Two British Solders Charged with Manslaughter in the Boston Massacre Killings, December 5, 1770

Henry Pelham's original illustration, 'The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre

On December 5, 1770, nine months to the day after the Boston Massacre, two of the nine soldiers in the British regiment, Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery, were found guilty of manslaughter for the killing of five local Boston men; the other seven soldiers were exonerated.

The incident in March, known as the Boston Massacre, helped to trigger the start of the American Revolution.

The Twenty-ninth Regiment on guard that night and representing the British Crown, was actually a battalion of Irishmen who had been conscripted by the English to fight in the colonies. The 29th regiment was described this way: “the average man was over 30, medium tall, and Irish.”

The 29th was led by Captain Thomas Preston, and the soldiers accused at the trial had names such as Hartigan, McCauley, Kilroy, White, 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.

At the sentencing on December 14 following the manslaughter conviction, the court allowed both men to invoke a medieval English plea for mercy called “the benefit of clergy,” originally offered to clergy and later extended to felons facing a first conviction. The plea involved the convicted showing their God-fearing ways by reciting Psalm 51; both Kilroy and Montgomery did so and thus had their execution commuted. They were branded with an M for murder on their thumbs and were released back into their regiment.

Years later, when Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s diaries became public, it turned out that Hugh Montgomery had admitted to his lawyers that it was he who yelled out the fatal call to "fire" that helped start the American Revolution.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has a number of important documents pertaining to the Boston Massacre, including events leading up to and following March 5, 1770. And read the Boston National Historic Park Service description of the trial.

Excerpts of this narrative were taken from Irish Boston, 2nd edition, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

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