New Myths of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite differently. It’s been mythologized in many ways, and myths and misconceptions continue to crop up. Here are some that I’ve seen repeated recently.

Did Crispus Attucks work at Gray’s ropewalk?

Boston’s official report on the shooting, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre…, gave a lot of attention to a brawl between soldiers and workers at John Gray’s rope-manufacturing facility on 2 March. That fight involved two soldiers, Mathew Kilroy and William Warren, and one ropemaker, Samuel Gray, who faced off on King Street three days later. Another soldier, John Carroll, was part of a follow-up brawl on 3 March. Thus, the town suggested, those soldiers had not shot in self-defense but out of anger at townspeople, and perhaps at Samuel Gray in particular.

In all that attention to the ropewalk fight, however, no witness identified Crispus Attucks as being involved. Testimony does put a big man of African descent in the brawl: Drummer Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment. But justice of the peace John Hill recalled shouting at Walker, “you black rascal, what have you to do with white people’s quarrels?” That suggests that no man of color like Attucks had been prominent in the fights before. Newspapers described Gray as a ropemaker but Attucks simply as a sailor.

In 2008 I noted a Boston Globe essay that said, “According to lore, Attucks reappeared [in Boston] just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker.” But there’s no evidence for that guess and some to suggest it was mistaken. I suspect people trying to find a tight link between the ropewalk fight and the shooting on King Street assumed Attucks was involved in both, but historical events aren’t always so neat.

Did Attucks work on a whaling ship?

In Traits of the Tea-Party, published in 1835, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher cited an old barber named William Pierce as his source that Attucks “was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor…” But Pierce also told Thatcher that he’d never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he didn’t have inside information.

Boston’s 1770 newspapers directly contradict Pierce. They said Attucks was from Framingham, not Nantucket. They reported Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence [in the Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—meaning he worked on trading voyages to the south rather than hunting whales.

I suspect that Pierce’s memory of Attucks from sixty-five years before had gotten mixed with his memory of the Prince Boston legal case, which did involve a man of African and Native descent, whalers from Nantucket, and a captain named Folger.

TOMORROW: The myth of the tombs.

George Washington and the “Murder Act”

The Wikipedia entry on the Administration of Justice in Massachusetts Act and several recent books state that George Washington called it “the Murder Act.”

That understanding appears to go back to David Ammerman’s study In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774, published by the University Press of Virginia in 1974. It says:

George Washington referred to the statute as the “Murder Act” because he thought it would give British officials free reign [sic] to harass Americans without fear of being brought to justice. The Virginia leader argued that transporting offenders into other colonies or Great Britain made it “impossible from the nature of the thing that justice can be observed.”

The last phrase Ammerman quoted comes from Washington’s letter to Bryan Fairfax dated 4 July 1774, which is transcribed here. It lays out American Whigs’ feeling of frustration:

As to your political sentiments, I would heartily join you in them, so far as relates to a humble and dutiful petition to the throne, provided there was the most distant hope of success. But have we not tried this already? Have we not addressed the Lords, and remonstrated to the Commons? And to what end? Did they deign to look at our petitions?

Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? Does not the uniform conduct of Parliament for some years past confirm this? Do not all the debates, especially those just brought to us, in the House of Commons on the side of government, expressly declare that America must be taxed in aid of the British funds, and that she has no longer resources within herself? Is there any thing to be expected from petitioning after this?

Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston, before restitution of the loss to the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at? Do not the subsequent bills (now I dare say acts), for depriving the Massachusetts Bay of its charter, and for transporting offenders into other colonies or to Great Britain for trial, where it is impossible from the nature of the thing that justice can be obtained, convince us that the administration is determined to stick at nothing to carry its point? Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?

But that letter doesn’t include the phrase “Murder Act.” Nor does any other document from Washington’s pen. It looks like Ammerman got his notes mixed up and put the phrase into the Virginia planter’s mouth, and then other authors repeated that attribution without checking.

It’s notable that Washington saw so much at stake in the Administration of Justice Act, well before the First Continental Congress. The law had no effect in Virginia, after all. But Washington was always one of the most prominent advocates of American unity.

“The Murder Act as it is commonly called”

Yesterday I quoted the meat of Parliament’s Administration of Justice in Massachusetts Act, passed in the spring of 1774. The law provided for royal officials indicted for murder in the course of enforcing the law to be tried outside the province. How did local Patriots respond?

They started calling that law “the Murder Act.” Because, they said, it encouraged those officials to murder protesters with impunity. Which was quite an overstatement, but the two sides had been tussling over the quality of or interference in Massachusetts justice for several years.

I went looking for the earliest use of that phrase, and was surprised to find it first as the 26 July 1774 Essex Gazette quoted and paraphrased an essay from the 27 June South-Carolina Gazette (which I couldn’t locate). That article advocated a boycott of all goods from other parts of the British Empire until Parliament repealed its new Coercive Acts, including “the MURDER-ACT.”

On 26 Sept 1774, John Adams adopted the same language when he wrote from Philadelphia to his Braintree neighbor Joseph Palmer:

Before this reaches you, the Sense of the [Continental] Congress concerning your Wisdom, Fortitude and Temperance, in the Massachusetts in general and the County of Suffolk in particular, will be public, in our Country. It is the universal Sense here that the Mass. Acts, and Murder Act ought not to be Submitted to a Moment.

Adams’s cousin Samuel picked up the phrase in a 29 Jan 1775 letter to Arthur Lee, a Virginian in London who lobbied Parliament for the Massachusetts House:

The Act for regulating the Government of this Province and the Murder Act as it is commonly called soon followd the Port Act; and General [Thomas] Gage, whether from his own Motives or the Instructions of the Minister, thought proper to assemble all the Kings Troops then on the Continent, in this Town and has declared to the Selectmen & others his Resolution to put the Acts in Execution.

Then Joseph Hawley, Northampton’s leading lawyer, used the phrase in a 22 February letter to Thomas Cushing:

Since I left Cambridge, I have had many thoughts on the state of this Province and continent; and suffer me to say, Sir, that the time is in fact arrived, when we are to drop all chimerical plans, and in our contemplations thoroughly to think down, and pervade every step that is proposed for practice; to judge of its practicability, and, as far as possible, to view all its consequences. With this conviction, I have been most seriously contemplating the commission and most important trust of our Committee of Safety, and especially that branch of it which relates to their mustering the minute men and others of the militia, when they shall judge that the late Acts of Parliament, viz. the regulation act and the murder act, are attempted to be carried into execution by force.

However, I haven’t found other examples of the phrase “Murder Act” in American newspapers or founders’ correspondence from 1774-75. I don’t claim to have caught every example, but I think the lack of widespread use of the phrase is telling. However much Whig activists tried to play up this new law, the “Murder Act” seems to have been a relatively mild concern.

(I also started this investigation with the thought that Adams and Hawley both knew the phrase “Murder Act” already from studying Britain’s Murder Act of 1751 or 1752. However, that short title didn’t become official until 1896 and appears in earlier sources rarely if at all. That law’s official title was “An Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder.”)

TOMORROW: George Washington and the “Murder Act.”

What Lay Behind the Administration of Justice Act

Among Parliament’s Coercive Acts of spring 1774 was the “act for the impartial administration of justice in the cases of persons questioned for any acts done by them in the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and tumults, in the province of the Massachuset’s Bay.” Or, in short, the Administration of Justice Act.

That law read:

WHEREAS in his Majesty’s province of Massachuset’s Bay, in New England, an attempt hath lately been made to throw off the authority of the parliament of Great Britain over the said province, and an actual and avowed resistance, by open force, to the execution of certain acts of parliament, hath been suffered to take place, uncontrouled and unpunished, in defiance of his Majesty’s authority, and to the subversion of all lawful government

Whereas, in the present disordered state of the said province, it is of the utmost importance to the general welfare thereof, and to the re-establishment of lawful authority throughout the same, that neither the magistrates acting in support of the laws, nor any of his Majesty’s subjects aiding and assisting them therein, or in the suppression of riots and tumults, raised in opposition to the execution of the laws and statutes of this realm, should be discouraged from the proper discharge of their duty, by an apprehension, that in case of their being questioned for any acts done therein, they may be liable to be brought to trial for the same before persons who do not acknowledge the validity of the laws, in the execution thereof, or the authority of the magistrate in the support of whom, such acts had been done…

That if any inquisition or indictment shall be found, or if any appeal shall be sued or preferred against any person, for murder, or other capital offence, in the province of the Massachuset’s Bay, and it shall appear, by information given upon oath to the governor, or, in his absence, to the lieutenant-governor of the said province, that the fact was committed by the person…either in the execution of his duty as a magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or in the support of the laws of revenue, or in acting in his duty as an officer of revenue, or in acting under the direction and order of any magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or for the carrying into effect the laws of revenue, or in aiding and assisting in any of the cases aforesaid: and if it shall also appear, to the satisfaction of the said governor, or lieutenant-governor respectively, that an indifferent trial cannot be had within the said province, in that case, it shall and may be lawful for the governor, or lieutenant-governor, to direct, with the advice and consent of the council, that the inquisition, indictment, or appeal, shall be tried in some other of his Majesty’s colonies, or in Great Britain…

Further clauses provided for witnesses to be brought to the trial venue with “a reasonable sum to be allowed for the expences of every such witness” and protection for them from lawsuits as well.

When the London government’s top lawyers (like Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn, shown above) wrote this legislation, they were thinking of how the Massachusetts legal system had treated Crown employees in recent years:

• During the 1768-1770 occupation of Boston, Whig magistrates had dismissed soldiers’ complaints about being assaulted by locals while issuing warrants against Lt. Alexander Ross, Ens. John Ness, and other army officers who had helped their men escape the local authorities. (Those court cases basically went away when the regiments moved out of town after March 1770.)
• Customs employee Ebenezer Richardson was convicted in 1770 of murdering Christopher Seider, a boy in a crowd attacking his house and family. (The Crown eventually pardoned Richardson.)
• Customs officer Edward Manwaring, his friend John Munro, and Customs house employees Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood had all been put on trial for the Boston Massacre based on flimsy evidence. (A Boston jury acquitted all those men.)

And of course there were the Boston Massacre soldiers themselves. Royal officials believed they had clearly acted in self-defense, even the two convicted of manslaughter.

In short, the London government had come to see the Massachusetts justice system as stacked against royal appointees just trying to do their jobs. The new law didn’t dismiss Massachusetts indictments or lawsuits against those officials, but it made sure they could be tried somewhere else.

Massachusetts Patriots complained this new law tacitly gave royal appointees the go-ahead to oppress people, knowing it would be too hard to convict them in a distant venue. Local Whigs were already complaining about the pardon for Richardson, and about trials before the Vice-Admiralty Court.

Unlike the other Coercive Acts, the Administration of Justice Act was never put into effect. As part of their protest against the Massachusetts Government Act, the province’s Patriots refused to sit on juries and shut county courts in the summer of 1774. That meant they also shut down indictments and lawsuits against royal officials. The new governor, Thomas Gage, never had reason to invoke this law.

TOMORROW: Where did the nickname “the Murder Act” come from?

“For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses”

Of late, one of the more discomfiting phrases in the U.S. Declaration of Independence has been this item from the list of what George III had done so tyrannically as to make it necessary for the thirteen colonies participating in the Continental Congress to break off from Britain:

For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;...

Today the U.S. of A. has made itself notorious for transporting people across the ocean, to the Spanish-American war trophy of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and for creating a system of what look like criminal trials as long as you don’t look too closely for fairness.

Official defenders of that system are now pointing to the end of the trial of Salim Hamdan, with a military jury deciding on a sentence of five and a half years, as proof that it can produce justice. Of course, most of those defenders thought only a much longer sentence would be justice. But if it’s just for Hamdan to be imprisoned for five and a half years for his crimes, then by logic it’s unjust that the U.S. of A. has held him in prisons for over six years so far, and makes no commitment about ever releasing him.

The recent prominence of the “transporting us beyond seas” phrase in the Declaration made me wonder what exactly it referred to. All the complaints in that part of the document were supposed to reflect colonists’ grievances with the government in London, embodied in the king.

Historians usually trace this particular complaint to the Administration of Justice Act, which Parliament passed in May 1774. Here’s the complete text from Yale Law School. Like a lot of other laws, it doesn’t make for comfortable reading, but this is the most important part:

That if any inquisition or indictment shall be found, or if any appeal shall be sued or preferred against any person, for murder, or other capital offence, in the province of the Massachuset’s Bay, and it shall appear, by information given upon oath to the governor, or, in his absence, to the lieutenant-governor of the said province, that the fact was committed by the person...either in the execution of his duty as a magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or in the support of the laws of revenue, or in acting in his duty as an officer of revenue, or in acting under the direction and order of any magistrate, for the suppression of riots, or for the carrying into effect the laws of revenue, or in aiding and assisting in any of the cases aforesaid:

and if it shall also appear, to the satisfaction of the said governor, or lieutenant-governor respectively, that an indifferent trial cannot be had within the said province,

in that case, it shall and may be lawful for the governor, or lieutenant-governor, to direct, with the advice and consent of the council, that the inquisition, indictment, or appeal, shall be tried in some other of his Majesty's colonies, or in Great Britain...

Americans of the time and many historians since have emphasized the phrase “or any other capital offense,” and in the eighteenth century British Empire there were a lot of capital offenses. That interpretation implies that the London government had decreed that it could bring almost anybody to Britain for trial, far away from their families, lawyers, and communities.

But that interpretation doesn’t seem to recognize the law’s most important qualifying phrases. It applied only to people acting as royal officials suppressing riots or collecting Customs duties, or folks helping those officials. It also applied only to Massachusetts. In other words, the Administration of Justice Act was aimed at rescuing officials who had used force to enforce Parliament’s laws from being prosecuted in local courts before hostile local juries.

When Parliament enacted this law, its leaders were probably thinking of Capt. Thomas Preston and the soldiers tried for the Boston Massacre, and Customs employee Ebenezer Richardson tried for killing young Christopher Seider during a small mob attack on his house. Crown officials had worried that those men would hang for what, in their eyes, was clearly self-defense. (In the end, Preston and the soldiers were acquitted or given “benefit of clergy,” branded, and released. Richardson was convicted of murder but pardoned by London and released.)

I’m not sure the Administration of Justice Act as written would have applied to those men. There doesn’t seem to have been a magistrate to assist at the Massacre, and Richardson wasn’t on the job when he got into his fight with the boys. Bostonians had threatened to use the law against other army officers and officials—for example, a grand jury tried to indict an army captain named John Willson for encouraging slaves to revolt. But those efforts fizzled out after people had made their point. I suspect that the threat of officials being put on trial for enforcing Parliament’s laws was still hypothetical, but this new Act still gave those men more security.

So was the Continental Congress justified in complaining about the royal government “transporting us beyond seas...”? Maybe the delegates had another situation in mind, and historians have erred in interpreting the Administration of Justice Act, just as many erred in interpreting the Quartering Act. Clearly political leaders in Massachusetts were worried in early 1775 about being arrested and sent to London for trial as traitors; that’s why Samuel Adams, John Hancock, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper, and others were outside Boston on 18 Apr 1775. But I’m not sure the Crown had ever done that by June 1776, however, and thus I’m not sure whether this Declarative phrase refers to an actual event or even an actual law.

Nonetheless, not transporting people out of their country to be tried in a pretend justice system seems like a good principle for the U.S. of A. to abide by.