The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial

By Dan Abrams and David Fisher

The practical side of the man was never satisfied with the payment he received for his representation of Captain Preston and the soldiers, a total of 19 guineas, but even as his political opponents used the cases against him, he never doubted that he had done the right thing. In 1787 he wrote in his own defense, “I begin to suspect that some gentlemen who had more zeal than knowledge in the year 1770 will soon discover that I had good policy, as well as sound law on my side, when I ventured to lay open before our people the laws against riots, routs and unlawful assemblies. Mobs will never do…”

In his later years he remained embittered that others failed to appreciate the reasons he had accepted the case. “To this day,” he wrote to a friend in 1815, “my conduct in it is remembered, and always have been… My head or my heart, or perhaps a conspiracy of both, compelled me to differ in opinion from all my friends, to set at defiance all their advice, their remonstrances, their raillery, their ridicule, their censures and their sarcasm…”

It will never be known for certain precisely what happened on the streets of Boston the night of March 5th, 1770. The popular story of the Boston Massacre became set in legend long ago.There is little doubt, however, that whatever actually took place, John Adams’s controversial role in the trials of Captain Preston and the eight soldiers helped set a critical precedent for the law that would prove to be a foundation of American liberty.

(Fisher and Abrams 2020, 286-287)

References

Fisher, David, and Dan Abrams. 2020. John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial. N.p.: Hanover Square Press.

ISBN 978-1-335-01592-1