What was boston massacre

The Sons of Liberty held funerals for the victims and organized a vigorous propaganda effort in order to turn public opinion against the Redcoats, and labeled the tragedy a "bloody massacre. The British soldiers were tried for murder and were defended by John Adams, a Boston lawyer who was as loyal to the idea of justice as he was to the Patriot cause. The Massacre site has been moved twice, both times from the center of the intersection. Today, a medallion on the Freedom Trail marks the site of the Boston Massacre and reenactments hosted by the Bostonian Society take place on the anniversary every year.

Skip to main content. Visiting the Boston Massacre Site. They were yelling at the soldiers, shouting profanities and insults at the soldiers. Others threw rocks, paddles, and snowballs at the besieged men. One of those protestors near the soldiers was a former slave named Crispus Attucks. The crowd continued to hurl verbal abuse and challenged the soldiers repeatedly to fire their weapons. The crowd became angrier and angrier. At one point a club or stick was thrown at the soldiers and struck one of the British soldiers.

The soldier fell to the ground. The musket ball struck Attucks who fell dead to the ground. A few seconds later, the other British soldiers fired into the crowd. Eleven people were hit, five men were killed and six were wounded. After the smoke cleared, Preston ordered his men to cease fire and called out dozens of soldiers to defend the Custom House. Most of the crowd of civilians left the area immediately around the soldiers as others ran to help the wounded.

American blood had been spilled at the hands of British soldiers for the first time. Royal governor Thomas Hutchison arrived on the scene and calmed the anxious and angry colonists and promised justice for what had just occurred.

But I wanted to show the way in which this picture itself really constitutes its own sleight of hand. We've made it part of our history. There are many incidents that we do and don't remember about the s that are part of the road to revolution. And this is a pretty early one. It's a moment when no one's thinking yet about a revolution. But what's really interesting about the Boston Massacre is that even though no one's thinking about a revolution in , it's really only a couple of years before people take this incident and remake it so that it becomes part of the story.

So [the story] itself is able to create part of the revolution, although in the moment, wasn't that at all. What inspired you to write this very different examination of what happened that day? It came from happening on just one little piece of evidence from the short narratives that are published the week after the shooting.

We have an original copy here at Carleton, and I've been taking my class to see them. But after a few years, I really read the first one for the first time. Someone repeats that he had been hanging out in a Boston house with a [British] soldier's wife and is making threats against Bostonians. I started pulling on the thread, and then I went to Boston.

And my very first day in, I was looking in the church records, and I found the record of a marriage between a [British] soldier and a local woman. I thought, I have a story. Here's a story. So stuff was hidden right there in plain sight, things we all should have been looking at but weren't really paying attention to.

It took seven months to arraign Preston and the other soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre and bring them to trial. Adams was no fan of the British but wanted Preston and his men to receive a fair trial. Certain that impartial jurors were nonexistent in Boston, Adams convinced the judge to seat a jury of non-Bostonians.

Eyewitnesses presented contradictory evidence on whether Preston had ordered his men to fire on the colonists. The remaining soldiers claimed self-defense and were all found not guilty of murder.

Two of them—Hugh Montgomery and Matthew Kilroy—were found guilty of manslaughter and were branded on the thumbs as first offenders per English law. The Boston Massacre had a major impact on relations between Britain and the American colonists. It further incensed colonists already weary of British rule and unfair taxation and roused them to fight for independence. The victims were troublemakers who got more than they deserved.

Over the next five years, the colonists continued their rebellion and staged the Boston Tea Party , formed the First Continental Congress and defended their militia arsenal at Concord against the redcoats, effectively launching the American Revolution. Today, the city of Boston has a Boston Massacre site marker at the intersection of Congress Street and State Street, a few yards from where the first shots were fired.

After the Boston Massacre. John Adams Historical Society. Boston Massacre Trial. The Boston Massacre. Bostonian Society Old State House. Historical Scene Investigation. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!