What Happened?
The evening of March 5, 1770 began with a small argument. A young wigmaker's apprentice named Edward Garrick confronted a British soldier named Hugh White, claiming that White's officer owed money to Garrick's employer. White struck the boy with his musket. A crowd began to form.
The crowd grew quickly. People threw snowballs, chunks of ice, and oyster shells at the lone soldier. White called for help, and a small group of soldiers under the command of Captain Thomas Preston arrived. The crowd pressed in closer. People dared the soldiers to fire, shouting insults and challenging them. The noise and confusion made it nearly impossible to know what anyone was saying.
Then the guns went off. No one could agree afterward on whether Captain Preston gave an order to fire, or whether the soldiers acted on their own after someone in the crowd yelled the word. What was certain was the result. Five colonists were dead or dying in the snow on King Street, and six more were wounded. The city of Boston was in shock.
The Scene on King Street
King Street was one of the main commercial streets in Boston, running from the waterfront up toward the center of town. The Custom House where the shooting took place was a symbol of British authority and tax collection. On the night of the massacre, lanterns and moonlight lit the street as the crowd and soldiers faced each other in the cold.
Victims of the Massacre
The five men who died were not politicians or wealthy citizens. They were working people. Their lives tell a story about who was actually present on King Street that night and why ordinary Bostonians had such strong feelings about the British occupation.
Crispus Attucks
Attucks was a sailor of African and Native American descent who had escaped slavery years earlier. He was the first to fall and is often remembered as the first person to die in the cause of American independence.
Samuel Gray
Gray was a ropemaker who had been involved in a fight with a British soldier just days before the massacre. He was shot and killed instantly on King Street.
James Caldwell
Caldwell was a sailor who happened to be passing through the area when the shooting started. He had no particular connection to the protest but lost his life that night.
Samuel Maverick
Maverick was a seventeen-year-old apprentice ivory turner. He was not part of the confrontation but was caught in the gunfire and died the following morning.
Patrick Carr
Carr was an Irish immigrant and leather worker who died two weeks after the shooting. Before he died, he told a doctor he thought the soldiers had been provoked, a statement that John Adams later used in the trial.
Eyewitness Accounts
The trial that followed would gather dozens of eyewitness accounts, and they did not agree. Some witnesses said the crowd was aggressive and threatening, throwing heavy objects and pressing right up against the soldiers. Others said the crowd was simply standing around and the soldiers fired without good reason. The confusion of that night made it genuinely difficult to know exactly what had happened.
Several witnesses said they heard someone shout the word "fire" before the soldiers shot, but could not say for certain whether it came from Captain Preston or from someone in the crowd. Others said no order was given at all and the soldiers fired on their own. The chaos in the street, the noise of the crowd, and the darkness all made clear accounts nearly impossible.
What witnesses did agree on was the aftermath. The dead lay in the street. Bells rang across the city. Thousands of Bostonians flooded into the streets in the hours that followed. Governor Thomas Hutchinson appeared on the balcony of the Town House and promised that the soldiers would face justice, which was the only thing that kept a full-scale riot from breaking out that night.
Primary Sources Used on This Page
- A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston
- Adams Papers Digital Edition