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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners. Exciting news Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [00:49]
Carter Roy
This is crime house.
- [00:55]
Vanessa Richardson
On the night of March 5, 1770, 30 year old private Hugh White was on watch outside a building called the Custom House in Boston, Massachusetts. He was standing in a small wooden booth called a sentry box. There was snow on the ground. The street was quiet. Then a 16 year old apprentice named Edward Garrick walked by and called one of White's officers a deadbeat. White stepped out of the sentry box and clubbed the teenager in the head with the butt of his musket. That was the spark. Within an hour, hundreds of people had filled King street, pelting White and seven other British soldiers with snowballs, ice, oyster shells and clubs. The soldiers opened fire. Minutes later, five colonists were dead or dying, including a 47 year old fugitive from slavery named Crispus Attucks. The colonists called it a massacre. The British called it self defense. And somehow by the end of the year, both sides would be proven right in the same courtroom by the same lawyer. This is the story of the Boston Massacre and it's probably different than the one you learned in school. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Today I'm digging into the Boston massacre, a chaotic five minute shootout on a snowy March night in 1770. It left five colonists dead, sparked a revolution, and produced one of the most famous trials in American legal history. You probably learned a version of this story in school. British soldiers, innocent colonists. Paul Revere's engraving. Five martyrs for liberty. But the real story is messier. The crowd wasn't peaceful. The soldiers weren't monsters. One of the victims may have been the one who threw the first punch. And the lawyer who got the British soldiers acquitted. His name was John Adams. So what really happened on King street that night? Who were the five men who died? And how did one of the most disputed shootings in American history become the founding myth of the American Revolution? All that and more coming up.
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- [04:45]
Vanessa Richardson
Well, Oregon Lottery.
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- [05:13]
Vanessa Richardson
To understand what happened on King street that night, we need to go back three years to a tax bill nobody in Boston wanted to pay. In 1767, the British Parliament was broke. They'd just finished a hugely expensive war against the French, the one we call the French and Indian War. And even though they'd won, somebody had to pay for it. A politician named Charles Townsend, who was essentially the country's finance minister, decided that somebody should be the American colonies. He pushed through a series of laws called the Townsend Acts. The these put new taxes on goods the colonies had to import from Britain, like glass, lead, paint, paper and tea. The colonies had already rioted in 1765 over an earlier Tax, the Stamp act and Parliament had backed down. Townshend was betting they wouldn't dare do it again. He was wrong, especially in Boston. Boston in 1767 was a city of about 16,000 people. It was a port town full of sailors and dock workers and tradesmen. And it had a long tradition of being kind of unmanageable. Two years earlier, an angry mob had stormed the lieutenant governor's mansion, looted it and broken every window. That same lieutenant governor, a man named Thomas Hutchinson, was still in office, watching another tax crisis unfold with mounting dread. Because at the center of the resistance was a force. 45 year old former tax collector turned political organizer named Samuel Adams. Sam Adams was uniquely, almost terrifyingly gifted at one thing. Building a political movement. His cousin, a young lawyer named John Adams, would later say that Sam had built a political engine in Boston. That engine had a name, the Sons of Liberty. They were a network of merchants, tradesmen and street organizers who pressured anyone who was cooperating with the British. They vandalized Loyalist shops. They wrote anonymous newspaper articles. And when a customs officer or colonial collaborator really crossed the line, they'd haul him into the street, strip him down, and pour hot pine tar over his skin. Then they'd roll him in chicken feathers and parade him through Boston on a wooden rail. It was as horrifying as it sounds. And Sam Adams people kept doing it. Under Sam's direction, they were turning Boston into the most ungovernable city in the colonies. By 1768, the Crown decided to do something about it. They sent in the army. On the afternoon of October 1, 1768, eight British warships pulled into Boston harbor with their cannons loaded. Somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 stories. Soldiers came marching off the long wharf in full red coated formation. They came ashore with drums beating and flags flying. Each soldier carried 16 rounds of powder and ball. That was one soldier for every eight civilians. And because the soldiers weren't paid much, a lot of them took part time jobs on their off hours, undercutting local workers by accepting lower wages. To Bostonians, this, this didn't feel like protection. It felt like an occupation. And it gave Sam Adams everything he needed. His Sons of Liberty started running an anonymous newspaper column called the Journal of Occurrences. It cataloged and sometimes exaggerated every clash between soldiers and civilians. A soldier who insulted a Boston woman ended up in the paper. A sentry who threatened a child ended up in the paper. The drumbeat was constant. And by the end of 1769, Boston was ready to explode. Okay, here's some context you need. First though, the colonies had agreed not to buy any British goods until the Townshend taxes were repealed. It was a boycott and it was the most effective weapon they had. But there were always shopkeepers who broke ranks and kept selling. And the Sons of Liberty made a point of publicly humiliating them. On the afternoon of February 22, 1770, a crowd of about 200 Boston boys gathered outside one of those holdout shops. The owner was a man named Theophilus Lilly. The boys had built a giant wooden sign in the shape of a hand pointing at his door, labeling him a traitor. A neighbor named Ebenezer Richardson tried to break up the crowd and. But Richardson was already deeply unpopular in Boston. He worked as a paid informer for the British Customs office. So when the boys saw him, he became their new target. They chased him back to his house and pelted it with rocks. They broke his windows. A rock hit his wife. In response, Richardson grabbed his musket, loaded it with small lead pellets and fired into the crowd from his window. The shot hit two boys. One survived. The other was 11 year old Christopher Cider. He died that evening. Sam Adams understood immediately what he'd been handed. He organized a funeral the likes of which Boston had never seen. The procession started at the Liberty Tree, the giant elm in Boston, where the Sons of Liberty held their gatherings. Four hundred schoolboys led the procession from the Liberty Tree with walking in pairs in front of the small coffin. There was an inscription on the top. Roughly translated from Latin, it read, innocence itself is not safe. Over 2,000 mourners trailed them, more than 10% of the entire city's population. And the rage against British soldiers, soldiers who technically had nothing to do with the killing of a child by a civilian, boiled over. Eight days later, on the morning of March 2, an off duty British soldier named Patrick Walker strolled into a workshop where rope was made. A place called A Rope Walk. It was owned by a Boston merchant named John Gray, and Walker was looking for some part time work to pick up. One of the employees, a man named William Green, looked him up and down and said, soldier, do you want work? Walker said, yes. Greene replied, well then, go and clean my outhouse. Walker swung at him and within seconds the whole workshop was involved. Several rope makers, including a 51 year old named Samuel Gray, no relation to the owner, beat Walker bloody and threw him into the street. Walker came back with a dozen of his fellow soldiers. The two sides went at each other with clubs and the ropemakers won. But the brawl wasn't over. Over the next two days, soldiers kept Showing up at the workshop looking for round two. And the rope makers kept meeting them at the door with sticks and lengths of cable. A British sergeant from the 29th Regiment went missing somewhere in the violence and was never seen again. Historians still don't know if he deserted, was killed, or just walked away from his post. It had only been 11 days since Boston had buried a child, and in just three more days, five more bodies would join him. There's one more person you need to meet before we get to that night. Because he wasn't just a victim. He was by some accounts, the man who started it. His name was Crispus attucks. He was 47 years old, tall, broad shouldered and and physically imposing. Almost everything we know about Crispus Atticus life comes from one document, a newspaper advertisement printed in the Boston Gazette on October 2, 1750. That ad was placed by a wealthy man named William Brown in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was offering a reward for the return of a runaway slave. The ad described, quote, a Mulatto fellow about 27 years of age named Crispus, 6ft 2 inches high, short curled hair. The age fits, the height fits, the location fits, framing him as about 20 miles west of Boston. Historians agree this is almost certainly Crispus Attucks. He was born around 1723. His father is believed to have been an African man named Prince Younger, brought to Massachusetts in chains. And his mother, by most accounts, was a Wampanoag woman, a member of the indigenous nation that had lived in the region for thousands of years before the English arrived. Crispus Attucks was multiracial African and Native American, and he was born into slavery. When he was about 27, he ran William Brown offered 10 pounds for his return, a serious reward, in 1750. But Adducks was never recaptured. For the next 20 years, he made his living on the water. He worked on whaling boats and merchant ships. In between trips, he came back to Boston for part time work. It was a dangerous life. Any white person could try to claim him as a runaway. The British navy could grab him off the street and force him to serve at sea. By March of 1770, all those threats were pressing in on Christmas addicts at once. He was 47 years old, working alongside the rope makers who just brawled with British soldiers, the same soldiers who were taking the part time jobs he needed to survive. He had every reason in the world to resent them. And on March 5, 1770, he met them face to face. That day it was quiet. By Boston standards at least. It was Monday cold. There was snow on the ground from a recent storm. The moon was nearly full and the streets were unusually bright. Around 8pm outside the Custom House on King Street, a 30 year old British private named Hugh White stood guard in a small wooden sentry box. The Custom House was where Britain's tax money was collected and stored. It was the most symbolic building in Boston, the literal headquarters of everything the colonies were resisting. And in less than an hour, the fight he started would leave five people dead.
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- [16:15]
Carter Roy
Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th, or you can binge all of them right now. Add free free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [17:06]
Vanessa Richardson
It was just after 8pm on Monday, March 5, 1770. Hugh White was on watch outside the Custom House on King street in Boston. About half a block away Way, a 16 year old wig maker's apprentice named Edward Garrick was walking with a friend and he was about to make the worst decision of his life. Garrick worked for a Boston wig maker named John Pedmont, and he had a grudge. A few weeks earlier, a British officer named Captain John Goldfinch had ordered a wig from Piedmont's shop. As far as Edward Garrick knew, Goldfinch had picked up the wig but now never paid for it. What Garrick didn't realize was that Goldfinch had actually settled the bill. Piedmont just hadn't bothered to tell his apprentice. So when Garrick spotted Captain Goldfinch walking down the street that evening, he saw a chance to embarrass him. He called out, there goes the fellow that won't pay my Master for dressing his hair. Captain Goldfinch kept walking. He didn't engage. But Hugh White, the sentry, had heard the whole, whole thing. And he wasn't going to let some teenager insult a British officer on his watch. He called out to Garrick. He said the officer was a gentleman and if he owed anything, he'd pay. Garrick shot back that there were no gentlemen left in the regiment. Hearing that, Hugh White stepped out of his sentry box, walked across the street and slammed the butt of his musket into the side of Edward Garrick's head. Garrick went down. His friend started screaming. A few passersby stopped to see what was happening, and within minutes, a small crowd had gathered around Hugh White, calling him names. Things like Bloody Lobsterback, which was a slur for British soldiers, a reference to their red coats. Someone threw a piece of ice, then another. Hugh White backed up the steps of the Custom House and loaded his musket. He banged the butt of it against the door behind him, yelling for backup. He pointed the muzzle at the growing crowd. The crowd kept building. 20 people. 30, 50. And then, somewhere in the city, a bell started ringing. So in 18th century Boston, church bells had one urgent meaning. Fire. The entire city was built out of wood. If a fire got out of control, it could burn down the whole town. So when you heard a bell, you grabbed a bucket and ran toward the sound. The bell at the brick meeting house started ringing that night. Historians still don't know who pulled the rope, but Bostonians came running out of their houses with their buckets, ready to fight a fire that didn't exist. They filled the streets. They asked where the fire was. They were told there wasn't one. They were told that British soldiers had attacked an apprentice. So within one minutes, those same people ran to King Street a few blocks away in a building called the Main Guard. The British officer in charge that night was hearing the same bells. His name was Captain Thomas Preston. He was about 47 years old, an Irish born officer in the 29th Regiment. And he had a decision to make. If he did nothing, his sentry might get killed by the mob. But if he sent soldiers in, he was breaking the law. The Massachusetts colony forbade soldiers from firing on civilians without a written order from a local judge. Preston paced the floor of the Main guard for nearly 30 minutes, weighing it. Finally, he made his Choice. He picked seven soldiers from the 29th Regiment, ordered them to fall in line, and marched them across King street toward Hugh White. The crowd parted just enough to let them through. Preston pulled Hugh White out of the sentry box and tried to march everyone back to the main guard. But the crowd had grown too big, and soon the mob closed in. The soldiers ended up in a loose semicircle on the steps of the Custom House. Eight British soldiers and one officer on one side, somewhere between 50 and 400 Bostonians on the other. The real number has been debated for centuries, but whatever the exact amount was, the math was bad. One of the men in that Crowd was a 19 year old clerk at a Boston bookstore named Henry Knox. Five years later, Knox would become a general in the Continental army, the colonial fighting force that won American independence. After the war, George Washington would name him the first Secretary of War of the United States. But on this night In March of 1770, he was just a teenager who'd run out of his shop on Cornhill Street. Knox shouldered his way through the crowd, grabbed Captain Preston's coat, and warned him directly if his soldiers fired, he was a dead man. Preston told Knox he was aware of the situation. Then he turned back to the crowd. Captain Preston shouted for the crowd to disperse. They didn't. People started throwing things at the soldiers. Snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, pieces of coal, sticks of firewood. The soldiers muskets were loaded but uncocked. They couldn't fire without first pulling back the hammer. And then, near the front of the crowd, a tall man stepped forward holding a club. Witnesses would later identify him as Crispus Attucks. What happened next was disputed for months. Months. Some witnesses said Adducks grabbed the bayonet of one of the soldiers, a private named Hugh Montgomery, and tried to wrench it out of his hands. Others said addicts just struck Montgomery with the club. Either way, Montgomery hit the ice. Then he got back up and shouted, damn you, fire. He pulled the trigger. There's a pause here that's hard to estimate. Witnesses gave times ranging from six seconds to over a minute. And to picture what was happening in that gap, you have to know how a musket worked. In 1770, after Montgomery fired, his weapon was empty. To reload, he'd have to bite open a paper cartridge with his teeth, pour the gunpowder down the barrel, ram a lead ball after it, and re cock the hammer. That whole process took 15 to 20 seconds, even for a trained soldier in calm conditions. So during that pause, Montgomery was reloading. The other soldiers were watching him. The crowd was still surging forward, and at some point, confused, terrified, or just thinking they'd heard a command, the other soldiers seemed to think Preston had ordered them to fire One by one they did. Crispus Attucks took two musket balls to the chest and collapsed onto the snow. By every account, he was the first first to die. A few feet away, the soldier, Matthew Kilroy, fired into the head of the 51 year old rope maker, Samuel Gray. The same Samuel Gray who'd been at the brawl with Patrick Walker three days earlier. Gray was killed instantly. A sailor named James Caldwell was hit twice in the chest and never made it off the street. A 17 year old apprentice ivory carver named Samuel Maverick had come outside thinking there was a fire and he caught a ricochet that tore through his abdomen. He'd live until the next morning. And then there was Patrick Carr, a 30 year old Irish immigrant who worked at a Queen street workshop making leather breeches. A musket ball passed through his hip. Carr would make it another nine days before dying. And on his deathbed he would say something that changed the course of history. But we'll get to that eventually. Captain Preston shouted, stop firing. And then something extraordinary happened. The Bostonians didn't run. According to Preston's own deposition months later, the crowd surged forward, not back. They grabbed at the soldiers bayonets and musket muzzles with their bare hands. They were trying to physically stop the soldiers from firing again. The soldiers reloaded but didn't shoot. The crowd pushed past them to drag the bodies off the street. Five colonists were dead or dying. Six more were wounded. The Boston Massacre was over. It had lasted less than five minutes. Word reached the acting governor, Thomas Hutchinson, within the hour. He rushed to King street and confronted Captain Preston in of front, in front of the crowd. Then he climbed up to the balcony of the townhouse, the building right behind King Street. He told the crowd, quote, let the law have its course. I will live and die by the law. End quote. By three in the morning, Captain Preston was in jail. The eight soldiers who'd fired into the crowd were arrested over the following hours. They were all charged with murder. And within days, the two British regiments occupying Boston had been forced to evacuate the city, moving to a fortified island in the harbor called Castle William. Sam Adams had been pushing for that for nearly two years. He'd just gotten everything he wanted. Within 48 hours of the shooting, Sam Adams and his allies started building the story that would become the founding myth of of the American Revolution. They gathered statements from over 90 eyewitnesses and published them in a pamphlet called A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. The title alone tells you the angle the Bostonians were innocent. The soldiers were murderers. The crowd hadn't provoked anyone. And then there was the image. Three weeks after the shooting, a Boston silversmith named Paul Revere, who you probably know from a different night in 1775, published a hand colored engraving. It was titled the Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston. The image showed seven British soldiers in a firing line, all shooting at the same moment. On orders from Captain Preston. The Bostonians were unarmed and helpless. The sky was sunny and above the custom house, Revere had painted a st sign reading Butcher's Hall. A sign that didn't actually exist. It was a brilliant piece of propaganda. It was also stolen, copied almost stroke for stroke from another Boston artist named Henry Pelham, who'd shown Revere his version a week earlier. Pelham was furious. Revere didn't care. His version became the image that would shape how Americans remembered the Boston Massacre. Massacre for the next two and a half centuries. Meanwhile, in a jail across town, Captain Thomas Preston was trying to find a lawyer. He needed someone who was willing to defend the most hated man in Boston. An officer who, according to the city's most powerful propagandist, had ordered his men to gun down innocent civilians. Every lawyer in Boston turned him down. Every lawyer that is, except for a 34 year old attorney working out of an office near the townhouse. He was a Harvard educated patriot. He was Sam Adams second cousin. And he believed that even the most hated defendants in America deserved a fair trial. His name was John Adams and on the morning of March 6, he said yes.
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Vanessa Richardson
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- [30:08]
Vanessa Richardson
On the morning of March 6, 1770, less than 12 hours after the Boston Massacre, a 34 year old lawyer named John Adams agreed to defend the eight British soldiers and their captain on charges of murder. He knew exactly what it would cost him. He was a patriot. His cousin Sam was running the smear campaign against the very men he just agreed to represent. Half his city would call him a traitor. He took the case anyway. And in doing so, he set up one of the most important trials in American history. First, a quick word on who John Adams actually was. At this point, he wasn't the founding father we think of today, yet he wasn't a delegate to anything. He hadn't written anything famous. He was a country lawyer from a small town called Braintree, just south of Boston. He'd gone to Harvard, married a woman named Abigail, and built up one of the busiest legal practices in Massachusetts. He also had a deeply held belief that everyone, including soldiers accused of murdering his own neighbors, deserved a competent defense. He would later write in his diary that taking the case was, quote, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of his whole life. His fee for defending PRESTON and the eight soldiers? 18 guineas. Depending on how you calculate it, that's about $5,000 in today's money for the most politically dangerous case in colonial America. Adams brought on two other lawyers to help. Robert Omuti, a Boston loyalist with deep ties to the Crown, and a 26 year old lawyer named Josiah Quincy, a Harvard grad who'd taken over one of Boston's top law practices at age 21. Quincy's older brother, Samuel Quincy, just happened to be one of the two prosecutors. Yes, you heard that right. The Quincy brothers were going to be on opposite sides of the most important trial of their lives. But the trial wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson made a strategic decision. He was going to delay it. He'd let public anger cool. He'd let memories fade. He'd let the soldiers sit in jail for seven months while Boston's rage died down. Then, In October of 1770, the proceedings finally began and Adams made his first surprise move. Adams asked the court to try Captain Preston separately from his eight soldiers. This was brilliant and ethically questionable because Preston's defense and the soldier's defense were going to point in opposite directions. Preston's argument, I never gave the order to fire. The soldiers acted on their own. The soldiers Argument. We only fired because our captain told us to. We were obeying orders. If both were tried together, the jury would see them blaming each other and probably convict them all. But if they were tried separately, each side could make its strongest case without contradicting the other. The soldiers in their jail cell figured out exactly what was happening. They sent a panicked letter to the court begging to be tried with their captain. They argued that they'd only been following his orders, that disobeying him would have gotten them executed by the British army. If they went down, they wanted him to go down with them. The court denied the request. Preston would be tried first. The soldiers would have to wait. Captain Preston's trial, formerly known as Rex v preston, ran from October 24 to October 30, 1770 in the Queen Street Courthouse. The central question was simple. Did Preston order his men to fire? If yes, he was a murderer. If no, he was a bystander. More than 40 witnesses testified. Some said they heard Preston shout fire. Others said the only person who shouted that word was Hugh Montgomery, the soldier who'd been knocked down by Crispus Attucks's club. The most compelling witness for the prosecution was a man named Daniel Calef. He testified that he'd been standing close enough to see Preston's face by moonlight that night and that he'd watched the captain. Preston's mouth formed the word fire twice. It was a vivid, specific, confident piece of testimony. But Adams had something stronger. He had reasonable doubt. He argued that Preston was standing in front of his men when the shooting started. If Preston had ordered them to fire, he would have been shot by his own soldiers. Adams argued that fact alone was proof that Preston never gave the command. Modern historians are split on whether Preston gave the order. But for that jury on that day, Adams argument was enough. On October 30, 1770, they returned a verdict of not guilty. Captain Preston was a free man. That left the eight soldiers and their trial began on November 27. This one was harder. There was no question that the soldiers had fired their muskets. Five colonists were dead. The whole city had seen it. So Adams shifted his strategy. He argued self defense. Adams called witness after witness to the stand. They described a violent mob. Men swinging clubs, throwing chunks of ice the size of fists and threatening to kill the soldiers where they stood. Adams's argument was simple. The soldiers hadn't fired in anger. They'd fired because they believed they were about to die. And then he brought in the testimony that would change everything. Remember Patrick Carr, the 30 year old Irish breach maker who'd been shot through the hip and lived another nine days. In those nine days, he'd told his doctor exactly what he'd seen. His doctor was a man named John Jeffries. And Jeffries took the stand for the defense. Jeffries testified that in the days before Carr died, he'd told him something extraordinary. Carr said he'd lived in Ireland and had seen British soldiers face down angry mobs many times before. And he'd never seen soldiers show more restraint than the ones on King Street. That night, Carr also said something the prosecution hadn't expected. He said he forgave the soldier who shot him. He believed the man had fired in self defense. This was the first time in American history that a dying person's words had been used as testimony in a criminal trial. What's now called a dying declaration. Under the rules of evidence at the time, a person about to die wasn't allowed to lie because they had no reason to. Their last words were considered the truth. And Patrick Carr's last words said the soldiers were weren't murderers. When it came time for closing arguments, John Adams delivered a speech that would echo through American law for the next 250 years. He told the jury, quote, facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. He laid out the law plainly. If the soldiers had been assaulted in a way that put their lives in danger, they were legally allowed to kill in self defense. If they hadn't been in that much danger but had still been attacked with snowballs, oyster shells, sticks, clubs, then the charge would be reduced from murder to manslaughter. The jury took his words to heart. Six of the eight soldiers were found not guilty on all charges. The two soldiers, soldiers identified as shooters Hugh Montgomery, who fired first, and Matthew Kilroy, who shot Samuel Gray in the head, were found guilty of manslaughter. The maximum sentence for manslaughter was death by hanging. But there was a loophole. An old English legal tradition called benefit of clergy, originally meant for actual priests in the Middle Ages, had evolved into a one time get out of the jail card that any literate man could invoke. If you could read a passage from the Bible aloud in court, your death sentence was commuted. Montgomery and Kilroy invoked it. Their punishment was reduced to being branded on the right thumb with the letter M for manslayer and being set free. Two soldiers branded, six soldiers acquired, acquitted. One captain acquitted and five colonists in unmarked graves. That was the legal result of the Boston Massacre. So I want to ask you, was John Adams a hero for defending these men? Was the verdict fair? Or did Boston let five of its own people die without justice? Leave a comment wherever you listen. I'd love to hear it. And now, here's the strangest part of the story. After the trials ended, John Adams and Sam Adams went right back to working together. Sam continued running his propaganda machine. Every year on March 5, he organized public memorial speeches, long, fiery denunciations of of British tyranny. They kept going for 13 years straight, and John never wavered either. On the third anniversary of the massacre, he wrote in his diary that defending the British soldiers was, quote, one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. Both Adam's cousins, in their different ways, helped build the same revolution. Sam built it through outrage. John built it through through law. And six years after the trial, both of them would be standing in Philadelphia signing the Declaration of Independence. As for the victims, they were laid to rest together in a single grave in Boston's granary burying ground, just blocks from where they were shot. Boston custom at the time required black residents to be buried separately. The city made an exception for Christmas Eve attics, so all five could be laid to rest side by side. Patrick Carr joined them nine days after the shooting, after his deathbed testimony had helped save his killer's life. In 1888, more than a century later, Boston put up a monument to the five men on Boston Common. It's still there today. The bronze figure on top depicts a woman, Liberty, breaking free, free of her chains. At the base is a relief panel showing Crispus Attucks lying in the foreground where he fell. I want to leave you with one thing. The Boston Massacre has been told as a hundred different stories over the past two and a half centuries. It was a massacre of innocent people and a justified act of self defense. It was a propaganda triumph for Sam Adams and a literary legal triumph for John Adams. It was a founding act of American liberty and a tragedy of poor leadership and worse luck. All of those things are true. Five men died on a snowy street in Boston because of a 16 year old's grudge over a wig and a 30 year old sentry who overreacted. They died because a captain made a hard choice under pressure and a quick crowd kept pressing forward. And because Crispus Attucks, a man who'd spent 20 years running from the people who'd enslaved him, finally decided he wasn't going to back down. Sam Adams made them into martyrs. John Adams made them into a legal precedent. Paul Revere made them into a piece of propaganda we're still looking at 250 years later. Whether the Boston Massacre was a massacre, a self defense killing, or the first shot of a revolution, it all depends on who's telling the story. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll see hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Theories, Cults and Crimes Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Przovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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