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 First Day of Testimony Against the Soldiers

The first witness in the trial of Capt. Thomas Preston for the Boston Massacre was a barber’s apprentice named Edward Garrick.

He testified about how Pvt. Hugh White conked him on the head for speaking rudely about a passing army captain.

Edward’s testimony might have been more useful in prosecuting White, showing he had was aggressive and violent toward locals before anyone threatened him. But the prosecutors at the soldiers’ trial never called the boy, and we have no indication why.

Instead, the Crown’s opening witness on 27 Nov 1770 was “Jonathan Williams Austin, clerk to John Adams, Esq.” Which is to say, an assistant and trainee of the senior defense counsel.

By modern standards, this is a clear conflict of interest. But Austin had already testified for the Crown at the Preston trial. Even though the captain was acquitted, prosecuting attorneys Robert Treat Paine and Samuel Quincy must have felt the law clerk was a solid witness because they brought him back.

“Do you know either of the prisoners at the bar?” Quincy asked as his first recorded question.

Austin replied that he recognized Pvt. William Macauley: “I was about four feet off: McCauley said ‘Damn you, stand off,’ and pushed his bayonet at me: I did so.” After the shots, Austin recalled, he saw Macauley reload.

The prosecutors asked the next two witnesses, merchant Ebenezer Bridgham and James Dodge, the same first question, and similar questions of town watchman Edward G. Langford and clerk Francis Archbald. The attorneys’ goal was to establish that the defendants were definitely among the soldiers on King Street, and hopefully among those who fired at the crowd. Thus:

• Bridgham said he saw a tall soldier he thought was Pvt. William Warren fire his gun, but didn’t see Cpl. William Wemms do so.
• Dodge named Warren and White as present, and said the first shot came from the left side of the squad.
• Langford identified White and Pvt. Mathew Kilroy, also said the first shot came from the left side, and testified that “immediately after Kilroy’s firing” ropemaker Samuel Gray fell dead, and “there was no other gun discharged at that time.”
• Archbald also testified to Kilroy’s presence.

Determining which soldiers were present and fired was crucial because on the morning after the shooting people had examined the eight muskets and found that one hadn’t been discharged. One of the soldiers therefore hadn’t killed or wounded anybody. But which one? The prosecution had to prove each shooter’s guilt.

Here are some vivid details from the exchanges.

Q. Was you looking at the person who fired the last gun?
A [from Bridgham]. Yes, I saw him aim at a lad that was running down the middle of the street, and kept the motion of his gun after him a considerable time, and then fired.
Q. Did the lad fall?
A. He did not, I kept my eye on him a considerable time.

Q. Was the snow trodden down, or melted away by the Custom-House?
A [from Dodge]. No, the street was all covered like a cake.

A [from Langford]. Samuel Gray…came and struck me on the shoulder, and said, Langford, what’s here to pay.
Q. What said you to Gray then?
A. I said I did not know what was to pay, but I believed something would come of it by and bye. He made no reply. Immediately a gun went off. . . . I looked this man (pointing to Killroy) in the face, and bid him not fire; but he immediately fired, and Samuel Gray fell at my feet.

A [from Archbald]: I saw a soldier, and a mean looking fellow with him, with a cutlass in his hand: they came up to me: somebody said, put up your cutlass, it is not right to carry it at this time of night. He said, damn you ye Yankee bougers, what’s your business:

At five o’clock, the judges adjourned until the next morning. Since most trials of the time were over in a day, that was unusual, but—after Capt. Preston’s trial—not unprecedented.

Looking for Trouble, Even on the Sabbath

Among the men who brawled at John Gray’s ropewalk on 2 Mar 1770 were a young ropemaker named Samuel Gray (no known relation) and Pvts. William Warren and Mathew Kilroy of the 29th Regiment.

The next day, there were more fights in Boston. Some redcoats from the 29th, including Pvt. John Carroll, went back into Gray’s ropewalk and challenged the men working there, along with sailor James Bailey. Then there was another brawl, with one private reportedly badly injured.

Town watch captain Benjamin Burdick also had a run-in with soldiers on Saturday:

A young man that boarded with me, and was at the Rope-Walks, told me several of them had a spite at him, and that he believed he was in danger. I had seen two soldiers about my house, I saw one of them hearkening at the window, I saw him again near the house, and asked him what he was after;

he said he was pumping ship:

(“Pumping ship” was slang for urinating. This may have been a reference to William Green’s rude joke the day before about cleaning an outhouse. Then again, the soldier might have been urinating.)

Was it not you, says I, that was hearkening at my window last night?

what if it was, he said, I told him to march off, and he damned me, and I beat him till he had enough of it, and he then went off.

That incident made Burdick, and even more so his wife, decide that he should carry a Highland broadsword when he went out on duty.

Sunday was a day of rest in Boston, of course. Yet more military men visited Gray’s ropewalks then, 250 years ago today. But this delegation was at a higher level, as owner John Gray testified:

At Sabbath noon I was surprised at hearing that Col. [Maurice] Carr [of the 29th] and his officers had entered my rope-walk, opened the windows, doors, &c, giving out that they were searching for a dead sergeant of their regiment; this put me upon immediately waiting upon Col. [William] Dalrymple [of the 14th, senior army officer in Boston, pictured above after retirement], to whom I related what I understood had passed at the rope-walk days before.

He replied it was much the same as he had heard from his people; but says he, “your man was the aggressor in affronting one of my people, by asking him if he wanted to work, and then telling him to clean his little-house.”

For this expression I dismissed my journeyman on the Monday morning following; and further said, I would do all in my power to prevent my people’s giving them any affront in future.

He then assured me, he had and should do everything in his power to keep his soldiers in order, and prevent their any more entering my inclosure.

Presently after, Col. Carr came in, and asked Col. Dalrymple what they should do, for they were daily losing their men; that three of his grenadiers passing quietly by the rope-walks were greatly abused, and one of them so much beat that he would die.

He then said he had been searching for a sergeant who had been murdered; upon which, I said, Yes, Colonel, I hear you have been searching for him in my rope-walks; and asked him, whether that sergeant had been in the affray there on the Friday; he replied, no: for he was seen on the Saturday. I then asked him, how he could think of looking for him in my walks; and that had he applied to me, I would have waited on him, and opened every apartment I had for his satisfaction.

These gentlemen in the military and in business were trying to keep the peace, but also sought to protect the interests of their operations.

The 12 March Boston Gazette added detail, perhaps even reliable, to the story of the missing sergeant:

Divers stories were propagated among the soldiery that served to agitate their spirits; particularly on the Sabbath that one Chambers, a sergeant, represented as a sober man, had been missing the preceding day and must therefore have been murdered by the townsmen. An officer of distinction so far credited this report that he entered Mr. Gray’s rope-walk that Sabbath; and when required of by that gentleman as soon as he could meet him, the occasion of his so doing, the officer replied that it was to look if the sergeant said to be murdered had not been hid there.

This sober sergeant was found on the Monday unhurt in a house of pleasure.

On the day of rest there were no more brawls, but rumors flew among the townspeople that soldiers were plotting revenge on Monday. Oddly enough, rumors spread among the soldiers that townspeople were plotting revenge on Monday.

COMING UP: Another glimpse of Sergeant Chambers. But first…