In the years leading up to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the rebel-rousing Sons of Liberty used an engraving of what they called “The Boston Massacre” to arouse anti-British sentiments.
The engraving, done by Paul Revere, shows a line of British soldiers coldly firing their bayoneted muskets into a crowd of Americans, several of which lay bleeding on the ground.
A poem underneath that scene notes how the King’s men “With murderous Rancour stretch their bloody hands, Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey.”
It was good propaganda. But it was a distorted version of the facts, as John Adams famously pointed out when the soldiers involved were put on trial.
Here’s a brief summary of what happened at the “Boston Massacre” on the night of March 5, 1770.
A small group of eight British soldiers were surrounded, yelled at and pelted with snowballs, ice chunks and debris by a much larger group of locals, after an American and a soldier got into an argument over a debt.
A mulatto seaman named Crispus Attucks reportedly hit one of the soldiers with a piece of wood. The soldiers panicked. Somebody yelled “Fire!” The soldiers shot into the crowd, killing Attucks and four other Americans.
When the British soldiers were arrested and put on trial for murder, a Boston merchant asked local lawyer (and future president) John Adams to defend them. He agreed, knowing it would make him unpopular and could ruin his career.
On December 4, 1770, the second day of the brief trial, Adams gave his summation to the jury.
He argued that anyone might have reacted the same way the soldiers did in such a confusing and potentially life-threatening situation. He suggested Crispus Attucks was more to blame for “the dreadful carnage of that night” than the soldiers, because of his “mad behavior.”
“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams said, creating a famous quotation that is still frequently used today. “And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter.”
The jury was persuaded. Six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two were found guilty of manslaughter and given the punishment of having their thumbs branded.
Several years later, John Adams wrote in his diary that his defense of those British soldiers was “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”
At the very least, he certainly gave our country one of its best quotations that day.
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