Site of the Boston Massacre

On this site, a skirmish between an angry group of colonists and a few terrified British soldiers erupted into the first deadly encounter between Boston colonists and British “red coats.”

The trouble began when a crowd of angry colonists left a local tavern and approached a British sentry standing guard outside on a chilly March 5^th, 1770.  They were “a motley rabble of saucy boys,” according to John Adams who had assembled an argument between a young boy and a soldier.  Eyewitness accounts of the event are confusing.  The boy was struck with the barrel of a musket by a sentry, and the crowd became a mob.   They threw sticks, ice snowballs and rocks at the young British guards, and finally a wooden club that knocked one of the sentries to the ground.

It might have been their jeering taunt “fire, fire, why don’t you fire?  You dare not fire?” that caused the confusion, or the panic of the young British soldiers who were outnumbered and under attack, but fire they did and within seconds 11 were wounded or dying.

Samuel Adams and Paul Revere seized upon the tragedy to spark a flame of anger among the colonists by representing the skirmish as a massacre.  The British soldiers were tried for murder.  John Adams, a Boston lawyer and ardent patriot defended them in spite of his contemporaries’ assertion that the event was a “horrible and bloody massacre.”  He was as loyal to the ideal of justice as he was to the patriot cause.

“…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.
John Adams