Boston Customs House Breaking Riot

Boston Massachusetts: On March 5th, 1770. An out breaking riot formed on Kings Street in Boston; ironically it formed in front of the Customs House. This riot turned bad when Hugh White called for nine other men to come and support him and crackling gunshots fired off into the snowy night. When the smoke cleared the colonists and the
British soldiers stood amazed at the five lifeless bodies piled up on the cobblestone street. The colonists stood and gawked in horror at the British soldiers, and the soldiers staring at each other in bewilderment wondering if they really pulled the trigger or if they were dreaming. Sadly, they weren’t dreaming and that night five colonists had died. It was a colder night when a group of colonists

“I believe that Edward Garrick was the ringleader” says White. White also says that Garrick teases him about how his commander is a fake and how he didn’t pay him without a wig. After this testament everything escalated quickly. White rams the butt of his musket at Garrick causing him to stumble. The other members in the crowd hated this and started to react by yelling or insulting White. White calls for back up inside the Customs house, eight British soldiers come to help support White.
The next couple of minutes were chaos; the crowd starts to throw rocks snowballs, and other hardened objects. An attacker threw a wooden club into the face of Hugh Montgomery knocking him off his feet. Montgomery shot of a warning shot, but it didn’t help because he was hit again by another attacker. Montgomery had no choice, raise his gun towards his attacker, [Richard Palmes] fled the scene, but others held their ground. Another British Soldier who was Matte Kilroy was pointing his musket at two other attackers. “At one point they were saying ‘you can’t kill us all, fire! You dare no fire’” says Captain Thomas Preston. In

John Adams agreed to work with them because everyone has a fair chance to represent themselves, so John and his partner Josiah Quincy defended the soldiers. These soldiers were tried at Superior Court of Judicature, after three stressful weeks Captain Preston and six of his soldiers were acquitted but two of them were founded for manslaughter. The two guilty were Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery, these two soldiers were discharged from the military and had the letter ‘M’ branded on their thumbs for manslaughter. I believe that this horrible event occurred because of the King, the colonists were sick and tired of being bossed around. You can’t own guns, you can’t do this you can’t do that, the king kept restricting the colonies. Then it felt like they were on invisible leashes with all of these policies and restrictions, it also felt like they were a piggy bank having there coins being plucked out of them. They felt this way because England kept raising taxes and kept taking money and the colonists were boiling over the tipping point. Since the custom house has tax collectors, the scene started there and the colonists didn’t think they would do anything. This Event was so important because it showed that the Soldiers weren’t just there to stop demonstrations and keep order, but they had no guilt on