Historical Background

Timeline

1767 Parliament passes Townshend Acts; customs commissioners arrive in Boston; Boston merchants call for boycott of taxed goods.
1768 Governor Bernard orders Assembly to rescind letter calling for protests against Townshend Acts and suspends Assembly when it refuses; British regiments arrive in Boston.
February 19, 1770 Boston Gazette features news from New York of soldiers destroying Liberty Pole and the rioting that ensued.
March 2, 1770 Soldiers and rope workers brawl in Boston.
March 5, 1770 Soldiers fire on crowd in King Street (“Boston Massacre”).
March 6, 1770 Boston Town Meeting demands withdrawal of troops; Captain Thomas Preston, Corporal Wemms, and seven soldiers are arrested.
March 10–11, 1770 Regiments leave Boston for Castle Island in Boston Harbor.
April 1770 Townshend Acts are repealed.
October 24–30, 1770 Preston’s trial results in an acquittal.
November 17–December 5, 1770 Trial of Wemms, seven soldiers; all acquitted except Privates Montgomery and Killroy, who are found guilty of manslaughter; sentence reduced to branding on hands.
1771 Thomas Young delivers oration on anniversary of the Boston Massacre; Paul Revere prepares illumination of the massacre.
1773 Boston Tea Party.
1774 First Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia.
1775 Declaration of Independence is issued.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the night of March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers under the command of Captain Thomas Preston fired on a crowd of an estimated two hundred people on King Street in Boston. Six people in the crowd were seriously wounded; three people were killed instantly, and two others died from their wounds within a few days of the incident. Immediately after the incident, Captain Preston ordered his men back to their barracks, and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson urged the crowd to go home so that the law could take its course. The next morning Hutchinson indicted Captain Preston and his eight soldiers for murder, while members of the community demanded the removal of all British troops from Boston. Although the troops were removed following the incident, the indicted soldiers were acquitted of murder, spurring the patriots to use the massacre as a rallying point against British rule in the North American colonies.

In the eight months that passed between the incident and the trial of the British soldiers, Boston patriots worked to produce their own account of the event. One of the most famous depictions is Paul Revere’s engraving based on Henry Pelham’s illustration. Revere’s image was even used in the Boston Massacre trials to illustrate where the bodies of the victims fell. After the trials, the patriots continued to shape public perception of the Boston Massacre by holding public commemorations every year on March 5 to keep the memory of the event alive and harness the increasing anti-British sentiments in the region.

British rule had been facing increased resistance from American colonists as the crown sought to increase taxation. The Townshend Acts of 1767, which were passed to raise revenue after the failure of the Stamp Act, served as a particular point of frustration for many colonists. There were two important differences between the Townshend Acts and previous attempts at taxation, like the Stamp Act or Navigation Acts. First, the taxes in the Townshend Acts applied only to products that the colonists imported from England. The second important difference was the decision to use the tax revenue to pay the salaries of colonial governors and magistrates. Prior to the Townshend Acts, colonial assemblies could influence British officials by withholding their salaries; however, the Townshend Acts stripped them of this right, angering many colonists and leading to the boycott of British goods.

Given the increasing frustration caused by these changes, sending troops to keep peace in Boston, as Benjamin Franklin observed, was like setting up a blacksmith forge in a gunpowder magazine. An explosion was inevitable. What was not at all inevitable, though, was the aftermath, as the events were shaped into a coherent narrative that led to patriotic resistance and, ultimately, independence.