The Boston Massacre

A Family History

Serena Zabin

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780544911192
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

"Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin'srich and highly enjoyablebook does just that."—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

A dramatic, untold "people's history" of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution.

The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs, and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabin's The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.

Notes

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Boston Marriages, BRCR: A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing Boston Marriages from 1752 to 1809 (vol. 30) (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1903)

Boston Selectmen’s Minutes, BRCR: A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston: Containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 to 1768 (vol. 20) (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1889) and A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston: Containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1769 through April 1775 (vol. 23) (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1893)

Boston Town Records, BRCR: A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records, 1758–1769 (vol. 16) (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1886) and A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records, 1770 through 1777 (vol 18) (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1887)

BPL: Boston Public Library

GP: Gage Papers, American Series, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

MHS: Massachusetts Historical Society

PANS: Public Archives of Nova Scotia

PRONI: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

SF: Suffolk Files, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives, Boston

TNA: The National Archives (UK)

Prologue

Bending over: For an analysis of the Pelham and Revere prints, see American Antiquarian Society, Paul Revere’s Engravings, rev. ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

Revere: See David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Two hundred and fifty: The most influential twentieth-century interpretation of the event was written by Hiller B. Zobel: The Boston Massacre, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970). His book is deeply sympathetic to the British government and army. On the Sons of Liberty side, see, most recently, Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution, Pivotal Moments in American History (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010). The most neutral (and convincing) interpretation is Eric Hinderaker, Boston’s Massacre (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

1. Families of Empire, 1765

Jane Chambers: ADM 36/6908, TNA. This muster roll contains the names of all the soldiers and the sixty-four women who traveled on the Thunderer; the report of their departure is in Stamford Mercury, “Ireland, Cork, June 10,” June 27, 1765.

The name: Every adult who embarked on a British navy ship—including soldiers and soldiers’ wives—was recorded on a list known as a “muster.” See ADM 36, TNA.

It may seem strange: Influential work considering families, sex, and intimacy in the creation of empires includes Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).

Women like Jane: Although historians who study the era of the American Revolution have never considered the importance of women in early modern armies to that conflict, military historians have long noted their presence in the British army. The best recent work on women in the eighteenth-century British army is Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), which focuses primarily on women who lived apart from their enlisted husbands. A careful collection of data for women in the British army during the Revolutionary War itself can be found in Don N. Hagist, “The Women of the British Army in America,” last modified 2002, http://www.revwar75.com/library/hagist/britwomen.htm. There are a few excellent studies of women in the British army in America during the Seven Years’ War, in particular, Paul E. Kopperman, “Soldiers’ Wives.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 60, no. 241 (Spring 1982): 14–34; Holly A. Mayer, “From Forts to Families: Following the Army into Western Pennsylvania, 1758–1766,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 130, no. 1 (2006): 5–43; and Sarah Fatherly, “Tending the Army,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 566–99. This newer work effectively refutes an older view, exemplified by Walter Hart Blumenthal, Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution (G. S. MacManus Co., 1952), that most women who traveled with armies were prostitutes. Groundbreaking work on European armies, such as Barton C. Hacker, “Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 643–71, and John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), focuses largely on the material—and sexual—support that women gave to the army, especially before 1650. The most significant study of women in the Continental army remains Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution (Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

“scum of every county”: Campbell Dalrymple, A Military Essay. Containing Reflections on the Raising, Arming, Cloathing, and Discipline of the British Infantry and Cavalry; with Proposals for the Improvement of the Same. By Campbell Dalrymple, Esq; Lieutenant Colonel to the King’s Own Regiment of Dragoons. Part the First (London: 1761), 8. For more evidence on the attitudes of officers, see Kopperman, “Soldier’s Wives.”

The army offered: Peter Way, “‘The Scum of Every County, the Refuse of Mankind’: Recruiting the British Army in the Eighteenth Century,” in Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 291–330; Arthur N. Gilbert, “An Analysis of Some Eighteenth-Century Army Recruiting Records,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 54, no. 217 (1976): 38–47; Richard Middleton, “The Recruitment of the British Army, 1755–1762,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 67, no. 272 (1989): 226–38. As a native of Ulster, a predominantly Protestant region, Matthew would have been a particularly welcome Irish recruit, since British officials greatly feared accidentally recruiting Catholics. Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 209.

“people are so full of bread”: Nathaniel Nisbitt, Lifford, to [Earl of Abercorn], August 10, 1759, D623/A/33/108, PRONI.

“Soldiers in most quarters”: Roger Lamb, Memoir of His Own Life (Dublin, UK: J. Jones, 1811), 4.

Matthew Chambers: Chambers’s age and birthplace can be found in WO 121/9/284. In the 1760s, nearly half of the enlisted men had been trained in a skilled trade, such as shoemaking, tailoring, or weaving. Another 40 percent had been manual laborers, building roads or chopping wood. See Peter Way, “Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763–1764,” The William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2000): 769. For marriage, see Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century, chapter 3.

“in general so abandoned”: Bennett Cuthbertson, A System for the Compleat Interior Management and Œconomy of a Battalion of Infantry. By Bennet Cuthbertson, Esq; Captain in His Majesty’s Fifth Regiment of Foot, And Late Adjutant to the Same (Dublin: Boulter Grierson, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1768), 194.

“officers should frequently”: Ibid., 35.

“the service suffers”: General Wolfe’s Instructions to Young Officers: Also His Orders for a Batt...