A decade before America’s original No Kings movement, Ben Franklin stood in London before the House of Commons and — while attempting to explain in some small way the American mind — warned against sending troops to America to quell unrest. “I do not see how a military force can be applied to that purpose,” Franklin declared, adding, prophetically: “They will not find a rebellion. They may indeed make one.” His words fell on deaf ears. In October 1768 nearly a thousand redcoats marched into Boston, a trail of artillery behind them.
As we limp our broken way toward the Fourth of July, it helps to remember the political lessons forged on those Boston streets. Protests are as much a part of the American experiment as baseball and barbecue. And nothing more effectively powers a low-simmering resistance than disproportionate force. Many Bostonians, who regarded a standing army in time of peace as a deep violation of American rights, believed the Crown was doing its best to make the colonists look like insurrectionists. It had manufactured a crisis, dispatching troops on dubious charges to establish arbitrary power and, as one paper noted in mid-March 1770, “to quell a spirit of liberty.” It can be dangerous to mistake a protest for a rebellion. Insurrection was nowhere in the air when those troops arrived. Eight years later, the imposition of troops would figure among the grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
Boston’s opposition leaders made the most of the redcoats’ arrival. “No man can pretend to say,” Samuel Adams declared in the pages of the town’s most popular newspaper, “that peace and good order of the community is so secure with soldiers quartered in the body of a city as without them.” He too knew how to manufacture a crisis, publishing lurid accounts of redcoats who daily threatened to blow women’s brains out, knock children down with cutlasses and burn Boston to the ground.
The people of Boston responded by stalking, threatening and hissing at the soldiers, pelting them with stones, mud, spit, oyster shells, snowballs and pieces of brick. They made trophies of swords and epaulets. They lost no opportunity to inform British grenadiers that, the grenadiers complained, they were “bloody-back thieving dogs” or “damned rascally scoundrel lobster sons of bitches.”
Tensions came to a head on the evening of March 5, 1770, when, in the center of town, snowballs and oyster shells finally elicited lead balls. After an attack on a sentry, a regimental captain ordered his men to level their guns. In a tense, tight space, a stick flew through the air, followed by the crackle of muskets. There would be five casualties, among them a half-African, half-Native American sailor named Crispus Attucks, shot twice through the chest and later deemed the first victim of the American Revolution.
Wildly different accounts of an evening that remains clouded in murk circulated through the colonies. Dueling versions made their way to London. Denouncing “the Horrid Massacre,” one pamphlet claimed the Crown had falsely accused the province of being in a state of rebellion, then did its utmost to drive it there. “The Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston” reduced the skirmish to a “ridiculous fray” and painted the people as the aggressors. No other piece of propaganda worked the magic of Paul Revere’s indelible engraving. In a scene drawn liberally from the imagination, a crisp line of soldiers fires into a huddled crowd. All the misery is on one side, all the rage on the other. There is no snowball or oyster shell in sight. (In most versions of the engraving, Attucks has become white.) So much did Revere’s engraving misrepresent the scene that at the soldiers’ trial, jurors would be warned against it.
The events of the night proved a boon to the opposition. In firm possession of the moral high ground, Samuel Adams could speak now of rights trampled rather than rights imperiled. Could the side with the guns truly claim it had fired in self-defense? The soldiers could have retreated, he argued. (They had been backed against a wall.) Who could say, in the dark, whether soldiers or civilians had brandished clubs?
Adams arranged as well for an annual commemoration and oration. Bells rang throughout Boston on March 5, 1771, when Paul Revere’s North End home was decorated with dioramas, one of them featuring innocents splayed on the ground in pools of blood. John Hancock made his public speaking debut at the 1774 commemoration. Inveighing against the “mad pretensions” of the Crown and the “vile assassins” they had dispatched, he expressed the wish that history provide no sequels to the butchery of March 5. There were tears all around.
By the time Dr. Joseph Warren was tapped for the 1775 address, troops had returned in force to Boston. Samuel Adams escorted some 40 British officers to the best seats in the Old South Meeting House that March morning. The crowd spilled out in all directions; British officers perched uneasily on the pulpit stairs as Warren discoursed on the dangers of standing armies. He deplored the corruption in London: “Some demon, in an evil hour, suggested to a shortsighted financier, the hateful project of transferring the whole property of the king’s subjects in America to his subjects in Britain.” In every age, he asserted, the few racked their brains for the means by which to exploit the many. Warren pronounced liberty dearer than life. It was to be defended against the attacks of friends as well as enemies.
Three months later Warren was dead, felled by a shot to the head at Bunker Hill. For another two centuries, Britain would continue to deploy armies to suppress civil unrest across the globe, with mostly miserable results. After several failed attempts, Boston finally erected a monument to Crispus Attucks and the other massacre victims in 1888. Commemorations continued until the end of the Revolutionary War, when they were replaced by the Fourth of July, an artificial anniversary, but one that elevated a lofty meeting of the minds over a senseless exchange of volleys.
This month, President Trump deployed over 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles. “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he declared, vowing to “liberate” the city from protesters, or what he called “animals” and “insurrectionists.” If Ben Franklin had not been sufficiently explicit with his warning in 1766, John Adams was in 1770, when he defended the beleaguered Boston redcoats at their trial. “From the nature of things,” he observed, “soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace!”
Stacy Schiff, the author of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” is at work on a book about Benjamin Franklin.
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