Conceived in Liberty (179 page)

The final crisis arrived on the night of March 5. The troops began the day by printing an insulting handbill. A small riot was then precipitated by a fist-fight between a soldier and a ropewalk worker; there had been bad blood between ropewalk laborers and the troops before. As night fell, a soldier struck, with his musket, a young apprentice, who had been denouncing British officers and rousing ugly memories of the child killing of two weeks before. A crowd now gathered before the barracks of the Fourteenth Regiment and pelted the sentries with snowballs.

Meanwhile, the meeting bell was rung and a crowd gathered at the customhouse on King Street, where the main body of troops was stationed. Someone recognized the soldier who had assaulted the young apprentice—a sentry at the customhouse—and the crowd attacked him with sticks of broken ice and snowballs. At this critical juncture, the customs officials at the customhouse called for the main guard headed by a Captain Thomas Preston to come to the rescue of the honor of the sentry, the army, and the commissioners who had brought the troops to Boston in the first place. Captain Preston and his guard of seven men stalked through the crowd, pricking the people with fixed bayonets. The crowd pressed in courageously on the bayonets, and when the gun of one soldier was knocked to the ground the soldiers emptied their muskets into the crowd. Joining in the shooting were customs officials, who fired upon the crowd from the privileged sanctuary of the upper floor of the customhouse. Five men fell dead or dying from that murderous volley, and six other Bostonians were wounded. The incident swiftly became known far and wide as the “Boston Massacre.” The first to fall dead was Crispus Attucks, a tall Negro sailor, who had been one of the most zealous front-fighters in the Sons
of Liberty. The others killed were a sailor, a ropemaker, and two young apprentices. At the sound of firing the townsmen fell back, but soon advanced again to take away their dead and wounded. The panicky soldiers got ready to fire again, but Captain Preston struck their guns out of position. Soon the Boston crowd began to form in earnest, and the streets rang with the cry of “To arms! To arms! Turn out with your guns!” Nearly five hundred people assembled, swearing to kill every British soldier who had fired upon the people. Preston and his men thereupon retreated rapidly to the safety of the guardhouse.

This was it. The people of Boston and of Massachusetts had had enough. The Boston Massacre was the final straw that sent this most sensitive spot in the American colonies once again to the brink of revolution. The next day, an extraordinarily large town meeting was held in Boston. Challenged by the rousing speech of Sam Adams, the meeting unanimously demanded the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Boston. Adams and Hancock were selected to head a town committee to present the demands before Hutchinson and the Council. The governor’s offer to withdraw one of the two regiments was scornfully spurned. Unless there was total evacuation, warned Adams, the troops would be destroyed. Fifteen thousand armed citizens, thundered Adams, were ready and eager to pour into Boston to eliminate the hated soldiery. When Adams made these threats, he noticed that Hutchinson trembled and grew pale, and he “enjoyed the sight.” The Council unanimously advised surrender, and warned Hutchinson that all New England would soon rise in arms against the troops and that “the night which was coming on would be the most terrible that was ever seen in America.” Before night fell, Hutchinson yielded, and promised speedy and complete evacuation of the troops. Soon the soldiery left, to the hooting of the crowd, for the safety of Castle William.

Sam Adams’ threats were not idle ones. Forty thousand New Englanders were ready to march for the liberation of Boston. Ten thousand were set to march from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, alone, led by the Portsmouth Sons of Liberty, who proclaimed that the “bloody work in Boston calls loud for
VENGEANCE.”
The Liberty Boys of Salem, Massachusetts, promised thousands of yeomen from Essex County to destroy a “licentious and bloodthirsty soldiery.” Indeed, armed men had already begun to march on Boston, until stopped by Bostonians with the word that the crisis was over.

Expulsion of the troops accomplished the first objective of the popular forces. The next goal was to bring those responsible for the massacre to the bar of justice. As early as March 6, Captain Preston and his men were arrested by the civil authorities of Boston and indicted for murder. The Crown authorities dragged their feet, however. The royally appointed superior court judges delayed the trial for as long as they could—actually until October. The prosecution was deliberately weak, and permitted a jury of which no member came
from the town of Boston. Preston and most of the soldiers were acquitted; two of the soldiers were convicted of manslaughter, but their punishment was absurdly limited to being branded on the hand. The historian Oliver Dickerson has brought out that one of the reasons for acquittal of the soldiers was the angle of the bullets killing Attucks and others, indicating a firing from the upper story of the customhouse, that is, by customs officials.
*

The people were understandably resentful of the acquittal and the light sentences. Was a slight brand on the hand to be the full payment made for five murders? The judges were bitterly reviled, and one eager young radical, the son of a chancellor, posted a notice urging assassination of the judges. Sam Adams, as “Vindex” in the
Gazette,
attacked the verdict and spread the liberal account of the massacre far and wide. Adams made March 5 an annual observance, to keep fresh in the minds of the people the “bloody work” of the “butchers” of King Street.

The obstruction by the judges was used by Adams to show that it was futile for the people to look to the (royally appointed) courts for redress of their grievances. Even the juries were unreliable. Only an armed people’s militia could be relied upon to deal successfully with the enemy, the British redcoats. With rumors flying of new British landings to punish Boston’s uprising, the Sons of Liberty trained a militia and resolved to fight and resist any future landing. “Innocence is no longer safe,” declared Adams in the
Boston Gazette;
“we are now obliged to appeal to God, and to our
ARMS
for defense.”

Despite the dereliction of the judges in the massacre case, popular pressure did force them to proceed with the trial of the child killer Ebenezer Richardson. Richardson was tried and convicted of murder, but pardoned by the Crown and allowed by the authorities to flee the country. Though they did not manage to bring the soldiers to justice, the popular forces were able to drive the hated customs commissioners as well as the troops out of Boston. John Robinson, the assaulter of Otis, fled to England and secured the pardon of Richardson, as well as a handsome reward by the Crown for the patriotic work of the judges in seeing that the soldiers and customs officials escaped punishment.

The Boston liberals still faced the task of enforcing nonimportation, and increased pressure was now put on the few recalcitrant merchants. The mob finally forced Nathaniel Rogers to flee Boston. The Sons of Liberty sent a message to their brethren in New York to be ready for him, and the New York Sons prepared a tarring-and-feathering party for Rogers. Driven from New York too, and having learned a rough lesson, Rogers returned to Boston in May to sue fruitlessly for restoration to good standing. The Boston Town Meeting also redoubled its efforts to help the merchants agitate for compliance
with the agreement. The result of the merchants’ nonimportation campaign was to lower imports from Britain into Boston from four hundred and thirty thousand pounds in 1768 to less than two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds the following year. Overall in the American colonies, imports from Great Britain fell substantially from 2.15 million pounds in 1768 to 1.33 million pounds in 1769.

The revolutionary temper of the people of Boston in the months after the Boston Massacre may be gauged by the instructions given on May 15 by the Boston Town Meeting to its representatives in the General Court. The town attacked Britain’s “deep laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism... for the extinction of all civil liberty in America.” The town meeting also challenged any “pretended right or power of... any exterior authority” to limit any American constitutional or natural rights or liberties. To an earlier Boston challenge to the right of Parliament to regulate any colony by statute, it now added the far-reaching rejection of the power of the Crown to instruct the colonial governors. To these, Hutchinson reacted in horror, believing they were “designs... to bring about a revolution, and to attain to independency.”

*
Oliver M. Dickerson, “The Commissioners of Customs and the ‘Boston Massacre,’”
New England Quarterly
(September 1954): 307–25.

Boston was not the only place where armed conflict exploded between the citizens and British troops. We remember that the New York Assembly had been forced by British threats to comply with the British Mutiny Act, and therefore voted to supply British troops in New York in June 1767. At the end of 1768 the Assembly, under pressure from the Sons of Liberty and coming under control of the radical-liberals, resumed its resistance and bravely refused to vote for the supplies during 1769. Finally, the Assembly yielded in mid-December 1769 by a thin majority. The agitation of the people, aggravated by the economic depression of the day, was led by the Sons of Liberty. Spearheading the attack was the merchant Alexander McDougall, one of the radical leaders of the Sons of Liberty of New York. McDougall, in the pamphlet “To the Betrayed Inhabitants” of New York, attacked the Assembly’s capitulation and urged imitation of the deeds of the “brave Bostonians.” At a popular meeting of fourteen hundred people led by John Lamb of the Sons of Liberty, a committee of Sons was appointed to pressure the Assembly. The Assembly lashed back at the McDougall broadside “as a false, seditious, and infamous libel” and called for the author’s arrest. Lamb and Benjamin Prince, a friend of McDougall’s, were accused of authoring libel, but the Assembly could find no evidence against them.

In mid-January 1770, resentment against the British soldiery came to a head. Since 1766 the British troops in New York had repeatedly cut down the Liberty Pole, which had been built by the Sons of Liberty to commemorate repeal of the Stamp Act. One of the grievances against the British soldiers was that they offered themselves as cheap civilian labor, thus undercutting the regular laborers. This was a major reason for the clashes between
ropewalk laborers and soldiers (who sometimes worked as civilians there at low rates) in the days before the Boston Massacre. In New York the Sons of Liberty, on January 16, issued an attack on those who employed British soldiers, and called a meeting at the Liberty Pole. The soldiers promptly cut down the pole and contemptuously deposited the pieces at the doors of the Sons of Liberty. The enraged Sons held a mass meeting of three thousand people, who protested the destruction of the Liberty Pole and the employment of British troops in laboring work. In retaliation the British troops issued a handbill denouncing the Sons of Liberty as dangerous enemies of the country. As some soldiers tried to post the leaflet on January 19, they were seized by Isaac Sears and a group of Liberty Boys and taken to the mayor’s office. An attempt by the British to effect a rescue led to a clash between the troops wielding bayonets, and the crowd armed only with chains and sticks. Several citizens were wounded at this, the Battle of Golden Hill.

A clash with occupying troops thus antedated Boston’s by nearly two months. But the consequences were considerably different. New York was ruled not by a popular leadership of radical-liberals but by factions of a conservative land-based oligarchy. In New York, the Sons of Liberty were not the vanguard of a dominant movement, but a radical group trying to work its way into position to crack open an oligarchic power structure. The armed clash, instead of cementing libertarian control here, intensified a conservative backlash and made the conservatives determined to crush the Sons of Liberty. Broadsides appeared, supporting the granting of money to the British troops and ridiculing the Liberty Boys, McDougall being attacked as an Irish upstart. His authorship of the “seditious” pamphlet criticizing the Assembly having been betrayed by an informer, Alexander McDougall was arrested by the Assembly during February and turned over to the common-law courts to be indicted for “seditious libel.” Consciously emulating the courage and career of John Wilkes, McDougall remained in jail rather than post bail, and was visited by adoring crowds and hailed as the “Wilkes of America.” The radicals even used the talismanic Wilkite number 45. To the New York conservatives, McDougall was indeed a Wilkes who sought to “trample down all legal authority, and shake the government to the foundation.” He was defended by John Morin Scott as well as by the Liberty Boys; but with the prosecution’s major witness (the informer) dying, the government decided not to press the case further. McDougall was released from prison to great popular rejoicing.

His freedom was short-lived. At the end of the year McDougall, on the same charge, was hauled before the vindictive Assembly, acting by its own authority. First, the Assembly tried to force McDougall to testify against himself. When he refused, it threatened him with torture to force him to testify. Still refusing, McDougall was asked to write out his reasons for doing so. Typically, the Assembly decided that this statement contained fresh libels in contempt of the Assembly, and demanded that he beg its pardon. When McDougall still refused, the Assembly sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment
for “high contempt,” and ordered the sheriff (as in the Smith-Moore case in Pennsylvania in the 1750s) to disregard any writ of habeas corpus. Only five members of the Assembly voted against this brutal suppression of freedom of criticism, by a government body that acted as its own complainant, judge, and jury. McDougall was finally released at the end of the Assembly session, in April 1771, with the government dropping all charges against him.