Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth

by Holger Hoock

“Scars of Independence is a brilliant, comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War that accents how this bloody and destructive conflict touched the lives of ordinary men and women.

After nightfall on Monday, March 5, 1770, small groups of Bostonians armed with lead-weighted clubs, cudgels, and cutlasses started accosting lone British officers and soldiers in the city’s streets. Elsewhere in town, soldiers threatened and assaulted civilians. It was rumored that a missing sergeant had been murdered, while troops had beaten an oysterman bloody. By eight o’clock, angry men were confronting the redcoats outside Murray’s Barracks, a sugarhouse at Draper’s Alley and Brattle Street where parts of the king’s army were quartered.

The site of their renewed encounter, the Custom House, symbolized the detested imperial revenue system that Britain had saddled on its thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies after its victory in the Seven Years’ War, which had ended in 1763. Britain wanted the colonies to share in the expense of the victorious war and their future defense, not least by contributing towards the costs of a 10,000-strong British army stationed in America. For years, Massachusetts had played a leading role in opposing these new imperial policies, by means both legal and extralegal. Bostonians remonstrated against the Stamp Act, which had imposed a new tax on every piece of printed paper. After that law was repealed, they took issue with the Townshend Acts, which levied duties on imports such as glass, lead, and tea.

Just a month earlier, a thousand-strong crowd had besieged the house of a customs informant who had reported on fellow Americans guilty of violating the imperial tax code; when he shot into the mass of people, an eleven-year-old boy was martyred.2

The turning point had come in 1768, when the British government sent several thousand troops to Boston to police the revenue system. For the Crown to show its military might in Boston in the manner it had previously done in Ireland or Scotland was a provocative move.

In a town of 15,000 or 16,000, there now were as many imperial soldiers as there were white male resid...

Captain Preston, desperate to calm heated tempers, was pleading with the civilians to disperse when a shot rang out. One of the grenadiers appeared to have been hit by an object—perhaps a snowball or a piece of ice or white-barked wood that either struck him or clipped the muzzle of his musket. According to most later reports, he had slipped on the ice, some saying his musket had briefly escaped his grasp. As he got up and recovered his firearm, he discharged a shot, whether deliberately or by accident. No one seemed to have been hit. There was a brief pause while many in the crowd looked for cover. Some, though, moved towards the soldiers, and one or two apparently even sought to wrestle their muskets from them. Several Boston militia drummers started beating to arms. A man in the crowd lashed out at the soldier who had fired; in the process, the assailant hit Preston’s arm hard with his club.

Then the grenadiers fired a round of shots. By the time Preston managed to stop the firing, three men lay dead in the snow, two more were dying, another half dozen were wounded. One bullet had hit the rope maker Samuel Gray, “entering his head and beating off a large portion of his skull.” Through the streaming blood, one bystander ascertained a hole “as big as my hand.” Crispus Attucks, a forty-seven-year-old former slave of Native American and African heritage who was passing through Boston, was felled by two bullets to his chest, one of them “goring the right lobe of the lungs and a great part of the liver most horribly.” Two bullets killed James Caldwell, a ship’s mate. Apprentice Samuel Maverick, seventeen, was hit in his stomach by a bullet that had ricocheted off a wall; although a doctor was able to remove the projectile, the teenager died in the morning.

Patrick Carr, a thirty-year-old Irish immigrant employee of a leather-breeches maker, was hit by a musket ball fired quite possibly by a fellow Irishman. The bullet “went through his right hip & tore away part of the backbone & greatly injured the hip bone.” Carr died ten days later.6 Henry Prentiss had at first assumed the soldiers’ guns were not loaded. But as men around him fell to the ground, he realized that he was witnessing “a scene the most Tragical, of...

From Rhode Island to the South, colonists intimidated customs officials and damaged property. In 1768, merchants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had renewed their resolve not to import British goods, soon to be joined by Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. Although Britain partially repealed the Townshend Acts in response to the boycott, the tax on tea, which raised the largest sums of money, remained in place. With imperial troops arriving imminently, the Boston town meeting called an extralegal convention of all the towns of Massachusetts, which promptly condemned “raising or keeping a standing army” without the people’s approval. By 1770, then, Boston’s neighboring towns were primed to respond to any further escalation of the brewing crisis—and whatever might happen in Boston would resonate across the colonies.8 As news of the fatal shootings spread through Boston that March night, the church bells rang again.

One week after the shootings, on March 12, the Boston Gazette published the single most influential anti-British account. Boston, the paper reported, had witnessed “a most shocking Scene, the Blood of our Fellow Citizens running like Water thro’ King-Street, and the Merchants Exchange.”

The story was soon reprinted in other colonies, where resentment against the overbearing empire was already brewing, as well as in the British press. The article, set within thick black borders, also covered the funeral rites of the massacre’s first four martyrs, attended by more than 10,000 people, and was illustrated with a woodcut showing four coffins with the initials of the slain, skulls and bones, and an hourglass and scythe.11

Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.

British officials delayed the trials of Captain Preston and his men until the fall, hoping that by then tempers might cool down. Supported by the Sons of Liberty, John Adams agreed to serve as attorney for the accused soldiers: everyone, he believed, deserved a fair hearing.

The jury acquitted Preston and six of the soldiers. The two men convicted of manslaughter pleaded benefit of clergy, a device that allowed for their capital sentences to be commuted; they were released after having their thumbs branded.13 In subsequent years, John Adams’s thoughts kept returning to that violent and defining evening.

The Boston Massacre had become an annually commemorated event, complete with orations, the display of relics, and guided tours of the bloodied site. On its third anniversary, in 1773, Adams recalled how much anxiety his role as defense attorney for the British soldiers had caused him. At the same time, he proudly reflected, ensuring that the defendants received a fair trial had been “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life.”

Adams’s thoughts may have sounded contradictory, but they illuminate the reason the Boston Massacre has remained so iconic over the centuries. The shootings had been the unplanned product of the violence of imperial oppression colliding with the violence of colonial resistance.

It was through the longest war ever fought on American soil that the Patriots defended their new nation’s independence from the British Empire.

Writing violence back into the story of the Revolution reminds us that America’s war for independence caused proportionately more human suffering than any other war in American history except the Civil War.

it is easy to forget that with an estimated 6,800 to 8,000 Patriot battle deaths, 10,000 killed by disease in camps, and up to 16,000 or even 19,000 who perished in captivity, the number of Patriot soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War would be well over 3 million in terms of today’s population—and significantly more than that if we consider Patriot deaths as a proportion of only the Patriot population in 1775 or 1783. More than ten times as many Americans died, per capita, in the Revolutionary War as in World War I, and nearly five times as many as in World War II. The death rate among Revolutionary-era prisoners of war was the highest in American history.

between one-fifth and one-third of the white population continued to support Britain in sentiment, if not always in deed.

In April 1775, British redcoats seeking to confiscate rebel weapons clashed with insurgent militia at Lexington and Concord. Those violent altercations in the Massachusetts countryside would turn out to be the first battles of the American Revolutionary War.

Also in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, the Sons of Liberty in New York City stole five hundred muskets as well as gunpowder from City Hall. John Wetherhead, a well-to-do English-born importer in the city, felt that the Massachusetts alarm “hurried the people into violences tenfold greater than ever” as mobs seized and beat men who refused to curse the king.

The Revolutionaries relied on terror—acts of violence and the threat of violence—to crush dissent.

George III had ascended the British throne in 1760 at the age of twenty-three. After a rocky first decade characterized by constant changes of government, by the eve of the American Revolution George had grown into a seasoned politician. Serious-minded, with a powerful sense of royal duty, the king possessed a strong work ethic and a clear Christian moral compass. As ruler, George took a close interest in foreign policy and military affairs. He would keep tabs on the planning and conduct of the American war.

According to the best estimates, the Americans suffered between 300 and 500 casualties on Long Island; nearly 1,100 men were taken captive, including three generals. The redcoats, irate at American snipers, instantly destroyed the rifles of those they captured.

It was now over a week since the nearly disastrous Battle of Long Island, when his troops had survived, barely, their first major encounter with the British Army. As his forces regrouped on Manhattan, Washington had to make some key tactical and strategic decisions: Should he abandon New York or defend it as long as possible?

Consider for a moment the food requirements of the Continental Army. Washington estimated that 15,000 men consumed 20 million pounds of meat and 100,000 barrels of flour annually. Until the evacuation of Manhattan in fall 1776, the American forces were reasonably well provisioned with pork and beef, bread, rice, and cornmeal, as well as fresh produce. But for the remainder of the war, supplies of meat, flour, and bread fluctuated widely; vegetables were often scarce, with the most severe shortages experienced in winter camps at Valley Forge and Morristown in 1778 and 1779.

In February 1778, soldiers had only three ounces of meat and three pounds of bread each to last them for an entire week. Washington acknowledged a paradox: “With respect to Food, considering we are in such an extensive and abundant Country, no Army was ever worse supplied than ours.”

Since Washington was forced, all too often, to resort to foraging and impressment, it was imperative that he control his troops’ conduct towards civilians. To that end, he put practical measures in place to curtail the soldiers’ opportunities for misbehavior. Washington set up posts near mansions along army routes in order to prevent straggling soldiers from peeling off. He ordered guards and patrols around campsites to be enhanced. Commanders limited the numbers of passes from camp and the distance enlisted men could travel even if they did have a pass. Roll calls were ordered two or three times per day, often unannounced, while officers checked soldiers’ tents and knapsacks for illegally obtained goods. Soldiers were banned from leaving camp after the nightly roll call and from taking weapons out of camp.

The general urged his civilian superiors once more to allow for harsher discipline to curb the alarming spread of plundering. His soldiers were using any excuse to steal from civilians.

They threatened to commit arson to make inhabitants flee their houses and then rob them with impunity; afterward, they often did burn homes to conceal their actions. Washington reassured Hancock that he had tried his utmost, including instituting summary corporal punishment, “to stop this horrid practice, but under the present lust after plunder, and want of Laws to punish Offenders, I might almost as well attempt to remove Mount Atlas.”28