose link between the shooting and the war that broke out five years later, after further confrontations such as the Boston Tea Party. In 1858 the Black abolitionist William Cooper Nell organised a commemoration highlighting Attucks and the part played by African Americans in the Revolution, and a monument to the victims was raised on Boston Common in 1888.

Our 1715 map shows Massachusetts among Britain's American colonies within the British Empire, and the 1783 map shows the newly independent United States.