To my mind, the main takeaway from the so-called ‘Boston Massacre’ is that martyrs to British tyranny were so thin on the ground in New England that the Sons of Liberty were reduced to using five morons who thought it was a good idea to goad and attack a group of armed soldiers.

A lesser known addendum to the incident was a previous violent altercation which took place only a couple weeks before, which saw what is called the first casualty of the American Revolution.

On February 22, 1770 (about two weeks before the larger incident) a mob gathered outside the shop of one Theophilus Lillie, a Boston merchant who had decided he was no longer going to participate in the boycott of British goods that followed the Townsend Acts. Only, rather than doing it quietly, he chose (rather rashly) to announce his decision in the Gazette. This being Boston in the latter 1700s, a town not known for its civility or restraint, this naturally resulted in an angry mob gathering outside of his house, hanging effigies of him, and so on.

Along comes Mr. Ebenezer Richardson, customs officer (and so not exactly a popular man in Boston). Seeing how things were going, he tried to defuse the situation and disperse the crowd, even calling on some passersby for help. Being more conscious of their own self-preservation than he was, they declined, and Richardson found the ire of the crowd directed at him instead. He quickly fled to his own house, pursued by mud and stones thrown by the crowd. However, the mob, like a pack of jackals incensed by fleeing prey, pursue him and begin attacking his house. The throw rocks that break his windows and hit his frightened wife, so Richardson gets out a musket and threatens the crowd with it. They just get angrier, and so he fires a blank cartridge as a warning shot. The mob proceeds to try to break down his door, so he finally loads it with bird shot and fires into the crowd.

Unfortunately, of all the people in that crowd, the shot happened to hit eleven-year-old Christopher Seider, who soon died of his injuries.

Naturally, the Sons of Liberty lap it up like the vampires they are and stage a huge public funeral for the boy, which is attended by over 1000 people. Newspapers tut-tut over the event and cry that “It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy death of young Seider will be a means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the soldiery, from being too free in the use of their instruments of death.”

I really don’t know how less ‘free’ a man could be in such a circumstance, given he had already fired a blank warning shot and had an angry mob breaking his door down. But such is life in Revolutionary Boston.

In any case, this raised the temperature in Boston and set the stage for an entirely predictable future confrontation between another angry mob and a group of soldiers, resulting in the deaths of the said five idiots.

Unlike those soldiers, however, Richardson was actually found guilty of murder (which shows how biased the Boston juries were, as well as emphasizing that John Adams was a mensch for defending the former), but was thankfully pardoned by King George. Naturally, that did not do anything to help the good King’s reputation in the colonies, nor was it at all a good idea to follow it up by giving Richardson another customs post in America – this time in Philadelphia. He ended up being hounded off the continent by newspaper attacks, but at least he wasn’t hanged.

I at first wondered why Seider’s case doesn’t get the attention the ‘Massacre’ does, but of course, the shooting of one boy by a private citizen can’t really compare for propaganda purposes to the killing of five people by His Majesty’s soldiers. There’s a specious sense of official violence about the latter which there isn’t about the former.

Both the ‘Massacre’ and the Seider incident strongly call to mind modern events: things like the George Zimmerman or George Floyld cases or related incidents. The actual facts don’t matter; what matters is only who did the shooting and how we turn it to our political advantage. The desperate man fearing for his life is granted less consideration than the angry mob or violent criminal threatening it purely because he’s one of the ‘bad’ people. The newspapers get sanctimonious about ‘what this says about us’ while giving no consideration to the facts. Obscure and sometimes disreputable characters become public figures overnight purely because they happened to die in a politically-expedient manner.

Believe it or not, whenever I find a pre-Revolution incident that I hadn’t heard of, I typically go in expecting it to look good for the rebels. Because even though I’m firmly in the Loyalist camp, I respect the fact that this was a complex situation in which both sides can have legitimate grievances (that and my brain still can’t quite accept the idea of “really? This is it?”).

But no, it’s almost always the same pattern: something doesn’t go the way the rebels want it to, or someone dares to disagree with them, they overreact and do something stupid, bad consequences result, they point to those consequences as yet another example of how oppressed they are, and repeat.

Again, this should sound familiar.