Moments from the Revolution: Part I of X - The First Shots (788 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesRating: 2 on 16 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Axolotl (View user info) at 2005-11-01 11:17:06 EST
In an effort to explain and connect with the emotions and people who broke away from England to form the United States of America over two hundred years ago.
Sources - Wikipedia, Eyewitness to History, 1776 by David McCullough, various eyewitness accounts, newspaper records, and letters and books from that time.
All events and people are true, except in the case where the real knowledge of that part of history is lost.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART ONE: The First Shots
It was late evening in Boston, and the streets were beginning to empty. Men drank in bars and children played on the cobblestones, and women walked in groups down the streets. And the British soldiers on guard outside the Customs House milled attentively across the ground, their rifles shouldered formally but their demeanors relaxed.
It was March 5th, and ice and debris littered the streets in the thaw from winter. Down King Street a young boy, Edward Gerrish, looked out at the British soldier who had struck him before. Private White had clubbed him in the arm with his rifle earlier that day, when Edward had been bothering one of the British officers over a piddling debt.
His small hand reached down into the melting snow and brought up a clump of ice. Forming it into a ball in his hands, he smiled at his companions as he took aim at Private White, the British infantryman.
"Redcoat!" he yelled in his childish excitement as he threw the ball of ice at the trooper twenty feet away. The ice hit the soldier in the hip; the man swore and gave an unwieldy leap to the side. The boys began to throw snowballs and trash at White, mostly missing him. Another British soldier stopped dead in his tracks and looked across the street at the four children, their smiles rapidly fading with guilty countenances replacing them.
Private White brushed the ice from his leg; it stung slightly, but no real harm done. Not that that was going to change the boy's punishment. He couldn't just let this Yankee brat get away with that; an impression must be made.
White strode quickly over to the group of children. The three accomplices departed in all speed back to the safety of their fathers in the pub, leaving the child who had thrown the ice
alone, standing in the debris and timber. The culprit grinned weakly.
With a mighty grunt, the redcoat slapped the child in the face with his gloved palm; the child fell. Some pedestrians walking by stopped to observe with disapproval.
"Yankee guttersnipe!" snarled the soldier, picking the boy up by his hair and striking him in the face again. The boy began to cry.
"Please, sir! I didn't...I didn't mean to—"
The redcoat jerked his head back and swore in his face, cursing him and slapping him. From the pub, a young Samuel Adams looked out.
Now this was a stroke of luck! A perfect chance, almost a God-given providence. All he needed to do was to start a riot, and the men in the bar would whip these Brits.
"Hey, Johnny!" Sam Adams said, turning away from the scene beyond the window of the pub. "Ain't that your boy out there being struck by that redcoat?"
A man at the bar ceased his conversation and put down his ale, looking out the window at Sam Adams' behest. Indeed it was his child being manhandled by the British soldier, as his officer looked on apathetically.
Johnny slammed down his tankard and marched out of the pub, his friends following timidly, tailing their furious companion with interest.
The cool evening wind struck Johnny's face as he stepped out onto the Boston street, Sam Adams watching with glee from the window.
Sam was sure this was just what the Patriots needed; an excuse to start a rebellion. The British would never fire, not unless a judge read the Riot Act. Any judge who dared go against Sam's intellect and ability to stir up a mob would have his house burned to cinders. The British would be forced to either leave Boston or start a war. Even now, Sam saw some of his 'professional' troublemakers gearing up for a good fight.
White had alerted his superior, Captain Thomas Preston, who had brought out a corporal and five more soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot out onto King Street to guard the Custom House. White spied the boy's father, Johnny, walking toward him and his blood ran cold. Johnny was a big man, late thirties, and he was mad as hell. Leaning to the ground, Johnny picked up a small piece of timber.
"Now, sir," White began, releasing the struggling boy and backing away toward the other soldiers.
Johnny heaved the wooden beam, about two feet in length, at White, who took the blow in the chest. He fell into step with his comrades, who were quite intimidating in formation, but not enough to repel a mob.
Now Johnny and his ten or so friends from the bar were crowding around the British soldiers, as well as some local men passing on the street. White looked around; there was a Negro approaching with a group of angry passerby, and several scolding women. Sam Adams' troublemakers also approached, about a hundred men walking out from the dockyard, ready to begin a good fight at any sign of trouble.
"Big man you are, striking a young lad like that!" an American, Patrick Carr shouted at the British squad. "Taking our jobs, now you're killing our boys? Fucking lobster-backs!"
Johnny grabbed a ball of ice from the bank at his feet, significantly larger than the one his son had thrown.
"Good sir, don't—"
The iceball hit one of Preston's men in the arm, gashing it raw and tender.
"Stop! Disperse!" another British soldier yelled at the crowd, waving his Brown Bess .54 caliber musket.
Bad idea. At this display of arms, the unruly crowd transformed into an unruly mob. The people crowding the British were three hundred men and women and the number was ever rising. Johnny and the men from the pub were feet away from the British, shouting vulgarities and threats, and people from the streets who had witnessed the boy's beating were pressing the squad on the left and right. The boy himself had made himself scarce.
Four hundred men, mostly Sam Adams' troublemakers and thugs, now crowded the Custom House, pressing the British soldiers against the wall, cutting them off from any reinforcement. This situation could quickly turn ugly.
"People, please!" Captain Preston cried out, his voice hoarse from the shouting. A snowball knocked his cap off.
"Recoats! Get out of Boston!"
"Lobster-backs!"
"Kill those bastards!"
The more aggressive were now throwing iceballs and snowballs; Johnny's father and the men from the pub were in the soldiers' faces, spitting at them and yelling violence in their ears. Samuel Maverick, an American, was taking swings at the retreating British.
From the pub, Sam Adams smiled. He virtually owned the press in Massachusetts; his propaganda machine could spin a minor incident into a massive clash of armies, good versus evil, imperialism versus democracy.
"Shoot!" a man called Patrick Carr was yelling at Preston, his neck bulging in rage and his face purple. "Shoot us, you sons-of-bitches, I dare you! Shoot! Shoot, you redcoats! Shoot!"
Crispus Attucks, the Negro, picked up a piece of frozen timber from the debris at his feet and stepped before the British patrol. With a powerful swing, he connected the club-like wood into White's face, breaking his nose and spraying blood into the air.
White got up, springing to his feet and shoving Attucks away with the barrel of his musket. Johnny
took the opportunity to shove a private, Hugh Montgomery, back. The other British soldiers looked at each other for guidance; they were pinned against the walls of the Custom House, there was no retreat.
Another club, thrown from a distance, bashed into Private Montgomery's shoulder. He staggered, and in his torment and confusion, Montgomery pointed his gun at Attucks through the blinding pain and pulled the trigger.
Crispus Attucks fell backwards, his abdomen shredded by five millimeters of lead. The crowd fell deathly silent. There was a second of universal hesitation as Attucks fell, cracking his head against the cobbles.
Then White pulled his trigger, and then another soldier followed suit, a Private Matthew Killroy, shooting the prone Attucks again in the stomach and killing him instantly. All seven of Preston's men fired into the crowd, Johnny's dad dodging three of the musketballs as he tried to make a hasty getaway from the scene.
The British reloaded their weapons, filling the breech with powder and using their rods to push in the balls. The vast majority of the crowd was attempting to escape, but the pub men and some of Sam Adams' thugs were not so easily dispersed.
A second volley. Musketballs ricocheted off bones and through rib cages. Patrick Carr and Samuel Maverick fell dead, Maverick with his brains dashed across the cobbles. Now the four hundred man mob was running at full speed away from the massacre. Five men lay dead or dying on the Boston street, with an additional eight wounded, balls having smashed into their shins, thighs and elbows.
Crispus Attucks died in a pool of his own blood, and John Gerrish, the father of the boy who was the catalyst for this tragedy, was not wounded.
"Why did they shoot?" Patrick Carr muttered, pierced in the side and leg by the thick musketballs. "Why did they shoot?"
White shouldered his smoking musket, all too aware that the American judges could try his squad for murder. A magistrate had to read a Riot Act before they could fire on a crowd...this had been an illegal demonstration.
Now more British soldiers came milling out of the Custom House, alerted by the mob's shouts and the gunshots. They stopped dead as they saw the thirteen bodies lying on the ground.
Captain Preston looked down at the dead and dying in nausea and guilt; gulping, he thought, "We're going to be in for it now."
The soldiers were arrested, and the bodies cleaned off the street. It was a dark day in Boston, for both the outnumbered British and the Americans who had lost some of their own.
Sam Adams however, was jubilant over the arrest. His printing company had begun to manufacture and distribute images and wax impressions of the "Boston Massacre" or so he titled the skirmish. His artists had done a fine job, what's more: the ink plates depicted the British firing their muskets all at once into a peaceful crowd of pedestrians, who fell back with their mouths open in shock at the volley.
Maybe with this, Sam thought, the war could finally begin. The war for independence that he and his cronies had been planning for so long could finally get off to a good start. The Bostonians could rise up in outrage when the English judge acquitted the British soldiers, and from the small colonial seaport town, the Revolution would start.
"But don't you see?" his lawyer cousin John Adams had pleaded with him. "This is madness; you need to think beyond Boston, Sam."
"But why?" Sam had replied. "The English judges will step in on the perpetrator's behalf, Boston will rise up, and England shall be forced from America."
"Not all Americans want war, Sam. What happens if in Virginia they say, 'those Bostonians are violent troublemakers! While we want independence, we must side with Britain against the mob rule of Massachusetts.' And the plan could turn back upon us! The British could clamp down on Boston with maybe four or five regiments, and there will be no independence."
Sam had dismissed him with superb disdain. There was one thing the lawyer John Adams could now do to prevent an all-out civil war in the colonies.
He would defend Preston and his men in court.
In spring, 1770, John Adams argued his case against his cousin Sam Adams. In the final statements of the trial, John Adams gave a speech.
"Let us not judge these British men for the killing of these Bostonians," John said. "But for the killing of a mob. Can it even be proven who fired and did not fire, or whether the order to fire was given? Captain Preston testified that he ordered, 'don't fire,' but it seems that the soldiers misheard. We have heard these witnesses say that Preston used the word 'fire', but could not clarify whether he had ordered a volley."
The jury had returned a verdict within a few hours: six not guilty on all counts, and two, Montgomery and Killroy, guilty of manslaughter, a far lesser crime. Only Montgomery and Killroy could be proved to have fired, and they received a branding on the thumb as punishment.
Before an American judge, John Adams got Captain Preston off on self-defense, and all but two of the soldiers acquitted. Samuel was furious. He had wanted the war to begin in Massachusetts in 1770, but if Samuel Adams had succeeded in his plot to get the war started, Britain would have crushed Boston when the other colonies refused to support the mob violence of Adams.
With several thousand British soldiers patrolling the city, there would have been no Boston Tea Party of 1773, where Sam Adams led a mob dressed like Indians to symbolize freedom and dumped an entire cargo ship's worth of tea into Boston Harbor to protest the lowering of taxes on tea, which cheapened the market. There might not even have been a Sam Adams; he could have easily been hung for treason.
And there certainly would not have been any Paul Revere, waiting with baited breath while watching the bell tower of the North Church on a cold April night five years later...
Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, had found out where the Patriots were storing ammunition and firearms, and had immediately planned to dispatch a battalion of redcoats to Lexington.
You know the rest, in the books you have read,
How the British regulars fired and fled,
While the farmers gave them ball for ball,
Behind each fence and farmyard wall.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
To be continued.
User Reviews
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-11-14 12:36:55 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
?
Submitted by Danger_Ranger (user info) at 2005-11-14 09:31:15 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuck you, i gotta start at the beginning.. brilliant. fucking brilliant. I gotta go to bed so i can wake up tomorrow, which is like today... in fact, tomorrow is tomorrow and it's already today which as a consequence is making me feel tired and desperately worn out... fuck you cunt, fuck you.
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2005-11-10 16:48:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm staying an hour late at work to read all of these.
Submitted by Viper_04 (user info) at 2005-11-07 05:20:08 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm with caes....but still a great start to the series, I'm going to read the next part now
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-11-02 07:28:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I found this interesting, but dry...I don't know, something put me off about it. It's like you half tried to write it as a story, and half as an essay and it ended up falling in between. I think I would have preferred one or the other. I won't break your streak though.
Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2005-11-02 01:10:55 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Because you're a badass!!!
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-11-01 18:11:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
That's a reason why I didn't rely that heavily on Wikipedia, just for information like the orders of battle, casualties, notable dead and wounded. For this part of the story, the Boston Massacre, I found on the internet the actual report made by Captain Thomas Preston detailing the conflict. He had ordered not to fire, but his soldiers only heard the word "fire" and had shot into the crowd. Just a great misunderstanding from the aggression of both sides.
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 17:20:33 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-11-01 17:02:35 (#)
Ranking: 0
Yeah, the Patriot molded about three different battles into one in the last scene. True, the British committed atrocities, but the Continentals definitely did also. Both sides refused to take prisoners, and executed downed enemies with bayonets in the stomach.
===
The British might have been authoritarian but they treated there colonies a lot better than the French, Belgians, Dutch or Spaniards did. Hence why they're the only ones who managed some success something through imperialism. They weren't cold calculating killing machines like Mel Gibson would like you to think so. Their treatement of natives was examplary compared of what the French or Americans did. There is no account that the Brits burnt down a church with people in it like the movie the depicted. The American Revolution was mainly economical, all revolutions are. The movie made sure to avoid that fact by depicting the British as evil men lead by the dicatorial King George III (they mentionned him like 4 times?) even though it was the British Parliament, a democratic body, that went to war against it's colony. The General Cornwallis character was also ridiculously distortionned.
If Americans believe The Patriot is solid historical facts (and they do), one can wonder if your source (wikipedia, a PUBLIC encyclopedia) will be accurate.
I guess what I'm saying...please make this look real, not romantic.
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 17:03:43 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
...like all Mel Gibson one-man epic movies. Though epic is a big word. His movies usually consist of him being a surhuman hero (though it's really just his enemies who are portrayed as incompetent), making desperate war cries like he did in Lethal Weapon when he rearanged his dislocated shoulder all the while having the camera constantly riveted on his percing blue eyes. He makes war look glamourous.
I'm suprised he didn't play Jesus in Passion of the Christ. It would've been the ultimate ego experience for Mel.
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-11-01 17:02:35 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Yeah, the Patriot molded about three different battles into one in the last scene. True, the British committed atrocities, but the Continentals definitely did also. Both sides refused to take prisoners, and executed downed enemies with bayonets in the stomach.
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 16:56:29 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-11-01 15:46:20 (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:22:01 (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, though I bet this serie will be very revisionist. The Boston Massacre itself has been exagarated a lot.
------------
Don't worry, I'm the French contributions will be featured
===
As long as it doesn't look like The Patriot, I'll be happy. That movie was filled with fallacies and blatantly anti-English.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-11-01 15:46:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:22:01 (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, though I bet this serie will be very revisionist. The Boston Massacre itself has been exagarated a lot.
------------
Don't worry, I'm the French contributions will be featured
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:44:21 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I'm not really going for a revisionist standpoint, just as truthful as possible. It wasn't British troops firing against unarmed civilians, and it wasn't the British defending against possible murder. Just a misunderstanding of orders.
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:22:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, though I bet this serie will be very revisionist. The Boston Massacre itself has been exagarated a lot.
Submitted by Fungah (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:17:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
It was really long, and as such u must of put a lot of work into it so +2 for u
Submitted by GodChicken (user info) at 2005-11-01 13:06:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment