Semiquincentennial + 1

Today marks the 251st anniversary of the so-called “Boston Massacre.” (Actually, to a diehard New York Yankees fan, this was the first Boston Massacre and is not to be confused with the second such event that occurred at the hands of the Boston Red Sox during games four through seven of the 2004 American League Championship Series—but I digress.)

“Massacre” is the label that was applied by Patriot propagandists to the action committed by occupying British soldiers when they fired on an unruly crowd of about two hundred demonstrators on the night of March 5, 1770, killing five civilians and wounding six others—and that label obviously stuck. The youngest to die was a seventeen-year-old apprentice to a joiner, Samuel Maverick, and the oldest a forty-seven-year-old sailor, Crispus Attucks, who was part Indian and part African American.

The mob that gathered in a snow-filled King Street before the Boston Customs House verbally abused a detachment of nine redcoats, including one officer, and some tossed snowballs and pieces of ice at the Crown’s men. The latter were part of a garrison that had been deployed to Boston in the fall of 1768 with the intent of discouraging popular opposition to British colonial policy in what London authorities deemed to be the epicenter of American unrest. Whether the initial shots that night were fired deliberately or by accident is still unknown, but this proved to be a milestone event on the road to war. The imperial troops were withdrawn from the city but would return four years later. Meanwhile, the colonists’ version of the tragedy was disseminated throughout the colonies and published in Britain.

Also on this Date

March 5, 1770 was also the day on which Frederick, Lord North, delivered his first speech in Britain’s Parliament as prime minister. Ironically enough, it was notable for requesting that the House of Commons repeal all duties imposed on its American subjects under the Revenue Act of 1767 except that on tea. Despite this initial conciliatory approach to the colonies, His Lordship—who had previously endorsed Parliament’s right to tax America—bore ultimate responsibility for the policies that precipitated the American insurrection, in particular the East India Tea Act of 1773, That is, according to Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy in The Men Who Lost America, his noteworthy study of British civil and military leadership during the Revolution (Yale University Press, 2013, p. 51).

North’s advocacy of a tea tax on the colonies to support Britain’s East India Company led to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 in protest—featuring the colonists’ unceremonious dumping of company tea into the town’s harbor—and Parliament’s retaliatory Coercive Acts in 1774. Known as the Intolerable Acts on this side of the Atlantic, those decrees abrogated self-government in Massachusetts, fined the colony, closed Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the lost tea, and required colonists to house the King’s soldiers on demand and even in their private residences. Furthermore, British troops reoccupied the city.

Parliament’s punitive measures ultimately precipitated an armed rebellion, and Britain responded by embarking on an extended military misadventure that would severely deplete its blood and treasure. The eight-year-long effort to quell the insurgency cost the mother country some forty thousand casualties and over fifty million pounds. In the process, the prime minister was subjected to a blistering litany of abuse by the British press as he became the scapegoat for the Crown’s military failures. In short, things went south for North.