The event was indeed a celebration of unity. The procession began with an invocation beneath the liberty tree and wound through the streets with a parade of 500 boys marching in front of the casket and 1,500 or so townspeople following. John Adams remarked that he had never seen a funeral of such size. “This Shows there are many more Lives to spend if wanted in the Service of their Country,” he wrote in his diary entry for the day. “It Shows too that the . . . Ardor of the People is not to be quelled by the Slaughter of one Child and the Wounding of another.”
The Gazette reminded its readers that indeed the boy had died “in his Country’s Cause,” and Phillis Wheatley, a slave educated by her Boston family, wrote a poem memorializing young Seider’s death (she misspelled his name) that began:
In heaven’s eternal court it was decreed
How the first martyr for the cause should bleed
To clear the country of the hated brood
He whet his courage for the common good.
—“On the Death of Mr. Snider, Murder’d by Richardson,” 1770
There is little doubt that whatever was to account for the incident, it would surely serve to solidify the position of the radicals and Adams’s appeal for unity of the colonists in opposition to the British. It might have even become the event that Bostonians would remember as the beginning of the Revolution in their town had it not been for the events that ensued just four days later.
On March 2, Patrick Walker, an off-duty British soldier looking for part-time work to supplement his salary, approached the rope-making factory of John Gray. It was an example of one more activity that hardened the common public against the soldiers’ presence in their midst, for not only did the redcoats insult and threaten the citizens (and sometimes woo away their sweethearts and bed their daughters); they were often willing to take temporary work at lower wages than the locals.
“So you want a job, do you?” one of Gray’s workmen is said to have asked Walker.
Indeed he did want a job, the eager Walker responded.
“Then go and clean my shithouse,” the workman responded, a witticism that provoked gales of laughter from his nearby cohorts and no end of retellings by historians (the richest account is probably that of Hiller Zobel).
Walker might not have been bright, but he was no coward. He fell upon the workman and a brief tussle ensued, one in which the soldier fared little better. In short order, then, two day laborers pummeled Walker into submission. Understandably, the hapless soldier ran off with the jeers of the workmen trailing him.
Shortly, however, Walker reappeared with at least eight of his comrades, spoiling for a rematch. The rope makers were more than happy to give it to them, and once again they came out on top. By this time the factory was giddy with triumph.
The self-congratulation was soon interrupted, though, for inside fifteen minutes yet one more contingent of troops returned, this time at least forty strong. This time the two sides went at each other with clubs and rope maker’s tools, but the outcome was no different. The soldiers were chased from the rope yards and hounded all the way back to their barracks.
Similar skirmishes took place on the streets over the next three days with civilians proclaiming their superiority and soldiers threatening revenge. During one fight, a soldier suffered a broken arm and fractured skull. As General Gage would admit, the stationing of troops proved to be an exercise in futility. “The people were as Lawless and Licentious after the Troops arrived as they were before,” he lamented.
Then, on the night of March 5, matters came to a head. There were rumors afloat that a brawl was planned between the sides, but whether that is true or not, there was no shortage of hotheads on the streets looking for trouble. It was a chill night lit by a quarter moon, the streets frozen, the remains of a light snow still on the ground. As one early account penned by Richard Frothingham had it, “as though something uncommon was expected, parties of boys, apprentices, and soldiers strolled through the streets; and neither side was sparing of insult.”
A group of soldiers left Murray’s Barracks on Brattle Street, “armed with clubs and cutlasses, bent on a stroll.” At Brattle Street Church they encountered a crowd that was collected there, most of its members carrying canes and clubs. “Wretched abuse” was exchanged, and fighting ensued yet again. As that was going on, Captain John Goldfinch, who was making his way back to the barracks, passed by a sentinel’s station on King Street near the Boston customs house. Loitering nearby was a young barber’s apprentice, Edward Garrick, who shouted an insult. According to the apprentice, the captain was a scoundrel who had not paid him for dressing his hair.
What Captain Goldfinch thought of this is not recorded, but it is known that the sentinel stepped from his guard box and clubbed the apprentice to the ground with a blow from the butt of his musket. After a moment, the boy made his way dazedly to his feet and ran off crying.
Goldfinch hurried on toward the barracks only to find his way blocked by the scuffle that had erupted outside Brattle Street Church, where townsmen were now pelting the troops with snowballs and chunks of ice and church bells tolled an alarm in the background. Goldfinch shouted orders for his men to repair to the barracks, and calm seemed restored, at least for the moment.
“For a little time,” says Frothingham, “there was nothing to attract to a centre the people who were drawn by the alarm bell out of their homes on this frosty moonlit memorable evening; and in various places people were asking where the fire was.” Possibly fifteen minutes of peace constituted the fulcrum upon which history was balanced. And then things changed.
At a quarter past nine a group of agitated townsmen rushed down King Street toward the customs house, led by the bruised barber’s apprentice. As they approached the sentry box, the apprentice stopped and pointed. “That’s him!” he cried. “That’s the soldier who hit me!”
The crowd surged forward at that. “Knock him down!” someone shouted.
“Kill him!” a second called.
By now the young soldier, John White, had deserted his sentry box and was backing carefully up the icy steps of the customs house, loading his musket as he went. It might have seemed the right thing to do at the time, clobbering the insolent barber’s apprentice while his commanding officer watched, but now, as an angry mob closed in upon him and his numb fingers fumbled with his weapon, he must have entertained regrets.
A snowball, more ice than snow, burst against his chest, and a jagged chunk of ice, enough to have felled him, flew past his head. The soldier raised his musket. “Stay back, damn you!” he called. A hail of snowballs and chunks of ice came in answer.
“Fire if you will!” came a cry.
“Damned coward!” another called.
One bystander burst into the nearby barracks to say that the life of the customs house sentry was in danger, and Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the day, rushed to the headquarters of the main guard, several hundred feet from the confrontation. In moments, a detail of seven, led by a green sergeant, set out at a trot toward the customs house, bayonets fixed.
The troops elbowed their way through the menacing crowd, using their bayonets to prod anyone slow to get out of the way. They arrayed themselves before the crowd at the base of the steps, and the sentry hurried down from the shelter he’d taken from the ice and stones the crowd was hurling at him.
Captain Preston came through the crowd then. “Make way!” he shouted, shouldering aside townsmen until he joined his troops. There were nine of them facing off the mob of fifty or so: Preston, the shaken sentry, and the seven men Preston had sent.
Preston might have been about to shout an insult at the crowd, or perhaps an order to disperse, but that is when a heavy ball of ice and snow burst upon his forehead. Perhaps Preston thought it was the prelude to a charge, or perhaps he was simply outraged by the insult.
“Fire!” he cried to his men as a hail of ice and snowballs rained upon them all. “Damn you, fire! Be the consequence what it will!”
One soldier did fire, just as a townsman strode forward and brought his cudgel down across the soldier’s hands. The soldier stumbled back with a cry, his weapon tumbling to the frozen pavement. The townsman barely paused, lunging toward Preston with a mighty roundhouse of a swing.
The club was aimed at Preston’s skull, but the officer ducked, and the blow glanced off his shoulder, sending his hat sailing. The rest of the troops were firing now. Seven shots were fired, or eight. Some swore they had heard eleven.
Five men lay on the pavement, three of them killed instantly. Two others would die by morning.
Samuel Gray, of the rope-making clan, was killed on the spot, “the ball entering his head and bearing off a large portion of his skull.” He’d just called out to his fellow protesters not to worry: “My lads, they will not fire.”
Crispus Attucks, a hulking “mulatto man,” and one of those who’d been involved in the original fighting by the Brattle Street Church, was also killed at once. He was leaning casually on a cordwood stick he carried for a club when he took two balls, one of which went through a lung and traveled on to pierce his liver.
Also dead was the seventeen-year-old James Caldwell, who lived nearby. He’d come out into the street and turned to ask someone in the crowd what was going on when two balls took him in the back.
A ball went through the stomach of Samuel Maverick, also seventeen, “son of the widow Maverick” and apprentice to an ivory carver. He would bleed until morning and finally die.
And there was Patrick Carr, said to be “a seasoned Irish rioter,” who worked with a leather breeches maker in Queen Street. He took a shot in the hip that exited out his side. He too would linger and bleed, and finally die.
Six more were seriously wounded, and as the stunned and shaken townsmen tended to the victims, the soldiers were reloading. They might have fired again if Captain Preston had not ordered a withdrawal to the main guard headquarters. Meantime, several companies of the 29th Regiment were drawn up there, a third of their number deployed in the kneeling position, ready to fire.
While Dr. Joseph Warren, a close associate of Samuel Adams, hurried to tend to the wounded and dying, a deputation of citizens made their way to Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson’s home to alert him of what had happened. The entire town was on its way to King Street, they told him, and full-scale warfare was about to erupt.
Hutchinson, never popular in the city, made his way to the gory scene with caution. When he arrived at King Street, he went to the office of the main guard and called for Captain Preston.
It was a simple question he had for Preston: “Do you know, sir, you have no power to fire on any body of the people collected together, except you have a civil magistrate with you to give orders?”
Preston’s reply was even more simply couched. “I was obliged to,” he said, “to save the sentry.”
This exchange, overheard by some in the crowd, resulted in a cry that became a chant: “To the town house, to the town house.”
The townspeople were demanding an immediate response to the matter by Hutchinson, and he was wise enough to grant it. “The law,” Hutchinson assured them at a gathering inside the town council chambers, “should have its course; he would live and die by the law.” Hutchinson ordered the troops arrayed outside the main guard to repair immediately to the barracks and ordered Captain Preston and the eight soldiers who had fired upon the crowd jailed, pending a proper inquiry. It was 3 a.m. by the time Preston was remanded behind bars and the populace largely dispersed, but Hutchinson managed to avert a total disaster.
The following morning presented a stunning scene to the citizens of Boston. As the Gazette reported, any passerby could view “the Blood of our Fellow Citizens running like Water through King Street and the Merchants Exchange, the principal Spot of the Military Parade for about 18 months past.”
Modern-day readers seeking a way in which to comprehend the power of the incident (and the attendant press accounts) upon the citizenry might look to the images published in the press following the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. On that day, Ohio National Guardsmen called to control an antiwar rally on the campus fired sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. Though some supporters of the guardsmen argued that the troops had feared for their lives and that some of the young people were of questionable background, such considerations mattered little to most of the nation. The “Kent State Massacre,” as it became known, is generally conceded to be the event that swung the last of the undecided populace toward a call for the end of the Vietnam War.
At 11 a.m. on March 6, 1770, citizens of Boston met in Faneuil Hall and formed a committee headed by Samuel Adams, Dr. Warren, John Hancock, and others to present a petition to Hutchinson demanding the immediate withdrawal of all troops to Castle William in the harbor. Hutchinson wasted little time in responding.
His answer was sent to the committee at the meeting hall at Old South Church, where an ever-burgeoning mass of citizens had gathered to share their outrage and determine their future course of action. Hutchinson began with an apology for the events of the previous evening and a promise that the law would indeed take its course in the matter. Furthermore, he said, the troops of the 29th Regiment would be removed immediately to Castle William. Until word was received from General Gage, however, the troops of the 14th Regiment, who had taken no part in the evening’s conflict, would be kept in the town barracks and would be “laid under such restraint that all occasion of future disturbances may be prevented.”
It would have been a bit like promising the outraged students at Kent State that the only guardsmen who would be left to patrol the campus were those who promised to be good, and the meeting of Bostonians (now swollen to roughly four thousand) was quick to respond. Adams and the others were soon back in Hutchinson’s office bearing a second resolution. “Nothing less will satisfy than a total and immediate removal of all the troops,” Adams informed the governor, reminding him that if he had the power to remove one regiment, he surely had the power to remove two.
Adams’s logic had little effect upon Hutchinson, who felt he had done more than enough to mollify the citizens. He sent word to his council that he would have no further use for them on that day and prepared to leave his offices. At that point, Colonel William Dalrymple, the commander of the troops, intervened. Perhaps the lieutenant governor should consult with his council as to these demands, he said. In fact, if the council felt that all the troops should be removed, Dalrymple would not object.
Hutchinson was surprised but gave in to Dalrymple’s urging and convened the council once more following dinner. At that meeting, the governor sat in disbelief as the council members one by one suggested compliance with the townspeople’s demands. There were said to be 10,000 citizens in Boston and towns nearby who were ready to take up arms. If it should come to that, there was no hope that their forces could prevail.
Hutchinson wrangled with the council well into the night, warning of the precedent such an action would set, but it was to no avail. In the end, the council affirmed its unanimous opinion and the disgruntled Hutchinson passed the word along to Colonel Dalrymple, appending the notation that nonetheless, as governor, he held no personal authority to order the removal of the troops. Dalrymple felt that appendix to be an unnecessary equivocation, but Hutchinson was resolute: if the council and the local commander wished to take responsibility for the matter, he would not oppose it, but he was certainly not going to back down to Adams and his cohorts.
Soon enough, word that the troops would be removed was passed to a cheering crowd at Old South Church. Colonel Dalrymple would begin his preparations in the morning, Adams advised. “There would be no unnecessary delay until the whole of the two Regiments were removed to the Castle.” According to town records, Adams, John Hancock, and other leaders of the Boston Sons formed a committee to supervise a night watch patrol to keep order on the streets until the troops were actually r
edeployed.
On the afternoon of Thursday, March 8, the third day following the shootings, more than 10,000 citizens took part in the funeral procession for the victims. The bodies of Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Crispus Attucks were interred in a single vault in the city’s cemetery. As the Boston Gazette put it, “The aggravated Circumstances of their Death, the Distress and Sorrow visible in every Countenance, together with the peculiar Solemnity with which the whole Funeral was conducted, surpass description.”
Patrick Carr, the fifth to die, would linger for a week before expiring of his wounds late on March 13: eventually he would join the others in their common grave. Though press accounts speculated that more among the wounded would soon follow, all recovered, though some historians would later point to young Christopher Monk, a shipbuilder’s apprentice, as the sixth victim of the shootings. Monk, seventeen at the time, was shot near the spine, and though newspaper accounts described his condition as grave, he pulled through. Monk never completely recovered, however, and lived out his remaining ten years in a compromised state, supported by the charity of others.
One might suppose that the Boston Massacre, as it became known, would have occasioned a mammoth upheaval among the populace. But Samuel Adams and other leaders went to considerable lengths to maintain calm. For one thing, the hated troops were on their way to Castle William. For a second, Adams had long contended that stationing an army in the midst of a peaceful town was an invitation to disaster, and it seemed that he had been proved right. He had no desire to see further violence erupt, for it would only support the claims of loyalists that Boston was an ungovernable nest of radicals and firebrands.
Considerable friction remained between Hutchinson and Adams, of course, but neither wanted further bloodshed. Adams concentrated his efforts on revitalizing the nonimportation movement in the town, convincing 212 of the city’s 225 merchants to agree to halt all sales of tea until Parliament agreed to repeal all the revenue acts. In what he considered the ultimate act of humiliation, Adams saw to it that the names of the thirteen recalcitrants were entered into the town records for posterity.
Desperate Sons Page 18
