British Bullets Fire Five: The Boston Massacre Ignites Revolution

Five colonists lay dead or dying in the snow outside the Custom House on King Street in Boston on the night of March 5, 1770, and within days, Paul Revere had produced an engraving of the scene so inflammatory, so distorted, and so widely distributed that it helped turn a local riot into a continental cause for revolution. The Boston Massacre, as it became known, killed five men and wounded six others in a confused confrontation that lasted only minutes. Tensions between Boston's civilian population and the British garrison had been building since 4,000 troops arrived in October 1768 to enforce the Townshend Acts and protect customs officials. Soldiers competed with locals for part-time jobs, fought in taverns, and represented a visible symbol of parliamentary taxation without colonial representation. On March 2, three days before the massacre, a brawl at John Gray's ropewalk between soldiers and workers left both sides looking for revenge. The evening of March 5 began with scattered confrontations across the city. A lone British sentry, Private Hugh White, was posted outside the Custom House when a crowd gathered and began taunting him. Captain Thomas Preston led a squad of eight soldiers to relieve White. The crowd pressed closer, throwing snowballs, ice chunks, and oyster shells. Someone — accounts differ on whether it was Preston or a voice from the crowd — shouted something that sounded like "Fire!" The soldiers discharged their muskets into the crowd. Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Wampanoag descent who worked as a sailor and ropemaker, was killed instantly. Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr also died, Carr lingering for nine days. Six others were wounded. John Adams, who would become the second president, defended the soldiers at trial, arguing they had acted in self-defense. Six were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter and branded on their thumbs. The massacre became the revolution's first martyrs and proof, in colonial propaganda, that standing armies in peacetime were instruments of tyranny.