-By Warner Todd Huston
You may heave heard of the saying “nature abhors a vacuum”? In essence, it means that once something disappears nature quickly fills the hole left behind. Well, in history there is another axiom about “vacuums.” It is that nothing occurs in one. In this short piece, we’ll take a moment to find out why the Boston Massacre was one of the final straws that severed the bonds of affection between the American Colonists and the British Crown and we’ll see that it didn’t occur in a proverbial vacuum. Far from being a sudden action or one that happened without precedent, the Boston Massacre was the culmination, at least philosophically so, of actions of a similar nature that had been happening in both England and the Colonies for months beforehand.
Any student of the American Revolutionary era knows of the Boston Massacre. It was that incident that occurred on March 5, 1770 in Boston, Massachusetts during which five colonists were killed by a contingent of skittish British Infantry. It was an incident inextricably linked to the beginning of the Revolution that founded the United States of America.
The row began when British Infantry private Hugh White was confronted by a townsman claiming that the soldier hadn’t paid a debt. The argument went on for some time during which more colonists gathered. At one point, Private White struck a young man with his musket butt angering the crowd further. Eventually, several hundred Bostonians gathered and began hurling insults at the beleaguered soldier causing several more British troops to come to White’s aid. Momentarily, one of the British troops was struck with a club and, once he regained his feet, the angered private fired his musket into the crowd. This startled the rest of the soldiers causing them to follow suit. It became clear later that the officer among them did not order his troops to open fire, but five colonists were killed in the incident nonetheless.
Continue reading “No Isolated Incident: Why Was the Boston Massacre so Shocking?”