The Boston Massacre Trials at 250: Two Men from Quincy Galvanize an American Debate

“Facts are Stubborn Things”: Remembering the Boston Massacre, Part 1

On the evening of March 5^th, 1770, the moon was just past first quarter, and its light illuminated the streets of Boston, reflecting off the freshly fallen inches of snow. Just after 9pm, shouting was heard from the area of King Street near the Town House (today, the intersection of State and Congress Streets near the Old State House). This drew attention from nearby residents who left their houses to investigate the commotion, but when the bells from nearby churches started to peal — signaling the outbreak of a fire — the crowd truly began to swell.

Not long after, the angry shouts turned to screams of panic as musket fire cracked in the night air. When the smoke cleared three men lay dead in the street, Crispus Attucks, a sailor and dock worker from Framingham of African and Native decent, Samuel Gray, a local rope worker, and James Caldwell, a young sailor on shore-leave. Eight others had been injured – two fatally so, Samuel Maverick, a young carpenter’s apprentice would die the following morning, and Patrick Carr, an Irish leatherworker would die nine days later. All had been fired upon by a group of British soldiers, men meant to be peacekeepers within the community. The Boston Massacre would become one of the most famous events leading up to the American Revolution, and a watershed moment in Massachusetts’ politics.

Over the following weeks Boston’s town leaders and Massachusetts’ colonial officials set about piecing together what had happened the night of March 5^th. Hundreds of residents turned up to make statements. Many claimed to have witnessed Captain Thomas Preston, the ranking officer present at the March 5^th shooting, give the order to fire on the crowd. But just as many other witnesses claimed to have heard no such orders given. In fact, they claimed that the crowd had been provoking the soldiers to attack and was even verging on violent – throwing snowballs, clubs, and oyster shells at the soldiers and maybe going so far as to knock one of the hated “lobster-backs” to the ground.

Without a clear public consensus about what had happened, the political factions of Boston saw an opportunity to shape the narrative to their own ends, and soon a war of rhetoric and propaganda was being waged. Those who agreed with the Crown and the administration of Massachusetts’ Colonial Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, generally spoke of the shootings as an “Unhappy Incident.” While they believed that the event was tragic, they asserted that the soldiers were not to be blamed for defending their lives from the notoriously unruly Boston mob. Those allied with Boston’s town leaders, or critical of Hutchinson’s administration, viewed the shooting as a “Bloody Massacre” and argued that the shootings were the inevitable result of the taxation policies which had been causing civil disharmony for the past few years. Add to that the injustice of quartering soldiers amid a civilian population during times of peace, and you had a recipe for disaster. Others simply called for the soldiers to be hanged.

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The rhetorical battles were ultimately settled by the political theatre of the subsequent trials in the fall of 1770. The 250^th anniversary of those trials we mark this year. During these trials all but two of the eight soldiers were fully acquitted, and even the other two survived the ordeal. This result was thanks in large part to the strategy employed by the defense’s legal team, which included two men from the North Precinct of old Braintree – an area now known as Quincy: John Adams, and Josiah Quincy Jr.

In his closing argument during the second Massacre Trial, John Adams made the statement that “Facts are stubborn things.” And called upon the men of the jury to consider the facts and to acquit the soldiers based on the truth — as laid out by the defense team. The jury did exactly that.

However, the question of truth still lingers in relation to the Boston Massacre. To this day, historians grapple with the question of what really happened on the night of March 5^th. Did the soldiers maliciously open fire on an assembly of largely peaceful, if angry, civilians? Or were they truly in danger of being injured by a violent mob, and thus merely defending their lives? That these questions remain unanswerable is why books can still be published, as recently as earlier this year, discussing these events. Historians still have plenty to debate and disagree on.

In this article there are two main goals: To examine the legal strategy employed by John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr. And to reflect upon how that strategy has impacted how we, as a country, remember the event known as the Boston Massacre, and why it is therefore still often invoked in modern national debates.

I do not intend to give a full historical account of the Massacre and its Trials or a historiography of the scholarship of these events. This article is merely meant to be a toe-dipping, in the hopes that others will subsequently find this topic worthy of diving into the ocean. As such, I have provided a list of books and other resources at the end of the article which I found helpful in shaping my understanding of these events.

Contradictory Legal Teams and Their Quincy Connections

In the days following the “incident on King Street” Massachusetts’ colonial government was legally bound to prosecute the soldiers involved in the case. An indictment was quickly drawn up and the soldiers were moved to the local jail, for their own safety as much as to fulfill the standards of the legal process. These were the eight most hated men in the colony, and it was not out of the question that Boston’s mob would string them up in their own version of justice if left unguarded.

Lawyers would be needed to represent these men, though few were willing to take the job. It was a friend of Captain Preston, James Forrest, an Irishman, who approached the three lawyers who would agree to take up the defense of the accused. When reflecting on the case years later, John Adams recalled that his two co-councils Josiah Quincy Jr. and Robert Auchmuty both refused to take the case unless Adams agreed to join the team. Josiah Quincy Jr. reported to his father that he had consulted with some of Boston’s radical Whig leaders before taking the case. In order to confirm that he would not be shunned from the next Sons of Liberty meeting for fulfilling his ethical obligations as a lawyer.

What this meant was that two radical young lawyers and active members of the Sons of Liberty (Adams and Quincy) would be working to secure the freedom of the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre. A position which could not have been further from their personal convictions. The third member of the legal team, Robert Auchmuty, was a loyalist and so was more comfortable with the task at hand.

When Josiah Quincy Jr.’s father, Josiah Quincy Sr., found out that his son would be representing the soldiers in court, he was appalled, and wrote to his son urging him to reconsider. Quincy Jr. brushed off his father’s concern and gave the prophetic proclamation that instead of scorn, history would laud the fact that he had taken up the soldiers’ defense. He wrote:

“This and much more might be told with great truth, and I dare affirm, that you, and this whole people will one day REJOICE, that I became an advocate for the aforesaid “criminals,” charged with the murder of our fellow-citizens.

I never harboured the expectation, nor any great desire, that all men should speak well of me. To inquire my duty, and to do it, is my aim. Being mortal, I am subject to error; and conscious of this, I wish to be diffident. Being a rational creature, I judge for myself, according to the light afforded me. When a plan of conduct is formed with an honest deliberation, neither murmuring, slander, nor reproaches move. For my single self, I consider, judge, and with reason hope to be immutable.

There are honest men in all sects—I wish their approbation;—there are wicked bigots in all parties,—I abhor them.”[i]

Coincidentally, that same year Quincy was appointed by the courts to represent the only man less popular in Boston than Preston and his men, and Quincy was able to see what sort of mood the Boston mobs would bring to Preston’s trial. Ebenezer Richardson had been charged with the murder of an 11-year-old boy, Christopher Seider. Richardson had shot into an agitated crowd throwing stones outside his house. The crowd had been agitated because Richardson had defended the shop of a custom officer earlier that day. Seider was the son of German immigrant parents and had been born in old Braintree’s Germantown neighborhood, making Josiah Quincy’s professional approach to the case all the more impressive.

Quincy argued that Richardson’s home had been under attack by a Boston mob, and thus Richardson had been afraid for his life at the time that he fired into the crowd. While this defense did not sway the jury in this case and Richardson was convicted, it provided Quincy with a test-run of a defense strategy that he would return to later.

When Adams agreed to take the case, he reportedly justified it by saying that “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country.” In his later reflections about the case he claimed that “It was, … 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.” Suggesting that, for Adams, there was a larger principle at stake.[ii]

But as the saying goes: no good deed goes unpunished. In taking the case, both Adams and Quincy saw much of their legal practices dry up. The business would not return until tempers had cooled after the Trials ended. But ultimately Adams and Quincy’s position won in the court of popular sentiment, which will be discussed further.

On the prosecution’s legal team, two men were appointed by the courts: Samuel Quincy, Josiah Jr.’s older brother, and Robert Treat Paine. By rights, Massachusetts’ attorney general should have been a part of this team as well, but after signing the indictments for the soldiers, Jonathan Sewall left the colony and did not return until after the Trials had been completed.

Samuel Quincy, on top of being the brother of Josiah Jr., was a classmate and friend of Adams. Meaning that three of the main players in the Trials were intimate friends but also political rivals. Adding to the drama, Samuel Quincy was a staunch loyalist. A fact which would eventually lead to his exile from America after the Revolution.

Samuel Quincy’s co-council, Robert Treat Paine, was a member of the Sons of Liberty. Undoubtedly because of this, he was more comfortable prosecuting the case than Samuel Quincy was. Paine was appointed at the behest of the town council despite his practice being based out of Taunton.

For the Quincy brothers and John Adams, their political beliefs were squarely in opposition to the job that they would now have to undertake. But it is a lawyer’s obligation to represent their clients to the best of their natural abilities once a case is accepted. This was the task that now lay before all five men.

“The Contempt of All Mankind”: Justice and Revenge in the Trial of Captain Preston

On October 24^th, 1770, the Trial of Rex v. Preston began at 8 a.m. It had been decided that Captain Preston would be tried separately from his men. A move which made the soldiers’ legal position all the more precarious, as Preston’s defense depended on his legal team proving that Preston had not given the order to fire. Thus the soldiers’ actions constituted a severe disobedience. The soldiers petitioned the court to be tried alongside their commanding officer, but that petition was denied.

Captain Preston had spent the prior eight months in Boston’s Queen Street jail, at least partially in an attempt to protect him from the Boston mobs. Several times over those eight months town officials and Preston himself had been afraid that peaks in public fury would lead to a storming of the prison. This did not occur, but it did not mean that Preston was safe.

If Preston were convicted at the end of the trial it was customary for an officer to be pardoned by the King for actions taken in the line of duty. However, it took ships several weeks to cross the Atlantic from London to Boston, and that was plenty of time for a mob to take justice into its own hands.

In his book “Boston’s Massacre” Eric Hinderaker points out that this is exactly what happened to another army officer convicted of murder in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1736, after being convicted in court, John Porteous waited in Edinburgh’s Tollbooth prison for his royal pardon when: “To prevent that outcome … an Edinburgh mob stormed the jail and hanged him themselves.”[iii]

An acquittal would not guarantee Preston his life either, as the mobs were just as likely to take offense to a jury’s pardon as the King’s.

However, as Hiller Zobel notes in his book “The Boston Massacre” the jury selection process skewed heavily towards the defense. Five of the twelve men seated had notable biases towards the Crown’s interests and there were no known radicals on the jury to act as a counterbalance. “Why the radicals permitted the packing is a mystery, explicable, perhaps, by Sam Adams’ absence from the courtroom.”[iv]

Zobel goes on to say that: “Because of the jury’s composition, the only doubt and excitement depended upon the slender possibility that the evidence would turn out so overwhelmingly unfavorable to Preston that not even a loyalist could avoid [convicting him]. Apart from that small chance, the trial, as lawyers and judges must have known, was nothing but a propaganda battle. Yet everyone acted as though a life were really at stake. That continuing charade was the most significant aspect of the entire proceedings.” [v]

But if the jury had been so skewed as to render the verdict of guilty impossible, and yet Governor Hutchinson and other colonial officials were still concerned about Preston’s survival past the end of the trial, then the “propaganda battle” was being waged for a different audience – the only one that had not yet made up its mind about Preston’s fate, and the only other significant player in Boston’s legal system not represented in the court room, the mob itself.

While no “substantial eyewitness account of Preston’s trial or the men’s has come down to us,” as Zobel puts it,[vi] we have enough information to parse together the rhetorical gist that the legal teams and its individual players took. In Preston’s defense his legal team sought to impart doubt in the jurors’ minds about Preston giving the order to fire, and they used the contradictory nature of the testimony given to aid in that approach.

As stated previously, some witnesses testified that they had heard Preston clearly give the order to fire, while others claimed exactly the opposite. In the end, Adams used his closing arguments to urge the jurors “it is always safer to err in acquitting” and he is noted as quoting the sentiment “it is better that five guilty persons go unpunished, than one innocent person should die.”[vii]

In the trial of the other soldiers, Adams’ closing statements are better recorded. There, he began by quoting an Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria. The spirit is similar to his defense of Preston:

“I am for the prisoners at the bar, and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria: “If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessing and tears of transport, shall be a sufficient consolation to me, for the contempt of all mankind.”[viii]

To the surprise of many watching, Preston was acquitted. He was then quickly spirited to Castle William in Boston Harbor to avoid a confrontation with any more Boston crowds. After the trial Preston left the colonies and returned to Britain and retired from the army.

Adams and Quincy however, had another case to argue.

“Mulattos, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs”: The Othering of the Mob in the Trial of the Soldiers

With the acquittal of Captain Preston, the fortunes of the other seven soldiers looked bleak. Their best legal defense – that they had fired on their commanding officer’s orders – was no longer available to them. The men feared that they would be the sacrificial lambs offered up to appease the Boston mob.

The trial of Rex v. Wemms et al, began on November 27^th, 1770.

In Adams and Quincy’s minds — Auchmuty declined to continue as a lawyer in the soldiers’ trial – there was another possible approach. One that harkened back to a line of defense tested by Quincy in the Richardson trial earlier that year.

It would be impossible to convince a jury that the soldiers had not fired upon the crowd on King’s Street on March 5^th. That was the one detail that all accounts of the night agreed upon. At best, one or two might be able to claim innocence via mistaken identity, or perhaps that their shot had not been the one to kill anyone, but this was not the approach that Adams and Quincy took. They intended that all of the soldiers would go free, and so they would present an argument that would shift the blame away from the soldiers and towards the other people present that night – the mob.

However, Quincy and Adams disagreed on how far they should take this argument. Quincy wanted to put the Boston mob on trial – at least rhetorically – and thus use the city’s unruly reputation to bolster their case. Adams wanted to use a lighter touch and attempted to “thread the needle” between blaming the soldiers (and possibly getting them executed) and blaming the town (and possibly bringing unforeseen consequences upon the whole colony). At one point during the trial, Adams threatened to quit the case if Quincy did not back off his attack on the Boston mob. Quincy reluctantly agreed.

Adams also saw this case as an opportunity to make the Sons of Liberty’s argument that the violence of March 5^th  was truly the result of the sustained violation of British civil rights in the form of the soldiers quartered in Boston during peacetime, and in the form of the battles over taxation that had been ongoing for the past several years. Zobel describes this tactic as “approaching professional malfeasance,” for denying their clients the strongest possible defense (Quincy’s preferred approach) in the interest of a political victory.[ix]

To win this case Adams needed to prove two things: that the soldiers had reason to be afraid for their lives when facing down the mob, and that the mob was not representative of Boston as a whole.

It was easy enough to establish through witness testimony that the scene on King Street had been chaotic on the night of March 5^th. The fact that no one could agree on just what had happened was likely a product of that chaos. Hinderaker mentions in his introduction, that moments of high stress impair one’s ability to mentally process what one is experiencing, and what we are left with are “patches of highly subjective impressions.”[x] The sheer volume of contradictory statements being presented to the jury no doubt kept the jury from swallowing the prosecution’s argument (still led by Samuel Quincy and Robert Treat Paine) that the soldiers had committed deliberate acts of murder.

Adams’ closing statement unfolds the second half of his complex argument. Here, Adams introduced the idea that the crowd on March 5th were not upstanding Bostonians but a collection of minorities prone to troublemaking. In one memorable passage he stated:

“We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob.—Some call them shavers, some call them genius’s.—The plain English is gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.—And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them: —The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers.—Such things are not new in the world, nor in the British dominions, though they are comparatively, rareties and novelties in this town. Carr a native of Ireland had often been concerned in such attacks … ”

Adams then singled out Crispus Attucks for special scrutiny. Attucks being the Massacre victim of mixed race (half African American, half Native American), and probably a former slave. Even though only one witness testified to Attucks directly confronting the line of soldiers, Adams used this violent description of Attucks to justify the soldiers’ fear and their decision to fire on the crowd:

“If this was not an unlawful assembly, there never was one in the world. Attucks with his myrmidons comes round [Jackson’s] corner, and down to the party by the Sentry-box; when the soldiers pushed the people off, this man with his party cried, do not be afraid of them, they dare not fire, kill them! kill them! knock them over! And he tried to knock their brains out. It is plain the soldiers did not leave their station, but cried to the people, stand off: now to have this reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear? He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down: This was the behaviour of Attucks;— to whose mad behaviour, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night, is chiefly to be ascribed.”

Adams continued:

 “And it is in this manner, this town has been often treated; a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together, and then there are not wanting, persons to ascribe all their doings to the good people of the town.”

Finally, Adams brought his argument to fruition. He insisted that the mob that attacked the soldiers on March 5^th was not consisting of true Bostonians. Instead, it was “a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham,” men not of the community, and therefore the community should not be blamed for their actions. Adams did his best to convince the jury that the Boston mob of March 5^th were “Others”.

He closed with the famous conclusion “Facts are stubborn things,” and:

“whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated.”[xi]

Therefore, Adams argued, in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of a rational jurist, the seven soldiers on trial could not be guilty of more than self-defense.

But if Preston wasn’t to blame, and these soldiers weren’t to blame, and if Boston also wasn’t to blame, then who, in Adams’ mind, was?

He hinted at it in this line from earlier in the same closing: “and indeed, from the nature of things, soldiers quartered in a populous town, will always occasion two mobs, where they prevent one.—They are wretched conservators of the peace!”[xii] The real blame must therefore lie with the people who wanted the soldiers in Boston in the first place — the custom officers, the people who refused to let them leave – the colonial assembly, and those who had sent the soldiers from England – Parliament.

The jury deliberated for only two and one-half hours before returning with a verdict. All but two of the soldiers were found not guilty, the remaining two were found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. These two soldiers were branded on the thumb with the letter “M” and set free — the typical sentence afforded to first-time offenders.

Echoes and Inkblots: Remembering the Boston Massacre, Part 2

Back in February (of 2020), Quincy Historical Society hosted a program in partnership with Adams National Historic Park and presented a screening of the “John Adams” episode of the 1964 television adaptation of Profiles in Courage. The episode dramatizes the events of the Boston Massacre Trials in a surprisingly accurate manner. The preparation for this program was the first time that I had truly engaged with the scholarship about the Massacre at an academic level – as opposed to as a curious reader, or while desperately trying to cram facts into my head while preparing to give Freedom Trail tours. What I discovered was an event that is one of the most famous in American history, and yet is one of the least well understood, and that also is being constantly reinvented and resurrected to meet the needs of whoever wishes to invoke its memory.  

The way in which the Massacre was remembered before and after the Revolution are markedly different. Between 1771 and 1783 there were Massacre Day commemorations observed in Boston on March 5^th. These usually involved live orations by significant Boston residents and leaders commemorating the fallen and stoking the zeal for the revolutionary cause. But after the Revolution, popular perceptions of the Massacre began to change. No longer was it useful to have a proud narrative of unruly mobs attacking representatives of the government. Especially when incidents of a similar ilk began testing the strength and endurance of the young republic.

Shays Rebellion was one such incident in Massachusetts. The Rebellion took place between 1786 and 1787, and it involved former Revolutionary War soldiers attacking court houses and other significant government buildings, eventually escalating into a full scale military confrontation. Noted Boston radical, Samuel Adams, said about Shays Rebellion: “in monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”[xiii] An ironic statement from a man who had spent much of his life fomenting rebellion himself.

The Massacre no longer served the rhetorical needs of the young country and was downplayed in the popular narratives. The triumph of reason and the rule of law in the Trials was brought to the fore, thus fulfilling Josiah Quincy Jr.’s prediction.

But then, in the years leading up to the American Civil War the Boston Massacre found new purpose. In particular, Crispus Attucks was adopted by the African American community in Boston as “the first martyr of the Revolution” and he became a symbol of the Abolition Movement in the state. He has remained the most well-known victim of the Massacre ever since and has inspired books, art, and even baseball cards. (Some of these pieces are currently on display in the Reflecting Attucks exhibit at the Old State House.)

The Boston Massacre is also often invoked in times when debates about the legitimacy of violence as a protest tactic are raised. Or conversations about the use of force on a civilian population.

One example is the Kent State shootings in 1970, when the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam war. Four students were killed, and nine others wounded. The thematic connection between this event and the Boston Massacre were quickly drawn. Posters were printed with Paul Revere’s engraving of the Massacre and the phrases “Boston March 5^th 1770,” and “Kent State May 4^th 1970” emblazoned in red and four black coffins, making the parallel clear.

In recent years, the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality have raised the specter of the Massacre (and particularly Crispus Attucks) once again. This only shows how enduring these themes of public outrage, deadly force, and competing narratives really are. They date all the way back to the time before America was a nation and persist to this day.

Academically speaking, the scholarship about the Boston Massacre tackles the issue of an event that has more questions than answers with two approaches:

The most popular approach is also the standard technique that historians use when researching or writing about a topic. Simply put, it is to gather all the information together (no matter how contradictory) and to look for patterns. What details recur again and again across the eye-witness testimony? How do people write about the event after the fact, as they get more information? These patterns suggest that those details are more accurate since they were noted by multiple people.

One downside to this approach, particularly in cases with lots of uncertainty, is that when one looks for patterns, one might also accidently discard or downplay information that doesn’t fit the narrative one’s trying to construct.

In some ways, events like the Boston Massacre become ink blot or Rorschach Tests for the people writing about them. In a Rorschach Test someone is shown an abstract ink blot image on a page and is asked to tell the test giver what they see in it. We might interpret something similar about how an individual talks or writes about what happened in Boston on March 5^th, 1770. Their answer might tell us more about them and their world view, than about the event itself.

The other approach is to ignore the night of March 5^th itself, and to focus on the facts that we are certain of around it: the circumstances leading up to, and the echoes left thereafter. In a sense this approach is like looking at a solar eclipse, one can only see the fiery corona around the sun when its brilliance is blocked by the moon. Philosophically, it aims to accept what we do not know, and to consider what that tells us. However, the downside to this approach is that it does not give us a satisfactory explanation of what happened during the Boston Massacre. An excellent example of this approach can be found in Eric Hinderaker’s book “Boston’s Massacre.”

These two approaches have even sprung up organically on the streets of Boston, utilized by the multitude of tour guides and park rangers that work The Freedom Trail. I got to see this first-hand when I worked as one of those tour guides and would listen in to my fellow orators recounting the tale. Some tour guides would recount a composite narrative of events, taking the parts of the eyewitness testimony that made the most sense to them. These narratives often differed from each other in subtle ways, but the tour guides were not giving people inaccurate information, it is just impossible to reconcile all the contradictory versions of events into a coherent narrative.

Other tour guides would employ the second approach and would usually have their tour groups look at primary sources, such as Paul Revere’s engraving, and have the group describe what they saw. Then the guide would subvert that first narrative by performing the same exercise with a different primary source, thus sketching the shape of the incident but also pointing out the discrepancies.

After watching many different guides use these various approaches, I concluded that there was not a right way to present the Boston Massacre to a group, or even a best way. The only wrong way would be to say things that were not true, and admittedly, I did see a bit of that as well.

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Over the months between the program in back in February and the writing of this article, I happened to read a piece in The New York Times Magazine which grapples with a lot of the same themes of uncertain facts and the malleability of truth in our modern world, that I was grappling with in an 18^th century context. Notably, at one point the author unwittingly paraphrases John Adams: “So while truth may be subjective, its balustrades are always the facts at hand.”[xiv]

This quote stuck out to me, so I copied it down on a post-it note and stuck it on the wall near my desk at home. There, I keep a collection of quotations that I find resonant — John Adams’ “Facts are stubborn things” is also scribbled on a post-it nearby. And those two quotes have been in eyeshot, and therefore on my mind, as I have mulled over how to present the history of the Boston Massacre Trials here.

This assertion that truth is malleable but inherently guided by facts reminds me greatly of both historians and lawyers. Lawyers will create a narrative out of an assembly of facts in order to persuade a jury to rule in their client’s favor. In a trial you get two versions of the same events, and the jury has to decide which is true. Historians do something similar. Historians assemble their facts into a narrative in an attempt to persuade their audience as well, but there are never just two possible versions of events when historians are involved. — And it can be comfortably said that the stakes are typically higher in a court room.

It is the digestive matter of many academic opinions that eventually makes it into textbooks, museums, and documentaries, and it is here where the public usually first encounters an historic event or subject. Setting aside for a moment that textbooks, museum displays, and documentaries, can also be hopelessly biased; what is presented to the public as “truth” in these settings is often a composite of the most plausible historical theories.

In the case of the Boston Massacre, the fact of the matter is we do not truly know why the soldiers fired on the crowd on King Street on March 5^th, 1770. We will likely never know for sure. And anyone who tries to describe what happened that night is offering their best guess based on the facts at hand. As stated before, this is not a bad approach, this is what all historians do — this is what they are trained to do. But the Boston Massacre is uniquely challenging on this front because there are so many primary sources and eye-witness accounts that are so wildly contradictory.

To me this is what makes the Boston Massacre a fascinating topic. It is frustratingly open ended. What it means is still up for debate, and that means that the Massacre becomes relevant again anytime our country grapples with the questions of truth, justice, protest, and civil order.

Suggested Reading

If you would like to explore this topic further, I recommend the following books and online resources.

Books:

The Boston Massacre, by Hiller Zobel — The definitive text on the Massacre and all the circumstances that led to the violence that night. It contains the most thorough examination of the eyewitness testimony and depositions.

New England Remembers: The Boston Massacre, by Robert J. Allison — Less than 100 pages long, but still a thorough account of the Massacre and its contributing factors. An excellent starting point for any curious readers.

Boston’s Massacre, by Eric Hinderaker — An excellent example of the “second approach” to the Massacre and its Trials, focusing more on the contradictions in the testimony rather than the overlaps, while still being easily accessible to a general audience.

The Boston Massacre: A Family History, by Serena Zabin — One of the most recent additions to Massacre scholarship that takes an entirely unique approach. Focusing on the intricate web of personal connections between the citizens of Boston and the occupying British army.

John Adams Under Fire, by Dan Abrams and David Fisher — Another recent publication, which focuses mainly on John Adams and his legal strategy. It too is detailed, but remains accessible to a general audience.

Online Resources:

Perspectives on the Boston Massacre – A digital exhibit set up by Massachusetts Historical Society exploring the Massacre and the primary sources in their collections. (I highly recommend exploring their digital collections as well. As they house and have digitized many of the documents referenced throughout this article.)

Reflecting Attucks – A digital exhibit arranged by Revolutionary Spaces exploring Crispus Attucks, his the complex life and identity, as well as his impact on American history and culture. This exhibit is also open to visit in person by appointment, at the Old State House through March 2021.

Revolution 250 – A website dedicated to consolidating and promoting events commemorating the 250^th anniversary of Revolutionary moments around Massachusetts and beyond. This link takes you to a compiled list of digitized Boston Massacre primary sources.

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[i] Bell, J. L. “Josiah Quincy, Jr., Takes the Case”, Boston 1775, 16 Oct. 2006, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2006/10/josiah-quincy-jr-takes-case.html. Accessed November 19, 2020. Only full transcript of the letter found.

[ii] “1773. March 5th. Fryday.,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-02-02-0003-0002-0002. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 2, 1771–1781, ed. L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 79.] Accessed November 19, 2020.

[iii] Hinderaker, Eric. “Boston’s Massacre.” 2017. Belknap Press: Cambridge. Pg. 178.

[iv] Zobel, Hiller B. “The Boston Massacre.” 1970. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York. Pg. 246.

[v] Zobel, Hiller B. “The Boston Massacre.” 1970. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York. Pg. 246.

[vi] Zobel, Hiller B. “The Boston Massacre.” 1970. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York. Pg. 247.

[vii] Zobel, Hiller B. “The Boston Massacre.” 1970. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York. Pg. 260.

[viii] “Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3–4 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3, Cases 63 and 64: The Boston Massacre Trials, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 242–270.] Accessed November 19, 2020.

[ix] Zobel, Hiller B. “Newer Light on the Boston Massacre,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 78. 1968.

[x] Hinderaker, Eric. “Boston’s Massacre.” 2017. Belknap Press: Cambridge. Pg. 1.

[xi] All quotes from Adams’ closing statement from: “Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3–4 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016.  [Original source: The Adams Papers, Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3, Cases 63 and 64: The Boston Massacre Trials, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 242–270.]

[xii] “Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3–4 December 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3, Cases 63 and 64: The Boston Massacre Trials, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 242–270.]

[xiii] Pencak, William. “Samuel Adams and Shays’ Rebellion,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1. 1989.

[xiv] Viren, Sarah. “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?” The New York Times Magazine. 18 Mar. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/magazine/title-ix-sexual-harassment-accusations.html. Accessed November 19, 2020.