White House: Road to Liberty: Boston Massacre

This is how Boston would remember it.

Soldiers in our streets. Colonists bleeding in the snow. An empire with a musket leveled at liberty. And yet, an image is not testimony. What happened that night was a tragedy.

No, it was a massacre. Yes! Men are dead, yes! Boston grieves, yes! Boston is angry, but neither grief nor anger relieves us of justice!

I argued the case in the courtroom. While I argued it before the court of public opinion. To understand that night, you must first understand the city in which it happened. Boston was no peaceful town suddenly struck by madness. For months, soldiers and civilians had lived nearly on top of one another, resentful, suspicious, quick to provoke.

A standing army in a crowded port city is tender enough. Because they were never there merely to keep peace. They were there to make Parliament's authority visible. Hmph, even off-duty soldiers took work from Boston laborers. Hungry men will take whatever work they can find.

But every encounter sharpened the city's temper.

Redcoats, go home! Watch your tongue, boy! Make me! And then, on the evening of March 5th, the spark came.

It began, as such things often do, smaller than history would remember.

Lousy bloody back! Can't even pay your debts! In the name of the King, step back! You'll not have this street! Out with ye!

In the name of the King, disperse! Fear was mounting by the second. And there they stood, armed soldiers in the middle of a civilian town, muskets leveled at the very people they claimed to protect.

Who gave the order? Who heard it clearly in the smoke and shouting? Who could say in that chaos what each man believed in the instant before he fired? Were they acting in self-defense or committing cold-blooded murder? Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, Patrick Carr.

5 Dead, and with them, any hope that the accused would receive a fair trial. A street quarrel had become a colonial cause. No courtroom could restore what had been taken that night. But the living could decide what would follow it. If soldiers could fire into a crowd in Boston, then no colony could call itself a colony secure.

The law could not punish men for being hated, it could only judge what had been proven. And to many, that looked intolerable. A Bostonian defending redcoats while the blood was scarcely dry! It is not sympathy, it is principle. If the law belongs only to our friends, then it is not law at all.

Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. A free people must be governed by evidence, not fury. And yet the people could see plainly what the law would not settle. An empire had stationed troops in a colonial town, and colonists had paid for it. In blood.

Most of the soldiers were acquitted. Two were convicted of manslaughter. The court had rendered its judgment. But the people had rendered theirs as well. Not merely on 8 soldiers, but on the power that sent them.

One verdict belonged to law, the other belonged to history. The law had spoken. The image was not evidence, it was persuasion. It turned a chaotic night into a simple verdict. Because the larger truth was unmistakable: if the court would try the soldiers, then the people would try the Empire.

The shots on King Street did not begin the war, but they gave the colonies something just as powerful: a story no one could ignore.