by Paul Lussier
And what was I doing in the middle of all this? To tell you the truth, I was happy to be out from under Billingsley (for returning to Harvard and facing him was out of the question) and, thanks to Otis’s wages, out from under my dependency on my father’s cash (I’d written Father a bit prematurely, I’ll admit, and told him what to do with his blood money). I wasn’t thinking about Adams and his campaign nearly as much as my narrative implies. Mostly I was concerned with saving every penny I earned from “keeping” Otis’s “books” (which mostly amounted to playing marbles with him all day long, I’ll be the first to confess) in order to keep the tiny room I’d let—the one with the view of Hancock’s back stairs, where nightly I’d watch for Deborah. To no avail.
And while I recognize that my preoccupation with saving my own hide seems selfish, may I remind the reader that it is only in hindsight that I figured out Adams’s plan—and his motives. I also wish to point out that no one, no matter how cynical, could ever have predicted the bloodshed that the Boston Massacre would involve. Gravely and deliberately plotted, all right, but there’s no question that once on its feet, the event took on a life of its own. Even Adams, whom I’m certain above and beyond anything else wanted to give England a good scare, could never have anticipated the carnage caused by it (at most, he expected a few shots in the air, perhaps, but no casualties). And as much as I hated him, I’m convinced that had he foreseen the debacle, he was not so obsessed that he wouldn’t have called it off then and there.
So it was my first lesson in Revolutionary ways, in fate asserting itself with a purpose only destiny would eventually lay plain.
The Massacre occurred on Monday, March 5, 1770, exactly as advertised.
“Spontaneous gunfire,” Historians would later declare. Indeed!
Sam Adams knew the sentry schedule, the various work shifts of the soldiers he had targeted. And for those citizens who would show up at the appointed time without their own weapons, he had in reserve a cache of sticks and stones. Cloaked in a red cape (a little bright and obvious, I thought, but then again, Samuel liked being noticed), he flitted from group to group in the square adjacent to the riot, supplying them with stirring words about liberty and, when those ran low, expletives characterizing the soldiers sent by the godforsaken king—foreign soldiers who had no business here at home.
And unfortunately for England, the King’s Twenty-ninth was the regiment that went on alert—far and away the worst of the lot, the only soldiers who’d involved themselves in civilian skirmishes to date.
It was cold, unusually so for March, and had, in fact, been snowing. Spring snow—wet, hard, and slippery.
I was there, crouched behind a wall, acting as Otis’s eyes and ears in the event things got out of hand (which of course they would) and the record needed straightening.
First up was a soldier, whom I could only assume had been targeted for goading once he entered the street. Almost simultaneously the church bells began to peal, signaling Fire! Mobs of men and boys descended upon the area instantly, armed with fire buckets, yes, but also cutlasses, scabbards, and clubs.
But then fate or planning stepped in—I still don’t know which—in the form of a small child named Garrick, a wigmaker’s apprentice, who happened to have a terrible toothache and a nasty tongue, who began pestering Captain Goldfinch (the targeted soldier) for money allegedly owed Garrick’s master for a trim to his peruke.
“There goes the fellow who won’t pay my master for dressing his hair!” the child cried, bawling at the top of his lungs, stepping on the heels of the captain, who was having little success breaking free of the brat, his sudden turnabouts and figure eights notwithstanding. My, my, did that boy hold on, and when Goldfinch produced a receipt which, from what I could determine, seemed to prove Garrick’s accusation false, the situation became even graver.
“No, no! I want cash!” said the greedy little sod.
The fire-bucket-toting, cutlass-wielding dozens who had gathered around by now were looking to one another for guidance, privately wondering if this was real or part of the play. One thing for sure: Someone had told the boy that whatever he got he could keep.
Suddenly Garrick bit Goldfinch and, lunging like a rattler at the soldier’s waist (which was as high as he could reach), screamed, “Give me the money, you cur!”
One Private Hugh White, a sentry who had been watching the disturbance from his solitary post at the Custom House across the way, came to rescue Goldfinch. At first he just tried to swat away the little dreadful with the butt of his musket. A little tap. Nothing more. But the boy went mad, falling into a heap on the cobblestones, and, pounding his balled fists and ragged feet into the walk (a little much, I thought), he tellingly hollered, “Yaaaagh! Yaaaagh! I’ve been shot!” over and over again, caterwauling until Goldfinch (and the rest of us) could listen no more.
My Lord—the sound coming out of that boy. It was as if he were one hundred times his size. So disproportionate that, thinking back on it now, I’m convinced my fleeting premonition in the moment had it right: That boy’s squeal, as much as it might have been premeditated, wasn’t springing from the boy, from the situation, or from Adams’s design. It was emanating from God: This was heaven’s cry.
Not a smidgen of honesty to the child’s claim, yet his cry was every bit as real and hard as bone. And as much as the crowd was prepared to assault Goldfinch, I’m absolutely certain their approach wasn’t due to any preconceived animus toward the British officer. Rather, it was a primitive, instinctual, automatic response to the boy’s cry, a raw, bloodcurdling, mature-beyond-its-years manifestation of their pent-up rage—and mine—at injustice, at unfairness, at struggle, at never having been treated compassionately or understood. Decades of disappointment with the American fantasy of freedom and prosperity gone wrong.
Goldfinch continued down the street.
White tussled with the urchin. Despite my orders to stay clear, I joined the fray, rushing the assisting officer with a group of two dozen or so who instantaneously decided to join us.
In the distance, as if right on cue, I heard, “Town born, turn out!” being chanted in unison, riding our way on the drizzle and the fog, along with fowling pieces, knives, sticks, and stones.
A runt, quite without intending it, had called the country to arms.
And to complicate matters more (or simplify them, depending on your view), across town, at the same hour, at Murray’s Barracks where the soldiers were housed, another boy—equally obstreperous—tossed snowballs and rocks at that garrison’s sentinels (“Get back, lobster-backs! Get thee back home! You are not welcome here!”). He too, chafed by a soldier’s musket but claiming he’d been killed—even as he raced through the streets fully ambulatory, remarkably spry for a corpse—was stirring a good stew. Hundreds heard him and rallied to help, spilling onto King Street to avenge a death that wasn’t. But nobody knew—or cared.
No matter what Sam Adams had contrived, this wasn’t about the Brits, not anymore. This was the egret’s call, the tortoise’s hiss, Deborah’s irrepressible smile. This was deep human need, yearning.
Across town, White was cornered by now, bayonet fixed and musket held low: “Molest me and I will fire!” he warned the ranks.
The Yanks, with their rusted swords, blunt clubs, and chipped cutlasses, dared, begged White to do just that. “Why do you not fire? Damn you, you dare not fire! Fire and be damned!” they chanted in unison, in counterpoint to Garrick’s “YAAAAAGH! [sniffle, sniffle] YAAAAGH!”
Then came the grenadiers (sent by kindly Captain Preston, secretly viewing the brewing riot from the Main Guard) to rescue White. These men were the hardest, fiercest, tallest (even taller with those bearskin hats), meanest shock troops of the British army. Together, all six—Carrol, Kilroy, Warren, Montgomery, Hartigan, McCauley—formed an imposing and forbidding wall.
But the people, by this point seething with fury, were not to be daunted. They set upon the grenadiers and, rattling their rusted, rustic we
apons, egged them on still more: “Damn you sons of bitches, fire! You can’t kill us all!”
Seconds later the king’s muskets were loaded with powder . . . and before anyone knew it, Montgomery had sent two bullets straight through Crispus Attucks’s heart. And the sound of the black man’s head hitting the pavement with an unforgettable thwack! was mistaken for another shot, detonating the powder keg, unleashing a disaster . . .
. . . In which Private Kilroy would shoot ropemaker Samuel Gray in the head and his mate Caldwell too—both falling dead on the spot, Kilroy further stabbing Gray’s lifeless body with his bayonet . . . just because . . .
. . . In which young Sam Maverick would die holding the hand of his master’s twelve-year-old son, both boys present for the fun of it, after their supper of stew . . .
. . . In which Irish teague Patrick Carr’s hip would be shot off, separated instantaneously from the spine, chips of bone scattering through the air like so many snowflakes . . .
. . . In which people would fall to their knees in grief and in wonder as to who in the name of hell had commanded “Fire!” and how exactly this situation had gotten so gravely and irreversibly out of hand. . . .
Every one of us present at the scene was paralyzed with confusion, mute with shock, so much so that long after the shots had been fired, we chose to believe that the dead bodies lying about were only heaps of greatcoats discarded by good men and women fleeing for their lives, and we left them behind.
No one dared believe that what had happened actually had, that fellow countrymen soldiers (we were still a colony of England, after all) had murdered citizens in cold blood.
“What about the lives?” I cried, in a voice as full as Garrick’s wail, directed to everyone and no one in particular all at the same time.
“What about the lives?” I asked for days thereafter as the scrambling to lay blame, to find opportunity in this carnage, conspired to erase the pain.
Back at the office of the Gazette, the propaganda machine lurched to life, feeding upon the recent dead, cranking out broadsides entreating Bostonians to attend a town meeting to “come up with our response to the sad and tragic affair.” Anticipating that the soldiers would be called to account for the night’s “murderous doings,” the press panted for eyewitnesses, producing wildly differing, dramatic accounts of the scene.
Boston was in utter turmoil.
I hid out with Otis, who had locked himself up in his house and was shooting his musket off at will from the upper story. As one of my last duties as his secretary, he ordered me, his mind unusually lucid and keen, to burn all his papers. Piece by piece, every record of every speech, every copy of every letter, and every article he had ever written on behalf of “the Revolution” was consigned to the flames.
Two days it took to complete this destruction, which Otis, his eyes wide open, sat and watched, crying, “I meant well but am now convinced that I was mistaken. Cursed be the day I was born.”
One day later they carried Otis away from me forever, per order of the court, hands, feet, and legs trussed and bound. The man who had made Hutchinson et al. tremble with his orations and rapier logic, sent south, to “rest indefinitely” at his kin’s quiet farm.
The night Otis was taken away, the particular brand of silence which once before led me to meeting Deborah and then Ezekiel swinging in the breeze returned. Only this time there were no bells, no clackety-clack of bones. Just death, flat and morbid, hanging in the air.
“Promise me you’ll keep to the point of Revolution,” were Otis’s penultimate words to me.
“Pray, sir, tell me, what exactly do you mean?” I asked, desperate for clarification.
And he replied, “Son, you must never stop asking: ‘What about the lives?’”
“The law is all and these men deserve a fair defense,” was what John Adams had to say.
He was talking about the British soldiers, by the way.
Now, as if things weren’t confusing enough, Adams was defending the soldiers who, just one month ago, his cousin had been scheming to oust from town. History has tried everything to justify this, to find reason and heroism in Adams’s decision to take the Redcoats’ defense, variously hailing him for his reasonableness (the argument being that the honorable Founding Father viewed all men, under the law, as deserving of a fair defense, no matter how heinous) and his innate goodness. Here, believe it or not, Adams’s deep commitment to The Cause is cited as the excuse for his undertaking the soldiers’ defense, the argument being that Adams, Patriot to the core, understood that the inevitable furor and cries of “Injustice!” surrounding any exoneration of them served the long-term goal of rebellion better than the soldiers’ conviction. The latter might leave the people more or less satisfied, content with the status quo, the current English justice system actually reinforced by acting punitively in favor of the slaughtered victims. That would not do, and Adams’s ingenious chicanery would see to it—what greater proof to the people could there be of the unfairness of British law than to watch an American attorney valiantly wield it to the letter, then have justice miscarry out of prejudice and concern for British interests over that of its subjects?
And what of the painfully evident risk to Adams’s professional reputation in all this? Not a problem. The story goes that paramount in Adams’s mind was his concern for his country. For liberty’s sake he’d nobly take—and did—his lumps.
This is bunk. Adams took the post because it paid decently, like any lawyer would. And if he had any secret agenda, it was to teach the people, whom he believed had acted “mobbishly, scandalously and in vain,” a lesson. To him, his cousin’s plan notwithstanding, the Boston Massacre was indeed mostly a spontaneous outpouring instigated by a raffish mob. There was but one aggressor, according to John Adams: It was not any one of the soldiers, but the rascally “People,” “the very Character of Boston’s inhabitants,” which precipitated the bloodshed.
But weren’t the soldiers supposed to be taunted into firing?
Apparently.
Wasn’t that the point?
Apparently.
Did they really expect people wouldn’t get hurt?
Apparently.
What queered everything, you see, was the shocking two-fold discovery that: (1) the Redcoats’ muskets really were loaded after all, and with shot (there had been some doubt about that); and (2) the people themselves were powder kegs of fiery, uncontrollable rage, a rage which had much less to do with quartered and billeted soldiers than anyone could fully admit or understand.
Of course, not grasping this last plain fact didn’t stop either of the Adams cousins from attempting to manipulate it to his own advantage. While John was busy preparing his defense of Preston and his men, Samuel’s acid pen scribbled a red streak denouncing those same soldiers his cousin was intending to vindicate. Which causes another dilemma for the History books, in that, for the duration of the trial, John and Samuel were as friendly as ever despite their apparently being on altogether opposing sides. Oh, there are theories, all of them struggling to adduce this seeming contradiction to some, as yet unknown, inscrutable overall grand plan of theirs.
Poppycock. John and Samuel continued to meet because there was no animosity between them. These weren’t personal passions, these positions—they were issues, planks, differing opinions, which gentlemen who wished to be regarded as gentlemen prided themselves on taking in stride. This wasn’t life. This was politics. Simply men jockeying for power and influence—understandable, perfectly respectable, and good. May the best man win!
So Samuel Adams would write that the soldiers were executioners, that “they were murderers of innocents, and this was plain fact. Curses from a crowd never gave soldiers license to kill,” even going so far as to say that “soldiers [had been] seen greedily licking Human Blood in King Street” right after the Massacre.
And John Adams would say: “We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. .
. . Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack-tars. And why should we scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers dry up, because there was a mob in Boston on the fifth of March that attacked a party of soldiers.”
And the people would cry: “What about the lives?”
Shots had been fired, after all.
So while John Adams was, with great aplomb and equanimity, holding forth, and court stenographers, boredly bent over their quills, dutifully recorded his every word, people were lining up from miles around to view Crispus Attucks’s embalmed carcass at Stone’s Tavern, and men, women, and children were hurling themselves upon Samuel Gray’s rigor-mortis-stiff corpse on display at the apothecary.
Every shop in Boston was closed, church bells tolled across the countryside, and a column, six men abreast, twelve thousand strong, proceeded from the Liberty Tree to the Old Granary Burying Ground, where the bodies of the five dead were lowered ceremoniously into a common grave.
The night of the mass burial I stopped by the Green Dragon, where the esteemed men were meeting. Actually I didn’t stop so much as storm the place, crashing through the door (readily visible these days, by the way). I demanded to be heard.
It was like going back in time: the long, pine table, the roaring hearth, the dark, smoky den, and the image of the dragon breathing fire. Only now, five years later, I was disgusted, not afraid, and instead of apologizing for my presence I took the floor . . . before realizing I hadn’t a clue what it was I had to say.
These days the gentlemen barely tolerated my presence. The only reason I wasn’t thrown out on my arse or directly into the fire was due exclusively to the fact that no one wished to appear disrespectful of Otis’s memory (as if he were already dead).