[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 a Founding
Father’s frustrating role in the Massacre’s aftermath, and why it matters.
The British
soldiers who shot and killed Crispus Attucks and his compatriots on King Street
were tried for murder (their leader, Captain Thomas Preston, individually; the eight
others collectively) but acquitted of all charges, thanks in no small part to their
lawyers, a 35 year-old Boston barrister named John Adams and his colleague
Josiah Quincy. Much later in life Adams reflected on both the challenges yet what
he saw as the paramount professional and historical importance of this legal
assignment, writing, “The
Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety,
and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly
and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of
Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers
would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the
Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was
exactly right.”
Perhaps Adams
was correct; but when I called his role in the Massacre’s aftermath
frustrating, I was referring not to his role in defending the soldiers (and certainly
not to his success in doing so, as I don’t believe any further death would have
benefitted anyone), but to how he chose to make his case. Adams did
so most especially by attacking Crispus Attucks and his peers, calling Attucks
in his closing statement “a stout
Mulatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person,” and then
arguing, “This was the behaviour of Attucks; to whose mad behaviour, in all
probability, the dreadful carnage of that night, is chiefly to be ascribed. And
it is in this manner, this town has been often treated; a Carr from Ireland,
and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon
their thoughtless enterprises, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c.
as they can collect together, and then there are not wanting, persons to
ascribe all their doings to the good people of the town.” Adams could not have
been clearer here about his separation of Attucks (and the Irish immigrant Carr),
along with the “rabble of Negroes, etc.” to whom he linked them, from “the good
people of the town,” his exclusion of these King Street protesters from the
Bostonian and American identity for which he wanted to argue.
That attitude is
deeply problematic, and not just for how we understand Crispus Attucks and the
other Boston Massacre protesters. In many ways, after all, John Adams would
come to embody
the Federalists, the group of Revolutionary leaders and Founding Fathers
who emerged as one of the first political parties and were most fully responsible
for the Constitution (it’s not a coincidence that the opposition movement to
the Constitution came to be known as
the Anti-Federalists). I know our historical understanding of the
Constitution has come a long way from theses
that it was drafted by a group of elitist white male property owners for
their own personal benefit, and I’m not here to suggest that such simplistic
narratives are adequate to the document and moment’s complexities. Yet just
because an explanation isn’t comprehensive doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the
equation—and in a period when the current dominant image of the Federalists is Hamilton’s depiction of that Federalist leader
as a working-class hero and champion of the common people, it seems to me more
important than ever that we remember the very different side of Federalists,
and of the nation’s founding, captured by Adams’ closing statement in the
Boston Massacre trials.
Next massacre
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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