illustration of revolutionary

March 5, 1770

It was a cold night in Boston.

A lone British sentry stood on a cobbled square covered in snow. He guarded the Custom House, where officers enforced British import and export duties. He was nervous. Tempers were high in the colonial city: British troops had been quartered there for two years, sent by King George III to keep the peace after Parliament issued yet another round of taxes. Bostonians bristled under the soldiers’ watch. They called the soldiers “Lobsterbacks” and plotted the colonies’ independence.

Now, as the British sentry stood guard, he realized he wasn’t alone. A rowdy group of young Boston men—some of them merely boys—emerged from the night and approached the sentry, jeering at him.

This kind of incident happened often in Boston in 1770. It might have ended there—with a few spat words—but high above, an alarm bell began to toll. Throngs of people flooded into the square, surrounding the sentry.

Historical accounts disagree about exactly what happened next. Some say the crowd of Bostonians began throwing stones and snowballs at the sentry; some say people took up sticks or clubs; some say there was angry chanting: “Kill him! Kill him!”

What’s undisputed is that a small group of British soldiers from the nearby garrison ran to the sentry’s aid, led by Captain Thomas Preston. And in the chaos, the soldiers shot five Bostonians in the crowd. Three died instantly; the other two died shortly thereafter from their wounds. One of the dead was Crispus Attucks, a Nantucket whaler. Another victim was a young boy.

Captain Thomas Preston and the soldiers were taken into custody. Boston was in an uproar. There would be a murder trial.

But what lawyer in Boston would defend British soldiers who’d just committed the Boston Massacre?

March 6, 1770

An Irishman pounded on John Adams’ door.

Adams, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, was discussing the shooting with associates in his office. He’d been near the square the night before: His club was meeting in the South End of Boston when they heard “the ringing of bells,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “and supposing it to be the signal of fire, we snatched up our hats and cloaks” and ran into the street, where “a crowd of people was flowing.” They didn’t witness the shooting; it was over before Adams and his friends made it to the square.

Adams was a Boston patriot through-and-through: Born on a Massachusetts farm, he’d attended Harvard College before becoming a prominent attorney and advocate for American independence. For years he’d criticized England in columns published in The Boston Gazette under the pseudonym “Humphrey Ploughjogger.” Adams’ chief complaint was the Stamp Act, which forced colonists to pay a tax on stamped documents. The tax itself was bad enough, but worse was its enforcement: The Act specified that colonists suspected of avoiding the stamp tax would be hauled before British vice admiralty courts instead of common law courts. The vice admiralty courts were not real courts, as far as Adams was concerned. They didn’t have juries; also, the defense wasn’t allowed to cross-examine witnesses. No colonist would receive a fair trial there, Adams argued.

A sensationalized engraving of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere in 1770. (Source: Library of Congress)

He knew something about fair trials. Adams was a brilliant attorney. In 1768 he defended merchant John Hancock after the British accused Hancock of smuggling. The charges were dropped. The following year, Adams defended four colonial sailors who killed a British naval officer. Adams argued it was self-defense: The officer had boarded the colonial sailors’ ship and was trying to conscript them into the Royal Navy. The sailors were acquitted.

Now, the morning after the Boston Massacre, a flustered Irishman named James Forrest came to Adams with a plea.

Adams would later recall the moment in his autobiography:

With tears streaming from his eyes he said, ‘I am come with a very solemn message from a very unfortunate man, Captain Preston, in prison. He wishes for counsel and can get none.’

This was now Adams’ quandary: Would he—a patriot who railed against British oppression, and whose cousin Samuel Adams ran the Sons of Liberty—defend the British soldiers?

It wasn’t an easy decision for Adams. His wife Abigail was pregnant. He cared deeply about America’s independence. Representing the British soldiers would make Adams unpopular in Boston; worse, if his defense revealed the soldiers were provoked, the world’s worst prejudices about American colonists (that they were “drunken ragamuffins,” as British Parliamentarian Lord North put it) would be confirmed.

Adams kept a diary. It was there, for his own conscience, that he scribbled a quote from Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria:

If, by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and years of transport will be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.

He agreed to defend the soldiers. “Counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free country,” he said.

October 24, 1770

There would be two trials.

Captain Thomas Preston would be tried first. As the officer in charge, he’d ordered the other solders into the square to defend the sentry. He hadn’t shot anyone himself. His trial would determine whether he’d commanded the soldiers to fire. After Preston’s trial, the other eight soldiers would be tried separately.

Adams was the defense attorney at both trials. His defense would rely on “fact, evidence, and law,” he said.

The first big moment came early in Preston’s trial: A witness claimed he saw Preston order the soldiers to shoot. But Adams cast doubt on the story: He revealed Preston wasn’t wearing the coat the witness described seeing that night.

Preston was found not guilty.

Before the trials began, British soldiers and sympathizers had grumbled that the accused wouldn’t receive a fair trial. “I do not see a chance of a verdict being found for the prisoners,” Lt Col. William Dalrymple, a British officer, wrote to a friend. But during the Preston trial, Dalrymple admitted: “I must do the people the justice to say that the trial has been conducted as yet with the greatest decency and decorum.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams told the court.

December 3, 1770

At the second trial—with eight soldiers’ fates in the balance—Adams went beyond decency and decorum: He gave an impassioned argument about the nature of justice.

John Adams Portrait
John Adams. (Source: Smithsonian)

“As the prisoners stand before you for their lives,” Adams told the court, “it may be proper to recollect with what temper the law should proceed to this trial.”

A fair court of law should err in favor of the accused, Adams argued. “It’s of more importance to the community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished.”

He cautioned against “presumptive evidence” being taken as proof of guilt. On the night of March 5, he said, the British soldiers were acting in self-defense: They were “surrounded on all sides” by a Boston mob that wanted to kill them. “And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them,” Adams said. “The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up, because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers.”

He emphasized that the mob’s anger was understandable given what Britain was doing in Boston. “Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one,” he said. “They are wretched conservators of the peace.”

But anger at Britain was no foundation for justice in a court of law, Adams argued. Boston could not convict the soldiers of murder if the evidence showed they were defending themselves.

Adams painstakingly went through the testimony of each witness to recreate the night of the shooting, showing the soldiers had reason to fear for their lives.

Then came his closing.

“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams told the court, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

He continued:

The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady undeviating course; it will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men.

The verdict came in: Two of the soldiers were convicted on a lesser charge of manslaughter. The rest were found not guilty.

Not everyone in Boston was happy with the verdict. The Boston Gazette railed against it. But there were no riots in Boston after the trials, and Samuel Adams was rumored to be pleased by his cousin’s handling of the British soldiers’ defense. Whatever else Britain and the rest of the world would say about the American colonies going forward, they couldn’t deny the colonists’ commitment to justice, liberty, and the rule of law.

July 3, 1776

John Adams wrote a letter to his wife.

The world was rapidly changing. War had broken out the previous spring: It started around Boston, naturally—first at Lexington and Concord then at the Battle of Bunker Hill, which overlooked the city. Continental troops had lost ground to the British, but they’d proved up to the fight. America’s independence was within reach.

In June 1776, Adams, now in the Second Continental Congress, organized a five-person committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, the youngest delegate on the committee, thought Adams should take the lead in writing the Declaration. But Adams insisted Jefferson write it. (First, he explained, a Virginian “ought to appear at the head of this business,” not a Bostonian. Second, Adams said, “I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise.” Third, he told Jefferson, “you can write ten times better than I can.”)

The Declaration included a list of grievances against the King—notably, that he’d “obstructed the administration of justice” by refusing to allow the colonists to establish full judiciary powers, had deprived the colonists in many cases “of the benefits of trial by jury,” had transported colonists “beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses,” and “had made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”

In short, Britain denied to the colonists the impartial and fair trial process that Adams, in 1770, had ensured for the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. It was one of the core reasons—along with the quartering of soldiers and taxation without consent—that Americans could no longer live under the British yoke.

In his July 3 letter, Adams told Abigail that Congress had voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 2. (The Declaration would be signed on July 4.)

“I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration and support and defend these states,” Adams wrote to Abigail. “Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means.”

The principles Adams lived by—among them, the right of a man to be tried fairly by his peers in a system that gave him every benefit of the doubt—were now the fabric of a new country, part of its reason for being, and a birthright for generations to come.

1802–1807

When John Adams began writing his autobiography in 1802, he was 67 years old. He had served as America’s first vice president and second president. He’d been instrumental in the Revolution and the early days of the American Republic.

And yet, as Adams looked back at his life, it was his 1770 defense at the Boston Massacre trials that he considered “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Judgment of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or witches, anciently. As the evidence was, the verdict of the jury was exactly right.”

By then America was living by its own hard-won laws: It had an independent judiciary and a Bill of Rights, which guaranteed Americans the right to due process and against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment), the right to a speedy trial with an impartial jury in criminal matters (Sixth Amendment), and the right to a jury trial in civil matters involving a significant amount of money (Seventh Amendment).

If the intent of John Adams and the other Founders survived over the next centuries, Americans accused of wrongdoing would be treated fairly, without passion or prejudice, in an impartial system where evidence and justice would prevail.

But that wouldn’t always be the case.