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Short, overweight, and quick-tongued, John Adams hardly fits the model of the typical Founding Father. But Adams’s contributions to American independence and the formation of the United States government were on a par with his contemporaries. Adams penned defenses of American rights in the 1770s and was one of the earliest advocates of colonial independence from Great Britain. The author of the Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights of 1780, Adams was also a champion of individual liberty. He favored the addition of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, and indeed the federal Bill in many respects resembled his Declaration. As president, he kept America out of war with France, but signed the unpopular (and probably unconstitutional) Alien and Sedition Acts to do so. Adams was a principled man who was willing to take unpopular stands. For example, his legal defense of the British soldiers who killed five Bostonians in the infamous “Massacre” of 1770 lost him law clients and friends. Though he often spoke his mind openly, Adams trusted few people aside from his wife Abigail, his only confidante. To her he once lamented that “mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me.” For many years such contemporaries as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson obscured him from the gaze of posterity. But in recent years, Adams’s contributions have been reevaluated and the man whom Thomas Jefferson called “a colossus of independence” has assumed his rightful place among his fellow Founders esteemed by history. |
John Adams and the Boston Massacre The twelve men of the jury sat down and waited for the trial to begin. It was October 24, 1770. British officer, Captain Thomas Preston, would face them alone, accused of giving the order to fire on colonials in what came to be known as the Boston Massacre. The men under his command would go to trial a month later. He and his men had been in jail for seven months, arrested after the conflict in the streets of Boston the night of March 5, 1770, left five colonials dead and another six wounded. The fate of the British soldiers would rest in the hands of an impartial jury. Preston’s jury was composed of all men, only two of whom were from Boston. (Even Preston’s defense attorney, John Adams, was from nearby Quincy.) The jurors heard the testimony of eyewitnesses on each side in a trial that would last five days. They were the foreman William Frobisher, and jurors Joseph Trescott, Neal McIntyre, Thomas Mayo, Josiah Sprague, Joseph Guild, and Jonathan Parker. Five men—Gilbert DeBlois, Philip Dumaresque,William Hill, William Wait Wallis, and James Barrick— were pulled from the trial’s onlookers to fill the jury. These men had the responsibility of determining whether Preston gave the order to fire on the colonials. The men were taking a great risk to serve on the jury. The mood in Boston was feverishly against the soldiers. Earlier, a citizens’ committee had demanded their arrest, as well as the removal of all British troops from the city. Patriots seized the opportunity to whip up public sentiment against the British.Copies of A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston and Paul Revere’s pro-colonial (and largely inaccurate) engraving of the event were wildly popular.
Concerned about the effect of public sentiment on the trial, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to persuade the chief justice of the Superior Court of Judicature to delay. He hoped that the public furor would subside so that, he said, “people may have time to cool.” In the end, the jury was also sequestered because of the great attention the trial was getting in town and in newspapers. The twelve men were acutely aware of their civic responsibility. Doubtless these men had read accounts or seen the emotional engraving of the Boston Massacre before they sat on the jury. A beautiful steeple in the background, the foreground of the engraving shows a straight line of red-coated British troops calmly firing on a helpless crowd, many of whom falling to the ground, wounded and bleeding. Behind the row of soldiers stands an officer with his hand raised, ordering the attack. “Was that officer in the picture Thomas Preston?” they might have wondered. When the trial began, the jury heard Daniel Calef’s testimony: “I looked the Officer in the face when he gave the word and saw his mouth. He had on a red Coat, yellow Jacket and Silver laced hat, no trimming on his Coat. The Prisoner is the Officer I mean.” On the other hand, defense witness Andrew, servant to Oliver Wendell, told the jury “I jump’d back and heard a voice cry. . . . The Officer was standing before me with his face towards the People. I am certain the voice came from beyond him.” The jury had to make sense of two contradictory descriptions of the same event. Had Captain Preston ordered the men to shoot citizens, or had he not ordered the attack at all? Even if he had ordered the men to fire, was it justified? They had to come to this decision without hearing from Captain Preston, who was not permitted to testify. What would these responsible citizens decide? They were sequestered and lived on “biscett[s] and cheese and syder” along with “sperites licker.” They deliberated a short time—only a few hours—and rendered their verdict. They could not determine that Preston had given the order to fire on the colonials, and they found him not guilty. After the trial, Captain Preston left Boston, moved to Castle William in Boston Harbor, and eventually returned to England. After rendering a verdict they knew would be terribly unpopular, the twelve jury members went back to their daily lives as citizens of Massachusetts, satisfied that they had carried out their civic responsibility. A month later, twelve different men walked into the same Queen Street Courthouse to begin the trial of the eight soldiers accused of firing into the crowd on that March evening. This time, not a single Bostonian was on the jury; the members were from Dorchester, Hingham, and other towns outside the city. These men were willing to serve on a jury for their neighboring community. They were faced with the responsibility of determining whether the soldiers had fired with malice or in self-defense. The prosecution based part of its case on the soldiers’ behavior before and after the massacre. One emotional witness swore that Private Matthew Killroy, the man who apparently shot citizen John Gray, “would never miss an opportunity, when he had one, to fire on the inhabitants, and that he had wanted to have an opportunity ever since he landed.” The prosecution tried to build its case that the soldiers had acted with malice and intent to kill. Led again by John Adams, the defense presented witnesses to support its theory. They argued that the soldiers fired in self-defense. They painted the picture of an out-of-control gang of colonial ruffians. They explained that soldiers were pelted with ice and other objects. They presented evidence that Crispus Attucks, a freed slave who died in the conflict, had attacked Private Montgomery with “a large cordwood stick.” The jury also heard evidence of one victim’s last words, in which he forgave the soldier who shot him, understanding it was an act of self defense. Adams asked the jury to consider whether “it have been a prudent resolution in them, or in any body in their situation, to have stood still, to see if the [mob] would knock their brains out, or not?” This jury, like that of Captain Preston, had to make sense of two very different versions of a story. What had happened on the night of March 5, 1770? Had the soldiers fired maliciously on innocent citizens, or had they been attacked and provoked by the crowd? The jury deliberated for two and a half hours, and, on December 5, 1770, returned a verdict of not guilty for six of the eight soldiers. The two others, Matthew Killroy and Hugh Montgomery, were convicted of manslaughter and were branded on their thumbs. Defense lawyer John Adams looked back on the trials in his diary three years later. He commended the jury for its responsible and courageous decision. It was “. . . one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country . . . [a]s the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right”—the just decision in a case entrusted to a responsible, impartial jury of colonial citizens. |
Letters to Abigail Adams, 1776 A. When I look back to the year of 1761 and recollect [James Otis’] argument concerning writs of assistance in the superior court, which I have hitherto considered as the commencement of the controversy between Great Britain and America, and run through the whole period from that time to this, and recollect the series of political events, the chain of causes and effects, I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution. Britain has been filled with Folly and America with Wisdom, at least this is my Judgment. Time must determine. It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distressing yet more dreadful. If this is to be the case, at least it will inspire us with many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies, and vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy us. The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals. The people will have unbounded power. And the people are extremely addicted to corruption and venality, as well as the great. I am not without apprehensions from this quarter, but I must submit all my hopes and fears to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe. B. You will think me transported with enthusiasm; but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph, although you and I may rue, which I hope we shall not. |
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