Episode 13: The Massacre

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Thirteen: “The Massacre”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 3/7/2025

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down was made possible with the support of Richard H. Brown and Mary Jo Otsea. Learn how you can make a gift to support the series at r2studios.org.

AMBUSKE: The snow was deep, and the night was cold and dark in Boston on March 5, 1770. As Bostonians and British soldiers traveled streets paved with oyster shells, compacted snow turned ice made for delicate walking. Though new fallen snow quieted their footsteps, the stillness of the fridge air carried sounds over a distance.

AMBUSKE: From within her lodgings at the Royal Exchange Tavern at the corner of King Street and Royal Exchange Lane, Jane Crothers heard a commotion outside. We know little about Crothers’ life before this moment. Perhaps she worked at the tavern; she may have only recently arrived in town. Surely, she felt a sense of anticipation, for in a few weeks’ time, she would marry Private Joseph Whitehouse of the 14th Regiment of Foot. She was but one of many British Americans who found and forged a family in the British Army.

AMBUSKE: As Crothers ventured out into the moonlight to search for the noise, she spied Private Hugh White of the 29th Regiment just across the lane, standing guard in front of the Customs House on King Street. White was 30 years old in 1770, a veteran of the army for 11 years. He had taken the king’s shilling in County Down, Ireland, and joined the army in 1759, a decent option for an unskilled lad like him.

AMBUSKE: We can imagine White stamping his feet to keep warm as he manned the sentry box in his blood red coat, the small clouds of hot breath rising from his face. The Customs House and the Royal Exchange Tavern were just down King Street from the Town House, the seat of the colony’s royal government. The main guard house was just across the way.

AMBUSKE: As she approached White, Crothers may have noticed some agitation. Earlier that evening, White had clubbed a wigmaker’s apprentice named Edward Gerrish with the butt of his gun, after overhearing Gerrish hurl insults at a British officer passing nearby. The officer had ignored Gerrish’s taunts, not wishing to inflame tensions that night; White did not have the officer’s discipline or composure.

AMBUSKE: Soldiers and civilians had lived in an uneasy, sometimes broken peace in Boston since the fall of 1768, when rioting and protests over the Townshend Acts compelled London to deploy regiments to the town.

AMBUSKE: Dismayed by the new taxes on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, and a new Boston-based customs department to enforce them, Bostonians had joined other British Americans in publishing protests, boycotting British goods, and in some cases, burning boats and destroying property.     

AMBUSKE: By the summer of 1768, London had had enough. The king’s ministers ordered regiments from Halifax, Nova Scotia to take up station in Boston, in hopes of restoring some semblance of order and good government in His Majesty’s colony of Massachusetts Bay.

AMBUSKE: In Boston, the soldiers, many of whom came with their wives and children, found cramped quarters, wary civilians, and the unenviable task of keeping the king’s peace in one of British America’s oldest towns.

AMBUSKE: But in the months after their deployment, some soldiers found wives among Boston’s women, and baptized their children in local churches. Some officers struck up friendships with the town’s elite, and even if Bostonians didn’t want soldiers in the town, some who led the resistance movement, like the merchant John Rowe, were willing to charge the army rent for their warehouses and private rooms, if soldiers were going to be there anyway.

AMBUSKE: Even Private White had friends in town. On the night of March 5, 1770, not long before he clubbed the wigmaker’s apprentice, he had exchanged pleasantries with a passing resident, asking after his family. 

AMBUSKE: Still, occasional brawls, exchanged insults, and perceived slights between soldiers and civilians made living together a daily struggle in a town that in the eighteenth century was all but an island.       

AMBUSKE: When Crothers reached White at his sentry box, she asked him about the noise she had heard. He said he didn’t know what it was. They may have heard shouting from nearby Brattle Street, where soldiers and civilians were scuffling and exchanging loud words. As White and Crothers talked, sometime around 9 o’clock, a group of Bostonians gathered before them. Just how many, the witnesses that night - men as well as women, black as well as white  – do not agree. It may have been 30 people, it may have swelled quickly to more than 200.

AMBUSKE: What is clear is that many were furious at White for having struck Edward Gerrish. And as the crowd gathered, Crothers claimed she heard someone in the mob shout:

JANE CROTHERS: “[T]here is that bloody backed Son of a Bitch let us go kill him.”

AMBUSKE: Bostonians began hurling oyster shells, chunks of wood, and ice at White, forcing him out of his sentry’s box and back toward the Customs House. He called to the main guard house for help.

AMBUSKE: At around 9:15, church bells began to ring. To ring at such a strange hour could mean only one thing: the town was burning. But as more Bostonians poured out of their homes and taverns to douse the blaze, they found only the heat of a growing mob confronting Private White and the soldiers who had come to help him.

AMBUSKE: Newton Prince, a free Black businessman and member of the Old South Church, heard the bells ringing. He ran out into the street, where he was told:

NEWTON PRINCE: “[T]here was no fire, but something better, there was going to be a fight. Some had buckets and bags and some Clubs, I went to the west end of the Town House where were a number of people. I saw Soldiers coming out of the Guard house with their Guns and running down one after another to the Customs house.”

AMBUSKE: Captain Thomas Preston of the 29th Regiment led a group of seven men to Private White’s aid, maneuvering through the growing crowd to join him in front of the Customs House. They formed a defensive half circle at the corner of the building, with bayonets fixed, and weapons loaded, as the insults, ice, and invective continued to rain down on them.

AMBUSKE: Richard Palmes, a merchant and member of the Sons of Liberty who had been trying to calm tempers that night, made his way through the crowd to Captain Preston. He asked the officer if he intended to order his men to shoot. “By no means, Sir, by no means,” Preston replied, knowing he could not legally act without a command from civilian  authorities.

AMBUSKE: Private White pushed Jane Crothers back, out of the way:

CROTHERS: “and bid me go home or I should be killed.”        

AMBUSKE: Witnesses like Prince and Crothers claimed they heard the mob daring the soldiers to shoot:

PRINCE: “[D]amn you why don’t you fire.”

CROTHERS: “Fire by God I’ll stand by you.”

RICHARD PALMES: “God damn you why don’t you fire”

AMBUSKE: From the crowd, a white object emerged, hurtling toward Private Hugh Montgomery. Whether it was snow, ice, or a chunk of birch bark, we’ll never know. Montgomery was anchored on the right side of the soldiers’ defensive arc. The object struck the muzzle of his musket, and as Montgomery recovered his balance and leveled his weapon, the crowd saw the flash of the pan, and heard the sound of a shot.

AMBUSKE: Some civilians fled, some froze in place, almost in disbelief at what had just happened.

AMBUSKE: And then, mere seconds later, someone shouted “FIRE!”

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down. A podcast about the history of the American Revolution.

AMBUSKE: Episode 13: The Massacre.

AMBUSKE: In the months before the deployment of British regiments to Boston in the fall of 1768, Boston merchants and consumers had organized non-consumption and then non-importation movements to protest the Townshend Acts, the colony’s House of Representatives called on its sister provinces to present a more united front in the face of Parliament’s overreach, and Bostonians intimidated, chastised, and harassed customs officials when they tried to enforce the new laws.

AMBUSKE: In many ways, the rioting, bonfires, protests, and effigies were in keeping with long held English traditions of resisting arbitrary power. Britons at home were no less inclined to foment civil disorder when they believed it too was warranted.

AMBUSKE: But in the 1760s, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to see troubling patterns in each other’s behavior - a quest for more centralized imperial rule in the one, and an increasing penchant for disobedience in the other.

AMBUSKE: When the regiments deployed to Boston, however, many Bostonians believed that the soldiers’ arrival transformed the port town into an occupied city. As the colony’s provincial council complained to London in 1769, colonists now lived “as if in an Enemy’s Country.” It was a world far different from the one they had imagined just a few years earlier.  

SERENA ZABIN: In the 1760s, especially right after the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763. Bostonians, like most other white colonists were extraordinarily thrilled to be British. They thought they were part of the shared glories of the future.

ZABIN: I'm Serena Zabin. I'm professor of history at Carleton College in Minnesota.

ZABIN: One of the things that's really just magnificent about Bostonians is they imagine themselves as partners, in what's going to be Britain's spectacular empire, they've just kicked out the French from an enormous part of North America, they have claimed a whole lot of indigenous land. There are lots of indications that there is going to be more and more land and more and more glory. It looks like a spectacular time to be British. And Bostonians are using this language of family and of marriage to say we are going to be your partner in this. We can't wait super excited.

AMBUSKE: The imperial bliss soon lost its luster. With the introduction of Stamp duties, and then the passage of the Townshend Acts, Bostonians and other British Americans began wondering about their place in the British empire.

ZABIN: Bostonians take it pretty personally. They feel pretty betrayed. They think of themselves as people who gave a lot to the Seven Years’ War, who committed deeply to the Empire, who are very loyal subjects. They saw themselves sometimes as partners in a marriage, and all of a sudden, they're being told that they are like, barely the bootblack. That suddenly they're just informed that they're supposed to come up with these ways of paying taxes that they felt were unfair, partly because they didn't have any say in how they got put together.

ZABIN: It's clear to many Bostonians and I'm gonna say not just the wealthiest, most elite men who sit on the governor's council, it is clear to people who read the newspaper and people who are neighbors with those who read the newspaper, that these taxes are not just about collecting money, because the point of the taxes and the way the taxes are being put together and are being collected is clearly an attempt to centralize the British Empire.

AMBUSKE: So, how did the arrival of British regiments in 1768 only deepen Bostonians’ suspicions about the empire? Where did soldiers and civilians find common ground in this fraught moment? And how did the tensions between them lead to that fatal night in 1770?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to Ireland, to recruit some of the men and families who would later deploy to British America. We’ll then sail west with the regiments, first to Halifax, and then south to Boston, to eavesdrop on soldiers and civilians adapting to new lives in Massachusetts Bay, before putting Captain Preston and his men on trial, to witness how the shooting on King Street became a massacre.

AMBUSKE: The deployment of regiments to Boston in the fall of 1768 reflected the many different threads that wove together the peoples and places of Britain’s Atlantic empire. Ireland was one such place. By the 1760s, the English and then the British had ruled Ireland for centuries. For the English, Ireland had been a training ground for empire, often with brutal results. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was also becoming an important source of manpower for Britain’s imperial ambitions.

AMBUSKE: The British stationed regiments there as part of regular troop rotations, holding them in readiness for deployment elsewhere throughout the empire. They were also meant to deter the perfidious French from fomenting rebellion among Irish Catholics against their Protestant rulers.

AMBUSKE: The 29th was among the regiments recruited and stationed in Ireland. Here’s Serena Zabin.

ZABIN: The 29th regiment of foot was an Irish Regiment, which is to say most of its privates are raised in Ireland. Most of the officers are Scottish, or Scots Irish. But the privates are Irish. They're primarily from Protestant Ireland. At this moment, it was illegal for Catholics to serve in a British Army.

AMBUSKE: Like Private Hugh White, Matthew Chambers joined the 29th Regiment in 1759 as the fighting in North America during the Seven Years’ War neared its end. He too hailed from County Down, not far from Belfast. Chambers was a tailor by trade, but his willingness to enlist at age 19 suggests he saw few prospects for himself in the north of Ireland.

ZABIN: Enlistment as a private is lifetime. Unless you manage to somehow get out of it. Either because you've been injured, or there are some privates who manage just to legitimately get discharged. But for the most part, you've made a lifetime commitment. A lot of the army is actually relatively old. They are born in the 1730s or 1740s. They're 30 or 40, at this point. So they're in their 20s When they're fighting the Seven Years’ War, but they are, they're still part of the army. Newer enlistees come largely because there is a regular paycheck, it's not very big, it's, you know, often insufficient, but for some Irish, it is more sufficient than what they are making as laborers on someone else's land in Ireland.

AMBUSKE: But the army wasn’t just recruiting men like Hugh White or Matthew Chambers. In a very real sense, it was recruiting their wives and children as well.

ZABIN: One of the things that is fascinating about the British army is that it's so unlike a modern 21st century army, we tend to think of them as pretty similar except for like, the material, right, just different guns, but they're actually completely different institutions. That 18th century British Army was a family institution, it was shaped with the expectation that the men who were part of it, were going to be part of a family. That didn't always work perfectly. But the army is an organization that employs both men and women. Every regiment has a set number of women who actually get rations and get pay to do some of the work of the army. Those women are almost entirely married to the privates in that regiment, very occasionally, their daughters instead, but they're largely wives, there are official rules about how many women are allowed to be paid as part of any regiment. Much of the time, commanding officers ignored those rules, because men were likely to desert if their wives were not allowed to be part of the regiment that they're traveling in. In this world, there's no way to send your pay home. So, if you are a woman who's married to a soldier, and you can't travel with the regiment, you're pretty likely to lose your husband's financial support. So there's a lot of incentive for women to be part of the army, and the British Army and its officers understood that, and so women and children travel with the army. And they are part of the financial responsibility of the army.

AMBUSKE: In June 1765, Jane Chambers, Matthew’s wife, along with their young child, were among the many wives and children who boarded the HMS Thunderer anchored at Cork on Ireland’s southwest coast. The ship was bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

AMBUSKE: In some ways, the 29th was unlike other regiments, given the number of women and children that accompanied it. One of the officers overseeing the embarkations convinced Irish officials to permit an even greater number of family members than usual to sail with their husbands and fathers, fearing that if they were left behind, they might end up in the orphanage or the alms house. Sending them to British America was a way to prevent their becoming a burden on the Irish public.

AMBUSKE: The Thunderer put into port at Halifax in July 1765, after a voyage of five weeks across the Atlantic. The town was barely fifteen-years-old when the Chambers family disembarked, along with 500 other soldiers and their families. Like the rest of British Nova Scotia, the town of Halifax was an experiment funded by Parliament, an attempt to directly manage the settlement process from afar. Even if the colonization of Nova Scotia wasn’t going as well as the British had hoped, Halifax, like New York City, had become a critical node of the British military in North America.

AMBUSKE: Like Ireland, Halifax was a place to hold troops in readiness in case they were needed elsewhere in the empire. And while the soldiers and their families were relieved they had not been sent to the West Indies, where tropical diseases could quickly decimate troops in close quarters, Halifax was cold. The barracks were rotting. Most of its civilian population – about 3,000 people – were single white men, though there were a small number of Black families as well.

AMBUSKE: Some officers, who had greater privileges, quickly decamped to Boston, New York, or other towns. For the mostly Irish enlisted men and those with families, there was little to do 400 miles north of Boston, except baptize their children, mourn their passing, welcome new family members into the world, write home to relatives, partake in the occasional drunken brawl in local taverns, and wait.

AMBUSKE: By the summer of 1768, the waiting was over.

ZABIN: There were all of these protests and boycotts after the 1767 passage of the Townsend Acts. And some of those boycotts are just people refusing to buy stuff. But there are also more dramatic street protests that include breaking people's windows threatening some of the customs officials who show up and the customs officials get pretty anxious and they flee to a ship that's in Boston Harbor, and they start begging the governor, please, we need more support.

AMBUSKE: In June 1768, rioting Bostonians forced the customs commissioners and their families to flee first to the HMS Romney and then to Castle William in Boston Harbor. The officials had seized John Hancock’s ship the Liberty on charges of smuggling, triggering the revolt. Ann Hulton, the sister of commissioner Henry Hulton, took refuge with her family in the castle. Although the trappings of polite society continued in what she called their “exile,” with splendid dinners with government officials and military officers, and tea with Governor Francis Bernard, Hulton observed how the riots impeded the king’s government and the execution of Parliament’s laws. As she wrote to a friend in London that July:

ANN HULTON: “The business of the Commissioners in the mean time [is] carried on here, my Brother has had a vast deal on his hands ever since he came Out. We found him just recovered of a fever caught by Lodging in an unaired Bed in a House he had taken about 4 Miles from Boston in the Country…Two of the Commissioners besides are of our Mess, but dont Lodge here, One of em goes every Night to the Romney & the other Lodges in the Barracks, The Clerks all Lodge in the Barracks.”

AMBUSKE: Hulton also took note of a growing Royal Navy presence in the harbor, and rumors of regiments on their way.

HULTON: “Ships & Sloops of War [have] arrived here from Jamaica. We have now no less than five Stationed round this Island as our guard. ….. Its reported that a Regiment of Soldiers is on the way from New York to Boston.”

AMBUSKE: Over tea that afternoon, Governor Bernard may have confided in Hulton his wish for a regiment or two to help keep the peace in Boston. General Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of British forces in North America, had offered to send soldiers if Bernard requested them, but the colony’s provincial council rejected that plan, and the governor felt he could not turn a blind eye to their unanimous advice.

AMBUSKE: In a postscript, Hulton captured the governor in a reflective moment, as he weighed the recent past against an uncertain future.

HULTON: “His Excellency says, two more such years as the past & the British Empire is at an End.”

AMBUSKE: What neither Hulton or Bernard knew as they drank tea on that day in mid-July, is that at that moment, secret orders were on a ship heading west from London to New York.  The Earl of Hillsborough, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, had read with growing alarm Governor Bernard’s recent letters recounting Massachusetts Bay’s resistance to the Townshend Acts, and its assembly’s attempt to enlist the support of the other colonies in their protests. Hillsborough directed Gage to send regiments to Boston to reinforce the colony’s civil government and ensure “due obedience” to the laws.

ZABIN: At this moment, there's no police in Britain. During peacetime magistrates and people who run towns and cities tended to depend on regiments of soldiers to help keep order. And primarily, they use regimens to do two things. One is to cut down on smuggling, which is a big concern, especially in England. And the other one is to put down riots and other historians have shown that the 1760s are kind of a peak decade for rioting all around Britain, in London, too. troops are used for both of those. And so it's therefore not at all a stretch for the governor to say, oh, right, I should ask for some regiments that will help keep order in Boston.

AMBUSKE: By the 1760s, Boston had maintained a Night Watch for over a century. The watchmen patrolled the streets at night, keeping an eye out for fire or threats to property and the community. While they could detain someone suspected of criminal behavior, they had no formal arrest powers in ways that we would now recognize. Nor did they have the imposing presence of regiments to quell large riots. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise, then, that Governor Bernard, Lord Hillsborough, or General Gage would consider sending regiments to Boston.

ZABIN: So a lot of back and forth about how that's going to happen. But there are some regiments already Halifax. Those are sent to Boston, because that's the closest set. And then another regiment will eventually come from Ireland. We end up with two and then eventually four, and they come to Boston in the fall of 1768.

AMBUSKE: The men of the 29th and 14th Regiments, together with a detachment from the 59th Regiment, sailed from Halifax with their families in late September 1768. They entered Boston Harbor a little over a week later. The 64th Regiment soon arrived from Ireland, bringing the 65th Regiment with it

ZABIN: And their job is supposed to be to keep order in Boston, to protect the customs officials to sort of tamp down on all of this writing, and to keep an eye on the smuggling. The attempt of many merchants to evade some of these Townshend acts and taxes. So their job seems not atypical.

AMBUSKE: But as John McCurdy, Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University explains, by 1768, the king’s ministers had begun to imagine a use for the army that was atypical. 

JOHN MCCURDY: The ministry in England are starting to change how they think about soldiers and quartering. When soldiers are in New York, or soldiers in or Albany, or Charleston, Philadelphia, they're there because they just need to have a place to put them. It's not about patrolling the people, the soldiers don't execute any type of police function. They're not there to enforce the laws or to keep the peace. They're just kind of kept in reserve in case war were to break out. When it comes to Boston, they've changed their ideas. The ministry in Britain starts thinking well, Boston is such a problem. They're attacking crown officials, tax collectors, they're not abiding by parliamentary law. Let's send soldiers to crack down and maybe they won't crack down immediately. But their presence will send the message that they could crack down. And so it's a very different feeling.

AMBUSKE:  Laws in Great Britain and the colonies governing peacetime armies were meant to assuage those uneasy feelings.

ZABIN: Everybody understands in the British world that troops have to be subordinate to the civilian authority, this goes back to as 17th century concern about whether an army that is still that exists in a time of peace. What purpose it's going to get put to. A peacetime army, is it just sitting there waiting for some king to take it and use against, anybody who disagrees with him. And what moment is that just become his own private set of arms. And the British are, are legitimately concerned about this, but they spend a lot of time trying to think about what kinds of controls can we put on this army, so that the king or his representatives can't just use it to get the king's will? Right. They pass a lot of laws about how exactly the army can get used. That includes things like the riot act. We use still now the phrase like to read someone the riot act, well, literally to read the riot act means that a magistrate, a civilian, not somebody from the military, a civilian magistrate has to get in front of a mob and say, if you don't disperse, the army will come. And he's supposed to say that a number of times before the army is allowed to come. So that is one of the ways in which the army is really supposed to be subordinate to the civilian authority. If the army shoots without any civilian having read the riot act, then really the army is in the wrong. They have no right to do that. But in practical and practical terms. You can imagine a riot in London or New York or any of those places. This is not that easy to do.

AMBUSKE: And as British officers knew all too well, the army’s very presence in towns and cities like London, Glasgow, New York or Boston ran the risk of violent delights with violent ends. 

ZABIN: Lots of times, of course, the Army is concerned that it can't control its own people. And so for the most part, all of this kind of urban policing that peacetime regiments are being sent to do is incredibly unattractive to people, especially to officers, who are the people who are going to be responsible if anything goes wrong. So most of the time, officers whose regiments are being sent to do urban policing are looking for ways to get out. They always think this is going to end my career and half the time they’re right.

AMBUSKE: From the decks of their ships, the soldiers and families who sailed into Boston Harbor in the fall of 1768 caught sight of the town that in the eighteenth-century was almost an island. Serena Zabin explains why:

 ZABIN: Boston in the 18th century was only about a square mile it was just the peninsula. Think about the Back Bay that really was a bay it's really is full of landfill now some garbage and some tops of hills. So it was a skinny little peninsula that was connected to the mainland by a place that was just called the neck because that's how skinny it was. But 16,000 people which honestly means that the density of Boston in the 18th century is not so different than its density today. It's actually a pretty full place. There's a lot of people there, and they're living in not very large homes, pretty cramped together. There are pigs and chickens wandering the streets of Boston eating up some of the garbage that's there. But the part that feels like you're jostling your neighbors as you walk by them. That's, that's pretty much the same.

AMBUSKE: As the new arrivals disembarked on the Long Wharf and marched into town, they took note of their new surroundings, a geography that signaled Boston’s place in the British Empire.

ZABIN: Boston is really clearly oriented in all kinds of ways towards the Atlantic. The way Boston was set up, it had a Long Wharf, what is known with great originality, as the Long Wharf that sticks out into Boston Harbor sticks out farther than any other Wharf, and it heads straight out to Britain. And from the Long Wharf, if you turn your back to the ocean and you look into town, you look right up the main drag into the heart of the British authority in Boston, which is now the Old State House, what was then known as the townhouse, so the governor could stand at his chamber or stand on a little balcony that stands outside his chamber and look straight down the main street, out to the Long Wharf and out to The Atlantic, and imagine himself looking straight out to London. And that is the orientation of Boston. Of course, there is that other side, where people are coming in from the country where goods come in from, the country where lots of people are also emigrating and moving back and forth. But the town imagines itself as focused towards London.

AMBUSKE: But where would the soldiers and their families live in this imperial town? During the Seven Years’ War, Boston didn’t build a number of barracks as did Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. Here’s John McCurdy:

MCCURDY: Boston considers it. They debate it in the assembly and decide not to. I think in part because not a lot of soldiers are sent to Boston. They have a fort on an island with Castle William or Castle Island, and that seems to be enough.

 AMBUSKE: Within hours of the soldiers and their families making landfall, the question of where to quarter them touched off an argument between Governor Bernard, the commanding officer Lt. Colonel William Dalrymple, and the Boston Selectmen.

ZABIN: There is an argument between the commanding officers with the support of the governor. They're on one side, and on the other side are the town Selectmen. And Boston is, at this moment, a town, not a city. It doesn't have a mayor, so the guys who are running the town, the governor wants all of these troops to be right in the center of the city, because what they're supposed to be doing is crowd control. He wants them right where all of the rioting is happening. Maybe he's got some idea that maybe he's just gonna requisition some space and just load all of these troops, men, women, children, into the center of Boston and the Selectmen say, You can't do that.

AMBUSKE: To protest the Governor’s plans, the Boston Selectmen invoked the Quartering Act of 1765. For them, the law that New Yorkers had resisted with so much vigor was an asset in their attempt to keep the soldiers out of the town.

ZABIN: They say, look, the Quartering Act says very clearly that troops, when they are brought to a new place, have to be housed first in existing barracks, then if there's not any room or enough room in the barracks, then they're put in public houses, in pubs, and there's still not enough room. Room at that point, one can requisition private space, and the Selectmen point out there's really quite lovely barracks in Boston. They are in Boston Harbor. They're on what's now known as Castle Island. They'd just been refurbished for the Seven Years' War. The army was perfectly happy to have them then, and they said that's where the troops should go. They should be out in the harbor. If they're gonna come here, they should be in the barracks.

 AMBUSKE: For Governor Bernard, who was charged with keeping the peace in the king’s province, the Selectmens’ arguments were a load of nonsense.

ZABIN: The governor says, Well, what good are they gonna do me out there? Castle Island is seven miles if you walk around three miles, if you row, and you have to row during high tide, how can I get troops to put down a riot if they're seven miles away, Selectmen say, well, that's not really our problem. We didn't really want them there, after all.

AMBUSKE: For Lt. Col. Dalrymple, who was concerned with where his men and their families would sleep, enough was enough.

 ZABIN: The commanding officer says, This is ridiculous. I'm not putting them in the harbor. So he marches all of these troops down the Long Wharf into the center of Boston.

AMBUSKE: At noon on October 1st, Dalrymple ordered two elite companies of soldiers to parade down the Long Wharf and into town. They stopped in front of the Customs House on King Street, where they were soon joined by more troops. John Tudor, a merchant and deacon of the Second Church of Boston, recorded the moment in his diary:

JOHN TUDOR: “The Troops drew up in King Street and marched off in a Short time into the Commons with Muskets charged, Bayonets fixed…their Colours flying, Drums beating & museck playing, In short they made a gallant appearance, makeing with the Train of Artillery about 800 men.”

AMBUSKE: The theatricality of the parade carried unmistakable symbolic power. As soldiers marched down the Long Wharf, a wharf that pointed east toward London, they entered the town bearing the sovereignty and power of Parliament and the Crown.

AMBUSKE: Having made his point, Dalrymple went about finding accommodations for the soldiers and their families.

ZABIN: He has them start camping in the middle of Boston on Boston Common and move into Faneuil Hall and take over some market space and some other places, and they're there for a couple of months while people keep bickering about what's going to happen.

AMBUSKE: As these British officials continued to bicker, the Twenty-Ninth Regiment set up tents on Boston Common and began settling in. Jane Chambers soon joined her husband Matthew in camp, bringing with her their children, including a baby girl born in Halifax. They had named the little one Jane, after her mother. Little Jane was a source of joy and a well of concern for her parents. She was ill in those early days in Boston, so much so that they convinced a local Congregational Church to have her baptized. Happily, the baby survived. 

AMBUSKE: As the Chambers saw to their daughter’s spiritual and temporal needs, army and town officials finally reached a delicate agreement about quartering the soldiers.

ZABIN: In the end, the army is forced to compromise with the Selectmen. The Selectmen say, if you try to just requisition private space, we will have you cashiered. This absolutely won't be the end of your career. None of these officers are that committed that they're willing to risk their career for this. The compromise they come up with is they say, Okay, we will lease private space from private people to put troops into Boston. We will pay rent. We will rent people's empty houses. They'll rent warehouses, which they turn into barracks. But that's not enough space. They also rent people's extra rooms, their sheds, whatever extra space they have, the army ends up paying for and as they do that, they end up moving all of these troops, including all of these families, into every corner of Boston. And they turn hundreds of Bostonians into landlords and landlady as they move all of these people into their private homes, when they do that, they've suddenly trying to integrate now 2000 men and a pretty unknown number of women and children, but we're gonna assume something like several 100 into a town of 16,000 people that's already quite dense. They're squeezing folks in there. It's not always a smooth process. People don't always get along super well, but they do all become neighbors. They all get to know each other really, very, very well.

AMBUSKE: Over the next seventeen months – from October 1768 to March 1770 – Bostonians and British soldiers learned to live together in their peninsular town.

ZABIN: And some of times that goes really well. One of the things that was remarkable about Boston in the 1760s and 1770s is that actually it was majority female. There are more women than men. In Boston, that's true of all colonial cities, partly because the Seven Years' War, a lot of young men actually are killed, so there's a significant population loss among young men, but also because cities are the only places where women can make wages in any serious way. And so I married women tended to move to the city if they didn't have a pretty stable family place to live in. They see all of these men and they think, well, that's a possibility. All of a sudden, here's a marriage possibility for me. And they see all of these men, and they think, well, that's a possibility. All of a sudden, here's a marriage possibility for me.

AMBUSKE: Women like Jane Crothers would find a husband in soldiers like Private Joseph Whitehouse of the 14th Regiment. Sukey Inman, the niece of merchant John Rowe, would soon find her match in a naval officer.

AMBUSKE: Not every Boston family approved of these unions. In June 1769, Joseph Lasenby, a member of the Sons of Liberty, walked into his daughter’s home only to find his 20-year-granddaughter Mary Nowell in bed with Private William Clark.

ZABIN: He is horrified.

ZABIN: This becomes a story in the newspapers, unsurprisingly, but they end up getting married, the soldier and the granddaughter the soldier ends up writing this tell all memoir about it, where he's clearly trying to get back at his in laws. The newspapers read this as a real political fight. What does it mean to bring the army, literally the arm of the empire, right into your home, right into your bed, into the bosom of your family, and both the soldier and the young woman are like, actually, I'm kind of in this to thumb the nose at my father.

AMBUSKE: For other women, the arrival of the regiments was also an economic opportunity. In the eighteenth century, women were essential laborers in a functioning military.

ZABIN: Women, who are being paid by the army, are overwhelmingly doing laundry. That's the one thing that men really won't do in the 18th century, there are plenty of male tailors, although there are also women who will make uniforms, but what men will not do is wash clothing, and that is an enormous hygienic problem for the army. That is one reason why it's important for them to have women who will do that very hot and heavy work.

AMBUSKE: Soldiers and their families were also potential consumers for Boston’s female merchants and laborers.

ZABIN: They are doing plenty of laundry. They're doing plenty of cleaning. They are, of course, also doing wet nursing when they can. But we see advertisements for that, and then we see lots and lots of women who are engaged in sort of small scale business ventures. They sell a lot of seeds, for example, that tends to be a big thing. Wealthier women run various kinds of shops for clothes, right? And also for cloth before it's made into clothing, then they'll sell things like gloves and stockings and shoes and things like that. So wealthier women are selling those fine imported goods, less wealthy. Women are selling those same goods, but in the secondhand market.

AMBUSKE: Some soldiers forged friendships with Boston men, and sometimes soldiers went to work for them.

ZABIN: Soldiers were absolutely looking for things to do. They are certainly looking for work. Sometimes they are skilled artisans themselves. We sometimes see tailors. We sometimes see wig makers, and they go and they look for work. Boston has a depression at this moment, but it also has a real labor shortage, and so for the most part, people are happy to hire soldiers.

AMBUSKE: Even if they weren’t exactly thrilled with the soldiers being in Boston, or in their granddaughters' beds, the Sons of Liberty also enjoyed some social and economic benefits from the British Army.

ZABIN: The Sons of Liberty think that they won this argument. They are pretty pleased. They made the army pay like hard cash to rent these spaces in Boston. They won the legal argument, and they actually are winning the fiscal argument. They are perfectly willing to rent whatever spaces they have. That's actually a success for the Sons of Liberty. Renting isn't a sign of one's political affiliation. We know some of the officers join fraternal organizations. Friends that have John Hancock and Paul Revere and some of our most famous Sons of Liberty, they are all in it together, marching around in their regalia, and they see each other, they have a pretty good time, apparently, socializing together. That doesn't seem to be a problem.

AMBUSKE: While the Sons of Liberty and officers like Dalrymple enjoyed cordial relations, Boston women and enlisted men celebrated welcome and unwelcome marriages, and Boston landlords collected rent from military tenants, Black British soldiers serving in the regiments forged relationships of their own with enslaved and free people of color in Boston.

ZABIN: While the Sons of Liberty and officers like Dalrymple enjoyed cordial relations, Boston women and enlisted men celebrated welcome and unwelcome marriages, and Boston landlords collected rent from military tenants, Black British soldiers serving in the regiments forged relationships of their own with enslaved and free people of color in Boston.

AMBUSKE: John Bacchus was one of at least 10 Black men serving as drummers in the 29th Regiment. Bacchus was born in Jamaica in 1726. From the surviving evidence, we can’t be sure if he was born in slavery or freedom, but we do know that he joined the army in 1752. He listed his occupation as a “laborer.”

AMBUSKE: By 1768, Bacchus was forty-three-years-old and had served in the military for sixteen years. Like many of the soldiers deployed to Boston, he was also the subject of a noise complaint from local residents who accused him and a white private of drinking and entertaining far too long into the night.

AMBUSKE: What did army service mean to Bacchus, as well as the other drummers, some of whom may have been forced into the regiment as enslaved people? In the absence of Bacchus’s own words, we can look to the experiences of a fellow soldier in the 28th Regiment, who left the army just 4 years earlier.

AMBUSKE: Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was born in Bornu, in what is now Nigeria in the early eighteenth century. He was taken captive at age 15 and sold into slavery, transported first to Barbados and then New York. In New York, a Protestant minister purchased Gronniosaw for £50, taught him to read and write, and when he died, freed Gronniosaw in his will. In a world in which a legally free Black man might be stolen back into slavery, for Gronniosaw the army was a means of protecting his freedom. In the final years of the Seven Years’ War, he enlisted in the 28th Regiment, and served in the Caribbean campaigns against the Spanish. Gronniosaw managed to purchase his own discharge in 1762, and later settled in England. In 1770, the same year as the shooting on King Street in Boston, he wrote and published his autobiography.

AMBUSKE: John Bacchus may have viewed his service in the British Army in the same light. When he arrived in Boston in 1768, Bacchus deployed to a town that was no stranger to slavery nor the precarity of freedom. Boston merchants were deeply involved in a transatlantic trade that transformed sugar, into molasses, into rum, into more enslaved field hands. And:

ZABIN: There are enslaved people in Boston. And they are part of every segment of the economy, they live in every kind of home.

AMBUSKE: By the late 1760s, Boston had a small population of free and enslaved people. Enslaved Bostonians labored for white residents everywhere, from the governor’s home on down to the docks. Cato, Governor Bernard’s manservant, ferried the governor around town as his coachman.

AMBUSKE: We find glimpses of another enslaved man, also named Cato, in the diaries of merchant John Rowe. In November 1766, Rowe sent Cato to the workhouse for what he deemed “a very bad fault.”

AMBUSKE: Rowe doesn’t tell us what Cato did to draw his owner’s ire, but another diary entry, just over a year later suggests that Cato may have resisted his enslavement. In January 1768, Rowe put Cato aboard a ship bound for Jamaica. Enslavers sometimes sold enslaved people they deemed troublesome to the West Indies, to the sugar fields and the prospect of an early death. 

AMBUSKE: It is also possible that Rowe rented out Cato to the ship’s captain for a time to serve as part of the crew. On January 4, 1769, Rowe recorded another incident involving a Cato, possibly the same enslaved man. Rowe returned home from dinner that evening to find this Cato in possession of a sword belonging to a soldier in the 14th Regiment. Rowe doesn’t tell us how Cato got hold of the sword nor any consequences.   

 AMBUSKE: Nevertheless, for white Bostonians like Rowe, Cato’s possible acts of resistance to his authority were unsettling in their own right, and in the absence of constant vigilance, they raised the prospect that the acts of one could become a conspiracy of the many.

ZABIN: Boston officials are terrified, and sometimes do call those Black soldiers up in front of the courts for hosting parties for having what they call disorderly houses, largely because they feared what kinds of conversations were happening there. We also know that the British Army, or at least some members of it, were willing to weaponize the fear of slave revolts

AMBUSKE: A few months after Cato’s forced journey to Jamaica in 1768, army Captain John Wilson staggered down Boston’s streets, deep in his cups, with a bravado fortified by liquor. Days earlier he had insulted two Boston residents, calling them “liberty boys” and “rebels.” Now, with a renewed sense of courage, he approached three enslaved men, asked them if their masters were Liberty Boys, and then said:

ZABIN: If you're willing to start an uprising in Boston and kill your masters, come to me, I'll protect you, the Army's got your back.

AMBUSKE: Wilson’s inebriated offer did not go unnoticed by white Bostonians. Three slave owners overheard him, and reported his words to Boston’s Selectmen. Wilson eventually surrendered to civilian authorities, but only after hiding out in his barracks for the better part of a day. The captain managed to avoid formal charges of inciting a slave revolt, pleading drunkenness as an excuse for his unseemly behavior.

AMBUSKE: Despite Bostonians’ general resentment of the soldiers’ presence, Captain Wilson’s drunken plan to provoke a slave insurrection, and one Scottish officer’s rather colorful threat to “set you all in fires in a menent and drive you all to hell and damnation,” by the summer of 1769 some semblance of order and calm had returned to Boston.

ZABIN: The protests in Boston have really calmed down after 1768 the officers argue to remove the soldiers in the summer of 1769 so there almost wasn't a Boston Massacre, if we think Boston Massacre was in March of 1770, in August of 1769, troops are embarking on ships and leaving to go to Halifax.

AMBUSKE: The 64th and 65th Regiments left for Nova Scotia. The British needed four ships alone to take the regiment’s women and children north. Governor Bernard left as well. In the spring of 1769, a Member of Parliament friendly to Boston’s Sons of Liberty leaked reports that the governor had sent to the king’s ministers, reports that in Bostonians’ view had portrayed them as lawless radicals. Those radicals promptly published Bernard’s reports in local papers. The British government recalled an angry and embarrassed Bernard to England, leaving Thomas Hutchinson to govern in his stead. When Bernard left in August, Bostonians celebrated his departure with a bonfire so large that the former governor could see it from his ship.

AMBUSKE: Before leaving British America for the last time, Bernard privately entreated General Gage to leave some troops in Boston. In his mind, they remained essential to the support of His Majesty’s government in the colony.

ZABIN: They get two regiments of the four sent off, and then the governor's like, yeah, I don't feel so good about not having any troops. And the officers are pleading with a please, could we get out of here before there's a disaster? The governor says, No, I really want to keep a few. The general says, Okay, fine. They've reduced the chances of something happening, but they do leave these two regiments in Boston. So in the summer of 69 it looks like everything is going to be fine, like things will calm down, and for the most part, Boston continues to roll on the way it had been.

AMBUSKE: But that renewed sense of stability only masked a persistent unease that lingered just beneath the surface. The haughty words of a soldier or a snide remark from a Bostonian, slights often lubricated by wine or rum punch, sometimes brought soldiers and civilians to blows. And even when incidents of violence didn’t involve civilians against soldiers, some Bostonians imagined them as part of a larger pattern of imperial oppression anyway.

ZABIN: In the winter of 1770 there are a number of very small conflicts with customs officials, and at one point, a customs official, who is frustrated by the street protest that's happening in front of his house, shoots out the window and ends up killing a teenager.

AMBUSKE: In late February, street protests broke out in Boston’s North End against merchants who they accused of violating the town’s non-importation movement. For days, the Sons of Liberty and their supporters harassed merchants like Theophilus Lillie, who had never signed the agreement. The protesters tarred and feathered windows, threw eggs at merchants’ homes, and threatened them.

AMBUSKE: In the pages of the Boston Chronicle, a newspaper sympathetic to the Crown, Lillie minced no words about these sons and daughters of liberty:

THEOPHILUS LILLE: “it always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty; that men who are guarding against being subject to laws which they never gave their consent in person or by their representative should at the same time make laws, and in the most effectual manner execute them upon me and others, to which Laws I am sure I never gave my consent either in person or by my representative.”

AMBUSKE: On the morning February 22nd, a customs official named Ebeneazer Richardson came to Lillie’s aid. Richardson was no admirer of the Sons of Liberty, nor did they think much of him, a man they deemed “the most abandoned wretch in America.” Throughout the day Richardson and the protesters traded insults before the customs officer took refuge in his home.

AMBUSKE: As the protestors lobbed stones, fruit peels, and wood at his door and through his windows, Richardson grabbed his gun and stuck it through the window frame. He fired, just as Christoper Seider bent down to pick up a stone. Eleven swanshot pellets lodged in his chest and abdomen. Two other men were wounded. Seider was carried to a house where he died at 9 o’clock that night. He was eleven years old.

ZABIN: At that moment, the commanding officer says, Well, should I go out there? And then it's like, well, I can't go and do anything about this until the civilian authority asks for my help, and the civilian authority never does.

AMBUSKE: With no civilian official reading the riot act before the crowd, the army had no legal authority to intervene.

ZABIN: When Christopher Seider is killed, it actually has nothing to do with the army. They are sitting there in their barracks, but the Sons of Liberty see this death and these protests against the customs officials as part of a larger political story, they organized an immense funeral for Christopher Seider. John Adams says he's never seen anything like it in all his days. Emerson's grandfather's in town, and he's just stunned by how many people are thronging the street. So there's an immense funeral that the Sons of Liberty see as one of the pieces of PR that they are doing to explain that really these customs officials are overstepping, that customs officials, like the army, are part of the British government, and they really shouldn't be in Boston. So already in February of 1770 you have people talking in political terms. Not everybody, but a lot of people are on the street for that funeral. But nonetheless, the troops are not a part of it. They don't necessarily see themselves as part of that story. Officers are saying, I don't love how these politics are rolling, but privates continue to be hanging out with their neighbors, getting drunk, getting married, having kids, baptizing them in the local churches. Those things are all happening.

AMBUSKE: As Ebeneazer Richardson awaited trial for murder, and the Sons of Liberty transformed Christopher Seider’s funeral into a public protest against imperial overreach, soldiers and civilians continued to fraternize with and insult each other.  

AMBUSKE: On March 2nd, ropemaker William Green called out to Private Patrick Walker of the 29th Regiment, who was just then passing by. Green asked Walker if he wanted some work. According to one account, when Walker signaled his interest, Green then told the soldier to “go and clean my shit house.”

AMBUSKE: The surviving sources don’t agree on who threw the first punch, but the ensuing brawl that erupted lasted two days before civilian officials and regimental commanders managed to get both sides under control.

ZABIN: So both the military and civilians tend to tell the story of what happens next from the perspective of what gets known as the Rope Walk Brawl. I'm not convinced that that's any more related to what happens in the night of March 5, which is the shooting, than any of the other random incidents and conflicts that have been happening in Boston since the troops show up. But the story gets put together that way.

AMBUSKE: Three days after William Green lobbed verbal scat at Private Walker, Jane Crothers was inside her lodgings at the Royal Exchange Tavern, when she heard a commotion outside. It was the night of March 5, 1770.

ZABIN: There's a snowfall, and it's worth remembering that Boston, at this moment doesn't have any street lights, so it's it's dark. Nine o'clock at night in March is dark.

AMBUSKE: Crothers headed outside and crossed the lane to find Private Hugh White of the 29th Regiment standing guard in front of the Customs House. Only hours earlier, White had clubbed a wigmaker’s apprentice with the butt of his gun for insulting an officer. As Crothers and White talked, they both heard:

ZABIN: Various kinds of things from the center of Boston, people talking, people bickering, maybe people fighting, right, which happens in front of various bars.

AMBUSKE: Crothers and White soon saw an angry crowd approaching them.

ZABIN: There are people on the street, including a number of young people, some of them apprentices, teenagers who come up to this private who's standing guard in front of the Customs House, which is right in the center of Boston, kitty corner from the townhouse, and they start hassling him.

AMBUSKE: They hurled snow, ice, oyster shells, and insults at White, who began to fear for his and Crothers’ safety.

ZABIN: And he gets anxious because her backup handful of soldiers come live by the officer the day and other civilians come out to find out what's going on.

AMBUSKE: Captain Thomas Preston arrived with seven men to reinforce White at the corner of the Customs House in the face of a growing crowd. White turned to push Crothers out of the way.

ZABIN: The number of people in the street ranges in people's estimates anywhere from 50 to 250 which is a big range. It's hard to know how many people are actually there trying to figure out what's going on. The officer of the day tells a civilian whom he knows on the street that this is all gonna be fine. He's just sort of there to try to calm things down, but things continue to get wild, and it's not clear what happens, because nobody can see anything.

AMBUSKE: In those chaotic few moments, as civilians and soldiers alike watched from many different points on King Street, as they threw ice, shouted insults, strained to hear, felt rage, fixed bayonets, and battled fear, no one person could see or hear everything. The first shot rang out from Private Montgomery’s gun. And then:

ZABIN: All we know that all the witnesses agree to, is that somebody yells "fire," and it's very unclear whether what we have are civilians who are yelling at the soldiers. You don't dare fire because, of course, nobody read the riot act. We don't know if somebody is yelling fire. There's a fire which is not uncommon in Boston, which is a wooden city, and much of the center of Boston burned down pretty spectacularly in 1760 so fire is not unusual thing to be afraid of, or whether actually somebody yelled fire as a command. So we don't know all of those are possible. All we know is that guns fire, and when the smoke clears, there are three people dead, two more dying on the street and another six who are injured.

AMBUSKE: Crispus Attucks was killed immediately. Two musket balls tore through his chest.

AMBUSKE: Attucks was a mixed-race man, a descendent of both West African and Indigenous Natick peoples. He had been born to the west of Boston in the town of Framingham nearly fifty years earlier. He had once been enslaved, although historians are not sure if he was legally free at the time of his death. Some Bostonians knew him as “Michael Johnson,” a name he used to conceal his identity and protect against possible re-enslavement.

AMBUSKE: That Attucks was even there that night was a matter of chance. In 1770, he was a sailor by trade and called the Bahamas home. He was headed to North Carolina by way of Boston when on the night of March 5th, he was seen leading a group of sailors, who were brandishing clubs and threatening Captain Preston and his men.

AMBUSKE: Ropemaker Samuel Gray was shot in the head. He was dead before he hit the ground. He has been standing in the crowd with his hands in his pockets.

AMBUSKE: James Caldwell, another sailor, was in the middle of King Street when two musket balls ended his life.

AMBUSKE: Seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick, was running away from the crowd when something redirected the flight of a ball, sending it into Maverick’s chest. He died the next day.

AMBUSKE: Irish immigrant Patrick Carr was crossing King Street and heading for the corner of Quaker Lane when a musket ball ripped through his right hip and into his spine. Carr was no stranger to a fight. Only moments before he was shot, another man had persuaded Carr to  leave a cutlass behind before joining the crowd. Doctors couldn’t save him. He died two weeks later.

ZABIN: Two are dying and those who are dead, I mean, they are bleeding out in the snow in front of the central seat of British power. Seeing that kind of violence, whether deliberate or not, and that's what's so unclear, but seeing it happen, seeing civilians die in front of the central site of British authority was really terrifying and really moving to everybody, including the governor, including the officers and, of course, including all of the Bostonians. It's a horrifying sight.

AMBUSKE: Within minutes of the shooting, Captain Preston called for the rest of the 29th Regiment to reinforce his men as the crowd began to back away, tend to the wounded, and reform for another fight. Governor Thomas Hutchinson raced to the scene, working his way through the crowd into the Town House, and from the balcony managed to somewhat calm the crowd with the promise of an immediate investigation.

ZABIN: Everybody at the time says, we have to do something about this. Nobody thinks that it was acceptable. The soldiers are not doubling down on what they did. The officers not saying this is justified. Everybody says, Wow, that was awful. And the question is, what happens after that?

AMBUSKE: Soldiers and civilians retreated. Preston turned himself in to civil authorities the next morning. He and the soldiers involved with the shooting were confined to the town jail. And as civilian officials began taking depositions, political factions began maneuvering to control the narrative.

ZABIN: The Sons of Liberty understand it as full of potential for the story that they are trying to tell about the overreach of the British empire into the ways in which they think the colony should live. They understand that there is a propaganda potential here. Likewise, Army officers understand immediately that there's a story here, and they need some PR help.

AMBUSKE: The Sons of Liberty orchestrated funerals for the dead men, arranging public spectacles that exceeded Christopher Sieder’s funeral only weeks earlier. They also turned to print, to champion a narrative that turned the shooting into “massacre.”

ZABIN: The Sons of Liberty, which includes Paul Revere, tell a very clear story that we continue to live with, because it's one of the very few images that we have from revolutionary America, which is the engraving of the Boston Massacre.

AMBUSKE: The artist Henry Pelham began working on a drawing of the shooting within days of the killings. He called his work The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre. Paul Revere managed to get a copy of it. Revere was a silversmith and a veteran of the Seven Years’ War. As he engraved a copy of Pelham’s sketch, he made his own improvements, tightening the focus here and there, and gave it a simpler, and more effective title: The Bloody Massacre.

ZABIN: We see soldiers all lined up, leaning forward with the officer safely standing behind them, urging them on to shoot this set of unarmed, innocent looking civilians, with a woman right in the middle, showing that these are not hooligans. These are all kind of middle class guys, that a single woman can be saved in the middle of them, that they are not at fault. The story that the Sons of Liberty are trying to tell here is that this is a massacre that was perpetrated sort of by the army, but mostly by the ministry who sent the army. The army is really just their engine, and it is absolutely what happens when a standing army in peacetime is sent to police an innocent. Set of people who did nothing wrong. Of course, they're going to mow them down in cold blood, and the British Ministry should have seen it coming. And that's the argument that the engraving tells and that is the argument that they're working really hard to get out.

AMBUSKE: The army had a different view of the shooting.

ZABIN: The argument, of course, that the army wants to tell is that this was self defense, that all along Bostonians have been out of hand. They needed to have an army to help control them, that there's been a lot of hostility, and only thanks to the army did the whole place not go up in flames anyway. And so therefore they were just doing their job. Those are the two parts of the argument that they're trying to put out before the trial.

AMBUSKE: Within two weeks of the shooting, and only after delicate negotiations between the Governor, army officers, and town representatives, most of the soldiers in the 29th and 14th Regiments were removed from the town to Castle William in the harbor. The barracks could not hold everyone, meaning that some soldiers had to leave their wives and children on the mainland.

AMBUSKE: With the soldiers gone, the army no longer paid rent for private homes and warehouses, leaving some army families in the lurch. Since they had always been considered temporary, and not permanent residents, town officials warned them that if they became destitute, Boston was under no obligation to provide them with public support.

AMBUSKE: Even as some women and children confronted a stark new reality, others still found happiness. Boston women continued to marry British soldiers. Jane Crothers became Jane Whitehouse when she married Private Joseph Whitehouse, three weeks after her ordeal on King Street.

AMBUSKE: Meanwhile, merchants like John Rowe continued to dine with British officers. The shooting may have shocked soldiers and civilians alike, deepening the mistrust between them, yet it didn’t completely sever the relationships they had forged, nor the ones they continued to build.

AMBUSKE: But in June, the 29th Regiment left for New Jersey, taking the soldiers and their families with it. Only the 14th Regiment remained, as did Captain Preston and his men, who were awaiting trial for murder. They sat in jail as Bostonians and the British army continued vying for control of the story of just what happened on that March night.

ZABIN: Both sides are trying to tell their story, to put out this narrative in the court of public opinion, but meanwhile, there's an actual court that will have to figure out blame. Whose fault was it? How did these five people die? Who's responsible for their death from the very first night people were so horrified, the governor promises that there will be an investigation and that this will happen in a civilian court, not a court martial. The officer in charge turns himself in, as do the other soldiers. They go to jail. And then there's a question about what kind of defense the soldiers and the officer are going to get.

AMBUSKE: For Boston’s town government, and for the Sons of Liberty, the impending trials of Preston and his men raised a number of concerning questions. Would Samuel Quincy, the colony’s solicitor general, and the crown’s prosecutor of this case, fight hard to convict the king’s soldiers in the king’s name? Or would he make a poor showing that led to their acquittal? Would the accused receive proper legal counsel from some of Boston’s most competent lawyers? Or would Boston’s attorneys beg off the assignment, as many already had, leaving the impression that Boston cared nothing for the rule of law?

AMBUSKE: For Preston and his men, the questions were more troubling. Would any Boston lawyer bother to represent them? And if they were convicted on charges of murder, would they face execution?

AMBUSKE: Boston lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr. agreed to defend them. Adams was the cousin of Samuel Adams, one of the leading Sons of Liberty. He was a frequent critic of Governor Hutchinson, and an opponent of Parliament’s attempts to centralize the empire. Quincy was the brother of Samuel Quincy, the man who was prosecuting their clients. Why they took the case has sometimes puzzled historians. In later years, Adams claimed he did so only with great reluctance.

ZABIN: And he sort of heightens the sense that he did this against lots of opposition.

AMBUSKE: Quincy’s “anxious and distressed” father was shocked to learn that his son had agreed to defend “those criminals.” Quincy nobly replied that at first he had refused, but believed it was his duty as an attorney to provide good counsel to the accused. At the end of his letter, though, he let slip why he had really changed his mind. He had received a visit from “an Adams, a Hancock, a Molineux, a Cushing, a Henshaw, a Pemberton, a Warren, a Cooper, and a Phillips.

AMBUSKE: In other words:

ZABIN: The Sons of Liberty begged John Adams and Quincy to take the defense of the soldiers, because they're looking to take a high ground. Their story really was that Bostonians were actually super law abiding people. They never needed an army there to keep control. And one of the ways that they want to make the argument that they are law abiding is to say we are going to take our best legal minds and offer them to these soldiers that we believe in the process, we believe in a court of law, we believe in the rule of law. We're going to lean right into it.

AMBUSKE: At the same time:

ZABIN: It's true that Sam Adams and some of the other Sons of Liberty are not convinced that this is the best strategy, and they're worried that John's gonna do too good a job. Yes, of course they should have defense, but the defense shouldn't be too awesome. And they're, of course, especially worried that the people who are supposed to be prosecuting the soldiers are, of course, the king's attorney. So they're really worried that the prosecution is not going to be very vibrant.

AMBUSKE: To ensure a more robust prosecution, the Sons of Liberty maneuvered to have the town appoint Robert Treat Paine, a lawyer practicing in southern Massachusetts Bay, to assist the solicitor general on behalf of the victims’ families.

M62 AMBUSKE: But they could influence only so much. Much would depend on the arguments that the prosecution and the defense presented in court. Captain Preston’s trial began in October 1770.

ZABIN: John Adams decides on a set of practices that are perhaps not legit today, but were perfectly fine in the 18th century, which is that he is going to defend both the officer and the soldiers, but in two different trials. So he separates the trial from the officer Preston from that of the soldiers.

AMBUSKE: Trying Preston and his men separately would allow the court to focus on the actions of each on the fatal night. Both would turn on a central question: Did Preston give an order to fire, and did the soldiers obey that order? Much was at stake. The outcome of one trial could have a profound impact on the other.

ZABIN: The privates are really anxious about this, and we in fact, have a letter that they wrote to Adams or to the court, saying, This is a terrible idea. You are about to make an argument that the officer did not give the command to fire, but if you do that, then all you're doing is hanging us out to dry, because, of course, we had to follow the order of our captain. What are you doing to us? But Adams actually manages to thread a really tiny needle that is both impressive and sort of horrifying. He makes the argument for the defense of Captain Preston, that Preston was in a situation that nobody could hear what he actually said. What he's really trying to do in that case is just show how much confusion there was, so that the jury couldn't legitimately say yes without a beyond a shadow of a doubt, we know that he gave a command to fire.

AMBUSKE:  To win the day, Adams asked the jury to imagine a Boston that didn’t exist

ZABIN: He somewhat carefully picks a jury that is likely to be sympathetic to Preston. Indeed, he gets Preston off. He does that also by just pretending that this whole world of connections between civilians and soldiers just didn't even exist. He just says nobody really could hear what was going on. How could you possibly believe that? How could you put your hand on your heart and swear that somebody gave that order? And he does that despite lots of other evidence that people did hear Preston say things. People knew who he was. But he gets Preston off.

AMBUSKE: The jury found Preston not guilty on October 30th. Friends of Preston were members of that jury, a fact both the defense and the prosecution conveniently ignored. Jane Crothers, now Jane Whitehouse, the wife of a private of the 14th Regiment, gave testimony in Preston’s defense, but no one mentioned that she knew many soldiers, and that she had married one.

AMBUSKE: With Preston’s acquitted, attention turned to the trial of the eight indicted soldiers, which began in late November. If Preston had not ordered them to fire, it meant they had done so on their own, making them murders. So, Adams:

ZABIN: Follows this defense of self defense, where he says yes, they shot. He can't say that they didn't people are dead. So he says yes, there were shots, but they had to defend themselves. But what he doesn't want to do is say that Boston is a scary place that soldiers have to defend themselves against. So he needs to say, yes, Bostonians real. Bostonians are legitimate, law abiding, calm people, the people that actually these soldiers were defending themselves against, were not real. Bostonians. They were Irish, they were sailors, they were apprentices, they were people of color.

AMBUSKE: As Adams told the jury in his closing argument:

JOHN ADAMS: “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 out landish jack tarrs.—”

ZABIN: And this is the moment that Crispus Attucks comes in.

JOHN ADAMS: “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.”

ZABIN: Crispus Attucks is one of the people who dies immediately he's shot in that crowd, and nobody really remarks on his color when he's killed, his color becomes important to Adams, who uses it by saying, actually, the guys who were killed, they weren't really legit. They're not really Bostonians. Yeah, there was a riot, and, of course, soldiers had to defend themselves. But Bostonians don't riot, just people who come here who aren't part of us. Because we, when we say we are Bostonians, what we really are are white, middle class, bourgeois people, and that's his argument, and it mostly works.

AMBUSKE: In December 1770, the jury found six soldiers, including Private Hugh White, not guilty. Two more, Privates Montgomery and Kilroy were convicted of manslaughter, based on clear evidence that both men had fired into the crowd.

AMBUSKE: With the trials over, Bostonians and British soldiers could begin moving on. But the shooting on King Street did more than just lead to the deaths of five men; the massacre wounded a family. 

ZABIN: Bostonians and soldiers have lived together for 17 months. When the shooting happens, they continue to live together for months. After that, they continue to marry each other, to have children together. They don't see the shooting as the beginning of the revolution. We've come to name it as that, but that's not what it felt like. But nonetheless, the shooting does make a change, because what it does is it ends up driving soldiers, of course, out of Boston, tearing apart the relationships that civilians and soldiers have made together, and it also really brings home to Bostonians what it means to live in the empire, what it means to really have the empire in your bed, in your home. Some of them look at that. They think, oh, I don't want this. But even more, they look at what it feels like to break down, and they think, I never liked this, even if perhaps they had, in fact, they really did. But just like any bad divorce, you look through it and all you see is the dark piece, and that's the story that the Boston Massacre comes to be at the time, nobody knew what it was, but the emotional ties that people made in those months that the soldiers and civilians are living together become significant for the emotional reasons that people decide that they're going to join a revolt.

AMBUSKE: Seven months after the trials over the “Bloody Massacre” had come to an end, Bostonians opened their newspapers only to find disturbing accounts of recent events in North Carolina.

AMBUSKE: For years, some white settlers in the North Carolina backcountry had complained about unjust provincial taxes, corrupt colonial officials, and lavish provincial spending.

AMBUSKE: They called themselves “Regulators,” and they intended to root out corruption in North Carolina’s government, politely through petitioning if they could, regulation through rioting if they must.

AMBUSKE: In May 1771, the provincial government responded to the Regulators’ demands at a place called Alamance. Weeks later, Bostonians, and other British Americans read with dismay of “an astonishing Account of a CIVIL WAR in North Carolina.”

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds is supported by Richard H. Brown and Mary Jo Otsea. If you’d like to make a gift to support the series, head to r2studios.org to learn how. You’ll also find there a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE: Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick.

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Patrick Long of Primary Source Media. 

AMBUSKE:  Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Serena Zabin and John McCurdy for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Anne Fertig, Grace Mallon, Evan McCormick, Adam McNeil, and Nate Sleeter.

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.