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From: "Ed St.Germain" <>
Subject: [[SAR-TALK]] a nice show, but...
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2003 10:02:21 -0800

What did the Boston Massacre episode of UNSOLVED HISTORY say about the
violence in Boston on 5 March 1770?

There was a lot of simplification, going even beyond what's necessary
for compressing a complex event into about 40 minutes of TV. For
example, Capt Preston and his soldiers had four lawyers working for
them, not just John Adams. How hard would it have been for the narration
to call him not "the lawyer who defended the soldiers," but "one of the
lawyers..."? Similar glitches:
* There were three trials of people accused of killing the civilians,
not just "the trial."
* Of the eight soldiers tried, seven fired their pieces that night; at
one point the show spoke of "six muskets."
* The show said, "Preston and six of the eight enlisted men were
indicted for murder"; all eight soldiers were so charged.
* Victim Samuel Gray wasn't a "dock worker" but a ropemaker, a more
highly-skilled, better-paying job. (Gray didn't even work at the docks;
his ropewalk was blocks away.)

Second, there was a steady bias in how the show depicted Bostonians as
aggressors at the Massacre. Both civilians and soldiers acted
aggressively and resentfully, each ratcheting up the hostility and
violence until the fatal shots. But the show made only a vague, general
reference to the conflict that had been escalating since the previous
Friday, with a major brawl between soldiers and civilians earlier on the
evening of 5 March.

Instead, the narration stated, "At eight PM, a young apprentice, Edward
Garrick, began to taunt [Pvt Hugh] White." Garrick didn't spontaneously
walk up to a larger, older, armed authority figure and insult him; only
crazy people do that. In fact, we know from testimony that young Garrick
worked alongside another British soldier and had even paid a friendly
visit to his barracks during the preceding weekend. The insults the boy
yelled on 5 March were about a passing officer who hadn't paid his
barber's bill on time. Garrick said nothing about White, his regiment,
or British soldiers in general. White nevertheless took the boy's
remarks about the officer personally, and responded with violence.

Even worse, the program said, "The ugly [note the loaded language]
demonstration became lethal when patriot Richard Palmes struck one of
the soldiers, Private Hugh Montgomery, with a stick." Twice more the
narration said Palmes struck that soldier before the first shot, and
footage of that recreated moment was replayed several times.

We have a lot of testimony from Palmes. He gave detailed accounts of
what he saw and did to a town committee, at Preston's trial, and at the
soldiers' trial. In all three accounts Palmes stated that he swung his
stick AFTER the first shot (in one case clearly after seeing the first
victim fall), and only because a soldier was poking at him with a
bayonet. He never struck the soldier he was aiming at; instead, he
accidentally struck Preston.

Furthermore, until that time Palmes, a merchant, had been trying to act
as a peacemaker. His stick was undoubtedly a walking stick, not one of
the cordwood clubs that other men in the crowd carried. Some of the
crowd were throwing things at the soldiers before the shooting. One of
those objects hit Pvt Montgomery and knocked him down. But Palmes wasn't
to blame.

It is difficult to see how the show's producers made this mistake.
Zobel's BOSTON MASSACRE (NY: Norton, 1970), 198, omits Palmes's
perception that a soldier was thrusting his bayonet at him, but is still
clear that he didn't swing his stick until after the first shot and that
he didn't hit a soldier. Palmes's full testimony is available in THE
LEGAL PAPERS OF JOHN ADAMS and reprints of A SHORT NARRATIVE OF THE
HORRID MASSACRE (deposition #53).

How well did the Discovery program do at answering the four questions
about the Massacre which it presented as "Unsolved"? Some of those
issues weren't unsolved at all, and the methods the show used to
investigate its questions are incomplete and contradictory. Here are
those questions, in order, and some remarks on the investigations:

1) Is the famous Paul Revere engraving of the Massacre accurate? The
producers would be hard-pressed to find any recent printed source that
says it is. Even elementary-school kids are taught otherwise; the Oct
2001 issue of APPLESEEDS magazine has an article pointing out several
ways the engraving misrepresented events. The producers appear to have
wanted to create more interesting television by overthrowing some
"standard" version of the event, and tried to make the Revere print into
the standard.

The producers then went further than they had to by concluding:
"Everything about this engraving is wrong." Actually, some of the show's
"corrections" are based on misunderstandings. Revere didn't create the
image; he copied a drawing by Henry Pelham, a future Loyalist. The
engraving doesn't show a daylight scene; there's a moon in the sky and
dark shadows on the left. Engravings couldn't include large patches of
black, so Pelham and Revere designed their prints with the sky blank, to
be painted in later, as early examples of this print show.

One of the odder moments in this analysis came when the show's narrator
intoned, "There was a total of nine British soldiers..., not eight." At
this moment, the producers superimposed numerals 1 through 8 over the
SEVEN soldiers in the print, a strangely mixed message. The show didn't
explain why omitting a soldier served as anti-British propaganda.

In general, however, the show answered its question about the accuracy
of Revere's print correctly. But that's hardly "unsolved history."

2) Did Capt Thomas Preston give an order to fire? The Pelham/Revere
image implies Preston did, some witnesses said he did, and this was an
issue in his trial. But it's been over 230 years since a Massachusetts
jury decided Preston hadn't given such an order. No historian from the
past century said he did (maybe Oliver M. Dickerson, but he also thought
it credible that Customs officials fired down on the crowd).

The producers suggested instead that "The crowd's taunts may have
brought the firing on themselves." That's certainly possible, but the
show omitted the one man who reportedly confessed to have yelled the
order to fire: Pvt Hugh Montgomery, one of the two soldiers convicted
for manslaughter. (See Zobel, BOSTON MASSACRE, 198 and 300.) Despite
interviewing Judge Zobel for the show, the producers don't seem to have
read his book carefully.

Again, the show's answer was correct, but unsurprising, because the show
asked the wrong question.

3) Did Massacre victims die on the site of the circle of cobblestones
now outside the Old State House? Producers were shocked--shocked!--to
discover that Boston put those stones and the tourists they attract on a
traffic-control triangle instead of in the middle of a busy lane. The
stones cover a spot where part of the crowd probably stood, but not
where the soldiers fired or anyone died.

What's most interesting about this investigation was the method the
producers chose. The narrator declared, "The UNSOLVED HISTORY team made
a remarkable discovery in the Rare Book collection of the Boston Public
Library": Paul Revere's drawing of the event from a bird's-eye view.

"Remarkable discovery"? This image has been reproduced in books since at
least 1891. It appears in LEGAL PAPERS OF JOHN ADAMS, Zobel's BOSTON
MASSACRE, and Esther Forbes's PAUL REVERE & THE WORLD HE LIVED IN, among
other titles. In proclaiming their "discovery," the TV producers seem to
have been following the motto NBC used to promote its reruns a few
summers back: "If you haven't seen it, it's NEW TO YOU!"

The producers then chose to treat that overhead view as a "scale
drawing." That's a big assumption. We don't know why this image was
created (we can't even be 100% sure Revere created it). Did the
producers confirm the image's scale accuracy by seeing whether the
footprint of the Old State House is slightly skew instead of
rectangular, as the drawing shows? Did they check surviving real-estate
records to be sure the properties on either side of King Street are in
proportion to each other? Without such confirmation the show's
conclusion about exactly where the soldiers stood is based entirely on
an assumption.

Once again, probably the right answer to an insignificant question,
arrived at through questionable methods.

4) Was Crispus Attucks the first man to be shot, and thus the first
American to die in the Revolution? Given that Attucks and Adams are the
only individuals from the Massacre that most people remember, and that
Attucks has always had great symbolic importance because of his
non-European ancestry, this question is the most provocative.

In one respect, the answer is clearly no. The program didn't mention
Christopher Seider, a Braintree-born boy about eleven years old shot by
a Customs official during a political riot on 22 Feb 1770. His death
helped create the hostile atmosphere in Boston eleven days later when
Pvt White (another employee of the Crown) hit Edward Garrick (another
Boston boy). At most, Attucks would be the first American to be fatally
shot by the British MILITARY.

The producers wanted to apply modern medical and ballistic testing,
which is so much more telegenic than archival research. So they offered
a digital animation of Attucks's two torso wounds. Unfortunately, it's
unclear what documents they based that image on: Dr Benjamin Church's
detailed description (SHORT NARRATIVE, deposition #88), the more general
remarks in newspapers, or some other source?

The show's digital picture of the musket balls passing through Attucks's
torso showed a man's body standing erect, chest thrust out. Witnesses
said Attucks was leaning forward over a long cordwood stick. Body
position would make a difference on the crucial question of whether the
balls went straight through his torso or were deflected.

The TV show devoted a lot of time to showing a gun expert firing pairs
of musket balls from a reproduction firelock into a hunk of meat. He
concluded that such a "brace of balls" would have flown too close
together to create Attucks's twin wounds at least eight inches apart.
That test was an interesting way to explore the question, but was it
conclusive?

The gun expert was firing two balls from one musket for the first time
in his life. He was using a single, modern recreation of a 1700s
firelock, so there was no check of variations among actual weapons. (In
other respects, this test seemed to be an accurate re-creation.
Witnesses put Attucks six to fifteen feet away from the soldiers; the
gun expert appeared farther than that from his targets, letting his
musket balls spread more. In some TV shots the expert appeared to have a
bayonet on his gun, as all witnesses agreed the soldiers had; in others,
he didn't, but It's doubtful that would make a difference.)

As a result of the gun expert's firing, the show's pathologist concluded
that Attucks was hit by "two rounds fired from separate weapons," one of
which had been deflected, probably by passing through the head of
another victim, Samuel Gray. This medical expert said Gray "may have
been leading the charge, so to speak"; was shot "point blank, close
range"; and was shot before Attucks. That conclusion raises a number of
questions, of course.

First, people in 1770 had more experience with their weapons than we do,
of course. No one then expressed doubts after the official indictment
said Attucks's two separate wounds came from the same weapon. Take, for
example, this account of a man fatally wounded by another man in his own
militia unit: "...one abial Petty axedentely discharged his peace and
shot two Balls through the Body of one asa cheany through his Left side
and rite rist." [Journal of Samuel Hawes, 28 Apr 1775, NEW ENGLAND
HISTORICAL & GENEALOGICAL REGISTER, 130 (1976), 213-4.] We can't be sure
how far apart Asa Cheany's left side and right wrist were, or how far
away Abiel Petty was standing, but it's hard to reconcile that
description with the thought that the balls would have remained only two
inches apart even after many yards.

The pathologist's statement about Gray and Attucks has no eyewitness
testimony in their favor, and a great deal against it. Edward Langford
testified that he heard one or more guns go off, yelled at Pvt Matthew
Kilroy, and then saw Kilroy shoot Gray--meaning Gray couldn't have been
killed by the first shot. Gray was toward the front of the crowd, but no
one testified that he was "leading the charge"; several people said he
was standing casually, and no one said he was the first man to fall. In
contrast, Benjamin Burdick; Jonathan Williams Austin; Andrew, a slave of
Oliver Wendell; James Bailey; John Danbrook; and other witnesses said
Attucks fell first. Several people reported him as leading the crowd
aggressively, grabbing the bayonet of one soldier's gun.

The pathologist seems to have decided Gray was shot before Attucks
solely on what happened when the gun expert fired two balls from a
recreation musket through some raw meat and a melon wrapped in duct
tape. Eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, but surely it should carry
as much weight as mutilated groceries 232 years later.

Let's assume, however, that the TV show's test firing proved that
Attucks's two chest wounds couldn't have come from a single firelock.
What are the odds that Attucks was hit in the chest by two separate
shots? How does one ball passing through Gray prove that the other
hadn't hit Attucks first? If two musket balls from the same gun fly as
one, how did the seven shots that night (some of which don't seem to
have hit anyone) leave eleven wounds in a wide fan? The show ended
without tackling the questions its conclusion raised.

Furthermore, to reach that answer the producers had to toss out the
premise they'd relied on to answer their previous question: that the
Revere overhead image is entirely accurate. Revere drew Attucks (labeled
"A") lying on the ground BETWEEN Gray ("G" and "2") and the soldiers.
Earlier the program caught Prof McEttrick saying, "Gray was further from
the soldiers." If a ball passed through Gray's head and into Attucks's
body, as the pathologist concluded was most likely, then Revere's image
couldn't have been accurate--which trashes the show's earlier answer. Of
course, the narration said nothing about this contradiction.

In sum, Discovery's UNSOLVED HISTORY added much to historians'
investigations of the Boston Massacre. In some important respects it was
at least as distorted as the long-discarded narrative of the event that
its producers set out to displace.

There are some elements of 5 March 1770 which could be investigated with
modern forensic techniques, or an approximation of them. In rereading Dr
Benjamin Church's description of Attucks's wounds, for instance, it
would be nice to have an anatomist's analysis of it (as well as a
clearer idea of whose "left" and "right" Church was referring to).

There seems to be good evidence that on occasion soldiers deliberately
loaded two balls in their firelocks. Test-firing more guns in more ways
could give a fuller understanding of how such balls flew. Perhaps
Attucks indeed couldn't have been shot that way, but stronger evidence
is needed before deciding the people of that time were mistaken.

The bird's-eye-view drawing purports to show the location of nine men
shot that night, most identified with circles and initials. (The program
said it shows only four men, but actually that's just how many bodies
are drawn fully.) We could put this together with eyewitness
descriptions of how the soldiers fired, which may or may not reveal
something significant.

One of the issues of the soldiers' trial was which of those eight men
had NOT fired his musket on 5 March. If the prosecution had been able to
identify that man conclusively, then the jury could have acquitted him
and then been certain that all the others had fired their weapons--which
might have changed the verdict for five acquitted men. (At least Samuel
Adams thought so.) Can we put together the testimony about where shots
came from to test the contemporary suspicions that Cpl William Wemms was
the one soldier not to fire?

Pvt Kilroy's bayonet was found to have blood on it the next morning.
Some witnesses accused him of stabbing at Gray's head after it had been
blown open. Others said he didn't, and still others reported receiving
"pricks" from soldiers' bayonets. How much blood could such a wound
leave on a bayonet?

Those are relatively minor points compared to the Discovery show's
portentous question: "What if the Boston Massacre...was an act of
self-defense?" But since two Boston juries in 1770 acquitted six of the
eight soldiers on the grounds of self-defense, and most historians have
agreed with that verdict, the program's main question didn't really seem
to need an hour to answer.

*****************************
Best regards,
Ed St.Germain, #94142
Riverside, CA
--
For Revolutionary War information on the Internet, your first choice
should be AMERICANREVOLUTION.ORG

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• [[SAR-TALK]] a nice show, but... by "Ed St.Germain" <>