5 March 1770, Adams was far more focused on how the event would be portrayed than how he would be portrayed. The British regulars had left Boston, true enough, but Adams wanted to get his (propagandized) version out of 5 March 1770 before anyone else could do so. To start, the tragic event needed a name, with Adams’ first idea the “Horrid Massacre”, a name which stuck in Boston. What was needed next was a coherent narrative of the tragic event, but nothing about the chaotic and horrific twenty minutes had been clear, even afterwards, except five civilians were killed by British redcoats. Had Preston, whose reputation of being cool-headed and benevolent were well known, ordered his men to fire; eyewitnesses could not agree. The concerned citizen standing next to Preston heard the word “fire”, but could not ascertain who shouted it. Adams used the uncertainty to his advantage in his narrative.
In the Gazette’s account, Preston ordered his men to fire, and the first of the five that was killed was Crispus Attucks, a Black sailor. Many that were deposed afterwards claimed that Attucks was the main aggressor, leading a charge on the redcoats. Henry Pelham created a detailed image of how he thought (wanted) the tragic event played out, showing Preston giving the order to fire on an innocent crowd while standing behind his men (Attucks was not depicted). Pelham titled his work “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre”. Pelham’s work is wildly inaccurate, given what is known for certain, such as Preston was really standing in front of his men.
Adams was also engaged in damage control, assuring Benjamin Franklin, the PA agent in London (since 1757), that his version was accurate. Adams didn’t know it, but many British newspapers latched on to his more lurid account, due to the sensationalism, as did European newspapers. Many in Britain assigned blame to the notoriously ill-behaved 29th Regiment. Adams worked to get Preston and the eight redcoats to trial quickly, while emotions still ran high. Hutchinson settled on a trial date in early-June 1770, where Adams and others directly appealed to the judges in the Superior Court wanting an earlier trial date. The judges did not want any trouble from Bostonians, and they agreed to an immediate trial. Soon afterwards, one of the judges fell from his horse, and the other judges refused to proceed without him; the trial was delayed until August 1770.
Adams kept insisting that the customs commissioners in Boston were behind not only the massacre, but the events beforehand as well, and soon enough all the customs officials sought refuge in The Castle. The MA House officially endorsed Adams’ narrative of the massacre, and Adams et al claimed that Boston and MA would never obey an act of Parliament of which they disapproved. Hutchinson wrote to London that it was beyond-time that Adams and his associates should be shipped to London for trial.
Behind the scenes, Hutchinson did his best to get the trial delayed later than August 1770. Hutchinson moved the MA House to Cambridge, thinking the further away from Boston the representatives were, the better. Hutchinson sent a letter of resignation as the Acting Governor of MA in late-March 1770, but sailing across the Atlantic at about the same time was Hutchinson’s Royal Commission as MA Governor.
During the Spring of 1770, John Adams agreed to defend Preston and the eight British regulars, an assignment which resulted in taunts and ridicule in the streets of Boston. It was extremely unlikely that John would have done so without consulting and getting the approval of Samuel Adams who seemed comfortable with John as the defense attorney.
The only question for the jury in Preston’s trial was this: Did Preston give the order to fire? As the trial commenced, it became clear to Samuel Adams that his narrative held very little sway. The lone sentry was under siege by a mob, the mob was the aggressor, and the jury was instructed to forget Revere’s absurd engraving. On the third day of the trial, reasonable doubt became manifest, and a unanimous vote for conviction seemed very unlikely. After six days of testimony, the longest trial held in MA’s history to that point ended with Preston’s acquittal on 30 October 1770. John Adams had succeeded in convincing at least a few jurors that Preston did not order his men to fire, since he was standing in front of his men when the shots were fired. In effect, Adams succeeded in his argument that Preston acted in self-defense, and that the mob was the aggressor. Preston’s acquittal surprised no one, and few were convinced of Preston’s innocence.
The trial date for the eight British regulars under Preston’s command was set for 20 November 1770, and Samuel Adams assumed that John Adams would use the same self-defense arguments to gain their acquittals. The jury for the eight redcoats was not impartial either, with none of the twelve from Boston. Samuel Adams moved on to non-importation which was coming apart at the seams. NYC defected from non-importation in July 1770, and Philadelphia followed in October 1770. The Sons of Liberty kept harassing the merchants that bypassed non-importation. Adams had to face the reality that the desire to continue non-importation had faded, and each colony blamed the other colonies for the failure of the boycott.
There was no trouble after the verdict, which relieved Hutchinson, who had his faith restored in the legal and government system, at least for a time. After the second trial, Samuel Adams made sure that his narrative ruled the day, where it appeared in serial form in the Gazette, and he made sure that Revere’s engraving was featured. Adams posed several pointed questions, such as why were the redcoats not in their barracks at 8 pm, and was there any way to definitively determine who carried and used clubs. Adams doubted that the words “Don’t Fire” were at all included in a British officer’s lexicon. Adams wanted and needed to prove that there had not been any plot involved on the side of Boston.
By then it was almost a year since the massacre, and Adams was still going full speed to shape his version of the tragic event before it receded into the past. Adams tried to create an annual remembrance on 5 March, which occurred until 1783, when another created holiday superseded it - The Fourth of July. By early-1771, Samuel Adams was not the only Adams that worried Hutchinson. John Adams had become a mystery to the MA governor, since John had shown much promise in Hutchinson’s estimation not long before. A year after the massacre, John Adams had become nearly as obstinate as Samuel Adams As Vindex, Adams kept the massacre alive and kicking, his narrative becoming the dominant and accepted version of what happened despite the seven acquittals of the redcoats.