March 5, 2020 Ceremony at the Boston Massacre Grave Site
March 5, 2020, Boston marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a transformative event in history that launched the road to revolution in the American colonies.
The
Massacre took place on a wintry Monday night on March 5, 1770, when British troops
fired into a crowd of angry Bostonians, killing five men.
The Boston
Gazette summed up the mood of the colonies when it wrote on March 12, “The
town of Boston affords a recent and melancholy demonstration of the destructive
consequences of quartering troops among citizens in a time of peace, under
pretense of supporting the law, and aiding civil authority.”
The
Soldiers
The
Twenty-ninth Regiment on guard that night was actually a battalion of Irishmen
who had been conscripted by the British to fight in the colonies. The regiment was described this way: “the
average man was over 30, medium tall, and Irish.”
Describing
the atmosphere that led to the skirmish, the Boston Gazette wrote,
“On the evening of Monday, March 5, several soldiers of the 29th
regiment were seen parading the streets with their drawn cutlasses and
bayonets, abusing and wounding numbers of the inhabitants.”
The
29th was led by Captain Thomas Preston, and included men named
Hartigan, McCauley, Kilroy, Warren, Carroll and Montgomery. It was
Preston who ordered his men to present arms to keep the crowd at bay, but the
taunting continued until someone panicked and shot into the crowd. Years later, it was revealed that the person
who yelled out the fatal call to fire was Hugh Montgomery.
The
Victims
One
of the five Bostonians shot and killed was Irishman Patrick Carr. Described by the Boston Gazette as a
leather-breeches-maker, Carr worked as an apprentice for Irishman John Field on
Queen Street, just a few blocks from the confrontation. He and
fellow Irishman Charles Connor heard the shouts and moved toward the scene,
according to Connor’s testimony.
The
shots rang out just as the two men arrived on the scene, and Carr became the
last man to be shot. He lingered for
several days before dying of his wounds.
Dr. John Jeffries, a surgeon who took care of Carr in his final days,
later testified that “Carr was a native of Ireland, that he had frequently seen mobs,
and soldiers called upon to quell them. Whenever he mentioned that, he always
called himself a fool, that he might have known better, that he had seen
soldiers often fire on the people in Ireland but had never seen them bear
half so much before they fired in his life.”
Carr’s testimony was used by the defense team to help exonerate the
soldiers.
The Trial
John
Adams, who later became the second U.S. president, was pursuaded to defend the
soldiers by James Forrest, an Irishman who was a local British loyalist.
"I
was sitting in my office, near the steps of the Town house stairs. Mr. Forrest
came in who was then called the Irish infant. I had some acquaintance
with him. With tears streaming from his eyes he said, 'I am come with a
very solemn message from a very unfortunate man, Captain Preston, in prison. He
wishes for council and can get none.’"
After
a discussion, Forrest offered Adams 'a single guineas as a retaining fee’ which
Adams accepted.
As the trial of Preston and his men loomed, an anti-Catholic dimension emerged. The Boston Gazette revealed that many of the soldiers were Irish Catholics, while the Providence Gazette suggested that Pope's Day, a virulent anti-Catholic event, should take place on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre so as to include Preston and the others in the effigy burning.
During the nine month trial, Adams himself described the Boston mob as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teaques and outlandish jack tars."
In total, nine British soldiers were
charged during the Boston Massacre trial. Captain Preston and six of his men
were acquitted, while two others - Kilroy and Montgomery - were found guilty of
manslaughter. But they invoked a
medieval English plea for mercy by reciting Psalm 51, and had their execution
commuted. Instead, they were branded
with an M for murder on their thumbs and released back to their regiment.
The
Engraving
After
the event took place, the famous engraving of the Boston Massacre by
Paul Revere was quickly printed and distributed widely in the colonies, helping
to fan the flames of rebellion. Revere, famous for the midnight ride to
Lexington and Concord in 1775, was a gifted engraver, but he didn’t do the
actual drawing. Instead, he used the work
of a 21 year old fledgling artist named Henry Pelham, who was the half-brother
of artist John Singleton Copley. Their mother, Mary Singleton
Copley, had emigrated to Boston from County Clare in Ireland in 1736.
Pelham was furious when he learned that his friend Revere had used his
illustration without Pelham's permission.
Pelham
eventually moved back to Clare, where his mother was born, and worked as a
surveyor and land agent. In 1806, he
accidently drowned in the Kenmare River when his boat overturned.
The
Monument
In the 1880s an effort to build a Boston Massacre Memorial to honor the victims was led by Irish immigrants John Boyle O'Reilly, Mayor Hugh O'Brien, Patrick Collins and other Bostonians. They got some resistance from certain Bostonians who considered the five victims rabble-rousers.
The memorial was built and unveiled in
November 1888. O'Reilly was called upon to write and recite a poem
for the occasion. He entitled it Crispus
Attucks, a reference to the Black man who was the first man shot during the
Boston Massacre.
Commemorative Events
Revolution 250, a local organization preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding in 2026, is promoting a number of events to commemorate the Boston Massacre this year, according to Suffolk University history professor and author Robert J. Allison.
“The Boston Massacre is the first event on the
path to Revolution. Over the next six years, Revolution 250 is planning
more commemorations of the Revolution, to inspire the next generation of
scholars and citizens. It is, as Benjamin Franklin reminded us, a
republic, if we can keep it,” Allison says.
For more about
Boston's Irish history, visit IrishHeritageTrail.com.
Excerpts from Irish Boston: A Lively Look at Boston's Colorful Irish Past by Michael Quinlin. Published by Globe Pequot Press/ Rowman & Littlefield.
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