Boston Massacre Essay By: Shweta Veda The Boston Massacre; a violent clash between a patrolling British squad,

and a mob of colonists; took place on March 5, 1770. On March 5, a British squad was patrolling a colony, when they heard jeering from a nearby crowd. "Redcoats! Brits!" The soldiers turned around, only to be greeted by snowballs, and a flurry of insults. The colonists continued spurting out the insults, even as the soldiers met them with cold, hard stares. A snowball that was aiming toward a soldier; crumbled onto the ground as a bullet pierced its center. The British were taking action. Bullets penetrated colonists' chests, and legs. As they fell to the ground, the British stopped firing, straightened up their backs, and strutted away in an orderly fashion. In the Boston Massacre: there were five fatalities. Three colonists were killed immediately by the bullets, while two other colonists died later on from the wounds they received. One significant death was that of Crispus Attucks, a recently freed slave that had been on the run for almost all his life, which was then ended by the Boston Massacre. Although five may not seem like a huge number in our eyes; it was a huge number to the colonists. The British had just killed five unarmed, unprotected colonists. This was HUGE. If it were not for the monumental carving by Paul Revere, the Boston Massacre might have been forgotten, or have been a minor incident, in the minds of many colonists. Paul Revere, a carver, knew he had to do something to show the tyranny of the British against the colonists. In his engraving, he depicted about eight redcoats, all smiling, jovial, and sinister; shooting out into the helpless crowd of colonists. Surprisingly, Crispus Attucks, a major figure in the Boston Massacre, was shown as a white man laying bloody on the ground. Although Paul Revere did a great job on his provocative carving, he left out a couple of details that actually occurred on the day of the Boston Massacre. First, Reveres engraving showed a blue sky; when the riot occurred after nine o clock. Second, on the day of the Boston Massacre, the ground was covered in ice, and snow. In Paul Reveres engraving, it looked like it was a sunny summer afternoon! Now, here comes the big question: why did the British soldiers feel the need to fire into the crowd of colonists? Well, it all started when a group of British colonists spotted a group of British soldiers walking around in their town. Upon seeing them, the colonists spurted into a boiling, angry mess. They shouted horrendous insults, and pelted the British soldiers with rocks, and snowballs. The British retaliated, pointing their guns towards the heaving chests of the colonists in the front, aimed, and shot! Surprisingly, the British soldiers that took away the lives of five Bostonians, never received any punishment. Their actions were taken to court, and the soldiers were defended by lawyers Josiah Quincy, and John Adams. The trial ran from October 24th to 30th at the Queen Street Courthouse. After six tense days in court, the Boston jury made his verdict: the soldiers had acted by means of self-defense; therefore, no punishment was to be given. This sparked a deep, dark fury in the Boston families who had lost their fellow family members, and other colonists in the near states. Those flames of fury could only be quenched by one thing: FREEDOM. The Boston Massacre was a major milestone in history; a milestone that proclaimed to the colonists that it was time to fight for independence. Without the Boston Massacre, the antiBritish feeling that had been arising, might have fallen. Whatever one perceives the Boston

Massacre to be, we can all agree that it was a significant road, on the great American journey, to claiming Americas independence from Britain.