That night one of the regiment’s sergeants missed roll call, and stories spread through the British ranks that he had been murdered in town. The missing man was later found alive, but not before his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Carr, had used the incident as an excuse for a surprise raid on the Gray ropewalk. Carr may have been looking for a cache of weapons or hoping to intimidate Gray. All he accomplished, however, was to provoke Gray to protest directly to Colonel Dalrymple.
Gray and Dalrymple compared notes. Later on, William Green’s words to Private Walker would be changed in court transcripts to “clean my necessary house” or “clean my little-house.” But the ropemaker and the colonel agreed that their accounts of the incident tallied and that William Green had been offensive. Gray agreed to fire him the next morning and to warn his other workers not to be insolent to the British troops. On his side, Colonel Dalrymple pledged to do everything he could to keep his men away from the ropewalks.
But at Benjamin Burdick’s house the same British soldier had come back to stand watch. Burdick went out to ask him what he was doing.
“I’m pumping shit,” the soldier answered.
“March off!” said Burdick.
“Damn you!” said the soldier.
Burdick began to strike him with a stick, and the soldier ran away.
From all over town, stories like that one were sweeping the Main Guard—the troop headquarters—and threats of retaliation from the British were reaching the patriots at Faneuil Hall. Even before William Green’s run-in with Walker, one patriot claimed to have heard four soldiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment saying that a great many men would eat their dinners on Monday who wouldn’t be eating them on Tuesday. A British soldier appeared at the door of a Bostonian named Amos Thayer to tell Thayer’s sister that she must keep him at home because there would be a great deal of bloodshed before Tuesday. Another patriot heard a teenage British fifer say he hoped to God the soldiers would burn the town down.
—
On Monday morning, March 5, Thomas Hutchinson laid before the Council a letter from Colonel Carr complaining about the town’s mood. Council members replied that the people would never be satisfied until the troops were removed. Royall Tyler added that the customs commissioners had to go, too.
The day had been cold but clear. A foot of snow covered the town, and along King Street the snow had frozen. Boston did not have streetlamps like London’s, and at night the only light shone through windows or from the moon. By 7 P.M., small bands of patriots armed with clubs had begun patrolling the streets.
John Gillespie had come out for a drink with friends, and on his way to a South End tavern he saw fifty men in those roving patrols. Gillespie had been drinking about an hour when a friend came to the tavern to say that three hundred men had gathered at the Liberty Tree with clubs and sticks to assail the British soldiers. Meanwhile, at the Brick Church in the North End, a man boosted a small boy through an open window and told him to climb to the belfry and start ringing the bell. By 8:30 P.M. bells were ringing all over Boston. Gillespie was sure there must be a fire. Ever since a devastating blaze ten years before, whenever men heard bells at night they ran for leather bags to carry water and for the pumps mounted on wheels that they called fire engines.
The tavern’s owner assured Gillespie that it wasn’t a fire. It was to collect the mob. Gillespie was walking home when two fire engines were pulled past him. He asked again whether there was a fire. No, the men answered, they were for fighting the soldiers.
William Davies, a sergeant major in the Fourteenth Regiment, saw men tearing up an outdoor butcher stall for clubs. They were shouting, “Now for the bloody-back rascals!” When they added, “Murder!” and “Kill the dogs!” Sergeant Davies slipped over to a friend’s house and exchanged his red uniform for civilian clothes.
Crowds seemed to be streaming toward the ropewalks and toward the British barracks. Only a few apprentices had gone to King Street, where the Main Guard stood just south of Town House and about forty yards from the customs office. At customs, Private Hugh White of the Twenty-ninth was on duty in the sentry box. The apprentices had gathered there when one of them, young Edward Garrick of Piemont’s wigmaking shop, spotted a British officer named John Goldfinch passing the sentry post. Garrick began jeering at him.
“There goes the fellow that won’t pay my master for dressing his hair,” he cried.
Goldfinch ignored him.
But even after the officer had disappeared the boy kept it up. Goldfinch was cheap, Garrick said. He wouldn’t pay Piemont the money he owed him.
Now Private White rose to the bait. Of course his captain would pay his debts, White said. Captain Goldfinch was a gentleman.
There were no gentlemen in that regiment, said Garrick.
Hugh White stepped out of the small sentry box and into the street. “Let me see your face,” he said.
Garrick did not flinch. “I am not ashamed to show my face.”
White swung his musket and struck Garrick a blow on the side of his head with its butt. Dazed and reeling, the young man ran to the doorway of a shop and began to yell for help. White followed and hit him again.
The eight or nine other apprentices in the street taunted White when he returned, muttering and cursing, to his post. “Bloody back!” the boys called. “Lousy rascal!” “Damned rascally scoundrel lobster son of a bitch!”
The shouts began to attract a crowd.
—
Around town, the encounters between soldiers and citizens were increasing. As three armed soldiers passed a Bostonian, Robert Pierpoint, one jabbed him with the handle of his bayonet. When Pierpoint protested, the others said he soon would hear more from them. Samuel Adams’ cousin Henry Bass watched a party of soldiers coming out of Draper’s Alley, a covered passageway that led to a barracks. The soldiers had drawn their cutlasses and were swinging them as they strode along, ripping clothes and nicking shoulders. A man called to them, “Gentlemen, what is the matter?”
They answered, “You will see by and by.”
On either side, a few men were trying to defuse the looming explosion. With the bells clanging and packs of boys racing through the streets, one civilian asked a group of British officers, “Why don’t you keep your soldiers in the barracks?” They claimed they were doing their best. The Bostonian persisted. “Are the inhabitants to be knocked down in the street? Are they to be murdered in this manner? You know,” he went on, “that our country and our town has been badly used. We did not send for you. We will not have you here. We will . . .” The rest was lost in the roar from a crowd that had collected around him.
The officers went on answering politely. A portion of the crowd was mollified and shouting, “Home! Home!” But others yelled, “The Main Guard!” and men went rushing toward King Street.
British officers like Captain Goldfinch were also trying to dampen tempers. Goldfinch was not aware of the blows Private White had struck to defend his honor, and at the end of Draper’s Alley he found a band of redcoats trying to swat away snowballs from the crowd with a shovel. Goldfinch worked his way through to the soldiers and ordered them back to Murray’s Barracks. They withdrew under a barrage of snowballs and insults: “Cowards!” “Afraid to fight!”
A merchant, Richard Palmes, stopped a band of officers to say that he was surprised to see soldiers out of their barracks after 8 P.M.
“Pray, do you mean to teach us our duty?” one officer demanded.
Palmes’s answer was tactful: “I do not. Only to remind you of it.”
Snowballs and curses had gone on falling as he spoke, and the officers had to stoop to avoid them. One gestured to the crowd and asked Palmes, “Why do you not go to your homes?”
Palmes turned to the townspeople. “Gentlemen, hear what the officers say. You had better go home.”
Some drifted away, others took up the cry, “To the Main Guard!” Shouting and pounding on walls, they raced to King Street. There Edward Garrick wa
s pointing to Hugh White in his sentry box and bawling, “This is the son of a bitch that knocked me down!”
The throng pressed in on White, hurling icicles at him, along with chunks of ice pried from the street. Private White shouted that he could not leave his post. If they did not stop, he said, he would have to call the main guard and the crowd would take the consequences. A civilian wearing a red cloak also pleaded for a halt, but the men and the boys retreated only for a moment. As the pelting went on, White fixed his bayonet and let everyone see that he was loading his musket.
Henry Knox, a heavyset Boston bookseller, approached White and urged him not to fire. If he did, he would die for it.
“Damn them,” said White. “If they molest me, I will fire.”
Jonathan Austin, a law clerk for John Adams, had been drawn to King Street by the bells and tried with no success to send the crowd home. Ice was bursting around Private White’s head when he pounded on the door of the Custom House. Inside, no one would open it. White heard a chorus of shouts from the crowd: “Kill him! Kill him!” “Knock him down!” “Fire, damn you, fire! You dare not fire!”
A town watchman assured White that his tormentors were mere boys and the sentry had nothing to fear from them. But White could see the size of the mob flocking to King Street. As he ducked from shards of ice, he shouted for help, “Turn out, Main Guard!”
That cry mingled with another call. “Town born,” the civilians were shouting to their fellow Bostonians, “turn out! Town born, turn out!”
At the main guardhouse, the officer of the day got word of the danger Private White was facing. Forty years old, his face pitted with smallpox scars, Captain Thomas Preston was an Irish officer respected for his solid judgment. He was also a musician who had performed regularly at Francis Bernard’s amateur musicales. Now he paced up and down for almost half an hour trying to decide what to do. Captain Preston understood that the law didn’t give him the right to march out his troops and disperse a crowd unless a civilian authority called on him to do it. Tonight, no justice of the peace was likely to brave the mob and come forward. And yet Private White was alone, one sentry facing men and boys armed with clubs and ice more deadly than rocks. In this crisis, Captain Preston could not rely on his officer of the guard, Lieutenant James Basset. Through family connections Basset had been commissioned at the age of twelve, and he was barely twenty years old, completely inexperienced, and shaking.
“What shall I do in this case?” Basset asked Preston.
The captain decided that his first duty was to Private White. “Take out six or seven of the men,” Preston said, “and let them go to the assistance of the sentry.”
Basset put together a relief party of one corporal and six grenadiers who included the tallest men in the regiment. Three of the six had fought the previous week at the ropewalks. Shedding their cumbersome watchcoats, they prepared to set off, but Preston knew he couldn’t trust the command to the corporal or even to his lieutenant. Basset stayed behind, and Preston and his column moved off, bayonets fixed but muskets empty.
Marching toward Private White, the soldiers brandished their bayonets to ward off anyone from coming too close. As they passed one Bostonian, he felt a blade brush his hat. But the men of the column, although they were tense, weren’t eager to fight. When another Bostonian, Nathaniel Fosdick, found them bearing down on him, he snapped, “Why are you pushing at me?”
“Damn your blood,” said a soldier. “Stand out of our way.”
“I will not,” said Fosdick. “I am doing no harm to any man, and I will not stand aside for anyone.”
The column of soldiers broke to either side and moved around him.
The relief party reached Hugh White’s sentry box, and Henry Knox cautioned Captain Preston as he had done with White. Approaching Preston as his men were loading their muskets, Knox seized him by the coat. “For God’s sake, take care of your men. If they fire,” Knox said again, “you die.”
Preston answered that he was aware of that. He brushed Knox aside and ordered Private White to join the relief column. As he left the box, the crowd didn’t try to stop him. With White safe, Preston turned his men around and ordered them to march back to the Main Guard. But the mob had become too dense for the soldiers to move, and all at once the fury that had been growing for eighteen months erupted on King Street.
“Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire!” someone shouted from the crowd. “You can’t kill us all.”
Preston formed his men in a semicircle next to a corner of the Custom House. They stood three feet apart as men from the crowd pressed within inches of their bayonets.
Richard Palmes still hoped to avert a calamity but had armed himself with a club. He went up to Captain Preston to ask whether his men’s guns were loaded. Preston said that they were, with powder and ball.
Palmes said, “I hope you do not intend they shall fire upon the inhabitants.”
“By no means, by no means,” Preston said, and he pointed out that since he was standing directly in front of the musket barrels, he would be the first to fall if the guns were fired. Giving an order to fire under those circumstances, Preston told Palmes, would prove that he was no officer.
Not everyone was reassured. A young woman who was a neighbor of Private White’s approached him, but he pushed her toward the corner. “Go home,” he said, “or you’ll be killed.”
As men kept the soldiers hemmed in, a rumor spread that James Murray was hurrying toward the scene. He was the justice of the peace who had stood bail for William Browne after the assault on James Otis. A voice cried, “Here comes Murray with the Riot Act!” If it was true, Murray would be bringing Preston the authority he needed to disperse the crowd. Under province law, a civilian official could invoke the king’s name to tell a gathering of fifty men, armed or not, to disband within one hour. The penalties for not obeying included the seizure of land, flogging, even prison. On this night, Bostonians would not be read the Riot Act. The figure drawing nearer was bombarded with snowballs and sent running down Pudding Lane.
The mob knew that without a civil authority the redcoats were helpless. Samuel Gray, one of the ropemakers who had fought on the day Patrick Walker was insulted, had rushed to King Street vowing to knock a few heads. A little drunk, he clapped an apprehensive friend on the back and told him, “They dare not fire.” Around him sticks and ice flew through the air, and men were yelling, “Damn you, you rascals, fire!” “You dare not fire!” “Fire and be damned!”
A Tory had worked his way behind Preston’s men and took up the cry in a different spirit. “Fire!” he urged the soldiers. “By God, I’ll stand by you whilst I have a drop of blood! Fire!”
It was the one word everyone was shouting—those who heard the bells and still thought the town might be burning, those goading the troops for their impotence, the Tory who wanted the British soldiers to avenge his politics. Everyone—except Captain Preston–was shouting, “Fire!”
A stick flew through the air and struck Private Hugh Montgomery of the relief column. He fell, and as he scrambled back to his feet a voice rang out above the others: “Damn you, fire!”
Montgomery cocked his musket and shot into the crowd. Richard Palmes, standing nearby, hit Montgomery’s arm and then aimed a blow directly at Captain Preston’s head. But Palmes slipped on the ice and only hit Preston’s arm. Montgomery prodded him away with his bayonet.
That first shot hit no one. The crowd had pulled back, and for a few seconds there was silence. Then Preston moved behind his troops. He didn’t order them to fire, but he didn’t give the command to recover—to cease fire. Without any order from their captain, the British soldiers began to shoot.
Private Matthew Kilroy, one of the brawlers at the ropewalks, fired with no apparent aim. Yet he struck Samuel Gray directly in the head and opened a hole as big as a man’s fist. Gray, who had just called, “My lads, they will not fire,” died instantly.
Another volley from the soldiers, and two bullet
s tore into the broad chest of Crispus Attucks. Dark-skinned, Indian or mulatto, Attucks stood six feet two inches and towered over most British soldiers, who rarely reached five feet ten. Two decades before, at the age of twenty-seven, Attucks had run away from his master. Now, nearing fifty and a leader by his age and size, he had come to King Street at the head of a band of Boston sailors. Gasping, Attucks fell to the street in front of the relief column.
A civilian shouted that the crowd should advance in order to stop the soldiers from firing again. It was a fatal misjudgment. As men pressed nearer, the British fired from even closer range. James Caldwell, a sailor, was struck by a bullet that passed through his body, and he took a second wound in the shoulder.
Robert Paterson’s trousers had been grazed when Ebenezer Richardson fired from his window twelve days before. Now as he raised his right hand a bullet struck him in the wrist.
Patrick Carr, an Irishman living in Boston, had started for King Street with a small cutlass fastened under his coat, but his neighbors persuaded him to leave it at home. The blade would not have helped him. He was struck by a bullet that tore away his backbone to the hip.
Edward Payne, a merchant living in King Street across from the Custom House, had gone out earlier to see whether there was a fire. Coming home to tell his wife she had nothing to fear, Payne lingered at his doorway, watching as the crowd grew. A bullet caught him in the right arm.
Ebenezer Mackintosh’s brother-in-law, Samuel Maverick, was racing away from the shooting when a bullet ricocheted and caught him in the chest. Dying, Maverick fell to the street. He was seventeen.
At first, with the smoke, the pushing and the din, no one could be sure what had happened. Many in the crowd couldn’t believe that the soldiers had been firing real shot and not merely trying to scare them with powder. Some thought that a few men had fainted from fright. Others decided that men had run away and that what was left in the street were only the greatcoats they had shed as they ran. The confusion explained why seventeen-year-old Christopher Monk could not persuade anyone that he had been hit in the chest. Monk had come armed with a bat that he used for street games, and now he felt himself lurching. Idly, his friend James Brewer asked whether he was wounded.
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