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THE HISTORY CAT
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Boston: A Ticking Timebomb
By 1770, Boston was a timebomb waiting to go off. Tick Tick. The city had been keeping itself busy boycotting, protesting, holding liberty meetings, and from the government’s point of view, being troublemakers. Now thousands of soldiers were stationed in the city, but like most things Parliament did, it kept making things worse.
It wasn't a question of if something would happen but when. That ‘something’ happened on March 5, 1770, when a snowball, a club, and a haircut all played starring roles in one of the most infamous nights in American history.
But let’s rewind the clock and talk about why the soldiers were in Boston in the first place.
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The Quartering Act of 1765
The French and Indian War ended in 1763 with Britain in control of a massive stretch of new North American territory. Colonists were pouring west across the Appalachian Mountains looking for land to farm, and the Native American tribes already living there weren’t happy about it. Pontiac’s Rebellion, an uprising on the Ohio frontier, made it clear that if settlers continued to move onto Native American land, there would be more violence. Britain decided to draw an imaginary line called the Proclamation of 1763 and told settlers not to cross it. To keep the peace, Parliament sent 10,000 troops to North America.
That last part is where things get complicated. To feed and house all those soldiers, Parliament passed the Quartering Act of 1765. The new law required that the colonies build and pay for military barracks, and if barracks were full, soldiers could be housed in inns, taverns, and uninhabited buildings, with colonists covering the tab for food, firewood, candles, and bedding.
In New York, the colonial assembly refused to comply with the law, and Parliament responded by suspending the assembly until they got in line. That got New York’s attention. It got everyone else’s attention too.
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Living Alongside the Troops
Paying for soldiers to live in your town was one thing. Actually, living alongside them was something else. By 1768, Boston had roughly 4,000 British troops packed into a city of about 16,000 people — nearly one soldier for every four residents. You couldn’t walk to the market or the docks without running into a redcoat. Since the troops were poorly paid, they took jobs in their off-duty hours, competing with the city’s working class for employment. Good jobs in Boston were hard to come by, and workers didn't take kindly to outsiders cutting in line.
One point that we want to drive home is that in 1770, it wasn’t the British versus the Americans. The colonists thought of themselves as British citizens. The idea of being ‘American’ was still five years away.
The problem was that British citizens were fighting British soldiers. Bostonians had decided the troops weren’t really there to protect them but rather were there to bully them into submission. The soldiers had been told that Bostonians were troublemakers who needed to be kept in line. You can see where this is headed.
The Sons of Liberty encouraged colonists to harass soldiers in the street. The soldiers were trained to kill the enemy, not keep the peace, and many of them struck back with violence and intimidation whenever an argument broke out. By the time shots were fired in the Boston Massacre, colonists and soldiers had already clashed dozens of times.
Reenactors take part in the A Weekend of the British Soldier
Minuteman National Historical Park
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Three Months Before the Massacre…
In January 1770, British soldiers in New York City tore down a liberty pole and posted a handbill threatening the Sons of Liberty. When colonists confronted the soldiers, it escalated into street fighting and ended with soldiers cutting and slashing civilians in what newspapers called the first time blood had been shed on both sides. Boston was watching.
Three Days Before the Massacre…
Just three days before the Boston Massacre, an off-duty soldier walked into John Gray’s Ropewalk looking for work. When he asked a ropemaker if there was any work available, the ropemaker told him to clean the outhouse. The soldier took it as the insult it was, threw a punch, and the fight quickly pulled in soldiers and workers from both sides. Some of the soldiers who opened fire on March 5 had been in that brawl four days earlier.
Thirty Minutes Before the Massacre…
A half an hour before the massacre, the city was already coming apart at the seams. Groups of colonists were in the streets that night, armed with clubs and chunks of ice, looking for soldiers to harass. The soldiers, still furious from the ropewalk brawl three days earlier, were in no mood to back down.
Within that same half hour, fights broke out near the Liberty Tree, at Dock Square, and at Murray’s Barracks, where four young men walking past the alley came across a soldier swinging an oversized broadsword against the walls and striking sparks. According to the Boston Gazette, a Patriot newspaper, when one of the men warned his friend to watch out, the soldier turned and attacked him, then drove his sword through another man’s clothing near his armpit.
Within a minute, ten or twelve soldiers poured out of the barracks with drawn cutlasses, clubs, and bayonets. A bystander who came to see what was happening asked the soldiers rushing toward the square if they intended to murder people. They answered: “Yes, by God, root and branch.”
Battle of Golden Hill, New York, January 19, 1770, by Charles MacKubin Lefferts,
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The Boston Massacre
That brings us to the event that set the timebomb off. Around 9:00 p.m. Captain John Goldfinch, a British officer stationed in Boston, was walking back to his barracks when a young barber’s apprentice, Edward Garrick, shouted an insult at him.
Apparently, the captain had cheated the kid by not paying for his haircut. Another soldier nearby did what any man might have done when a name-calling kid was threatening his captain; he clubbed him in the face with the butt of his musket. Garrick ran off crying.
Goldfinch continued making his way back to the barracks when he ran into an angry crowd who were getting into their own fight with a different group of soldiers. Goldfinch ordered those troops back to barracks, and things died down. That is until a second angry mob armed with clubs came marching down the street with the barber’s apprentice leading the way. The crowd grew and began pelting the soldiers and shouting death threats. More troops arrived to defend their buddies and disperse the crowd. You can imagine the chaos that was unfolding. Then Captain Thomas Preston, hit in the head with an ice ball, ordered his troops to fire. When the musket smoke had cleared, a dozen colonists were lying bleeding in the snow. Three died instantly; two would die later from their wounds, and six seriously injured. The soldiers wisely decided to high-tail it out of there and locked themselves inside their barracks. The streets of Boston had erupted into open warfare.
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The Trial and Its Aftermath
The drama didn’t stop when the shooting ended. In fact, things were just getting started. The governor, Thomas Hutchinson, rushed to the scene to try and restore order. Hutchinson wasn’t exactly popular in Boston, but he made a smart move by promising to remove the troops from the city and having Captain Preston and eight of his soldiers arrested. It was a clever mix of appeasing the angry mob and protecting the soldiers from an immediate lynching.
When it came time for the trial, John Adams, future president of the United States, stepped in to defend the soldiers. Adams wasn’t a fan of the British occupation, but he believed in fairness, even when it wasn’t the popular choice. His defense painted the crowd as a dangerous mob throwing ice, snowballs, and insults, practically daring the soldiers to fire. The jury agreed—mostly. Six soldiers were acquitted, and two were found guilty of manslaughter. Their punishment? Branding on the thumb, which was about as lenient as it got back then.
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Two Views on the Boston Massacre
The bodies weren't even cold before both sides started fighting to tell their version of the story.
Paul Revere, a Boston silversmith and member of the Sons of Liberty, got to work telling the Patriot point of view. Within weeks of the shooting, he created an engraving that turned a messy, chaotic street fight into something that looked like a cold-blooded execution. In his drawing, Revere showed soldiers in a perfect line, firing into a helpless crowd, while colonists collapsed dramatically in the street. It wasn't accurate, but it didn't need to be. The point was to stir up Anti-British feelings, and it worked. Paul Revere’s image spread through newspapers and taverns across the colonies. The night of March 5, 1770, had officially become known as ‘The Boston Massacre’.
Meanwhile, Captain Preston was writing his own account from his jail cell, arguing that the crowd had planned the attack all along, that around 9 p.m. someone had broken into two churches and deliberately rung the bells, knowing it would flood the streets with people. He also insisted he never gave the order to fire, pointing out that he was standing directly in front of his own soldiers' muskets and would have been the first one shot. His account was smuggled to London and published there.
Under enormous pressure, the British pulled their troops out of Boston entirely, relocating them to a fort on an island in the harbor. Colonists called it a victory. The soldiers called it a tactical retreat. Either way, the streets of Boston were finally free of redcoats… but the damage was done.
The Bloody Massacre in King-Street"
Paul Revere - 1770
Exit Ticket
Use the article to answer the following prompt:
1. Write two short newspaper headlines (1 sentence each):
- A headline written from the perspective of a British soldier or official
- A headline written from the perspective of the Sons of Liberty
Your headlines should describe the events of March 5, 1770 in one sentence. The best headlines are usually dramatic and attention grabbing.
Copy and paste the questions onto a Word or Google Doc
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