The morning following the shooting, no one in Boston could talk about anything else. People tried to pump anyone and everyone for information. When British navy sailors from the HMS Rose entered William Rhoades’s tavern on King Street the next morning, he asked them what they had heard about the shooting, and whether any of the other sailors had been carrying guns the night before. The shoemaker David Loring similarly brought up the deaths with Sergeant Whittle of the Fourteenth Regiment. At the inquests that morning, men stood over the bodies of the slain and tried to puzzle out what had happened.
Early on March 6, the town crier went through every street in Boston, announcing a special town meeting, to be held at 11 a.m. that day. As usual, this meeting was open to all Boston residents, not just those who could vote. That meant women, apprentices, and children could attend. Three or four thousand “Freeholders and other Inhabitants” streamed that morning through the Merchants’ Market to Faneuil Hall. The town officials’ first order of business was to ask Bostonians, then and there, to “give information respecting the Massacre of the last night,” so that the town clerk could take down their testimony at once. The blood spilled in the town’s central street had shocked the people of Boston. John Rowe sympathetically characterized his neighbors as “greatly enraged and not without reason.” Many wanted to talk about what they had seen the night before. They wanted to bear witness.
John Singleton Copley, already renowned as a painter on both sides of the Atlantic, was the first to stand. Like so many other Bostonians, he had not previously recognized two opposing sides, loyalist and patriot, or accepted that he would have to choose between them. In the preceding two years, he had painted portraits of men who would come to be identified with opposing factions: the Son of Liberty Paul Revere and the commander of the British army in North America, General Thomas Gage. Yet on March 6, 1770, Copley was so stunned by the shooting that he was eager to make a public statement accusing the soldiers of deliberate intent to harm Bostonians.
After four more witnesses gave their depositions, it became clear that the number of townsfolk demanding to share their reactions was far too great for the town clerk, William Cooper, to transcribe by himself at that moment. Still, the demand had to be met, and Cooper accordingly appointed a three-member committee to collect testimonials at a later time. These depositions, eventually numbering nearly a hundred, would fundamentally shape the perception of the shooting, from 1770 to the present. No one at the time had any idea how influential those testimonies would turn out to be.
For the moment, however, the Boston Town Meeting turned its attention to the first priority: namely, getting soldiers off the street. This political body had never stopped calling for the removal of the troops. The previous summer a resolution was passed to the effect that “the Residence of a Military Power in the Body of this Metropolis is upon various Considerations, quite disagreeable to the Inhabitants.” Regardless of any individual feelings their daughters or wives or they themselves might have had for the military men and women they had met, the members of the town meeting were convinced that the only way to prevent more bloodshed was to remove the troops and their guns permanently from Boston’s streets.
The night before, the elected officials in the council chamber had asked Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, now the acting governor, to order the troops to leave the public square. Hutchinson had refused to do it himself and asked Lieutenant Colonel Carr, the commander of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, to give the order. As Governor Bernard had done upon the arrival of the troops a year and a half earlier, Hutchinson claimed that he, a civilian officer, could not give orders to the military. And so the town meeting appointed a committee of fifteen of the wealthiest of the town’s inhabitants who were most committed to the liberty movement, including John Hancock, Justice of the Peace John Ruddock, Joshua Henshaw, and Samuel Adams, to tell Hutchinson that the troops had to leave immediately. Some of the fifteen were already serving as selectmen; all of them were formally affiliated with the Sons of Liberty; all of them were willing to tell Hutchinson to his face that “the Inhabitants and Soldiery can no longer dwell together in safety.” Presumably, all were likewise ready for the long standoff that was likely to ensue; the most that could be hoped for was that the lieutenant governor’s “power & influence may be exerted.”
As with the argument over the housing of the troops, the impact of the deliberations over their departure was wider than anyone imagined at the time. The next set of compromises that these men eventually made created a long trail, throughout the British Empire.
Hutchinson himself had not been idle that morning. While the town meeting strategized, he sent a message to the Governor’s Council, as well as to Lieutenant Colonels Dalrymple and Carr, to meet with him. Before they could gather in his chambers, however, and even before Hutchinson himself appeared, representatives of the town meeting arrived. Hutchinson found the selectmen, including several who were part of the town meeting’s new committee of fifteen, waiting for him. They told him that they could not answer for the conduct of their fellow Bostonians if the troops stayed in the town. No sooner had Hutchinson predictably responded that it was “not in his power” to order the troops to withdraw to Castle Island than the rest of the members of the committee of fifteen knocked at the door. They too told Hutchinson “in plain terms” that people in Boston and the neighboring towns would riot if the troops remained.
In response to the demands of the town meeting delegation and the selectmen to remove all the troops, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson stubbornly insisted that he could not order the soldiers to depart, even in the face of an armed uprising against them. Besides, he added, “an attack upon the King’s Troops would be High Treason.” One wonders how Hutchinson was interpreting the previous night’s attack: as the Bostonians’ first step toward such high treason?
Even the representatives of the army offered only partial support for Hutchinson’s desire to keep troops in town. Dalrymple, bowing to the acting governor’s statement that the most recent conflicts with civilians had involved the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, offered to send that regiment to Castle Island. He also promised that he would keep his own Fourteenth Regiment in the barracks at Wheelwright’s Wharf. The promise was no guarantee of peace; even if Dalrymple intended to restrict all the privates to the wharf’s three warehouses, Bostonians would still have numerous military families and officers thronging their streets.
By the time Dalrymple and Hutchinson finished suggesting their plan to the committee of fifteen, it was well past time for lunch. The town meeting in Faneuil Hall had adjourned for a few hours during this discussion with Hutchinson; when it reconvened in the middle of the afternoon, at least four thousand people were present, far too many for the hall, so the meeting was moved to the Old South Meeting House, the largest indoor public space in Boston. There the committee presented Hutchinson’s proposal—that only the Twenty-Ninth Regiment would move to Castle Island. The town meeting soundly rejected the plan.
Half of the original committee of fifteen returned to the Town-House to try once more to persuade Hutchinson to order the removal of all the troops. The Governor’s Council supported the committee. But neither Hutchinson nor Dalrymple wanted to take responsibility for such a retreat. Dalrymple insisted that Hutchinson express, in writing, his desire to remove the troops, and Hutchinson, after some vacillation, complied. For his own part, Dalrymple (in a letter written the next day) assured his commanding officer, General Gage, that when asked to remove the troops, “I absolutely refused. After much persuasion I consented to take the liberty of sending the 29th regiment to the castle, until your pleasure should be known.” Only after Hutchinson explicitly required him to move both regiments from town did Dalrymple agree. The lieutenant colonel insisted that he was stuck between the rock of his own military assessment of the situation, in which the town would be better off protected by troops, and the hard place of his responsibility as a military commander to submit to civilian authority: “In this delicate situation was I placed, told if I remain contrary to the governor’s order all should be at my peril, yet unwilling to leave the place without your consent, I made an effort to procure time tho in vain, not being of a rank sufficient to refuse obedience to the Civil Governors power I was obliged to submit.” Dalrymple noted that Hutchinson lacked both support and authority. “He is without friends, and I may add power,” Dalrymple caustically concluded.
The delegation from the town meeting returned triumphantly that afternoon to the meeting, where the news of the regiments’ departure provided joy as well as satisfaction. To the relief of both the lieutenant governor and some of the more moderate Bostonians, including John Rowe, the crowd dispersed “very peaceably to their Habitations.” It may have seemed to some like the end of the story: the shooters in jail awaiting an impartial trial and the chastened lieutenant governor and commanding officer acknowledging that military force could not subdue a community determined to hold on to its rights, as its spirited activists refused to back down. As the minister and liberty party adherent Samuel Cooper stated, “We are now happily deliver’d from that Army, which instead of preserving the Peace among us, has in numerous Instances most audaciously violated it, and instead of Aiding has overaw’d and sometimes even assaulted the civil Magistrates, and Demonstrated how impossible [it] is for Soldiers and Citizens at least in our Circumstances to live together.” To Cooper and others, the shooting proved that the town meeting and the selectmen had been right all along: the troops, and not the Bostonians, had been the disturbers of the peace.
In the same letter, Cooper continued, “For these and other reasons we cannot suppose that Troops [will] ever again be quarter’d in the Body of the Town.—I could say much upon this Subject but chose to forbear.” Cooper’s silence on the subject of troops living in the “Body” of Boston is intriguing. What was he refusing to discuss? Clearly, there was plenty of food for thought on the topic of troops and inhabitants living in close quarters, but none of it was spoken aloud. Marriages, baptisms, and friendships between soldiers and civilians had become a forbidden topic.
It was no easy matter to pack up several thousand men, women, and children. Military families resisted the breakup of their homes, and Dalrymple himself was in no rush to comply with his agreement. If he proceeded slowly enough, he thought, perhaps the townspeople’s anger might abate. Or perhaps Gage himself might order him to move the troops out of Castle William and back into the center of the town. In that case, he thought he could try “to reinstate matters when the popular fury has subsided.”
Dalrymple’s hope was in vain, however, and he found himself forced to start moving troops to the harbor. John Rowe was one of many who kept an eye on the army’s progress. By the Friday following the Monday shooting, he was recording in his diary, “Yesterday two Companies of the 29th went to the Castle & four companies more went this day.” One week after the shooting, he noted carefully, “The Remainder of the 29th Regiment went to the Castle this day.” Three days later the newspaper reported that “all the 29th Regiment and the greatest Part of the 14th, are gone to the Barracks at Castle-William.”
The thousands of Bostonians who had thronged Faneuil Hall and the Old South Meeting House had seen the departure of the troops as a step toward calm. With some eight hundred men gone from the peninsula, the town certainly felt emptier. Edward Ireland, the head constable of one of Boston’s central wards, noted with great pleasure, in his March monthly report, that “ever since the Soldiers have been gone the streets that used to be full of uproars and confused men now is still, espesely on satterday night and on the Sabetth.” Not only were those rowdy soldiers off the streets, but, he added in a direct note to the selectmen, “gentlemen I can’t help taking notice of the town inhabitants, how freely they answer the watch ever since the soldiers have been gone.” Did Ireland mean that soldiers’ cronies, the ones who were up to no good, had melted away also? Or were the townspeople less tense and more willing to acknowledge the authority of the watch? Ireland himself no longer had to compete with military men patrolling the streets and clearly enjoyed asserting his superior ability to maintain calm.
Little as Dalrymple or Hutchinson wanted to move troops out to Castle Island, they too felt an urgent desire to separate the townspeople from the troops. Two weeks after the shooting, Dalrymple wrote to Gage with evident relief, “Nothing can be more effectual to prevent further disputes with the inhabitants than the situation of the 29th [on Castle Island]; their intercourse [with Bostonians] is necessarily all at an end, no complaint was made of them after the affair of the 5th, at least no just complaint, and at the Castle no further altercation can happen.” Dalrymple thought he had found the silver lining in the retreat.
Hutchinson was heartened as well: no more soldiers living among Bostonians determined to undermine the government, no more conflicts between civil and military authorities, no more squabbles in the streets. Dalrymple complained that the island quarters were far too crowded for both regiments, and Gage proposed sending the regiments to new postings elsewhere, but Hutchinson disagreed with both men. The soldiers were perfectly happy, he wrote to Gage, and any possible problem with the new arrangements was “caused by the multitudes of women and children belonging to the 29th.” In Hutchinson’s eyes, those families were the “difficulty” in an otherwise excellent arrangement.
Now that the opposition had stopped complaining about the presence of the troops, Hutchinson was not eager to see Gage send them completely out of the province. Though troops barracked on Castle Island might not be as easy to recall to put down riots in the heart of Boston, as Governor Bernard had argued in 1768, when he insisted on their living in town, they still had some use, including the protection of the customs commissioners. Despite Dalrymple’s attempts to persuade both Hutchinson and Gage that the situation was far from perfect, Hutchinson was sure that the move would turn out to be a blessing, and not even one in disguise. “The men seem to me to be in better condition since they have been at the castle than when they were in Town,” he reported to Gage a week later.
While Hutchinson was putting on his rose-colored glasses, his political supporters and opponents alike were coloring their reputations and spreading their versions of the March 5 shooting. Within days any Bostonian with access to the media—printed, spoken, or artistic—swung into action; by the following Monday, the newspapers had printed varied accounts of the event. The Boston Gazette reported that Captain Preston had ordered the soldiers to fire, while the Boston Chronicle was willing to go no further than to call it an “unfortunate affair.” In protest of the Chronicle’s halfhearted condemnation of the shooting, most of its advertisers pulled their support from the paper; it folded less than four months later. The artist Henry Pelham was hard at work on his drawing of the event within a few days of its occurrence; it took Paul Revere only several days more to acquire the cartoon (without Pelham’s approval) and use it as the foundation for his own famous engraving. Like the difference between the newspapers’ accounts, the two artists’ titles speak to the varieties of interpretation immediately following the deaths. Pelham called his work “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power.” Revere, of course, called his “The Bloody Massacre.”
The horror of the deaths affected thousands. On March 8, John Rowe joined the funeral procession for the slain. He was amazed at the number of people who followed the victims to the gravesite. As he marched solemnly through the narrow streets with others, in rows of six, he wondered if more than half of the town had joined the procession: ten to twelve thousand people, he estimated, were with him, out of a town of sixteen thousand. Others had come from neighboring towns to take part in the somber occasion. The Reverend William Emerson of Concord (grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson), fifteen miles away, happened to be visiting his in-laws that day. He watched the “awful & solemn Procession.” It was “extremely affecting!” he wrote to his wife. The sounds of the funeral echoed for miles; church bells pealed throughout Boston. Bells from the neighboring towns of Roxbury and Charlestown joined in the tolling.
Anyone who did not know what to think about the deadly event could hear it from the pulpit. On March 11, the first Sunday after the shooting, the Reverend John Lathrop used his sermon in the Second Congregational Church to condemn the soldiers. His parishioners rushed his sermon into print in London, with the title Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston.
As a result of Lathrop’s sermon and those of equally persuasive ministers, news of the atrocity spread quickly through Massachusetts and beyond. Within a week of the shooting, other towns had taken official action. The town meeting of nearby Medford authorized a committee to send a letter of support to Boston. Medford blamed the shooting on “the detestable machinations of a few wicked & artful men,” an unsubtle reference to the British government in London, but lamented as well “the deplorable Condition the Town of Boston has been reduc’d to, by the insolent & savage Behaviour of the Soldiery, quartered among them.”
The second week after the shooting, the Boston Town Meeting returned to the issue of taking depositions from witnesses to the shooting. In place of the three men who had formed the original committee, three new men were chosen, all of them powerful, well connected, and far more active members of the Sons of Lib
The committee chose to publish the affidavits, with a long introduction, as A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March, 1770, by Soldiers of the XXIX Regiment. They sent some forty copies abroad to sympathetic members of Parliament, as well as one to the outgoing prime minister, the Duke of Grafton. These were accompanied by a letter, reprinted in the local newspapers, that explained the reason for sending the copies in the first place: “to intreat your Friendship to prevent any ill Impressions from being made upon the Minds of His Majesty’s Minesters and others against the Town.”
But this was disingenuous; the persuasive nature of the pamphlet lies in what Bostonians themselves had to say about their own experience of the events. The lengthy appendix of first-person testimony, drawn from ninety-six depositions, dwarfs the introduction both in size and in importance. The depositions were collected over a period of nineteen days, as Bostonians told their stories and as Bowdoin, Pemberton, and Warren took notes. At the end of his or her testimony, each deponent signed an affidavit in the presence of two justices of the peace, to swear that the written deposition was accurate. Since the three-man committee welcomed anyone who wanted to testify against the soldiers, it took depositions from people whose voices were not usually welcome in the town meeting or other political venues: white women, both married and single, and black men, both free and enslaved. Black women did not testify, but whether their voices are absent by choice or exclusion, we cannot know.
The depositions were arranged by the committee in roughly chronological order, intended to show the soldiers in the worst possible light. Many of them dealt not with the night of March 5 itself but with other points of conflict, such as the fight at the ropewalk on March 2 and the soldiers’ alleged ensuing desire for revenge. Other depositions spoke to the longstanding hostility between soldiers and townspeople; still more claimed that soldiers knew in advance that something momentous would happen on the night of March 5. For anyone reading the depositions from beginning to end, the cumulative effect is an acceptance of the idea that the firing on the townspeople constituted premeditated murder.
Because the clear aim of the Short Narrative was to shape public opinion against the troops, Bowdoin, Pemberton, and Warren attempted to embargo local distribution of the pamphlet. They were eager to send their version of events to London but determined not to distribute it in Boston. The town meeting sanctimoniously but perceptively voted to lock away any copies not sent to England out of a concern that “the unhappy Persons now in custody” might see the pamphlet as “tending to give an undue Byass to the minds of the Jury” who would try them. The town meeting was likely less concerned that the soldiers might not get a fair trial and more concerned that the town of Boston might appear to be stacking the deck against the defendants. Above all, Bostonians wanted to look moderate, fair, and high-minded.
Various army officers had their own concerns regarding public perceptions. Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple wrote to his commander, General Gage, that on a ship leaving for England the next day he would “send home copies of the narrative [of this whole affair]; they may prevent opinions being formed prejudicial to truth.” Dalrymple’s letter crossed in the mail with one from Gage, who advised Dalrymple, “Be so good to Collect the most impartial Accounts of this unhappy affair from the Beginning.” Gage understood that the essential question was whether the army, and especially its officers, had acted appropriately. The behavior of individual soldiers was not his concern; rather, he wanted to ensure that the world knew that British officers could control their men. In a postscript to Dalrymple, Gage added, “Enquiry should be made into the Conduct of the Soldiers, previous to the last affair, and if any are found to have Acted in any manner deserving Punishment, they should be Confined.”
With the help of Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson and one sympathetic justice of the peace, Dalrymple managed to put twenty-five depositions on the boat to England a full week before the town had finished collecting its stories. Those deposed claimed, as Gage had hoped, that Bostonians had premeditated and precipitated the riot in King Street and that the soldiers had fired only in self-defense. Moreover, Officers Hugh Dixon and David St. Clair, the same men who had assaulted the Halifax magistrate three years before, now claimed that “since they have been in Boston they have been frequently insulted and abused.” Titled A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance, the pro-military pamphlet was an explicit rejoinder to the Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre. Not only was the title less gory than the town’s—made even more vivid in the London editions of the Short Narrative by an accompanying miniature version of Revere’s engraving on the frontispiece—but its depositions began at number ninety-seven, as if in continuation of the depositions included in the Short Narrative. In the race to frame the narrative, the army seemed to win. But although the depositions in support of the army made it to England first, the pamphlet did not enjoy a wide distribution, and the pro-colonial Short Narrative reached England before the pro-imperial depositions were published.
Still, Gage did not give up. He labored over his report to his superiors at home. In April he pleaded with Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson to postpone the soldiers’ trials as long as possible, in order to stir up sympathy for the defendants and anger at Bostonians. “In my accounts of the unhappy Transactions of the 5th of March, I have not omitted to state the situation of the Town and temper of the people, the efforts to inflame them to think of revenge, and the endeavours used to overawe the judges,” he assured the lieutenant governor. “But my Letters unfortunately go home late,” he added, and he worried that the trials might begin before officials in England had time to appreciate how desperately the soldiers might require a royal pardon.
In June 1770, after the first sets of depositions from both sides had left for London, Dalrymple wrote to Gage to suggest that he ask the Twenty-Ninth Regiment to search their recollections of violent encounters with Bostonians: “The 29th regiment having in many cases suffered from the violences of the Magistrates and people, it might be proper that affidavits should be obtained from them, which when sent here will properly find a place in the proposed publication, everything apposite to one purpose shall be collected, and if there is any further attention to be paid to military grievances, it will make our suffering appear extraordinary tho in that hope I am not sanguine.”
Given how explicitly Dalrymple urged that evidence be collected in order to show the army’s “extraordinary” torment while stationed in Boston, it is clear that most of these stories of brawls between townspeople and soldiers were recorded (although not necessarily invented) by him in order to shape public opinion. Lieutenant Colonel Carr obediently interviewed men from the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, but even before reading the affidavits, Gage was sure he knew what the men would say. “Carr has not yet transmitted them to me,” he informed Dalrymple. “I am told they tend to prove the People of Boston, the most Vile sett of Beings in the whole Creation.”
Throughout the summer and fall of 1770, the two pamphlets spread through the English-speaking world. Notices of their arrival began to show up in the London literary magazines. In the Critical Review, the writer and satirist Tobias Smollett reviewed both publications, as did Ralph Griffiths, the editor of the Monthly Review. Smollett was deeply incredulous of the Short Narrative, and he particularly abhorred Revere’s engraving, which accompanied the London version. The print, he scoffed, is in “every-way dismal.”A Fair Account, on the other hand, he was sure would completely exculpate the army. By contrast, Griffiths’s only complaint about the Short Narrative was that it contained nothing that had not already been printed in the English newspapers. He read the Fair Account with a more skeptical eye than did Smollett, sardonically noting that the supporting affidavits were given by people “most of whom, however, it will be observed by every attentive reader, are officers in the army.” Both sides had disseminated their stories to London readers. Surprisingly, neither side had been able to dominate public opinion.
Given how explicitly each side intended to cast blame on its opponent, it is not difficult to find the biases in each pamphlet. As Smollett noted in his review of the Short Narrative, “The design of this narrative . . . is evidently to enflame.” “It must be remembered,” Smollett continued, “that when people are inflamed to a certain degree, there is no difficulty in procuring evidences who will, even bona fide, prove anything conformable to the prevailing disposition of the times.” Bostonians and soldiers alike were angry and willing to say anything that fit with the story they were trying to tell—a story of anger, violence, self-defense, and revenge.
As the accounts of the shooting—the town’s Short Narrative and the army’s Fair Account—passed from printer to bookseller to reader, the outlines of a new story were becoming clear. Gone, or at least much less prominent, was the narrative of an army closely enmeshed with the citizens of the town; in its place arose a stark portrayal of conflict and separation. The connections between soldiers and civilians were still evident to those who paid careful attention to the pamphlets’ appendices, but the story of inexorably growing hostility dominated perceptions. Whether siding with the town or the army, members of the public agreed that only one question needed to be answered: was it the citizens or the soldiers who had placed the final straw on the camel’s back?
While these pamphlets provided much fodder for conversation on both sides of the Atlantic, the prize that Crown and town officials alike hoped to capture was the moral high ground. Both sides accordingly framed the pamphlets, the pictures, the letters, and most of all the trials of Captain Preston and the soldiers to answer one basic question: Was the shooting simple murder or an act of self-defense? In other words, who was guilty, the living or the dead? A courtroom, with judges and jury weighing the merits of each side, seemed to be the ideal setting to resolve the question.
Yet precisely because they were trying to shape a story that blamed the other side, the people giving the depositions focused on finger pointing. They may have had reason to color or tilt their testimony toward accusation, but they had no reason to lie about the context in which their conversations took place. Distressed as Boston’s inhabitants may have been after the shooting, it did not occur to any of them to hide evidence of civilian-military relationships. While the soldiers accused of deliberately shooting Bostonians sat in jail, everyone else went about their lives as best they could. The story in the pamphlets—of angry and threatening words—was both underpinned and belied by evidence of neighborliness so unexceptional that deponents could not be bothered to remove it from their testimony.
Even members of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment, profoundly affected by the shooting and its aftermath, did not completely sever their relations and interactions with the town following the lieutenant governor’s decision to send them to Castle William. Throughout March and April, men slept on Castle Island while many of their wives tried to stay in Boston. The overcrowded fort would be particularly unpleasant for children, and even with only some of the families in the barracks on the island, the cramped quarters were vulnerable to epidemics.
But staying in Boston without their husbands or the presence of the military was hard for wives. Dalrymple was eager to start saving money on rent, now that he was moving so many people out to the free housing on Castle Island. General Gage’s first order to him, when he heard about the shooting and the town meeting’s pressure to remove the troops, was to “incur as little Expence as possible for the accommodation of the regiments.” Within two weeks of the shooting, Dalrymple had emptied many of the larger buildings that the army had rented and was preparing to hand them back to their owners. Women who did not join their husbands on Castle Island found themselves essentially evicted.
Mary Dickson and Margaret Bishop tried to stay in their rented housing after their husbands moved into Castle William. In Boston, they were surrounded by both women and children of their old military community and their new civilian acquaintances. With Mary were her two children: four-year-old John, who had been born in Halifax, and baby William, born and baptized just thirteen months earlier. The military husbands and wives who had acted as William’s godparents at Christ Church—Richard and Eleanor Starkey and Dennis and Frances McCormack—also chose to have the women and children in their two families remain in Boston for as long as they could, in that spring of 1770. Eleanor and her three children stayed at the northern foot of Beacon Hill, not far from the Mill Pond. There they rented a house from a free black instrument maker named Daniel Halsey. Frances and her daughter, Mary, stayed in the same neighborhood, sharing a house with Catherine Charloe, the African Jamaican wife of another soldier. All of the women, including Margaret, had been in Halifax together. Margaret and Catherine had both traveled from Ireland on the Thunderer five years earlier.
But without barracks or a housing allowance, Mary and Margaret struggled to keep a roof over their heads. It might have been homelessness that led them to squat with their children in an empty warehouse on Bradford’s Wharf in the North End. They shared the space with a local couple, the Akeleys. On April 1, the town watch found the four adults. They may have resisted leaving their shelter; the head of the North End watch, Isaac Townshend, described the encounter as “routs and disorders.” Certainly, there was no love lost between Townshend and the squatters. When he wrote up his report for the selectmen, Townshend characterized them all as “bad persons.” Townshend and Joseph Akeley had clashed the year before, when Townshend had arrested him and a friend for carousing with a local nuisance whom he described as “a drunken Troublesome Noisey fellow.” This time, Townshend locked the three women and Akeley in the watch house until morning. Margaret and Mary had to promise Townshend that they would leave town at dawn; the Akeleys merely had to find a new place to live, since Bradford’s warehouse was “such an old Building and no fireplace,” making any light unsafe. Margaret and Mary, meanwhile, slipped away and out of the historical record.
The warehouses the army had leased as barracks were emptying out, but plenty of people remained in the homes that Bostonians had rented to soldiers and their families. Isabella Montgomery and Elizabeth Hartigan, wives of two of the jailed soldiers, were still in Boston, as were at least a half dozen women from their company alone, including Mary Dickson and Catherine Charloe.
The presence of these women in Boston, and comings and goings of soldiers as well, were apparent to everyone. A committee of Boston’s leaders, including Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, Thomas Cushing, wrote in July 1770 to Benjamin Franklin, who was in London, that “since their removal the Common Soldiers, have frequently and even daily come up to the Town for necessary provisions, and some of the officers, as well as several of the families of the Soldiers have resided in the Town.”
These families worried town officials, who feared that their presence in Boston was permanent rather than temporary. The officials may have managed to force the soldiers to leave, but they had not been quite so successful with the military women and children. If the army was not going to support these families, who would? The Boston selectmen might have had some sympathy with the otherwise unpopular governor of Halifax, who, after the departure of regiments there, wrote angrily to the commanding officer that “as great inconveniences have arisen from numbers of idle, helpless and indigent Women left in this Town by regiments on their departure from this Province, together with a very heavy expense to the inhabitants for their Support and Maintenance, I must therefore intreat that you will be so good as to give such Orders as may prevent an addition of this inconvenience so that the Women which have been brought here by the Troops may be obliged to embark with them.”
Officials in Boston knew that they could not force most of these families to leave. Robert Love, a representative from the selectmen tasked with “warning out” strangers, did, however, hunt down more than forty families of soldiers still living in Boston to give them the reminder that, even if they were destitute, the town had no obligation to pay for their relief. The thin legal formality of a warning did not mean that the families had to leave, nor even that they might not receive relief, but it did alert women and their children that the town felt no obligation to them.
And so when Dalrymple began to move troops to Castle Island in the weeks after the shooting, women had to make a choice. Should they try to go to the overcrowded fort? Or should they stay in Boston, thereby increasing the possibility that the commanding officers would leave them behind when they embarked for the next deployment, but allowing them to remain close to recently made friends, and possibly even family?
For the wives of the two married soldiers held in Boston’s jail for their part in the shooting on King Street, the choice was clear, at least for now. Both the newlywed Elizabeth Hartigan and the Irishwoman Isabella Montgomery stayed in Boston while their husbands were imprisoned. It took more than ten weeks after the shooting before Robert Love came to visit both women. Montgomery may have been warned of the possibility of this visit by her landlord, a member of the Governor’s Council, Royall Tyler. Elizabeth Hartigan, as a Boston resident, might have known about the practice.
Love’s visit was not an act of vengeance by the town. He was legally committed to let Montgomery know that, with her husband in jail and the rest of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment departed from Boston, the town was not obliged to give her poor relief in the event that she could not support herself. On the other hand, Love’s warning of Montgomery was one of the very few moments when he preserved his political passions on paper. The Irishwoman was on her own, he noted in his report to the selectmen, because her husband “is now under Confinement in our Gaol for the murder of our people the Last March.” It seems not impossible that Love elaborated to Montgomery that if the regiment deserted her here in Boston, a likely possibility if her husband was found guilty and executed, then she and her children, Mary, Esther, and William, were on their own.
Just because the town of Boston was giving warning that it would not support army women did not mean that it would actually leave these families to starve. Edward McCarthy was still living out at Castle William when Love warned his wife, Mary McCarthy, in May 1770 that she and her daughter, Frances Mary, then living in a rented house in the South End, were not entitled to support from the town. Once the regiment left Boston, however, and the army stopped paying a housing allowance, apparently the McCarthys could no longer afford the rent. They were admitted to the poorhouse two months later, where they stayed for some six weeks. Taxes from the province of Massachusetts paid for their stay.
The soldiers had hardly left Boston before rumors began to fly that they were moving back to town. Several people informed town officials that “a number of Soldiers with their Baggage landed . . . at Wheelwright’s Wharf.” One eyewitness claimed that at least sixty men had disembarked. To keep an eye on the soldiers, the town meeting established a committee to ensure that no more soldiers came from Castle Island “than they think necessary.” Boston was no longer a garrison town. But that did not mean that the troops, including their families, were gone. In some ways, life went on as before.
John Rowe had watched with mixed feelings as the regiments moved out to Castle Island. He was deeply shaken by the shooting. When Patrick Carr, after lingering for another week and a half with a shattered hip, died on March 14, Rowe recorded the funeral of the “unhappy sufferer.” He seemed to be playing the role of town official the next day, when Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple invited him to visit and shared with him the news that General Gage had approved the removal of the troops. But when Dalrymple came to Rowe’s house two days later for a midday dinner, it was as a friend rather than as an army official. Throughout the spring Rowe had kept his social calendar full of drinks with Sons of Liberty like John Hancock and dinners with British army officers like Dalrymple. A year and a half later, he was still enjoying the company of army officers. On a hot day in August 1771, he spent the day on the ship of the British naval commander, with seven officers among the guests. Rowe thought it was an excellent evening: “a fine entertainment and the Genteelest supper I ever saw. Twas a very agreeable and polite affair.”
Rowe was not the only Bostonian willing to leave behind any sense of rancor after the shooting. For all the violence of that night, few seemed willing to cut all ties between the citizenry and the military. Flirtatious soldiers continued to draw the eyes of young women. Private Samuel Strain had several of them—and a few town officials—distressed at the possibility of his leaving town in 1770. After he had moved to Castle Island in May 1770, he was accused of fathering a child and was hauled to Justice Dana’s house on an arrest warrant. A young woman named Mary Dean claimed he had gotten her pregnant. Faced with the probability that Strain, now several miles from the town center, would disappear without paying any child support, Dana set bail and ordered him to wait in jail until someone paid his bond. No one did. Two days later, apparently while still imprisoned, Strain published marriage banns, an official intention to marry a different local woman, Mary Wharf. However, intention is not the same as fulfillment; as there is no record of their actual marriage, Strain may never have married Wharf either.
Unlike the rakish Samuel Strain, other soldiers and civilians continued to make more conventional ties. In fact, half of the marriages in Boston between civilian women and military men were solemnized between March 5, 1770, and June 1772. These unions are part of the same pattern of intimate connections that developed before the shooting in King Street became the Boston Massacre. Just as the church records documented before March 1770, military families like those of John Spencer and William Mills continued to ask civilians to act as godparents for their children. Most telling of all, local women continued to wed soldiers in the weeks and years after the shooting.
Like the fraught interactions on the night of March 5, these marriages could combine elements of hostility with affection. The Bostonian Elizabeth Hillman married thirty-two-year-old Jesse Lindley from the Fourteenth Regiment in the summer of 1770. After their marriage, Lindley gave a deposition in which he claimed that during the fall of 1769, he and another soldier had an experience much like Hugh White’s: the two soldiers were on sentry duty when a cluster of Bostonians began to insult them and hit them with clubs. As he recalled, “The two sentrys were oblig’d to charge their Bayonets in their own Defense.” Like White, the sentries had to call on their fellow soldiers from the guardhouse for backup, but help did not arrive until after the crowd had dispersed. It may have been sheer luck that no one was killed that night. Yet when Lindley and Hillman married the following summer, the church record did not mark Lindley as an outsider. Instead, the clerk identified him and Hillman as “both of Boston.” For her part, Hillman seemed willing to make a commitment to her new military community. Just a month after her marriage, she stood as godparent to the infant daughter of another man in her new husband’s company.
Even the Twenty-Ninth Regiment was not anathema to most Bostonians. Unusually, Simon Bennis decided to join the regiment on March 9, 1770, just four days after the shooting and just one month before his child was born. Although Bennis apparently was not a native of the town, he had been living there since 1769. That year, he married a Boston woman named Margaret Querk, apparently part of a community of immigrants from the Isle of Man. When their child, Susanna, was born in April 1770, her two godmothers were local women with Manx names: Cluckus and Kewen. Even so soon after the shooting in King Street, local women did not reject friends associated with the military.
Neither did local men. John Rowe had enjoyed Captain Preston’s company when he first came to Boston. Preston was among the first officers Rowe had met socially in the month after the troops came in 1768, and they had stayed friendly. Captain Preston had even been part of the small circle of guests invited to Sukey’s ball at the end of February 1770. Even when the captain was in prison, Rowe did not forget his acquaintance. On a fine Friday morning, as four companies of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment were packing to sail to Castle Island, Rowe went to visit Preston in jail.
Eighteenth-century jails tended to be dark and dreary. In 1765, Thomas Hutchinson had described the Boston jail as “dark, damp and pestilential.” But the court had been willing to tax all of Suffolk County for the money to build a new prison in 1768, a two-story stone building looming over Queen Street. High-ranking prisoners like Preston could expect a “cleanly apartment,” which he might have to himself. Less fortunate men might be “thrust into a tiny apartment,” which they would share with four or five others.
Given the physical surroundings, Rowe was surprised to find the officer in good spirits. A half dozen debtors languished, trying to straighten out their financial affairs, while most of the twenty-one other prisoners were awaiting trial for theft. Many of the cells had iron spikes in the doors to discourage escape, and the structure was sturdily built, as some of its residents knew well. Private Bryan Donnelly of the Sixty-Fourth Regiment and his cellmate, the Bostonian Abel Badger, had tried to set it on fire the previous winter. Just to burn through one of the interior doors apparently took hours, and eventually they succeeded in burning much of the jail, including the roof. In their defense, they later claimed that they were just trying to make a hole in the wall sufficient in size to pass a bottle of rum into the next cell for another soldier—which that soldier vigorously denied.
Neither rum nor food was easy to come by in jail. Most prisoners depended on others to bring them what they needed; in some cases the jailer might be willing to provide food, but for a price. Ever since Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson and Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple had begun negotiating with the selectmen about the removal of the troops from Boston, Captain Preston, Corporal Wemms, and the seven privates who had turned themselves in after the shooting had been confined in the jail. As the Twenty-Ninth Regiment began to pack up for Castle Island, it was not clear who would remember these inmates. Would their Boston friends be willing to help them?
James Hartigan’s new wife was still in Boston and might have brought him food, as Isabella Montgomery might have done for her imprisoned husband, Edward. William McAuly’s wife, Mary, had come from Ireland with him, crossing the Atlantic on the same voyage of the Thunderer that brought Jane Chambers to America, but then Mary disappeared from the historical record. Perhaps she was no longer alive. If their families and friends did not help, the soldiers could find themselves both cold and hungry for a very long time.
Within the jail, debtors and criminals were not separated. In April 1770, when the soldiers took up residence in the prison, twenty-one of its twenty-three inhabitants there on criminal charges had been charged with theft; the other two had been arraigned for “profane swearing.” The colorful term covers more than one might think, since one of the two had in fact committed perjury, while the other was in jail for foul language. The justice of the peace charged the second man a set fee for every time he had used such language: “four Shillings for the first of the said oaths, and one shilling for each of the other and four shillings for the first of the said curses and 1 [shilling] for each of the other.” When he refused to pay the fine, however, the justice changed the man’s punishment to ten days in jail.
The thieves too were a mixed crowd. Four were women, some of whom had had earlier run-ins with the law. Two more were soldiers, one from the Fourteenth Regiment and another named Patrick Freeman from the Twenty-Ninth. Freeman had been in jail since the end of December. Yet another was a private in the Fourteenth Regiment. And in April 1770, the keeper of the jail added a third designation, for prisoners involved in the shooting: “suspicion of murder.”
Debtors were allowed out of the jail during the day; they were required only to sleep there at night. However, those designated as criminals were, in the language of the penal system, “close confined.” That spring, when the jail was more crowded than ever, the term must have felt quite literal. Rather than the usual two dozen prisoners, it held at least forty.
To men accustomed to barracks, the lack of space might not have seemed too onerous. Indeed, to a bold soldier like the playwright William Clark, close quarters offered opportunities. He was still unable to pay the fine of forty shillings with which the court slapped him after he had pushed his pistol into his father-in-law’s chest. In town, he might not have had much chance to get close to an officer to plead for aid; in the Boston jail, however, he must have found it easy to corner Captain Preston. By the end of July, he managed to talk Preston into sending a petition to Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson on his behalf. On his salary, it was no surprise that Clark found himself, as Preston wrote in the petition, “entirely unable to pay” his fine and court costs. At this rate, Preston noted wryly, Clark had become both “a burthen to the province and a loss to His Majesty’s Service.” It would be better all around to release Clark and send him back to his regiment. The governor agreed, remitting Clark’s fine and sending him on his way.
The Boston jail was where people were held before their trial; incarceration was very rarely used as a punishment. Only a few people, like William Clark, might remain in jail even after trial. Until they could pay their fine, and sometimes their court or incarceration costs, they had to wait in the jail or the workhouse. But most of the prison’s inhabitants were anxiously awaiting their day in court.
Jail could be a terrifying experience for poor families. The Bostonian George White, who was imprisoned with the soldiers in April 1770, could do nothing about the impact of his incarceration on his family. The Supreme Court convicted him that month of breaking into and entering the home of John Moffatt. After he had been in jail for over a year, his children could no longer manage without his support. The selectmen ordered them to the almshouse in August 1771. White had completed his punishment by the next spring, but he was still in jail. Presumably, he had yet to pay his bill.
Other family members suffered even more directly from a family member’s imprisonment. The Bostonian Richard Smith had been accused of multiple counts of theft—one of them in conjunction with George White—and was remanded to the town jail. While he was in court, making his case before the justices at the end of March 1770, his pregnant wife came to the jail. As she waited for him to return from court, Mrs. Smith agreed to run an errand for a prisoner who was “close confined.” Richard Smith claimed that when his wife got back to the jail, the keeper (whom the imprisoned Smith, tellingly, referred to as the “owner” of the jail) knocked her down “all in the mud and dirt and afterwards used her in a Barborous Manner inhuman like.” The pregnant woman feared that the jailer’s beating would kill both her and her unborn child.
No fewer than sixteen prisoners observed the assault on Mrs. Smith. Three weeks after they were jailed, four of the soldiers—Wemms, Warren, Hartigan, and White—signed a petition in support of their fellow prisoner Smith. Besides these four, several other soldiers who were in jail for theft testified to seeing the assault too, as did Ebenezer Richardson, still awaiting trial for the murder of Christopher Seider. The prisoners must have been horrified by the abuse, asserting that if the judges wanted to question them concerning it, they would be “willing and more” to help. Despite the accounts of violent hostilities between soldiers and civilians that officers and selectmen were collecting in the weeks immediately following the shooting, the soldiers in Boston’s jail continued to treat Bostonians once again like neighbors, rather than strangers.
Still, after the evidence of the jailer’s maltreatment of Smith’s wife, the spirits of the imprisoned soldiers must have sunk rapidly. Nor were they alone in their concern. Ebenezer Richardson, waiting to be arraigned after shooting Christopher Seider from his window in February, looked to his future with trepidation. Barring a last-minute pardon from the king himself, chances were good that a jury would demand his life in return for Seider’s. Richardson spent some of his time reading an Anglican catechism as he prepared himself for an adult baptism, unusual for the era but well suited to his circumstance. It seemed like an appropriate time to pray.