[On March
5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on
King Street. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that
pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to a special Guest Post from my
sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]
On two ways to
contextualize the uneasy communal dynamic that precipitated the massacre.
As I understand
it, English soldiers had been stationed in Boston for only two years as of the 1770
Incident on King Street (as the British still refer to the Massacre).
Beginning in 1768, the Crown and Royal Governor had brought such a
standing military presence to the city and colony, seeking both support for
increasingly unpopular taxes and policies and to quell the incipient rebellious
activities in which Samuel
Adams and his peers had begun to partake. Needless to say, the city’s
inhabitants did not take well to this infusion of soldiers onto their streets,
into their day to day lives, and into many
of their public buildings and spaces (and even occasionally their homes,
although as the hyperlinked article notes that took place less often than is
sometimes suggested), and tensions remained consistently high throughout the
period. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before those tensions exploded
into something more overt and violent; in any case, explode they did in early
March, 1770, with a confrontation between a handful of soldiers and a group of
aggrieved Bostonians developing into a full-scale pitched conflict that left
five Bostonians killed (three instantly when the soldiers began firing into the
rioting crowd, and two more due to wounds).
One way to
contextualize and understand both those overall tensions and that moment of
violent conflict is to consider the British soldiers as an occupying force. Of
course as of 1770 they were part of the same overall nation and community as
the Bostonians, but the same could technically be said of the American soldiers
who occupied
the Philippines in the early 20th century, and clearly many
Filipinos felt that the US troops were an army of occupation nonetheless. Seen
in that light, the events of the Boston Massacre could be described as a form
of insurgency, of native resistance against such an army of occupation. Since
much of the last century-plus of American history (or at least foreign policy) has
involved insurgent campaigns against US occupying armies, from the Philippines
to the
Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, Vietnam to Iraq, I can understand why it
might be difficult for us to conceptualize our Revolutionary activists as
themselves part of such an insurgency (or, to take it a step further and more
controversially still, to see Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty as insurgent
terrorists). But in many ways, the dynamic of occupation and insurgency seems
to capture quite effectively the relationship between these intruding British
soldiers and the Bostonians seeking to push back on their presence in their
city and community.
Yet at the same time,
there are various ways in which that dynamic doesn’t line up as well with the
complex historical realities of the situation, and perhaps the most overt has
to do with the sizable contingent of Bostonians (and Americans) who were
and would remain Loyalists to the Crown. It’s not just that we need to
remember that not all Bostonians saw the British soldiers as a hostile
presence, although certainly there was likely a spectrum of opinions that
reflect the breadth of American perspectives on the ongoing relationship with
England overall. Instead, the importance of remembering the Loyalist Bostonians
is that doing so reminds us that the move toward the Revolution was far from
inevitable, and thus that individual moments like the Boston Massacre were not
necessarily steps toward a definite endpoint as much as chaotic and uncertain
encounters between various American contingencies and communities. The lead-up
to any historical event can seem in hindsight like a foregone conclusion, just
as the Revolution’s eventual outcome can make the Loyalist cause seem doomed
from the outset. But neither of those things were the slightest bit true in
1770, a moment instead when various American and English communities met
together on the streets of a city that was still very much all of theirs.
Next massacre studying
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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