The Boston Massacre by Serena Zabin

Author:Serena Zabin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

This sketch shows the bodies of the four men killed on King Street.

The Bostonian James Bailey said he had spent five or six minutes standing with Private White that evening. He explained, “I went up to him because I knew him, and to see what was the matter.” Later, Bailey recalled that there were “boys . . . heaving Pieces of Ice,” “large and hard enough to hurt a man, as big as your fist,” at the sentry. When reinforcements came, Bailey was still standing with White in the sentry box. Private John Carroll may have recognized Bailey from Gray’s ropewalk. He strode up to Bailey in anger and shoved his bayonet against his chest. White was less interested in replaying the weekend’s brawl than shutting down the current crisis. He told Carroll to leave Bailey alone. White was a friend; Carroll was not, and Bailey knew them both.

All of these people had genuine social ties, though on the surface, their stories are indeed contradictory. Jane Crothers saw a hostile, violent mob that pelted soldiers with sharp, heavy objects and threatened to kill them. In her version, both the soldiers and their commanding officer resisted the temptation to shoot townspeople, even when provoked. Not until an unnamed stranger ordered them to shoot did they fire. They had no forethought or intent to harm. Standing on the same street corner, Wilkinson apparently saw an entirely different event. Calm, orderly Bostonians, out in the streets for one reason—to save their town from fire—essentially left the trigger-happy soldiers alone. There were no missiles, no shoving, not even any harassing comments about red-uniformed “Lobsterbacks.” Crothers saw the military men as paragons of virtue; Wilkinson saw Bostonians as the same. Yet when Wilkinson, Crothers, and others looked at that formation of soldiers, they did share the perception that they were looking at individuals, not automatons. They saw specific persons that night—men embedded in their communities, family men, not faceless soldiers.

After the shooting, as townspeople gathered beneath the balcony of the Town-House, demanding to hear from Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, it was not clear that the violence was over. Officers ordered men to stay in their barracks, but they had little control over soldiers living in private homes. Meanwhile, Bostonians claimed that armed soldiers were roaming the streets in large packs, looking for more defenseless civilians. At such a moment, it seems likely that neighborly bonds between civilians and soldiers, even those who had drunk together, run away together, and made families together, might rupture beyond hope of reconciliation.

But, luckily for Edward Crafts, those relationships were not so easily broken. Crafts, a Bostonian, was out urging eyewitnesses to tell Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson that they had heard Captain Preston order his troops to fire on Bostonians. Close to midnight, still on the streets, he passed a detachment of twenty soldiers, who immediately surrounded him. On the command of one of the corporals, they prepared to shoot him, and the corporal struck him with the side of his gun.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.