We all learned about the Boston Massacre in school when we studied the American Revolution. We saw the image of the uniformed British soldiers firing on the unarmed citizens. We learned that it was one of the events that pushed us inexorably to the point of war. But we didn’t learn the whole story. I guess there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, it’s a complicated story, and that would make it more difficult to teach about, especially for younger students. Also, with the full story, the “bad guys” are not completely without merit, and the “good guys” were not perfect. Not the easiest thing to teach impressionable youngsters, I guess.
However, as an adult, I really appreciated this more nuanced examination of the event. Why is the subtitle “A Family History”? Well, not only did colonists at that point in time see themselves as “children” of the mother country of England, but the English troops had been stationed long enough in Boston that several had married local women. There was not enough room to quarter all of the troops at the fort at Castle Island, so many soldiers had to stay in Boston proper, either renting rooms in private homes, or living in the upper level of Faneuil Hall, or in warehouses. And a married soldier was not as unusual as it might sound. A number of soldiers had left Great Britain with their wives and children in tow. The army was aware of and sometimes facilitated this arrangement.
The other part of this account which is left out history books for kids is the trial of the soldiers. The lawyers on both sides called a great number of eye witnesses, many of whom swore to completely contradictory accounts. Even today, going through the trial transcripts, it is difficult to determine what actually happened. What I had forgotten, if I ever heard it before, was the verdict in all of these cases, which I’m sure was not popular at the time. But with the benefit of time, they seem to have been justified.
If this was your family, how would you research them? I was impressed with all of the detail this author included about the marriages of the soldiers with the local women, and the baptisms of the children from these marriages. She apparently thoroughly researched the Boston City and marriage records for the time period. She also quotes from records left from letters and diaries of Bostonians who wrote about this period, and from newspaper articles. Local research is not easy, but can yield a lot of information.