Old State House and Boston Massacre Site
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Transcript
The Old State House stood at the center of royal government in Massachusetts. Just outside, on March 5, 1770, confrontation between townspeople and British soldiers ended with soldiers firing into a crowd. Five civilians died from the incident and its immediate aftermath.
Patriot activists rapidly named it the Boston Massacre. Paul Revere distributed an engraving, based on an earlier image by Henry Pelham, that showed an organized line of redcoats firing into a helpless crowd. It was extraordinarily effective propaganda — and not a neutral diagram of what witnesses described.
The legal aftermath complicates the picture further. John Adams, a leading Patriot, defended the soldiers because he believed they deserved a fair trial. Most were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native ancestry, was among those killed and later became a powerful symbol in Black abolitionist memory as well as revolutionary commemoration.
So was it a massacre? Five people were indeed killed by troops during a tense occupation. But the word was also political framing from the start. The important lesson is not to choose between “real event” and “propaganda.” It was both an actual deadly confrontation and an event immediately transformed into a weapon of persuasion.