Boston Massacre

On the evening of March 5, 1770, a confrontation on King Street in Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, resulted in British soldiers firing into a crowd of colonists. The incident began when a wigmaker's apprentice, Edward Garrick, verbally confronted a British officer and was struck by sentry Private Hugh White. A crowd gathered around White, growing to more than 50 people led by Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race former slave, who threw objects and challenged the sentry to fire. Captain Thomas Preston dispatched additional soldiers to relieve White, and the group, numbering eight soldiers plus Preston, faced a crowd estimated between 300 and 400 people who taunted them and threw snowballs and other objects.

Private Hugh Montgomery was struck by a thrown object, dropped his musket, then recovered it and fired into the crowd without an order from Preston. Other soldiers then fired a ragged series of shots. Rope maker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, and Crispus Attucks were killed instantly. Samuel Maverick, a 17-year-old apprentice, died the next morning from a ricocheting musket ball. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant shot in the abdomen, died two weeks later on March 14. Apprentice Christopher Monk was seriously wounded and, according to reports, died in 1780 purportedly due to injuries sustained that night.

Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson helped disperse the crowd by promising an inquiry. Preston and eight soldiers were arrested by the next morning. Amid continued unrest, British troops were withdrawn to Castle Island. On March 27, 1770, the eight soldiers, Captain Preston, and four civilians were indicted for murder. The civilians, who were in the Custom House, were alleged to have fired shots.

Captain Preston was tried separately in late October 1770 and was acquitted after the jury concluded he had not ordered his men to fire. The trial of the eight soldiers opened on November 27, 1770, with defense attorney John Adams arguing the soldiers had acted in self-defense against a threatening crowd. Patrick Carr's deathbed statement, describing the crowd's provocations, was admitted as testimony and reportedly influenced the outcome. The jury acquitted six of the soldiers; Private Hugh Montgomery and Private Matthew Kilroy were convicted of manslaughter. Under the benefit of clergy provision then in law, their sentences were reduced from death to branding on the thumb. The four civilians were tried separately on December 13, 1770, and all were acquitted; a servant who had testified against them was later convicted of perjury.

The event was widely publicized through pamphlets and Paul Revere's engraving of the scene, which circulated throughout the Thirteen Colonies and is credited with heightening anti-British sentiment in the years preceding the American Revolution.