Chapter 20: Descent into Lawlessness. The Scriptures tell us to, "Render therefore to all their due, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor," Romans 13:7. Nevertheless, the Sons of Liberty and many other colonists in Boston continually harassed their British soldiers instead of rendering them honor. This led to a tragic incident that the colonial propagandists call the Boston Massacre. On the night of March 5, 1770, a lone British sentry stationed in Boston got into an argument with one of the colonists.
Before long, a mob gathered around the sentry, jeered him, and then began pelting him with snowballs and chunks of ice. Some of the men in the mob were armed with clubs. Fearing for his life, the sentry retreated to the steps of the Royal Customs House and yelled for help from the other soldiers. The British officer on duty, Captain Preston, was in a quandary about what to do. He could see that the sentry's life was in danger, but he had only seven soldiers on duty with him. What could seven men do against a mob?
Furthermore, Preston knew the law forbade the soldiers to fire on civilians unless they had order from a magistrate. After weighing the matter, Captain Preston decided to come to the sentry's rescue. He and his seven soldiers confronted the mob and ordered them to disperse. However, the mob refused to do so. Instead, they kept pressing in closer to the soldiers and continued pelting them with heavy sticks, chunks of ice, lumps of hard coal, and packed snowballs.
The mob eventually grew to about 400 people, mainly young men. Captain Preston later described the incident in court. The mob still increased and were more outrageous, striking their clubs or bludgeons one against another and calling out, "Come on, you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare." Profanity deleted, "Fire and be damned, we know you dare not." And much more such language was used.
At this time, I was between the soldiers and the mob, talking with them and endeavoring with all my power to persuade them to retire peaceably, but to no effect. They advanced to the points of the bayonets and struck some of the bayonets and even the muzzles of the muskets. They seemed to be trying to close in on the soldiers. While I was thus speaking, one of the soldiers, having received a severe blow with a stick, fell a little to one side and instantly fired.
When I asked him why he fired without orders, someone struck my arm with a club, which for some time deprived me of the use of it. Had this blow been placed on my head, most probably it would have killed me. As other testimonies verified, the leader of the mob, Crispus Attucks, had knocked one of the soldiers down, who then fired his musket. Seconds later, several of the other soldiers fired. Preston, who had never given the order to fire, immediately yelled for the soldiers to cease firing.
But by then, five members of the mob had been killed and six others wounded. The leading agitator in Boston, Samuel Adams, named the unfortunate shooting incident the Boston Massacre. He spread complete lies about the episode through the colonies, making it appear to have been a planned, purposeful massacre. In his fictitious account of the incident, a British officer ordered his soldiers to fire upon a peaceful crowd without provocation.
Not only that, according to Adams, the British had planted other soldiers in the nearby Royal Customs House, who also fired from windows upon the peaceful crowd. Paul Revere made an engraving of the event based upon Adams' fabricated account. However, in this instance, we know the exact truth of what happened because the British soldiers were arrested and put on trial for murder before a colonial jury. The man defending them was one of the key revolutionaries himself, John Adams, a cousin of Samuel Adams.
In the trial, all the facts came out. There was no arranged, purposeful massacre. It was not a peaceful crowd, but an organized mob armed with clubs, stones, and chunks of ice. The mob attacked the soldiers first, and no command was given to the soldiers to fire. Instead, the soldiers panicked and fired in self-defense. Furthermore, no shots were fired from the Customs House.
Nevertheless, Samuel Adams never retracted his totally bogus version of the incident, and it was his maliciously false account that most colonists believed. Likewise, it was the dishonest representation of the event in Paul Revere's etching that stayed in the people's minds. It's no wonder that even American biographers, who typically portray all of the revolutionary leaders in the best possible light, conclude that Samuel Adams was a habitual liar and master propagandist.
One biographer has characterized him as a man who "evaded truth and mishandled the facts so glaringly that almost everything he wrote is a demand for refutation." Another biographer writes that he "preached hate to a degree without rival." What would make a staunch churchgoing man like Samuel Adams publish such lies? What would make him want to stir people up over false pretenses? The answer is that he apparently had never put on the new man.
I say that because Paul describes the new man as someone who has "put away lying" and who "speaks truth to his neighbor." When we are born again, no corrupt word should proceed out of our mouths, but only what is good for necessary edification (Ephesians 4:25-29). But how should a Christian view the so-called Boston Massacre? What would Jesus have to say about all of this? Interestingly, Jesus lived in a setting similar to that of the colonists in Boston, only far, far worse.
He and the other Jews didn't have British soldiers around them; they had Roman soldiers. Unlike the British soldiers, the Roman soldiers were foreign conquerors, and they didn't need the permission of a magistrate to attack any civilian who gave them problems. What did Jesus tell his Jewish disciples concerning their response to this foreign occupying army? He said, "Whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two," Matthew 5:41.
In other words, don't just obey the soldiers and officials, but do more than they ask. If the Christians in Boston had obeyed Jesus, there would have been no Boston Massacre. In fact, there wouldn't have been British soldiers in Boston in the first place. The reason they were there was to protect the citizens and officials against the violent Boston mobs, and those mobs were run by Samuel Adams, a churchgoing, professing Christian. The Gaspee Incident.
In June of 1772, a British revenue ship, the Gaspee, was chasing a smugglers' boat in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. But the Gaspee ran aground in shallow water. The captain had no choice but to wait until the rising tide would free the ship. However, before the tide came in, some of the Sons of Liberty rowed out and boarded the ship. They shot the captain and set the ship on fire. Many of the men involved in the incident were leading citizens of Providence, Rhode Island.
So the colonial authorities let the men off scot-free. Sadly, the Gaspee Incident wasn't an isolated case. The British authorities found it almost impossible to prosecute and punish smuggling and acts of violence because the colonial juries always sided with their countrymen and refused to find them guilty. For that reason, Parliament was forced to pass a law that permitted authorities to try suspected smugglers in the Admiralty Court in Nova Scotia.
Although the colonists complained bitterly about this, they had left the British government with little choice. They had demonstrated over and over again that they would always side with their fellow colonists accused of smuggling, even letting outrageous acts such as the burning of the Gaspee go unpunished. Parliament Gives In. Although our textbooks portray the English king and Parliament as oppressive, tyrannical, and unresponsive to the colonists' pleas, it was Parliament that made all the concessions.
The colonists never conceded anything or gave one inch of ground. Eventually, Parliament withdrew all of the Townshend duties except for a three-penny tax on each pound of tea. This amounted to a 1.7% tax on tea. To put it in another way, in today's currency, it meant the colonists were paying merely two to three cents extra for each cup of tea. This tea tax paid very little of the cost of maintaining the troops on the frontier, but Parliament decided to accept this and leave the matter there.
For all intents and purposes, the colonists had won. But the last thing Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty wanted was peace and good relations between Britain and the thirteen colonies. So he and the Sons of Liberty constantly searched for ways to create conflicts with the British and to start various incidents. The so-called Boston Tea Party is a perfect example. It is more correct to call it the Boston Tea Vandalism. The Boston Tea Vandalism.
In 1773, the British government made a deal with the East India Company to help keep this company afloat. Like the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company before it, the East India Company was the proprietor of an English colony. However, its colony was in India rather than America. Its primary colonial export was tea. But the British tariffs on tea, coupled with the smuggling of Dutch tea into Britain, Ireland, and the American colonies, had pushed the East India Company to the point of bankruptcy.
So the Tea Act was passed to help save the East India Company. The act granted the East India Company a five-year rebate on the tariffs it paid on tea so that it could sell its tea at a competitive price. Parliament thought this would be a win-win situation. It was obviously a good deal for the majority of the American colonists, as well as for the Irish and the British. They could now purchase legal tea, make Parliament happy, and save money to boot.
Our textbooks regularly portray various English laws as aimed at the thirteen colonies when their main focus often was somewhere else. This was the case with the Tea Act. The primary market it targeted was Ireland, not the thirteen colonies. The population of Ireland was nearly double that of the colonies, and the Irish were heavy tea drinkers. But the act also included the thirteen colonies, the West Indies, Nova Scotia, and Quebec.
As was true of so many other British laws, the only subjects who went into an uproar over the Tea Act were the thirteen colonies. No doubt most of the American colonists would have been happy to drink legal tea at a price cheaper than illegal tea. However, instead of allowing the people to make their own choice about the matter, the Sons of Liberty once again turned to violence and threats to keep the people from being able to make their own choice.
Because of threats from the Sons of Liberty, virtually no one dared to become a consignee for this English tea. As a result, up and down the eastern seaboard, ships were turned away without ever unloading their cargoes of tea. Everywhere, that is, except in Boston. There, the governor was adamantly determined that the Sons of Liberty were not going to rule the colony. Moreover, the governor's sons had agreed to take consignment of the tea.
However, the Sons of Liberty controlled the dockworkers, and when three ships with cargoes of tea landed at the docks of Boston, the dockworkers made sure the cargo was not unloaded. Even though they had no legal right to do so, the Sons of Liberty ordered the ship captains to leave Boston without unloading their tea. Now, under British law, once a ship had docked, it had to pay the duty on its cargo even if the cargo wasn't unloaded.
Although it was none of their business whatsoever, the Sons of Liberty threatened the captains bodily if they paid the required duty. But the governor wouldn't let the ships leave unless they paid the duty. To make things even more complicated, under British law, unless a docked ship unloaded its cargo within twenty days, the customs officials could seize the ship's cargo. This would have brought the tea into Boston after all.
The Sons of Liberty knew that if the tea was brought into Boston and people were given the free choice of buying it, many, if not most, of them would buy this English tea. There was no reason not to. So rather than let this happen, the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, destroying anywhere from 8,000 to 18,000 British pounds worth of tea. In today's currency, the value of that tea would be between two and four million dollars. So this was no small prank.
It was terroristic vandalism on a grand scale. Benjamin Franklin was appalled by this needless vandalism, and he declared that the people responsible needed to pay for all the tea destroyed. Even the friends the colonists had in Parliament were shocked by this lawless act. The British government now realized Massachusetts had descended into mob rule. Britain needed either to abandon Massachusetts and perhaps the other colonies to the lawless mob or else reestablish its God-given authority.