Reading the Bloody Massacre

King Street did not come out of nowhere. It was the fifth year of a quarrel that had been escalating in steps, and each step had made the next one likelier.

In 1765 the Stamp Act produced the first intercolonial resistance: twelve stamp distributors forced out of office in eleven weeks, a congress at New York, and a merchants' boycott that brought British exporters to Parliament begging for repeal. Boston had invented the method — effigy, procession, a visit to the man's house — and it had worked without anyone being killed. Parliament repealed the Act in 1766 and, on the same day, passed the Declaratory Act asserting its right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. Each side read the outcome as a win.

In 1767 Charles Townshend tested that reading with duties on glass, lead, paint, paper and tea, and did something more consequential than the duties themselves: he created an American Board of Customs Commissioners and sat it in Boston. The town now housed, permanently, the officials whose job was to search its warehouses and seize its ships, tried in vice-admiralty courts without juries.

In 1768 the Board seized John Hancock's sloop Liberty, a crowd went for the customs officers, and the officers fled to an island fort in the harbour and asked for protection. In October, troops landed. Roughly two thousand regulars came ashore into a town of about sixteen thousand people, and were quartered not in barracks outside it but in the town itself — in warehouses, in Faneuil Hall, in tents on the Common. To a political culture raised on the belief that a standing army in peacetime was the instrument by which free states were turned into unfree ones, this was not an inconvenience. It was the thing itself, arriving.

By 1770 two regiments remained, and the friction had become daily and physical. Soldiers on low pay took casual work in their off-duty hours, undercutting Boston labourers in a slack economy, which put the two groups in direct competition for the same wages. There were fights.

The six weeks before

On 22 February 1770 a customs informer named Ebenezer Richardson, besieged in his house by a crowd throwing stones at an importer's shop next door, fired into the street and killed Christopher Seider, an eleven-year-old boy. Samuel Adams organised the funeral. Something like two thousand people walked behind the coffin. A jury convicted Richardson of murder that April; the judges declined to pass sentence, and he was eventually pardoned from London, which was read in Boston as confirmation that the Crown would not let its servants be punished.

On 2 and 3 March soldiers and workers brawled at John Gray's ropewalk, after a ropemaker answered a soldier asking for work by telling him to go and clean his outhouse. The fights went on for two days and drew in dozens of men from the 29th Regiment.

King Street was eleven days after Seider's funeral and two days after the ropewalk.

It began with a debt. On the evening of 5 March 1770 a wigmaker's apprentice called out to a British officer about an unpaid bill, and the sentry outside the Custom House, Private Hugh White, struck him with the butt of his musket. A crowd gathered. Church bells rang, which in Boston meant fire, which brought more people out with buckets and, it being a crowd on a cold night, with whatever else came to hand.

White retreated up the Custom House steps and called for help. Captain Thomas Preston brought a relief party of seven men of the 29th through the crowd and formed them in front of the building. Several hundred people pressed in. They threw snowballs, ice, oyster shells and sticks, and they shouted at the soldiers to fire, which men who want to see whether a bluff is real do.

Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked down by something thrown. He got up and fired. After a pause the others fired raggedly, over several seconds, some without orders and some apparently thinking an order had been given. Eleven men were hit. Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray and James Caldwell died in the street. Samuel Maverick, seventeen, died the next morning. Patrick Carr died on 14 March, after telling his doctor that he thought the soldiers had been provoked and had fired to defend themselves.

Preston and eight soldiers were arrested within hours. The troops were pulled out of the town to the harbour fort. Boston's own militia companies patrolled the streets, to demonstrate that the town could keep order without an army in it.

Both sides understood immediately that this was a fight about the account, not the facts. Within a week Boston's town meeting had appointed James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Pemberton to gather depositions; they collected ninety-six and rushed them into print as A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple's people were collecting their own at the same time, and about thirty of those reached London as A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston. Preston published his own version in a London newspaper from his cell.

Three other things made it work. It was fast: on sale on 26 March, seven months before a jury heard a word of evidence, so it defined the event before the event had been adjudicated. It was cheap and copyable: a print could be bought, pinned to a wall, and re-engraved by anyone with a plate, which is exactly what happened. And it came with eighteen lines of verse and a list of names, so the viewer was told what to feel and given martyrs to attach the feeling to.

It also supplied the word. Boston's newspapers were calling it a massacre within a week, and Revere's title fixed it. That word was not neutral in 1770: it had entered English around 1600 to describe the St Bartholomew's Day killings of French Protestants, and it carried the smell of religious atrocity. A Fair Account spent a page objecting to it, arguing that a resistance by a dozen soldiers against a hundred men with clubs bore no resemblance to the slaughter of the Protestants of France in 1572 or of Ireland in 1641. That complaint was correct on the merits and lost completely, because Revere had already put the word under a picture.

In the colonies

The print went out along the same network the Stamp Act resistance had built: newspapers, merchants' correspondence, committees. It was used as the frontispiece to the Boston committee's own pamphlet, which fused the visual claim and the sworn testimony into one object. Copies and re-engravings spread from New Hampshire to Georgia.

It also became a ritual. On 5 March 1771, the first anniversary, Revere lit his windows from inside and put his prints in them so that passers-by saw the images glowing in the dark. Boston held a Massacre Day oration every year from 1771 until 1783, with Joseph Warren, John Hancock and others taking the platform in turn, and Christopher Monk — a wounded man who never recovered — was reportedly shown to the crowds as a living exhibit.

In London

On 1 April the town meeting hired a sloop and sent its report to England, and it sent the prints with it. They found a ready audience, but a particular one. In May a British edition of the Short Narrative appeared in London from William Bingley, a radical printer in the circle of John Wilkes, with an engraving of the killings as its frontispiece; Bingley also sold a separate print of the scene for sixpence. That is where the image landed in Britain: not on the ministry, which had already received Dalrymple's depositions and was unmoved, but among the domestic opposition, who had their own quarrel with the same government and were glad of the ammunition.

The ministry's own reading of King Street was that the soldiers had been provoked, and it was not much shaken. When news of Preston's acquittal reached London in December it was greeted with relief and treated as evidence that the Bostonians had overplayed their hand.

The awkward timing

On the very day of the shooting, 5 March 1770, Lord North moved in the Commons to repeal the Townshend duties — all of them except the duty on tea, kept as a matter of principle. Neither side knew. The news crossed in both directions over the following weeks, so the most inflammatory image of the decade went into circulation exactly as the grievance that produced it was being partly withdrawn.

This is the part the print makes hardest to see, and it is the most creditable thing anyone did that year.

John Adams took the defence. He was thirty-four, ambitious, a cousin of Samuel Adams, and he had every political reason to refuse. Josiah Quincy II joined him. Preston was tried in late October 1770 and acquitted: the jury was not satisfied that he had given an order to fire, and the evidence was that he had been standing in front of his own men's muskets, which is not where a man stands when he intends them to shoot.

The eight soldiers were tried separately from 27 November. Six were acquitted. Montgomery and Matthew Kilroy were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, pleaded benefit of clergy, were branded on the thumb and released. Adams used Patrick Carr's deathbed statement — that the soldiers had been provoked, and that he did not blame the man who shot him — admitted as a dying declaration, which was hard for the prosecution to answer because Carr was one of the five the print called martyrs.

A separate case followed the print's other accusation. Four civilians — Edward Manwaring, John Munro, Hammond Green the Custom House porter, and Thomas Greenwood — were charged with firing on the crowd from the Custom House windows. The sole witness was Manwaring's French servant boy, Charles Bourgatte. All four were acquitted, and Bourgatte was convicted of perjury; there were persistent rumours that patriot organisers had put him up to it.

So a Boston jury, in a town that had buried five of its own ten months earlier, heard the evidence and declined to convict. That verdict and this engraving are documents about the same night, and they do not agree. Adams thought his part in it one of the best services he ever did his country, and he was right, but the print is what the country remembered.