British Soldiers Fire on a Crowd in the Boston Massacre

British troops had been stationed in Boston since 1768, sent to quell resistance to Parliament's taxes and to customs officers. The National Park Service records that the occupation did little to calm the town and instead made the tension worse, with fights between colonists and soldiers and open clashes between supporters and opponents of the boycott of British goods. In February 1770 an eleven-year-old boy, Christopher Seider, died after Ebenezer Richardson fired into a crowd outside his house, and tempers were still raw on the night of March 5.

That evening a sentry, Private Hugh White, stood outside the Custom House on King Street, and a crowd gathered around him. Captain Thomas Preston led a small party of soldiers to his aid, and the crowd, throwing insults and objects, surrounded them. The sources agree that the soldiers then fired into the crowd, but not on why. The unsigned account printed in Boston a week later says the captain ordered the soldiers to fire; the American Battlefield Trust describes a soldier struck by a thrown object who fired first and was followed by the others. Five people died, among them Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr, and others were wounded. Governor Thomas Hutchinson ordered Preston and the soldiers arrested.

The fight over what to call the event began at once. Contemporary accounts and Paul Revere's engraving named it a massacre, and the National Park Service says some 10,000 people, by one estimate, attended the funeral of the first four victims on March 8. The Battlefield Trust adds that the soldiers were tried for murder in Massachusetts, with John Adams as their defence counsel, and that six were acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter. The episode hardened colonial distrust of a standing army quartered among civilians, and it fed the quarrel with Britain that led to the First Continental Congress.