The snowball fight of March 5, 1770, is a well known story. British soldiers guarding the Boston custom house fired into an unruly mob of dock workers, killing five of them. When Samuel Adams published an account of the shootings, the episode became known as the Boston Massacre. Little did the Patriot leader know the strange chain of events that would follow his expose.
After Sam Adam's publication, the colonists were furious and demanded justice. So vociferous were they, that the British authorities decided to make scapegoats of the Redcoats.
The first to be on trial was Captain Preston. He was found innocent. That left the eight soldiers, who now realized more than ever that they needed a good lawyer. Had their captain been found guilty, that would have rendered them guiltless; they had just been following orders. But with Preston having found innocent, the soldiers were now on their own-hung out to dry. At that point, the best lawyer in Boston stepped in to take their case and save their lives.
When the trial opened, the defense attorney, who was himself a colonial, was held in almost as much ridicule as the soldiers. Cold stares surveyed him in court, and he met with outright hostility on the street. Nevertheless, he persevered.
The defense counsel maintained that the mob into which the defendants had shot, was in reality an unlawful assembly. So brilliantly did he argue the case that, after two and a half, the jury came back with a not guilty verdict for six of the soldiers and manslaughter verdicts for the other two.
None of the defendants in the Boston Massacre went to jail. even the two guilty ones, claiming a common law custom, escaped prison by being branded.
Thus it was that eight British redcoats owed their lives and their freedom to a colonial lawyer who laid aside his own political feelings to do his duty. For you see, that Boston attorney who successfully defended the soldiers of the Boston Massacre was none other than John Adams, our second president, one of the most ardent anti-British patriots Massachusetts ever produced.
