What if I told you the event that sparked the
American Revolution didn't start with some, you
know, grand philosophical debate over human liberty?
Right, like some noble speech in a hall somewhere.
Exactly. But instead, it actually started with
a teenager screaming in the street about an unpaid
haircutting bill. It really is wild when you
look at the actual history. It is. So you're
joining us for a deep dive into an event you
probably think you know, the Boston Massacre.
We are pulling from a really comprehensive historical
overview of what actually happened on that freezing
night of March 5, 1770. And the mission today
is to essentially strip away centuries of that
oil painting mythology. Yeah, because when you
look closely at the source material, the birth
of the nation wasn't this masterpiece of noble
men making clean, heroic decisions. No, not at
all. It was chaotic. Super chaotic. It involved
the 18th century equivalent of like an outrage
algorithm. Yeah. And it culminated in a shockingly
controversial legal defense by a future president.
It really is a story where the ground level facts
clash wildly with the legend we're all taught.
But to understand how a dispute over a wig maker's
bill ends in gunfire, you have to understand
the environment. Like, Boston in the 1760s was
this incredibly wealthy, vital shipping town,
but its economy was just being suffocated by
the Townsend Acts. Remind me, those were the
tariffs, right? Yeah, exactly. They were tariffs
passed by the British Parliament on everyday
imported goods. We're talking glass, lead, paint,
paper and tea. So this is the whole taxation
without representation breaking point. Decisely.
But reading the sources, it hits you that it
wasn't just abstract political theory to these
people, you know? Yeah. It was their livelihoods
being squeezed. Oh, absolutely. And the British
government didn't just send strongly worded letters
to enforce these deeply unpopular tariffs. In
1768, they sent heavily armed troops. Right,
into the city itself. Yeah, you had the 14th
and 29th regiments of foot. station directly
inside the city. They weren't in some distant
fort. They were living right among the civilians
they were supposed to be policing. Reading through
the sources, the sheer claustrophobia of that
setup is staggering. Oh, totally. It makes me
think of a modern day hostel. military occupation
but crammed into a tiny freezing 18th century
peninsula. That's a really good way to put it.
You have civilians who feel entirely oppressed
in their own homes and then you have these heavily
armed underpaid soldiers who feel entirely unwelcome
and on edge. Right they are literally just trapped
together waiting for a spark. Exactly. And the
friction was constant because both sides were
heavily armed and actively patrolling the streets
the formal command structures often broke down.
Because it's not the general with each other.
Right. It wasn't generals negotiating with politicians.
It was low -ranking soldiers dealing with deeply
personal, daily civilian grievances. Which is
a recipe for disaster. It is. And that grinding
tension reached a tragic boiling point just weeks
before the massacre itself. On February 20th,
1770, an 11 -year -old boy named Christopher
Sider was shot and killed by a customs employee.
Wow, an 11 -year -old kid. Yes. And the reaction
to Sider's death shows you exactly where the
public mindset was. His death was heavily amplified
in local papers like the Boston Gazette. I mean
you can imagine the outrage. Oh it was immense.
The organizers turned his funeral into an enormous
visual spectacle. It was described as one of
the largest gatherings in Boston's history. So
they took this immense unified grief. and it
essentially mutated into pure rage. That's exactly
what happened. The sources say that after the
funeral, you literally had gangs of locals and
groups of off -duty soldiers actively roaming
the streets. Just looking for a fight. Yeah,
practically hunting for confrontations with each
other. It was a profoundly combustible atmosphere,
which is why the events of March 5th spiral out
of control so unbelievably fast. Right. It was
an environment where the smallest provocation
was going to trigger a massive explosion. And
this is where we get to that teenager I mentioned
at the top. Oh, right. The haircut bill. Yeah.
So it's the evening of March 5th, and you have
a single British sentry, Private Hugh White,
standing on guard duty outside the Boston Custom
House. Just by himself. Just by himself. Out
of nowhere, a 13 -year -old wickmaker's apprentice
named Edward Garrick shows up. OK. He starts
publicly screaming at a British officer. Captain
Lieutenant John Goldfinch, accusing him of not
paying his master's bill. And the profound irony
of this inciting incident is that Goldfinch actually
had paid the bill. Wait, he had? Yeah, he settled
the account the day before, so knowing he's in
the right, Goldfinch just like... ignores the
kid's insults and keeps walking. Which is probably
the smartest thing he could have done. Definitely.
But Private White, the guy standing guard, decides
he needs to intervene. Oh, man. Which, given
the Roman gangs we just talked about, feels like
a spectacularly bad idea. It was the worst possible
move, but Private White tells the kid to be more
respectful to an officer. They start exchanging
insults. the teenager starts poking the officer
in the chest. Yeah, so Private White leaves his
post, raises his musket, and strikes this 13
-year -old kid on the side of the head with the
butt of his gun. Yikes. So Garrick starts crying
out in pain, and a crowd immediately swarms the
area. But here's the detail that fascinated me.
Church bells begin to ring. Right. And in 18th
century Boston, church bells ringing at night
only meant one thing, a fire. Yeah, and think
about the mechanics of how a fire alarm worked
back then. You don't just call 911. Exactly.
You don't just wake up and look out the window.
If the bells ring, you grab a bucket, you grab
tools, maybe a club to break down doors, and
you run out into the dark streets ready for intense
physical action. So you suddenly have an estimated
300 to 400 people pouring out of taverns at home.
With their adrenaline just pumping. Right. carrying
clubs and buckets, only to find a British soldier
who just assaulted a local kid. And they completely
surround Private White. And they are furious.
They're throwing snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster
shells, stones. It's pelting him. Yeah. And the
sources note that one of the men helping to lead
this incredibly aggressive crowd is Crispus Attucks,
a mixed -race former slave. Right. And Private
White realizes he's in deep trouble. He retreats
up the steps of the Custom House, essentially
backing himself into a corner and calls for backup.
Which is when Captain Thomas Preston shows up,
right? Exactly. Captain Preston and seven soldiers
from the 29th Regiment push their way through
this massive angry crowd with fixed bayonets
to rescue him. And among those seven is a private
named Hugh Montgomery. Wait, I have to stop you
here because I saw this in the notes and couldn't
believe it. Henry Knox, the guy who goes on to
become George Washington's famous artillery general
in the revolution, he's just casually hanging
out in the crowd as a 19 -year -old bookseller.
He is. History is full of these bizarre intersections.
That is so wild. Knox is right there in the thick
of it and he actually grabs Captain Preston by
the coat and warns him point blank, if they fire,
you must die. Yeah, because Knox understands
the law. If the military fires on civilians without
authorization, the commanding officer hangs.
And Preston knows this. He tells Knox he's aware.
He gets his men to form a semicircle around Private
White. He is desperately shouting at these 300
to 400 people to disperse. But they don't. No,
they don't. The crowd is pressing right up against
the blades of the bayonets. They are spitting
at the soldiers, they are hitting the barrels
of the muskets with their clubs, and they are
literally daring the soldiers to shoot. Just
screaming at them. Yeah, screaming, fire, damn
you, fire. The psychology of the soldiers in
that moment must have been pure terror. I can't
even imagine. I mean, they are vastly outnumbered.
They are taking physical hits from rocks and
heavy chunks of ice. And crucially, they do not
have orders to shoot. Right. But then the breaking
point arrives. A thrown object, likely a heavy
piece of ice or a club, strikes Private Montgomery
hard enough to knock him to the ground. Oh, wow.
So he drops his musket. He does. He scrambles
back up, completely panicked and furious, recovers
his weapon, and without any command from Captain
Preston, he shouts, damn you, fire, and discharges
his weapon directly into the dense crowd. Just
setting off a catastrophic chain reaction. Exactly.
Eyewitnesses later testified there was a pause,
maybe a few seconds, maybe up to two agonizing
minutes, where the other soldiers, disoriented
by the noise and the flash, simply start firing.
So it wasn't organized at all? No, not a coordinated
military volley. It was a ragged, chaotic series
of panic -induced shots. And once the thick black
powder smoke finally clears, five American colonists
are dead or dying on the cobblestones. Samuel
Gray, James Caldwell, Crispus Attucks, Samuel
Maverick, and Patrick Carr. It's just devastating.
You know, we really need to pause and reevaluate
how we talk about this event, because we are
fundamentally taught to view the Boston Massacre
as this brave, unified stand of patriots resisting
British tyranny. The whole noble narrative. Right.
But listening to the mechanics of how it actually
played out... It wasn't a noble protest. It was
a chaotic, tragic bar fight that spiraled into
a bloodbath because an entire city was pushed
to its psychological limit. It is incredibly
messy. And the authorities recognize that messiness
immediately. How so? Well, Acting Governor Thomas
Hutchinson practically sprints to the balcony
of the State House that same night. He promises
the crowd that there will be a strict, fair,
legal inquiry if everyone just goes home. And
they actually listen. They do. The physical violence
on the street ends. But what replaces it is a
completely different kind of warfare. The information
war. Exactly. Because the physical smoke had
barely cleared before the Patriots realized that
whoever defined this event first owned it. Precisely.
They swapped muskets for printing presses. Both
the Patriots and the loyalists understood that
the actual truth of the chaos was far less important
than the narrative they could build around it.
And the Patriots executed a master class in propaganda.
We all know the famous engraving by Paul Revere,
titled The Bloody Massacre. Right, the one everyone
sees in history textbooks. Yeah, though the sources
make it clear he actually stole the design from
a lesser -known engraver named Henry Pelham.
Oh, interesting. But Revere is the one who rushed
it to the presses. And looking at it now, it
functions exactly like a modern algorithm designed
to target the lizard brain. Like social media
style. Exactly. Instead of trying to explain
the complex reality of ice -throwing crowds and
panicked sentries, Revere flattened the entire
event into a single, highly edited, emotionally
manipulative image. He definitely knew his audience.
He completely bypassed logic to maximize outrage.
If you look at the engraving, Revere depicts
Captain Preston standing safely behind his men,
actively raising his sword, ordering a synchronized
execution of a peaceful, well -dressed crowd.
Which completely contradicts the sworn testimonies
of almost every eyewitness present. Exactly.
He even added a sniper firing from the window
of the customs house, and he cheekily changed
the sign on the building to read, Witcher's Hall.
That is some heavy spin. Oh, it gets crazier.
He totally removed the snow, the clubs, the darkness.
And depending on which market he was selling
to, some versions of the print altered Crispus
Attic's skin color. Wait. Really? Yeah. They
would emphasize his race or hide it, depending
entirely on which narrative would sell better
to that specific audience. Wow. And you have
to consider how media functioned in a largely
text -based 18th century world. A vivid, bloody,
highly partisan image like that stands out massively.
It must have gone viral, essentially. Exactly.
It was hung up in taverns. It was nailed to the
walls of farmhouses all across New England. It
bypassed the intellect and went straight for
the gut, effectively radicalizing colonists who
were hundreds of miles away from Boston. Meanwhile,
alongside this visual manipulation, you have
the Battle of the Pamphlets. The Paper War. Right.
The Patriots quickly published a document called
A Short Narrative, put together by local leaders.
They gather over 90 depositions, carefully curated
to argue that the soldiers had deployed that
night with the explicit premeditated intention
of slaughtering citizens. And of course, the
loyalists, led by Governor Hutchinson, are frantically
trying to counter this. Naturally. They gather
their own depositions from the soldiers and publish
a pamphlet called A Fair Account. It argues the
exact opposite, that the citizens of Boston had
deliberately planned an ambush to murder the
troops. But the Patriots won the war of logistics,
didn't they? They did. They put their pamphlet
on a faster ship to London. Just beat them to
the punch. Exactly. So by the time the loyalist
version arrived, the narrative that bloodthirsty
soldiers had massacred innocent civilians was
already cemented in the minds of the British
public and parliament. So the propaganda strategy
worked flawlessly on the court of public opinion.
Flawlessly. But the law required a very different
standard of proof. And that brings us from the
printing presses to the courtroom, where we get
one of the most surprising twists in American
history. Oh, this is my favorite part. The man
who steps up to defend these completely despised
British soldiers. John Adams, a leading patriot,
a vocal critic of British overreach, and our
future second president. He took the case. Which,
I have to say, makes absolutely no sense on the
surface. It seems counterintuitive, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Why would the ultimate patriot risk his
life, his career, and his reputation to defend
the very soldiers his own political party is
calling butchers? It was a highly calculated
move. driven by both intense pragmatism and deep
principle. OK, unpack that a bit. Well, pragmatically,
the colonial leaders knew that if they held a
kangaroo court and executed these soldiers, London
would likely respond by revoking the Massachusetts
Charter and sending in an overwhelming military
force. Ah, so they had to prove they were civilized.
Exactly. But personally, Adams harbored a profound
belief in the rule of law. He believed that no
matter how unpopular the defendant, a fair trial
was the only thing separating society. from tyranny
okay ensuring a fair trial is a beautiful principle
but we need to look at the actual defense strategy
Adams used to get those acquittals yeah it gets
a bit dark because it is incredibly uncomfortable
to read today Adams basically puts the victims
on trial he really does he doesn't argue that
the soldiers were angels he argues they were
terrified men reacting to a deadly mob but the
language he uses He leans all the way into the
class and racial prejudices of the jury. He absolutely
did. Adam stood in front of that jury and described
the Bostonians who gathered that night as a motley
rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes,
Irish teagues and outlandish Jack Tars. It's
just so blatant. And he specifically scapegoats
Crispus Attucks. He tells the jury that Attucks'
very appearance was enough to terrify any reasonable
person. He claims Attucks was one who grabbed
a soldier's bayonet and caused the firing, even
though multiple witnesses testified that Attucks
was actually 12 to 15 feet away when the first
shot rang out. It's a complete distortion. Adams
explicitly tells the jury that the dreadful carnage
of that night was Attucks' fault. Which forces
you to confront a really difficult question.
Was Adams being a noble champion of blind justice,
or was he a political elitist who was perfectly
willing to throw working class apprentices, Irish
immigrants, and a former slave to the wolves
just to preserve the respectability of the colonial
elite in the eyes of the British crown? I leaned
toward the latter, honestly. He used every ugly
bias available to him to win. And it worked.
The jury acquitted Captain Preston entirely,
finding he never gave an order to fire. Unbelievable.
They also acquitted six of the soldiers, but
two soldiers, Montgomery, who fired the first
shot and a private named Kilroy, were found guilty.
But not of murder. No, however, they weren't
convicted of murder. They were convicted of manslaughter.
And their punishment is one of the most bizarre
legal footnotes I've ever heard. It's so strange.
They didn't go to prison. They got branded on
the thumb. How on earth does shooting into a
crowd result in a thumb branding? It's due to
a medieval legal loophole called benefit of clergy.
Benefit of clergy? Yeah. Originally, centuries
ago, this was a law meant to protect actual clergymen
from secular courts. But by the 18th century,
it had evolved into a first -time offender loophole
for certain crimes. So how did they prove they
were clergy? To prove you were clergy, all you
had to do was read a specific passage from the
Bible, usually Psalm 51. So because Montgomery
and Kilroy could read a Bible verse out loud
in court, they escaped the hangman's noose. Precisely.
They were branded with an M for manslaughter
on the brawn of their thumbs in open court so
they could never use the Lukehole again and then
they were released. That is just mind -blowing.
It is. But the jury's decision to lessen the
charges to manslaughter wasn't just based on
Adams' rhetoric. There was a crucial piece of
evidence that essentially exonerated the soldiers,
and it came directly from one of the victims.
Patrick Carr, the Irish immigrant. Yes. Carr
had been shot in the abdomen during the chaos.
Medical science being what it was, it took him
two agonizing weeks to die. Two weeks. Just awful.
During that time, his surgeon continuously asked
him about what happened that night. And Carr,
knowing he was dying, testified that he had grown
up in Ireland. He had seen plenty of street mobs
clash with the British soldiers over there. And
what did he say about the soldiers in Boston?
He said he had never seen soldiers bear half
so much abuse before they fired. He told his
doctor that he believed the soldier who shot
him did so in self -defense and he explicitly
forgave him. That is just it's staggering to
have the clarity and grace to forgive the man
who shot you while you were dying from the wound
because you recognize the possible situation
he was put in. It was so impactful that the justices
specifically instructed the jury to weigh Carr's
words heavily. Historically, this became one
of the very first recorded uses of the dying
declaration exception to hearsay evidence in
U .S. jurisprudence. Right. The legal assumption
being that a person who is actively stepping
into eternity has absolutely no motivation to
lie. Exactly. And when you pull all of these
threads together, the relevance for you listening
today is impossible to ignore. It really is.
We are talking about the freezing streets of
Boston in 1770, but the themes are remarkably
modern. They feel like they could be ripped from
today's headlines. This deep dive shows us that
the core issues we wrestle with right now are
foundational to who we are, how highly edited
media shapes our perception of reality, the very
real terrifying danger of escalating mob mentality,
and the intense strain between raw public outrage
and the cold rule of law. Yeah, these aren't
new glitches in the system. Exactly. These were
the exact forces that birthed the country. It
fundamentally changes how you view history. I
mean, Samuel Adams and the Patriots immediately
began hosting annual commemorations of the event,
literally calling it Massacre Day. They needed
that narrative. Right. They needed a massacre
to unify the colonies, so they built one out
of a tragedy. They prioritized the utility of
memory over the reality of history. They turned
a localized riot into the undeniable spark of
the American Revolution. Which leaves me with
one final thread from the source material that
I just keep thinking about. What's that? Well,
we spend so much time analyzing the five men
who died immediately, the soldiers who survived,
and the politicians who spun the narrative. But
the historical records briefly mention another
name, Christopher Monk. Oh, right. He's an apprentice.
Much like the kids who started the argument,
he was caught in the volley and severely wounded.
He was crippled that night. Crippled. And he
lived with those devastating injuries for another
10 years, finally passing away in 1780. Wow.
A casualty of the revolution who lived long enough
to watch the war begin, but who suffered quietly
every single day because of a petty argument
he had absolutely nothing to do with. That is
just incredibly tragic. It really makes you wonder,
you know, how many Christopher monks are completely
left out of our history books. When we define
a historical tragedy by its immediate explosive
aftermath and by how politically useful it is
for the people in power, how easily do we forget
the victims whose suffering just quietly unfolds
over decades, long after the propaganda posters
have been taken down?