In the years following the Boston Massacre, the city of Boston held an annual Massacre Day commemoration on March 5. On the fourth anniversary of the event, John Hancock delivered an emotional speech to the crowd. His tribute tied the Boston Massacre to the growing independence movement and demonstrated that the event remained a source of inspiration for years afterward. The last Massacre Day memorial was celebrated with the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783.
Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny. Is the present system, which the British administration have adopted for the gov-ernment of the colonies, a righteous government—or is it tyranny? Here suffer me to ask (and would to heaven there could be an answer), what tenderness, what regard, respect or consideration has Great Britain shown, in their late transactions, for the security of the persons or properties of the inhabitants of the colonies? Or rather what have they omitted doing to destroy that security?
They have declared that they have ever had, and of right ought ever to have, full power to make laws of sufficient validity to bind the colonies in all cases whatever. They have exercised this pretended right by imposing a tax upon us without our consent; and lest we should show some reluctance at parting with our property, her fleets and armies are sent to enforce their mad pretensions. . . .
But I forbear, and come reluctantly to the transactions of that dismal night when in such quick succession we felt the extremes of grief, astonishment, and rage; when heaven in anger, for a dreadful moment, suffered hell to take the reins; when Satan with his chosen band opened the sluices of New England’s blood, and sacrilegiously polluted our land with the dead bodies of her guiltless sons!
Let this sad tale of death never be told without a tear; let not the heaving bosom cease to burn with a manly indignation at the barbarous story through the long tracts of future time: let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children until tears of pity glisten in their eyes and boiling passions shake their tender frames; and whilst the anniversary of that ill-fated night is kept a jubilee in the grim court of pandemonium, let all America join in one common prayer to heaven that the inhuman, unprovoked murders of the 5th of March, 1770, planned by Hillsborough and a knot of treacherous knaves in Boston, and executed by the cruel hand of Preston and his sanguinary coadjutors, may ever stand on history without a parallel. . . .
We have all one common cause; let it, therefore, be our only contest who shall most contribute to the security of the liberties of America. And may the same kind Providence which has watched over this country from her infant state still enable us to defeat our enemies.
Source: Mayo Williamson Hazeltine, ed., Orations from Homer to McKinley (New York: P. F. Collier and Sons, 1903), 7:2628–29, 2631, 2637.