What Happened to the Boston Massacre Defendants?

After being acquitted of murder at the Boston Massacre on 5 Dec 1770, Cpl. William Wemys and five private soldiers “went their Way thro’ the Streets,” the Boston Gazette reported. They probably boarded a boat to Castle William, where the 14th Regiment of Foot was stationed.

Nine days later, fellow defendants Edward Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy joined them, each with one hand bandaged after branding.

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th had already decided how he would send those men back to the 29th Regiment, which had been moved to New Jersey. The commander wrote:

A bad disposition appearing in the Soldiers who were confined I shall send them round by sea, we have but too much reason to suspect their ententions to desert they are not at all to be depended on.

“I do not chuse to trust them any other way,” he added on 17 December. It would be great to know why Dalrymple was suspicious, but we don’t.

Until recently, the story of those eight British enlisted men stopped there. But Don Hagist has been doing thorough research on British troops during the War for Independence, culminating in the new book Noble Volunteers. Don found more information on some of those soldiers in the muster rolls and Chelsea pensioner records, which he generously let me publish here. I’ve added information on others over the years. So here’s what happened to all the defendants.

By May 1771, William Wemys was promoted to sergeant. He was still a sergeant when the company was stationed at Chatham, England, on 29 July 1775. His company’s muster rolls end there, so we lose track of him.

In the grenadier company, John Carroll and William Macauley were both made corporals. William Warren, despite being the tallest of the defendants, transferred out of the grenadiers to another company in the 29th.

As I related in this posting from 2006, Pvt. James Hartigan died on 4 Nov 1771 at the 29th’s next assignment in St. Augustine, Florida.

The regiment was in England when the war began, and army commanders decided to send it back to North America. That could have exposed Pvts. Montgomery and Kilroy to being captured by the American rebels, their hands still bearing the brand of the Massacre. On 22 Feb 1776 those two men appeared before a board of examiners for military pensions administered by Chelsea Hospital. Montgomery, age forty-one, was deemed “Worn Out,” and Kilroy, only twenty-eight, was found to have “a Lame Knee.” The board discharged both men from the army with pensions.

The rest of the 29th Regiment sailed to Canada, where different fates awaited different companies. Pvt. Warren and Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry, spent the American war at separate stations in Canada. White was finally discharged from the army on 10 Nov 1789, then aged forty-nine.

John Carroll, promoted to sergeant by February 1777, and Cpl. Macauley were still with the 29th’s grenadier company, which was assigned to Gen. John Burgoyne’s invasion force. Those two men might therefore have become part of the “Convention Army” of prisoners of war marched from Saratoga to Cambridge at the end of that year. But there’s no record of anyone in Massachusetts recognizing those two soldiers from the Massacre trial.

I discussed the evidence about Capt. Thomas Preston’s retirement here. He started to receive an annual £200 royal pension in 1772, and it continued until at least 1790. In the 1780s Preston was living in Dublin.

Of the defendants in the third trial, I profiled Hammond Green in this posting. He evacuated Boston in 1776 as a Customs employee, and his wife and children followed the next year. The royal government gave Green a Customs job at his new home of Halifax, and he was still working there in 1807.

Thomas Greenwood was working for the Customs service in 1770 but wasn’t listed among the employees who evacuated in 1776. I don’t know anything more solid about him.

Edward Manwaring retained the post of chief Customs officer on the Gaspé peninsula until 1785 when he was succeeded by his neighbor Felix O’Hara.

John Munro carried on his business as a notary “at his Office South Side of the Town House.” The 12 Jan 1775 issue of the Massachusetts Spy reported that he had died the previous Tuesday at the age of thirty-nine after a “tedious illness.” He was buried out of Christ Church on 13 January.

Serena Zabin on Military Families in Boston, 3 Dec.

This is probably the Revolutionary-history event that I’ve been looking forward to most this season. On Tuesday, 3 December, the Boston Area Early American History Seminar, which meets at the Massachusetts Historical Society, will host a discussion of Serena Zabin’s paper on “Occupying Boston: An Intimate History of the Boston Massacre.”

Back early in my own research on the Massacre, I stumbled across the name of Pvt. James Hartigan in Boston’s published vital records. He married a woman named Elizabeth Henderson at Trinity Church on 2 Sept 1769. Five months later, Hartigan was one of the soldiers shooting into the mob on King Street. As the Legal Papers of John Adams had already noted, a Boston official went through the ritual of warning Elizabeth Hartigan out of town while her husband was in jail. (For more of their story, see this posting.)

Serena Zabin, who’s a professor at Carleton College, has been working along the same lines, but on a bigger scale. According to the seminar description:

As the records of some forty marriages of military men and more than a hundred baptisms of their children make clear, women constituted a fundamental component of the British army’s experience in Boston. This chapter from a larger study of the intimate occupation of Boston examines the personal, social, and political meanings of these new families.

I lucked out because the town records clearly label Hartigan as a private in the 29th Regiment. I don’t recall seeing so many other military men identified in the marriage and baptism data. I therefore guess that Prof. Zabin has been cross-referencing muster rolls and church records. And what other sources might she have found about the lives of these military families? Were soldiers marrying woman already attached to the army, newcomers to Boston, or local girls? What was it like to be one of the children traveling with the king’s army to this hostile town? The sources may not survive to answer those questions, but they comprise one of the few unexplored aspects of the Massacre.

This seminar will start at 5:15 P.M. at the M.H.S. at 1154 Boylston Street. Prof. Zabin’s paper will be available for reading beforehand. She’ll start the discussion with a few remarks, Prof. Lisa Wilson of Connecticut College will respond to the points raised in the paper, and then other participants may join in. Members of the public are welcome to attend; the society asks people to send a message if they’re coming so staffers know how many chairs and sandwiches to put out.

“We poor men that is Obliged to Obay his command”

Pvt. Mathew Kilroy was one of the soldiers of His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot put on trial after the Boston Massacre of 5 Mar 1770. Finding sources that preserve the voices or stories of individual British enlisted men in this period is very hard—all the more reason to marvel at the work behind Don Hagist’s British Soldiers, American Revolution site.

In the case of Pvt. Kilroy, one legal document speaks for him—in a way. It’s a filing from the Massacre trial, on behalf of Kilroy and two fellow defendants:

To the Honourable Judges of the Superior Court,

My it please Yr. Honours we poor Distressed Prisoners Beg that ye Would be so good as to lett us have our Trial at the same time with our Captain for we did our Captains Orders & if we dont Obay is Commands should have been Confine’d & shott for not doing of it—

We Humbly pray Yr. Honours that your would take it into yr serious consideration & grant us that favour for we only desire to Open the truth before our Captains face for it is very hard he being a Gentleman should have more chance for to save his life then we poor men that is Obliged to Obay his command—

We hope that Yr. Honours will grant this our petition, & we shall all be in duty Bound over to pray for Your honours

Dated Boston Goal
October ye. 24th. 1770

Hugh White
James Hartegan
Mathew Killroy
+
his mark

Capt. Thomas Preston was due to be tried first. It appears that White, Hartegan, and Kilroy were concerned that he would throw the blame for the shootings on them. The judges didn’t grant their petition, Preston did indeed build his defense on never having ordered the soldiers to fire, and in fact the evidence still looks mighty favorable to him.

Two of Preston’s attorneys—John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr.—then defended the soldiers in their separate trial. These days, that would be a conflict of interest, but in 1770 there weren’t that many lawyers to go around.

That legal team argued mainly that the soldiers had fired in self-defense, and for the most part they were successful. The jury convicted only two of the eight men, and only of manslaughter. Those two were Pvt. Edward Montgomery, who privately admitted to having yelled “Fire!” to his comrades, and Kilroy. Probably the bayonet evidence sunk him.

It’s not clear why of the eight soldiers only Kilroy, White (the sentry), and Hartigan signed this petition. But that detail is a reminder that each “redcoat” was an individual, making his own decision for his own reasons, which in most cases never got written down.

TOMORROW: Mathew Kilroy’s voice at the trial?

King Street on the 5th of March 1770

As night fell on the 5th of March, 1770, small groups of British soldiers and Boston workers resumed the fights of the previous week. These confrontations coalesced into a big brawl around “Murray’s barracks,” named for the man who had rented his widowed sister’s idle distillery to the army to house much of the 29th Regiment.

King Street in the center of town was still peaceful, though. Teenaged apprentice Edward Garrick was standing there, near the shop where he worked for wigmaker John Piemont. Capt. John Goldfinch of the 14th Regiment passed by. Edward yelled out that the officer had not paid his barber’s bill.

Capt. Goldfinch showed young Edward the receipt he had in his pocket and— No, of course he didn’t. The captain did have a receipt in his pocket, but he was a British officer and gentleman, and he didn’t deign to reply to a greasy barber’s boy yelling in the street. (Grease was a necessary ingredient in shaping and styling wigs.) Especially with all the insults that Bostonians had yelled at the army since 1768.

Nearby, at the mansion rented by the Customs Service for its office, stood Pvt. Hugh White of the 29th Regiment. He was thirty years old and had served in the British army for eleven years. [Thanks to Don Hagist for alerting me to the British National Archives online record that contained that info.] Though Capt. Goldfinch ignored the barber’s boy, Pvt. White didn’t. He told the teenager that the officer “is a gentleman, and if he owes you any thing he will pay it.” Edward, who had visited with other soldiers of the 29th the night before, replied that there were no gentlemen in the 14th regiment.

Then Edward’s fellow apprentice Bartholomew Broaders arrived with a young woman on each arm. Those women, probably teenagers as well, were servants in the Customs House. The father of one of them had asked Bartholomew to escort the girls to the apothecary. Edward joined the party, and all four young people went into the mansion’s kitchen for a visit.

Meanwhile, Capt. Goldfinch arrived at Murray’s barracks. As the senior officer on the scene, Goldfinch broke up the brawl, shoving and ordering soldiers indoors. Merchant Richard Palmes and Dr. Thomas Young, the most radical of Boston’s Whig leaders, told locals to go home.

Back at the Customs House, one young woman’s brother came into the kitchen and told the barber’s boys that it was getting late. Having spent about an hour inside, Bartholomew and Edward went back out onto King Street. They headed home quietly and— No, that would be too sensible. Edward Garrick started complaining about Capt. Goldfinch’s bill again.

But Pvt. White ignored him and— No, of course he couldn’t let that go. The sentry called Edward over. “I’m not afraid to show my face,” said the apprentice, and walked up. White clonked the boy on the side of the head with the butt of his musket.

Edward staggered back and burst into tears. Bartholomew yelled at White, demanding “what he meant by thus abusing the people”—elevating an individual attack into tyranny. A sergeant chased the apprentices away with his sword, but they found another young wigmaker, Richard Ward. Soon several teenagers were running around the center of town, telling people about the sentry’s assault. One witness recalled them yelling, “you Centinel, damned rascally Scoundrel Lobster Son of a Bitch”!

It had been only a week since Boston’s huge funeral for Christopher Seider, a boy about eleven years old shot dead by a Customs officer. Now folks heard about the man guarding the Customs office abusing another boy. Naturally, this upset people. While some passersby told the boys to disperse, others joined them or at least stopped to watch. (Among the men who eventually joined the throng was Robert Paterson, a sailor whose trousers had been cut by the same shot that killed Seider.)

A town watchman named Edward Langford arrived. He told the apprentices “to let the Sentry alone” and told that soldier “not to be afraid, they were only boys, and would not hurt him.” But around the same time, some of the boys had gotten into the First Meeting and started ringing its bell—the town’s fire alarm.

The crowd swelled quickly as people arrived with their fire buckets. Some private fire companies rolled their engines toward the center of town. It soon became clear that there was no fire, but people spread the news about the big fight at Murray’s barracks, about the sentry at the Customs House. The crowd grew larger and angrier—at least 200 people.

Pvt. White sent two messengers from the Customs House to the Main Guard on the other side of the Town House, asking for reinforcements. Eventually the senior officer there, forty-year-old Capt. Thomas Preston, sent a squad of seven privates under Cpl. William Wemms. After a few more minutes, Preston followed.

All those reinforcements were grenadiers of the 29th. Two of the privates—Edward Montgomery and James Hartigan—had wives in Boston. Three—Mathew Kilroy, William Warren, and John Carroll—had been involved in the fights between soldiers and ropemakers at the end of the previous week. They pushed through the crowd to White’s side, poking men with their bayonets and shouting, “Damn your blood, stand out of the way.”

The soldiers ranged themselves in an arc around the Customs House door. By this time the barber’s boys all seem to have gone home. Among the people toward the front of the crowd were Samuel Gray, one of the brawling ropemakers, watching happily. Bookseller Henry Knox, young and burly, buttonholed Capt. Preston and warned him, “For God’s sake, take care of your men.” Richard Palmes and other gentlemen reminded Preston that without a magistrate he had no legal authority to order his men to fire.

Then twenty or thirty sailors and dock workers arrived from Dock Square. A gentleman had told them that the Customs service was behind all of Boston’s troubles—a common political position. On their way from the docks these men had picked up stout sticks from a pile of firewood. They moved through the crowd to the front, close enough for one sailor, a man of African and Native American ancestry over six feet tall, to grab a bayonet and jerk it back and forth. Benjamin Burdick, Constable of the Town House Watch, arrived, carrying a broadsword at his wife’s insistence. He yelled at the locals to stand back for their own good. Some civilians were throwing snowballs, ice, and lumps of coal.

Someone in the crowd threw a stick. It hit Pvt. Montgomery, on the right side of the line of soldiers, and knocked him down. He scrambled back to his feet, fired his musket, and yelled, “Fire!” His comrades responded by shooting, not together but in a ragged sequence. One man didn’t fire—probably Cpl. William Wemms, on the far side of the line.

At first many in the crowd didn’t believe the soldiers’ guns were loaded. But the tall sailor collapsed in the gutter, two balls through his chest. Samuel Gray fell dead on watchman Langford’s foot. Other men and teenagers were also struck, some in the front of the crowd, some in the back, one on his doorstep across the street. Each musket had probably contained two balls, so the seven shots produced a dozen wounds.

The crowd fell back. Constable Burdick tried to take charge for the town, fetching a doctor and another man to carry away the bodies and then trying to memorize the soldiers’ faces. People carried dead and wounded men to taverns, doctors’ offices, or their homes. Capt. Preston swatted up his men’s muskets to stop them from firing again, then marched them back to the Main Guard. Hearing the shots from blocks away, Capt. Goldfinch said, “I thought it would come to this.” His wigmaker’s receipt was still in his pocket.

Elizabeth Hartigan: newlywed

I’ve felt like I’ve been neglecting half of colonial Boston’s population. Not the children (who were more than half, and whom I spend extra time on). I mean the females. So between now and “Pope Night,” I’ll try to focus on a few women’s stories.

Of course, those stories often come to light because of the women’s relationships with men, who conducted most of the public business of the times and therefore got into documentary records more often. And that’s the case with my first subject: Elizabeth Henderson.

On 2 Sept 1769 at Trinity Church in Boston, Elizabeth Henderson married “James Hartigan a Soldier of the 29th.” I don’t know where or when she was born, or how the couple had met.

Had Elizabeth come down from Halifax with that army regiment? Was she a Massachusetts woman who fell in love with a soldier? Did she grow up in Boston, or move to the town from the countryside or Britain? Was she part of the mainstream English, Congregationalist society, or was she already in some ways an outsider? She did, after all, marry an Irish soldier in an Anglican church. Was this her first marriage?

The following 5 March, Pvt. Hartigan was sent by Capt. Thomas Preston to reinforce the sentry outside the Customs office on King Street. An angry crowd was throwing snowballs because that sentry had clubbed an apprentice earlier in the evening. By the end of the night, Hartigan and most of his comrades had fired their muskets, and five civilians were dead or dying. The next day, Hartigan and his colleagues were arrested for what locals called a "Massacre."

Hartigan remained in jail through spring and summer. His regiment was withdrawn to Castle William in the harbor and then redeployed to New Jersey. On 4 May a Boston official “warned out” Elizabeth. The record of that warning appears in The Legal Papers of John Adams:

Elisabeth Hartick a Soldiers Wife Lodges att Mr Hiklans in Kings Street he is one of the 29 Rajment Now in Goal in Boston to be tryed for the murder of the people in Kings Street the Last March Warned in his Majestys Name to Depart this town of Boston in 14 days.

“Warning out” wasn’t quite as unwelcoming as it sounds. Officials didn’t actually force anyone to leave. But by telling a head of household to do so, they absolved the town of financial responsibility if that family became too indigent or sick to take care of themselves.

In the case of Elizabeth Hartigan, this notice tells us that she did not have any children or other relatives living with her in mid-1770. Otherwise, they would have been listed as well.

I suspect that the “John Hiklan” she was lodging with was John Hickling, who left a deposition about what he'd seen at the Massacre and was mentioned by a couple of other witnesses. For example, Joseph Hillyer told the court during the soldiers’ trial, “A little boy, at Mr. Hicklings told me People were kill’d.” If Elizabeth had been in Hickling’s house in March, therefore, she would have been within earshot of the riot and shootings.

SPOILER

Pvt. Hartigan was acquitted of all charges in Nov 1770, and rejoined the 29th in New Jersey. The last record of him is on the regiment’s muster roll dated 30 April 1772 in St. Augustine, Florida. It lists James Hartigan as “Deceased 4th. Nov 1771.”

What happened to Elizabeth? Again, I don’t know. But I’ll note that at St. John’s Church in Essex, New Jersey, an Elizabeth Hartigan married James Brown on 5 Jan 1772. They were both said to be “of New York.” I wouldn’t even suggest that this was the soldier’s widow, quickly remarrying, except that the very next wedding on that church register is “John Burnet to Margaret Weeks, both of 29th Regt.,” on 16 Feb, and a man from the 29th had married there in the previous March as well. So that was where people associated with the 29th went to marry, and a new marriage for Elizabeth is a nice possibility to contemplate. But good luck to anyone trying to track down an "Elizabeth Brown" in New York!