How did the Boston Massacre happen?

Answer 1

The people in Boston didn't want the British in their city. One night, while most of them were drunk, a man hit a soldier, causing the soldier to strike back. This caused a crowd to come and help the man stuck down. They were yelling at the soldiers and threatening them to shoot while holding sticks and rocks, ready to pelt them. One of the soldiers were struck by a rock thrown by the crowd and shot into the crowd, causing others to shoot too. Their captain told them to stop and don't fire, but they couldn't hear. People were shot and killed, but only five people died. The people called this the Boston Massacre, even though when you think of massacre, you imagine many people dying, not just five. The painting of the Boston Massacre was not accurate; the painting was used as a Propaganda.

Additional info:

It's not so simple that "the people in Boston didn't want the British in their city". The people in Boston considered themselves to be British citizens, and as far as the British government was concerned, that was true.

The problem was that once the Seven Years' War (also known as the French and Indian War in the US) ended in 1763, Britain found itself with a massive debt. Not only had they just fought what is often considered the world's first "world war" in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and India; but Britain had also paid for Prussia's role in the war. Prussia (a small country that is now part of Germany) was Britain's only major ally and had done most of the fighting in Europe- against France, Russia, Austria and several other countries- all at the same time. Additionally, the treaty ending the war gave the British a large empire, mostly at France's expense, and they needed to set up administration and infrastructure, as well as defense, such as against raids by American Indians. To pay all this debt, the British Parliament began raising taxes.

The American Colonists were upset that they had no say in any of these matters- they were not allowed to vote for parliament, so they could not elect people to stop the government from passing laws they didn't like, especially tax increases. This is what is meant by the rallying cry of "no taxation without representation". Enforcement of these taxes became difficult as colonists boycotted merchants who complied with the taxes.

Parliament, misunderstanding what was happening, believed that the Colonists simply didn't want to pay taxes, so they passed the Townshend Acts to change the way taxes were paid and also to make it so that colonial government officials were paid by Parliament instead of by local colonial taxes (so the officials would be loyal to Parliament rather than the people they were governing). You can see why the colonists would be upset at all of this- it seemed like Parliament was trying to take from the colonists but give nothing back.

The Massacre was the culmination of this tense time. On March 5, 1770, a soldier was guarding a government building when a Bostonian came along and accused one of the officials who worked in the building of not paying for something. It escalated until the guard knocked down the other man, and a crowd started to grow. Other soldiers arrived to help the guard, as the crowd grew larger and angrier, and began throwing rocks, trash and snow at the soldiers. Eventually, as mentioned above, the soldiers began to fire, killing five civilians and wounding six more.

The British soldiers were not entirely "off the hook". There was a contentious trial, where the soldiers were famously defended by a Boston lawyer named John Adams, who would later become an important leader of the Founding Fathers. Despite already being a member of the rebellious "Patriots", Adams insisted that the soldiers get a fair trial and took the case when nobody else would for fear of reprisals by the Patriots. He was successful in getting six of the eight soldiers acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter (because they had fired at the crowd) but were given light sentences since it was their first offense. Some civilians were also put on trial but all were acquitted.

Most of the Townshend Acts were repealed following the Massacre, except, notably, the tax on tea. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed, lowering the cost of British tea (to try to get Colonists to buy it instead of Dutch tea, and thereby pay the Townshend tea tax)- and the Tea Act was followed by the Boston Tea Party, then the "Intolerable Acts" (where Parliament tried to punish Boston for destroying the tea), and in April 1775, the Revolutionary War had begun.