The Worst and the Best Of America

The Boston Massacre, an incident in which British soldiers occupying Boston to quell rebellious behavior against taxation on the colonists were pelted with snowballs and stones and responded by firing on the crowd.  Five people were killed, including Crispus Attucks, a black sailor.  The event, which took place 250 years (a quarter of a millennium) ago today, was a shameful moment in American history, both in terms of the provocation of the soldiers and the response from the soldiers. It brought out the worst in Americans  But it also brought out the best.

A thirty-five-year-old lawyer from Quincy, Massachusetts agreed to represent the eight soldiers who fired on the crowd, along with Captain Thomas Preston, who was believed to have given the order to fire.  Adams was not popular for representing the defense, but he believed that the occupying British soldiers were still entitled to a fair trial.

Adams (above, from a 1766 portrait) was able to make the case for Captain Preston, showing how it it could not be determined that he had given an order to his soldiers to fire during the captain's October 1770  trial, which lasted a week.  Captain Preston was acquitted , because it was impossible to prove that he had ordered his soldiers to fire.  The other soldiers were tried in December, and Adams noted how the circumstances of the incident led to the British soldiers firing on the crowd, and he made his now-famous argument about jury decisions: 

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence . . ..  It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever." 

Two soldiers, who fired directly into the crowd were convicted of manslaughter, but Adams won an acquittal for the other six.  Even before there was a United States of America, an American proved that the right to a fair trial is essential to a functioning democracy.  That is at least an important legacy of the Boston Massacre as the Revolution itself.