Boston Essay

By 1770 Boston was no longer Winthrop’s ‘city upon a hill’ whose citizenry had a covenant with God. Instead, Boston was the commercial and political epicentre of the Thirteen Colonies, and had been engulfed by a hot atmosphere of colonial discontent at the British, brought about by years of war, taxes and occupation. The discontent boiled over into riot on the evening of 5 March 1770, when Captain Thomas Preston and his seven guards arrived to relieve a Sentinel of his harassers amidst taunts of “you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare!” from an ever-swelling crowd of eighty. One of Preston’s men responded to being struck with a weapon by firing into the crowd. The ensuing chaos left five colonists dead, six more injured and the city inflamed. Whilst it is almost certain that Preston didn’t order his men to fire, he would have faded into the mists of history, had his innocence not been later challenged during the American Revolution. Patriots idolised and misconstrued the incident; John Adams claims it laid “the foundation of American independence” from their British tyrants. Their flawed imageries of the so-called ‘Boston Massacre’ reverberated across the Thirteen Colonies, and it’s the idealism they propagated more so than the incident itself which stirred colonists to revolting against the Crown.

The odds had never in Preston’s favour that faithful night, indeed it was a mixture of the provocative taunts from the ever-swelling crowd and the darkness that befell the pre-electric Boston streets that make faithful recollections difficult to obtain. However unfortunate the consequences of the incident, it is nearly certain that Preston hadn’t issue the command to fire. Whilst undisputed are the facts that the guards’ muskets were half-cocked and bayonets charged against the furious crowd, it would have betrayed Preston’s honour to fire. This is because as an experienced officer, like his comrade James Gifford, knew that “officers never give...