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.

The Forgotten Trial for the Boston Massacre

On 12 Dec 1770, 250 years ago today, the third trial for the Boston Massacre began.

This is the trial that later generations of Bostonians preferred to forget. In 1771 the Loyalist printer John Fleeming published a seven-page report including witness testimony as an appendix to the much longer record of the soldiers’ trial. But Harbottle Dorr didn’t buy that expanded edition and keep it with his collection of Whig newspapers.

In 1870, when Frederic Kidder assembled his History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770; consisting of the narrative of the town, the trial of the soldiers: and a historical introduction, containing unpublished documents of John Adams, and explanatory notes, he reprinted John Hodgson’s transcript of the soldiers’ trial but not the appendix. He replaced those seven pages with a single paragraph on the verdict.

Because John Adams wasn’t involved in the third trial, its record also makes no appearance in his Legal Papers, the most complete source of documents on those proceedings.

When I started my Revolutionary research, the only way I could read about the third trial was to visit a library that owned a first edition, second state of The Trial of William Wemms… from 1771. But now Google has digitized that book, so everyone can find its account of the third trial starting at page 210.

The defendants on 12 December were:

• Edward Manwaring, a Customs officer assigned to Douglastown on the Gaspé peninsula in Canada, who was in Boston on 5 Mar 1770.
• John Munro, a notary public and friend of Manwaring who had the bad luck to be socializing with him that evening.
• Hammond Green, a boat builder whose family worked for the Boston Customs office.
• Thomas Greenwood, a low-level local Customs officer.

Those men were indicted on the evidence of one person: Charles Bourgate, a fourteen-year-old francophone servant of Manwaring. Earlier this year I traced the French boy’s evolving story starting here. Despite the forensic slipperiness of that account, a Boston grand jury indicted those four defendants for murder.

On 11 December, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was still on leave as Chief Justice, had two other Superior Court justices visit him at the Province House. He urged them to “continue,” or postpone, those men’s trials till the spring session. That would have been a full year since the shooting on King Street. Perhaps he hoped the accusation would just go away. Senior justice Benjamin Lynde declined.

Thus, the third Massacre trial started on 12 December. Massachusetts advocate general Samuel Quincy prosecuted, though he considered the attempt to convict these defendants “another Windmill adventure” with himself as “poor Don Quixot.” The record doesn’t say who served as defense counsel, and legal historian Hiller B. Zobel suggests the defendants didn’t need one.

The first prosecution witness was Samuel Drowne, who said he had seen “two flashes from the Custom-house” behind the soldiers as they fired. Stationer Timothy White testified that he had hosted and employed Drowne for two years and “never observed any thing to impeach his veracity and understanding”—though “Some people thought him foolish.”

Charles Bourgate then told his story of being pulled into the Customs house and forced to fire out at the crowd by a “tall man” with a sword-cane—some suspected Customs Commissioner John Robinson, notorious for cutting James Otis’s scalp with his walking-stick. Charles said he’d seen his master Manwaring shoot a gun, too. The prosecution rested.

Four upper-class defense witnesses then testified that they had watched the confrontation on King Street and seen no shots from the Customs House. One of those gentlemen was Edward Payne, who had actually been wounded in the shooting and had no reason to protect any shooters.

Two women who lived in the Customs House said they had viewed the shooting from the very room that Charles described, and there had been no men with guns there.

Manwaring’s landlady, Elizabeth Hudson, stated that he and Munro had been at her house during the shooting along with the traveling entertainer Michael Angelo Warwell and young Charles.

The court brought the French boy back to the stand. He insisted that he’d told the truth and Hudson (and everyone else) had lied. The judges summoned four men known for speaking French well, including schoolmaster John Lovell and merchant Philip Dumaresque, and asked them to question the boy to make sure there was no language barrier. He stuck to his story.

At that point the defense lowered the boom. James Penny, a debtor who had been in the jail while Charles was housed there as a witness, stated that the teenager had admitted to him:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. [Elizabeth] Waldron, the wife of Mr. [Joseph] Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

Charles “positively denied that he had ever made any such declaration.” He asked that another debtor, cabinetmaker William Page, be called to the stand. But Page testified that he’d seen the French boy in deep conversation with James Penny, who was taking notes, so that ended up bolstering Penny’s claim.

The case of Rex v. Manwaring et al. went to the jury. The record ends:

The Jury acquitted all the Prisoners, without going from their seats.

The third Boston Massacre trial thus ended within a day, as was usual in that period. But it also set up a fourth Boston Massacre trial: of Charles Bourgate on the charge of perjury.

“I then went up stairs into the lower west chamber”

As I described yesterday, in late March 1770 the Boston Whigs threw themselves behind Charles Bourgate’s story of shooters in the Customs House during the Boston Massacre.

Though one of the most respected magistrates in Boston refused to proceed with that case, the grand jury decided to investigate. According to an anonymous Crown informant:

the Grand Jury had the people who were in the Custom House, Vizt. [Bartholomew] Green’s Son [Hammond] & Daughter [Ann], and Thomas [Greenwood] & Molly [Rogers] two Servants, before them, once and sometimes twice a day for several days, but they continued uniform in one story Vizt. that there was no other person in the house that Night but themselves that at the time the soldiers fired, they were in the Room, where the supposed fireing was, and were certain there was no such thing.

Every method was made use of by threatning to make them fix it on some person but to no effect—

On 24 Mar 1770, 250 years ago today, Justices John Ruddock and John Hill took down the testimony of three of the people who looked after the Customs House: John Green, his brother Hammond Green, and Thomas Greenwood.

I’ve quoted two of those men in detail before, so here’s what Hammond Green had to say about the evening of 5 March, as printed in the Short Narrative report:

between the hours of eight and nine o’clock, I went to the Custom-house; when I came to the front-door of the said house, there were standing two young women belonging to said house [Elizabeth Avery and Mary Rogers], and two boys belonging to Mr. [John] Piemont the barber [Bartholomew Broaders and Edward Garrick];

I went into the house, and they all followed me, after that Mr. Sawny Irving came into the kitchen where we were, and afterwards I lighted him out at the front-door; I then went back into the kitchen again, and the boys above-mentioned went out; after that two other boys, belonging to Mr. Plemont [one probably Richard Ward], came into the kitchen, also my brother John, who had been in a little while before;

he went to the back door and opened it, saying that something was the matter in the street, upon which, with the other three, I went to the corner of Royal Exchange-lane in King-street, and heard an huzzaing, as I thought, towards Dr. [Samuel] Cooper’s meeting, and then saw one of the first-mentioned boys, who said the centry had struck him; at which time there were not above eight or nine men and boys in King-street;

after that I went to the steps of the custom-house door, and Mary Rogers, Eliza. Avery, and Ann Green, came to the door, at the same time heard a bell ring, upon the people’s crying fire, we all went into the house and I lock’d the door, saying, we shall know if any body comes;

after that, Thomas Greenwood came to the door and I let him in, he said, that there was a number of people in the street; I told him if he wanted to see any thing to go up stairs, but to take no candle with him; he went up stairs, and the three women aforementioned went with him, and I went and fastened the windows, doors, and gate;

I left the light in the kitchen, and was going up stairs, but met Greenwood in the room next to the kitchen, and he said, that he would not stay in the house, for he was afraid it would be pulled down, but I was not afraid of any such thing;

I then went up stairs into the lower west chamber, next to Royal Exchange-lane, and saw several guns fired in King-street, which killed three persons, which I saw lay on the snow in the street, supposing the snow to be near a foot deep;

after that, I let Eliza. Avery out of the front door, and shut it after her, and went up the chamber again;

then my father, Mr. Bartholomew Green, came and knock’d at the door, and I let him in; we both went into the kitchen and he asked me what was the matter; I told him that there were three persons shot by the soldiers who stood at the door of the Customhouse; he then asked me where the girls were, I told him they were up stairs, and we went up together, and he opened the window, and I shut it again directly; he then opened it again, and we both looked out;

at which time Mr. Thomas Jackson, jun. knock’d at the door,

I…asked who was there?

Mr. Jackson said, it is I, Hammond let me in;

I told if him my father was out, or any of the commissioners came, I would not let them in.

Jackson had already testified on 16 March that “when I knocked at the Custom-house door, all the persons I saw at the window over the centry box at the Customhouse (which window was then opened) was Mr. Hammond Green and some women.”

In sum, Hammond Green swore that he’d been in the Customs House the whole night, and he hadn’t seen Charles Bourgate, Edward Manwaring, John Munro, or a “tall man” with a musket. Furthermore, five other people in or around the building corroborated Green’s story. Four had even been in the room where the gunmen supposedly stood. And the local authorities had sworn testimony from at least four of those witnesses.

Nevertheless, the legal case against Edward Manwaring rolled on.

Charles Bourgate’s Massacre

Today, 5 March, is the Sestercentennial anniversary of the Boston Massacre. I’ve written a lot about the Massacre over the years, including this post from 2007 about how the trouble started and how easily people could have avoided it.

So today I’m sharing a rarely recounted perspective on the event from a teen-aged servant named Charles Bourgate. He was reportedly born at Bordeaux, France, but also identified as “a Jersey boy.”

This was the French boy’s testimony at the trial on 12 Dec 1770 of his master, Customs official Edward Manwaring, along with Manwaring’s friend John Munro and lower-level Customs employees Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood.

All four of those men were charged with participating in the murders on King Street, with muskets actually shot out an upper window of the Customs house, as shown above from the print by Paul Revere.

Charles testified:

I am an apprentice to Mr. Edward Manwarring. On the evening of the 5th March last, I was at Mr. [John] Hudson’s in Back-street, at the North-end, where my master then lodged, Mr. Hudson and his wife [Elizabeth] were at home;…

According to the boy’s earlier deposition for town magistrates, Manwaring and Munro had gone to the Customs house to “drink a glass of wine” about half an hour before he heard an alarm.

when the bells rung I ran into King street, and to the door of the Custom-house which was on a jarr partly open, and a young man one Green, he with one eye, (pointing to Hammond Green) opened the door and pulled me in; two or three gentlemen came down stairs, and one of them a tall man, pulled me up stairs, and said to me, you must fire, the tall man gave me a gun, and said to me “if you don’t fire I’ll kill you”—

In his deposition, Charles said, “I saw my Master and Mr. Munroe come down stairs, and go into a room; when four or five men went up stairs, pulling and halling me after them.” So not exactly the same detail, but the same result.

I went up stairs and stood by a front window in the chamber, and the tall man loaded two guns with two balls each, and I fired them both; as soon as I had fired one gun, he, the tall man, said again to me, “if you don’t fire I will kill you.” He had a cane with a sword in it in his hand, and compelled me to fire both the guns.

After I had fired these two guns, Mr. Manwarring fired one gun also out of the same window. The tall man loaded the three guns, and I see him put the balls in each of them and heard them go down. The two guns I fired, I pointed up the street and in the air. When my master Mr. Manwarring pointed his gun out of the window I was in the room, but went out and was on the stairs before his gun went off, I heard it, but did not see it.

As soon as I had fired, the tail man took me down stairs, and said he would give me money if I would not tell: I replied, I did not want any money, but if I was called before the Justices, I would tell the truth.

There were a great many people in the house, and a number of people round me in the chamber where I fired, I can’t tell the precise number, but there were more than ten, Mr. Munro and Hammond Green were in the house below stairs, Mr. Manwarring was in the chamber when all the three guns were loaded and fired, there was the space of a minute and an half between the second gun I fired, and the third which my Master fired. There was a candle in the chamber, but I cannot tell whether there were one or two windows in it. When I came up into the chamber, there were two guns in it, I fired twice out of the same gun, but I cannot tell whether Mr. Manwarring fired the same gun I did.

At the time I and my master fired, the street below was full of people, and the mob were throwing sticks, snow-balls, &c. It was pretty dark, but I don’t know but there might be a little moon. I can’t tell whether the guns my master and I fired, were fired before or after the firing by the soldiers.

When I went from Mr. Hudson’s to the Custom-house, I passed through the lane that leads from the Market to the Custom-house, (Royal-exchange-lane) and I did not see the Sentry-box or any soldiers near the Custom house; there were many people round there in the street.

Immediately after I went down stairs, I went out of the house and saw a great number of people throwing snow-balls and sticks, but I saw no soldiers. I returned to Mr. Hudson’s house, Mr. Hudson and his wife were then at home, and no other person in the house.

Earlier Charles had declared, “I ran home as fast as I could, and set up all night in my master’s kitchen.”

At the trial, attorneys asked the French boy again “where he was when be heard the report of his master’s gun?” He said “he was quite down stairs,” thus not able to declare positively that Manwaring had shot at the crowd but certainly implying he had.

Asked whether William Molineux had asked him about his story, Charles said “he was in the goaler’s house with Mrs. Otis the prison-keeper’s wife, Mr. Wallis, deputy sheriff, and Mr. Molineux, and that the latter told him to tell the truth.”

Of course, none of this was the truth. Except, probably, that Hammond Green had only one eye.

TOMORROW: The morning after a Massacre.

Hammond Green on Trial

Most people who follow early American history know that after the Boston Massacre the British soldiers were put on trial for murder. People who study the topic more closely know that there were separate trials for Capt. Thomas Preston and the eight enlisted men.

At those trials John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., handled the defense alongside future Loyalists Robert Auchmuty and Sampson Salter Blowers. They won acquittals for most of the accused, convictions for manslaughter instead of murder for two. Americans remember the Whig lawyers’ work for the soldiers as a touchstone of every defendant’s right to a vigorous legal defense.

But there was a third murder trial after the Massacre which we hear very little about. While the record of the soldiers’ trial was reprinted multiple times in the 1800s, the publishers left out the description of that third trial which was originally printed with it.

That trial grew out of the claims of Charles Bourgate, a teenager of French extraction who worked for Customs official Edward Manwaring. For reasons of his own, Charles accused his master of having fired a gun out of an upper floor of the Customs house at the crowd on King Street.

When the teenager first made this accusation, Manwaring quickly refuted it by bringing in a friend, notary John Munro, to testify that the two of them had been somewhere else at the time. In addition, Hammond Green and Thomas Greenwood testified that they had been in that room of the Customs House during the violence, not seeing Manwaring or anyone else shoot out the windows.

Bourgate then revised his testimony to say that both Manwaring and Munro had been up in the room with guns. And that Hammond Green had yanked him into the Customs House to shoot a gun as well. This made no sense, but it allowed the Boston Whigs to arrest all four of those men and discount their testimony—after all, one should expect accused murderers to lie to protect themselves. Soon the town was proclaiming that it had evidence for a Customs service conspiracy against the people.

It looks like the judicial system recognized the relative weaknesses of this case. While Capt. Preston and the soldiers remained in jail until their trial, Green was released on bond on 7 April, as this document from the Boston Public Library collection shows. It identified Green as a “Boat builder.” His sureties were fellow boatbuilder Thomas Hitchbourn and the printers Richard Draper of the Boston News-Letter and John Green and Joseph Russell of the Boston Post-Boy.

The Customs men’s trial finally started on 12 December, after the soldiers’ ended. Samuel Quincy (shown above) had the difficult task of prosecuting. Bourgate repeated the latest version of his story under oath. Another youth (“Some people thought him foolish”) described seeing flashes from the Customs House windows. Then the defense called its witnesses.

Four merchants stated they had seen no shots from the windows. One of those men, Edward Payne, had been wounded in the Massacre, so he had no reason to cover up anything. Elizabeth Avery testified that she had watched the shooting with Hammond Green:

There was no other people in this room, (except them I have mentioned) during the whole time of my being there, but Thomas Greenwood who came in and went out again in a minute. Nor was there any gun or pistol, or candle in the room. Nor was the door of the balcony or any of the windows of the chamber opened that evening to my knowledge, and I verily believe they were not. The French Boy, who has just been sworn in this Court was not there that evening, nor did I ever see him there in my life. Nor was Mr. Manwarring or Mr Munroe there on that evening.

Hammond’s sister Ann stated the same.

Later the defense attorneys called a man who had spent time in the Boston jail with Charles Bourgate and said the boy had boasted of the reward he would get for perjuring himself. Charles denied that, but the jury cleared the Customs men of murder without getting up from their seats. The acquittal even made the London Chronicle.

I can’t tell if Hammond Green worked for the Customs service in 1770 or simply lived with his father who did. But by the time the war broke out, he was on the payroll as a tidesman. In March 1776 Hammond Green evacuated to Halifax with the British army, leaving behind his wife, Mary, and their child. In July 1777 the Massachusetts legislature granted permission for them to join him in Nova Scotia. Mary died in the following years, and in 1785 Hammond married Elizabeth Mott, young daughter of a former Royal Artillery mattross. Green was still working as a tidesman at Halifax in 1807, thirty-seven years after being tried and acquitted for the Boston Massacre.

“Three persons which I saw lay on the snow in the street”

I’ve been tracking the experience of Ann Green on the night of 5 Mar 1770 through the testimony of people with her. Yesterday I left Ann in an upper room of the Boston Customs House where she lived, looking down on the increasingly violent crowd on King Street.

Customs employee Thomas Greenwood described the sight:

I went into the back room and got the key of the little drawing-room, being the lower west corner chamber, and went up
stairs, and Elizabeth Avery, Mary Rogers and Ann Green followed me into the room; we all looked thro’ the glass, I saw some persons standing by the centry-box striking with sticks, but did not see them hit any body, tho’ a number of persons were close by them; I told the women above mentioned that I would not stay, for I was afraid that the house would be pulled down, there being about forty or fifty persons consisting of men and boys…

So Greenwood left. He went to the army’s main guard for help, but I can’t help but think that the three women felt he was deserting them just after saying the situation looked dangerous.

Ann’s brother Hammond finished locking all the doors and windows below and then joined the young women in that “lower west chamber, next to Royal Exchange lane,” he testified. Elizabeth Avery later told the court:

I lived with Mr. Bartholomew Green at the Custom-house on the 5th of March last, and when the noise was in the street, before the house I went with [Hammond Green,] Nancy Green and Mary Rogers up into that chamber of the house, which is next to Royal-exchange-lane and right over the Sentry-box as it then stood, and from the west window in that room saw the party of soldiers come down from the Main-guard to the Sentry…

The merchant Edward Davis (1718-1784) later described seeing “two women standing in the chamber of the Custom-house, which is next to Royal-Exchange-lane, with their hands under their aprons, in the posture of spectators.”

Hammond stated, “I…saw several guns fired in King-street, which killed three persons which I saw lay on the snow in the street, supposing the snow to be near a foot deep.” Avery said she “tarried in this room till the firing was all over, and the soldiers had returned from whence they came.” Then Hammond “let Eliza Avery out of the front door, and shut it after her.” The record doesn’t say why she was leaving the house where she lived.

Ann and Hammond’s father Bartholomew Green then came home. Hammond said they spoke in the kitchen:

he asked me what was the matter, I told him that there were three persons shot by the soldiers who stood at the door of the Custom-house; he then asked me where the girls were, I told him they were up stairs, and we went up together…

Unfortunately, we don’t have any description from Ann Green of what she had experienced. She testified at one of the trials that followed, but the surviving record says only that she “confirmed in every particular the testimony of Elizabeth Avery, the preceeding witness.” So we have to guess what it was like to be in that room—watching the fight develop outside, wondering if the crowd would attack the house, not knowing where her brother John or others were.

And then the authorities came for her brother.

TOMORROW: The third murder trial to follow the Boston Massacre.

Ann Green’s View of the Boston Massacre

Bartholomew and Abigail Green had a number of children, some of whom lived in the Customs House on King Street with them in 1770. Among those children were two brothers, John and Hammond. (Bartholomew’s mother had been born Hannah Hammond.) I quoted John Green’s account of what he saw at the Boston Massacre last year.

The Greens also had a daughter called Ann or Nancy, and she also witnessed the shooting on 5 March. It was not how she expected her evening to go.

So far as I know, we don’t have any testimony directly from Ann Green, but we can track her through other people’s accounts. Here’s the wigmaker’s apprentice Bartholomew Broaders describing how she and a maid in the family, Elizabeth Avery, asked him to escort them on an errand:

Soon after [eight o’clock] Mr. Green’s maid and his daughter called him out of the shop, and asked him to go to the apothecary’s; and then they with the deponent returned to the custom-house; in going he met his fellow-apprentice [Edward Garrick], and they went & stood upon the custom-house steps, and Mr. Hammond Green came out, saying, come in girls; then the deponent and his fellow apprentice, by the maid’s invitation, went in also…

That pleasant visit of the two young barbers with two young maids, chaperoned by one of their brothers, was interrupted by the arrival of a man named Sawny Irving, apparently upset that he had lost his hat in a fight with soldiers. After some discussion Hammond Green showed Irving and the apprentices out.

A few minutes after that, Hammond later testified, “two other boys belonging to Mr. [John] Piemont, came into the kitchen, also my brother John.” Out in the street, as described here, Edward Garrick got into an argument with Pvt. Hugh White, the sentry in front of the Customs House. White clubbed Garrick on the head. Broaders yelled back at the soldier, which started to draw a crowd.

John and Hammond Green went out different doors of the house to see what was going on. John walked further, following the noise. Hammond described coming back to look after his sister:

I went to the steps of the Custom-house door, and Mary Rogers, Eliza. Avery, and Ann Green, came to the door, at the same time, heard a bell ring; upon the people’s crying fire, we all went into the house and I locked the door, saying, we shall know if anybody comes; after that, Thomas Greenwood [another Customs employee] came to the door and I let him in, he said that there was a number of people in the street, I told him if he wanted to see anything to go up stairs, but to take no candle with him; he went up stairs, and the three women aforementioned went with him, and I went and fastened the windows, doors, and gate; I left the light in the kitchen, and was going up stairs, but met Greenwood in the room next to the kitchen, and he said that he would not stay in the house, for he was afraid it would be pulled down…

Greenwood left the Customs house, meeting John Green, who was trying unsuccessfully to get back in. The two men went to the army’s guardhouse on the other side of the Town House for help, but found that a squad of soldiers was already on its way to reinforce Pvt. White. And to guard the Customs house itself, in case the mob started to attack the building.

Meanwhile, Ann Green and the two other women were in the upper-floor room, watching the growing violence on the street below.

TOMORROW: What the women saw at the Massacre.

John Green’s View of the Massacre

On 24 Mar 1770, five days after a draft of Boston’s report on the Massacre was submitted to the town meeting, justices of the peace John Ruddock and John Hill quizzed John Green about what he’d seen on the night of the 5th.

I spent some time earlier this week trying to figure out who John Green was, and this is my best guess. He was descended from a line of three Bartholomew Greens. His great-grandfather and grandfather were both newspaper printers, and his uncle John (1731-87) was still in that business as co-publisher of the Boston Post-Boy until 1773. But, as Isaiah Thomas described, John Green’s father had carved out his own niche:

Bartholomew, the eldest [son]…, never had a press of his own. The following peculiarity in his character introduced him to a particular intercourse with the merchants of the town; he made himself so well acquainted with every vessel which sailed out of the port of Boston, as to know each at sight. Perpetually on the watch, as soon as a vessel could be discovered with a spyglass in the harbor, he knew it, and gave immediate information to the owner; and, by the small fees for this kind of information, he principally maintained himself for several years. Afterwards he had some office in the custom house.

John’s ship-spotting father Bartholomew looked after the Customs office on King Street, with his unmarried daughter Ann helping out. The printer John Green also had ties to the Customs service; its officials granted him printing contracts, and his newspaper tended to support the royal government.

The younger John and his brother Hammond, who had been given their grandmother’s maiden name and was legally a “boat-builder,” both went to the Customs office on the evening of 5 Mar 1770, probably to make sure their relatives were all right. This is how John later described his experience to the magistrates in a deposition:

I, John Green, of lawful age, testify and say, that on Monday evening the 5th instant [i.e., of this month], just after nine o’clock, I went into the Custom-house, and saw in the kitchen of said house two boys [Edward Garrick and Bartholomew Broaders] belonging to Mr. [John] Piemont the barber, and also my brother Hammond Green;

upon hearing an huzzaing and the bell ring, I went out, and there were but four or five boys in King street near the sentinel [Pvt. Hugh White], who was muttering and growling, and seemed very mad. I saw Edward Garrick who was crying, and told his fellow-apprentice that the sentinel had struck him.

I then went as far as the Brazen-Head [importer William Jackson’s shop sign], and heard the people huzzaing by Murray’s barrack [rented to the army by James Murray on behalf of his sister Elizabeth Smith], I went down King-street again, as far as the corner of Royal Exchange lane, by the sentry, there being about forty or fifty people, chiefly boys, near the Custom-house, but saw no person insult, or say anything to the sentry; I then said to Bartholomew Broaders, these words, viz.: the sentry (then standing on the steps and loading his gun), is going to fire;

upon which I went to the Custom-house gate and tried to get over the gate, but could not; whilst standing there, I saw [Customs tide waiter] Thomas Greenwood upon the fence, to whom I said, open the gate; he said that he would not let his [own] father in, and then jumped down into the lane and said to the deponent, follow me; upon which I went down the lane with him, and round by the Post-office, to the main-guard;

he went into the guard-house and said, turn out the guard, but the guard was out before, and I heard that a party was gone to the Custom-house; I then heard the guns go off, one after another, and saw three persons fall;

immediately after, a negro drummer [of the 29th regiment] beat to arms, upon that the soldiers drew up in a rank (and I did not see Greenwood again, until the next morning), after that I saw the 29th regiment drawn up in a square, at the south-west corner of the Town-house; soon after I went home; and further I say not

When John Green testified, Boston officials suspected that Customs service employees had killed people in the crowd by firing guns from an upper window of the building. Green’s brother Hammond and Thomas Greenwood were indicted for murder—despite Green putting Greenwood at the guard-house when the shooting started.

At the end of the year those two men stood trial alongside Customs official Edward Manwaring and notary John Munro, all accused on the basis of dubious testimony from a teen-aged servant named Charles Bourgate. They were quickly acquitted.

The statements of John Green, his relatives, and Thomas Greenwood fit well together and also match testimony from other witnesses, unrelated and unindicted. Those accounts helped to inform the script of tonight’s reenactment of the Boston Massacre outside the Old State House.

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?