The Boston Massacre produced two simultaneous and contradictory responses from the patriot leadership. Samuel Adams used it as propaganda. John Adams used it as a test of principle. Both things happened. Both are documented.
British troops had been stationed in Boston since 1768, sent by Parliament in response to colonial resistance to the Townshend Acts. Their presence was a constant source of tension. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a confrontation developed between a crowd of Bostonians and a small detachment of British soldiers guarding the Custom House on King Street. The sequence of events — who threw what, whether an order to fire was given, who fired first — was disputed in real time and remains disputed in the historical record. What is not disputed: five colonists were killed and six were wounded. The dead were Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr.
Crispus Attucks was the first to die. He was of African and Native American descent, likely an escaped enslaved person who had worked as a sailor and ropemaker. His name appears in a 1750 runaway slave advertisement. He became a significant figure in the abolitionist movement decades later — used as evidence that Black Americans had participated in the founding of the nation from its earliest crisis. The Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, produced by the Boston town committee three weeks after the event, documents all five deaths.
Three weeks after the killings, the Boston town meeting approved a committee report titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. The committee included James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton. The observations of events prior to the massacre were drawn up by Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren. The document included eyewitness depositions and was printed for circulation in England — its primary purpose was to present the colonial case to a British audience before the Crown's version arrived.
Paul Revere's engraving of the event — widely circulated — depicted British soldiers firing in a volley at a peaceful crowd on the order of their officer. Contemporary testimony in the trial record does not consistently support this depiction. The order to fire was one of the central contested facts at trial. The colonial leadership understood that the narrative of the event was as important as the event itself.
Captain Thomas Preston and eight soldiers were indicted for murder. They could not find legal representation. Every lawyer they approached declined. John Adams agreed to take the case. He was thirty-four years old, a committed patriot, a member of the Sons of Liberty, and a vocal opponent of British taxation policy. He took the case because he believed every person accused of a crime was entitled to a competent defense — and because he understood that the integrity of colonial justice would be measured by whether the accused received one.
Adams later wrote in his autobiography that taking the defense was "one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." The argument he made was not that the killings did not happen. It was that the evidence did not support murder — that the soldiers had been placed in a situation where they faced a threatening crowd, that it was unclear who gave any order to fire, and that the law required proof of intent to commit murder, not merely proof that someone had died.
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.
The trial of Captain Preston was held separately in October 1770 and ended in acquittal. The trial of the soldiers — Rex v. Wemms — began November 27, 1770. Adams's minutes of the Crown evidence survive at Founders Online. The trial ran for several days. Adams delivered his closing argument December 3–4.
The jury returned its verdicts on December 5, 1770. The verdicts are documented at Founders Online.
Kilroy and Montgomery pleaded benefit of clergy — a legal provision that reduced the sentence for first-time offenders convicted of certain crimes. They were branded on the thumb and released. No soldier served prison time for the five deaths of March 5, 1770.
The Boston Massacre produced two simultaneous and contradictory facts, both documented in the primary record. The town of Boston produced a narrative of the event designed to persuade a British audience of colonial grievances. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren helped produce that narrative. At the same time, John Adams — a member of the same patriot movement — took the legal defense of the soldiers responsible for the deaths, argued for their acquittal on the evidence, and secured it for six of eight.
The propaganda and the defense were not in contradiction from Adams's perspective. The propaganda was about the political meaning of the event. The defense was about what the law required. Both could be true simultaneously: the killings were politically significant evidence of the dangers of a standing army quartered among civilians, and the specific soldiers charged did not meet the legal standard for murder. Adams wrote decades later that taking the case had cost him clients and social standing — and that he had no regret.
The Boston Massacre trial is one of the founding era's clearest documented examples of the principle that legal due process applies even when it is politically inconvenient. John Adams, arguing against the political interests of his own movement, secured acquittals for six British soldiers on the available evidence. The trial record is at Founders Online. His closing argument contains the "facts are stubborn things" passage — one of the most precise statements of evidentiary principle in the founding era. Both documents are linked below.