Patriots (20 page)

That first shot hit no one. The crowd had pulled back, and for a few seconds there was silence. Then Preston moved behind his troops. He didn’t order them to fire, but he didn’t give the command to recover—to cease fire. Without any order from their captain, the British soldiers began to shoot.

Private Matthew Kilroy, one of the brawlers at the ropewalks, fired with no apparent aim. Yet he struck Samuel Gray directly in the head and opened a hole as big as a man’s fist. Gray, who had just called, “My lads,
they will not fire,” died instantly.

Another volley from the soldiers, and two bullets tore into the broad chest of
Crispus Attucks. Dark-skinned, Indian or mulatto, Attucks stood six feet two inches and towered over most British soldiers, who rarely reached five feet ten. Two decades before, at the age of twenty-seven, Attucks had run away from his master. Now, nearing fifty and a leader by his age and size, he had come to King Street at the head of a band of Boston sailors. Gasping, Attucks fell to the street in front of the relief column.

A civilian shouted that the crowd should advance in order to stop the soldiers from firing again. It was a fatal misjudgment. As men pressed nearer, the British fired from even closer range. James Caldwell, a sailor, was struck by a bullet that passed through his body, and he took a second wound in the shoulder.

Robert Paterson’s trousers had been grazed when Ebenezer Richardson fired from his window twelve days before. Now as he raised his right hand a bullet struck him in the wrist.

Patrick Carr, an Irishman living in Boston, had started for King Street with a small cutlass fastened under his coat, but his neighbors persuaded him to leave it at home. The blade would not have helped him. He was struck by a bullet that tore away his backbone to the hip.

Edward Payne, a merchant living in King Street across from the Custom House, had gone out earlier to see whether there was a fire. Coming home to tell his wife she had nothing to fear, Payne lingered at his doorway, watching as the crowd grew. A bullet caught him in the right arm.

Ebenezer Mackintosh’s brother-in-law, Samuel Maverick, was racing away from the shooting when a bullet ricocheted and caught him in the chest. Dying, Maverick fell to the street. He was seventeen.

At first, with the smoke, the pushing and the din, no one could be sure what had happened. Many in the crowd couldn’t believe that the soldiers had been firing real shot and not merely trying to scare them with powder. Some thought that a few men had fainted from fright. Others decided that men had run away and that what was left in the street were only the greatcoats they had shed as they ran. The confusion explained why seventeen-year-old Christopher Monk could not persuade anyone that he had been hit in the chest. Monk had come armed with a bat that he used for street
games, and now he felt himself lurching. Idly, his friend James Brewer asked whether he was wounded.

Sons of Liberty broadside

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

“Yes,” said Kit Monk.

“You are only frightened,” Brewer assured him.

But a man named John Hickling had felt the gaping wound in Samuel Gray’s head, and, as the powder blew away, others in the crowd began to realize what had happened. Men who had withdrawn now edged forward warily to care for the wounded. The soldiers reloaded and cocked their muskets.

Captain Preston rushed down the firing line, pushing the
musket barrels toward the night sky. “Stop firing!” he ordered. Furiously, he demanded to know why his men had fired. They said that they had heard the word “Fire!” and thought it had come from him. At once, Preston understood the enormity of what had happened.

Benjamin Burdick, who had run a British soldier off his property, inspected the body of Crispus Attucks and then walked directly to the line of soldiers and peered at them in the moonlight.

“I want to see some faces that I may swear to another day,” Burdick said.

Captain Preston, with the prospect of a murder trial vivid before him, said,
“Perhaps, sir, you may.”

Abigail Adams in 1763, the year before her marriage, and John Adams, about 1764

TWO PORTRAITS: MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

J
OHN
A
DAMS
had joined a club of fellow lawyers, and on the fifth of March they were meeting in the South End when the alarm bells began to clang. The club members assumed that the town was on fire, snatched up their hats and cloaks and ran off to help fight the flames. Only when he was in the street did Adams learn that British soldiers had fired into a crowd. Adams and his wife had lost an infant daughter only a few weeks before and were awaiting the birth
of another child, and he hurried home to be with his family. The route took him past a company of British troops with muskets on their shoulders and bayonets fixed. The soldiers had left a narrow path for a man of Adams’ stocky build, but he pushed forward, ignoring the soldiers’ menacing expressions as if they were a row of marble statues. By the time he reached his house in Cold Lane, the town seemed to be calming down for the night.

At thirty-four, John Adams was nearing the age James Otis had been when he argued against the writs of assistance, but Adams was aware that he had not made the same impact on the province. Both men had come from rural backgrounds. Like Speaker Otis, Adams’ father had once been a shoemaker before he became a farmer. But differences in the two boys’ characters had shown up early. The young Otis had loved the classics. John Adams had found studying Latin so dull that he went to his father one day and asked to be excused from it.

“Well, John,” his father said, “if Latin grammar does not suit you, you may try ditching. Perhaps that will. My meadow yonder needs a ditch.”

Exhilarated by his escape, the boy threw himself into the digging. Within minutes, he realized that a shovel weighed more than a textbook. That first morning was the longest he had ever endured, and he rejoiced when the day finally ended. After the second morning, he wanted to tell his father that he had made a mistake, but pride wouldn’t let him. By nightfall, John asked to return to Latin. In August 1751, at fifteen, John entered Harvard College.

During graduation ceremonies four years later, Harvard’s president singled out John as a first-rate scholar, and a minister from Worcester hired him as Latin master for his grammar school. Nothing about the job appealed to the young man except the pay. An escort came for him with a horse, and, before he was twenty, John Adams went off to become a provincial schoolteacher.

His class quickly saw through Adams’ teaching method. He picked the brighter boys and told them to teach their classmates while he wrote voluminously at his desk. He was considered pious, and the other masters supposed that he was composing sermons. But Adams was writing to his former classmates, mourning the end of their days at Harvard.

Some days he passed the time by imagining himself a dictator, with his students as famous generals and distinguished politicians. Then he remembered that his generals were three feet tall and many of his politicians still wore
infant petticoats. Very soon he was considering routes of escape. He rejected the ministry because he thought a congregation’s first requirement in choosing a preacher was not piety, integrity, good sense or learning; it was stupidity. Medicine was possible, and he thought of making his name as a
surgeon. The army took personal wealth or a rich patron. Yet military service had one great appeal: he could find out whether he was a hero or a coward.

Adams dipped into lawbooks, went to court to hear the colony’s better lawyers, and became drawn to the bar. He saw its shortcomings, all the hours lost on meaningless writs and indictments, but the law seemed a quick, sure road to prosperity, and he apprenticed himself to a leading lawyer.

During the next two years, Adams taught during the day and studied law at night. Over meals, his tutor was something of a freethinker, interested in debating religion more than the law. John Adams, with a prickly disposition, enjoyed their debates, and other learned men also engaged him in friendly arguments that exposed him to theories of equality and liberty. Adams, conservative by nature, contended that some persons could never enjoy complete suffrage—women and children, idiots and madmen, criminals and debtors. But he was listening and learning. Most of all, he was watching himself and the impression he was making.

Although he lived in a province that banned the theater, Adams treated life as though it were a drama going on around him. In his diary he recreated each day’s scenes and dialogue, then stood apart and criticized the figure he cut on Worcester’s stage. Almost always it was a poor one. He was sharp-tongued when he should have been bland, he wrote. Insipid when he should have been witty. With women, he was tongue-tied and awkward. Worst of all, he was sure he was irredeemably lazy. Why couldn’t he be like Mr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, whom the best people in Worcester considered an industrious genius? But then, should he be worrying so much about fame? No! Man’s true goals must be piety and virtue.

Nothing seemed to come easily for John Adams, and being admitted to the bar at Braintree became another ordeal when his law tutor did not go along to present him to the court. Jeremiah Gridley came to his rescue, offering to shepherd him through the formalities. Then Gridley said, “Mr. Adams, permit me to give you a little advice. In the first place, pursue the law itself, rather than the gain of it.” And, he added, don’t marry early.

When that last advice made John Adams smile, Gridley asked whether he was engaged.

Adams said he was perfectly disengaged. But he couldn’t vouch for how long he’d remain so.

Gridley smiled in resignation. “An early marriage will probably put an end to your studies and will certainly involve you in expense.” He looked at his watch. “You have detained me here the whole forenoon and I must go to court.”

But John Adams followed Gridley’s advice. He threw himself into more study even though he couldn’t always find the volumes he wanted. “No books,” he wrote during a low moment, “no time,
no friends.” His studies might not make him rich, but they were a way of gaining respect. Adams wanted to end the casual insolence of colleagues like Robert Treat Paine, who once challenged him during an argument to cite the source of his opinion.

Adams said, “Vinnius.”

“Vinnius!” said Robert Paine. “You can’t understand a page of Vinnius!”

He had no right to say that to me, John Adams complained to his diary. He knows nothing of me at all. “For the future, let me act the part of a critical spy upon him, not that of an open unsuspicious friend.”

—

His diary had become John Adams’ one intimate. He could dissect in its pages each new personality entering his life. Hannah Quincy, for example, usually managed to lead their banter to some provocative question about the relation between a husband and a wife. John Adams found Hannah more thoughtful than most young women and noted with approval that she was always reading. More often, though, he analyzed himself: “I have not conversed enough with the world to behave rightly.” People always seemed to be laughing at him. Adams talked with Robert Paine about Greek, which made Paine laugh. He told Samuel Quincy that he wanted to be a great man, which made Quincy laugh. He lectured young women on the folly of love, which made everyone laugh. Meanwhile he was neglecting his true duty. “Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts and of my behavior. How shall I
gain a reputation!”

Over the next half-dozen years, Adams became known as a competent lawyer, an acceptance that brought him neither riches nor fame. He lamented that never had a man conducted so much business—Yankees were litigious—for so little profit. At the same time, he continued to examine the available young women of the
colony. He came close to proposing to Hannah Quincy, but finally chose Abigail Smith, daughter of a Congregational minister and born to the Puritan aristocracy. Abigail’s father had given her and her two sisters the freedom to read and think at a time when learning for a woman was unfashionable. Daughters of wealthy families were taught only to read and write, add and subtract, and possibly play a musical instrument. Hannah Quincy and James Otis’ witty sister, Mercy, were exceptions. Abigail Smith had been too delicate to attend even a dame school. But she read—poetry, fiction,
The Spectator
from London—and wrote long letters to her friends, who disguised themselves with names like “Calliope,” “Aspasia” and “Aurelia.” Over their four-year courtship, Abigail became “Diana” in her letters to Adams, who was “Lysander.”