The Boston Massacre: A Family History

by Serena Zabin

Overview

“Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book does just that.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

A dramatic, untold “people’s history” of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution.

The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs, and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544911154
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	390,394
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

SERENA ZABIN is a professor of history and director of the American studies program at Carleton College. She is the author of Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings. She is also the codesigner of a forthcoming serious video game about the Boston Massacre, Witness to the Revolution.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue xi

1 Families of Empire, 1765 1

2 Inseparable Interests, 1766-67 17

3 Seasons of Discontent, 1766-68 31

4 Under One Roof, 1768 49

5 Love Your Neighbor, 1769-70 79

6 Absent Without Leave, 1768-70 109

7 A Deadly Riot : March 1770 136

8 Gathering Up: March 6, 1770-August 1772 160

9 From Shooting to Massacre, October-December 1770 191

Epilogue: Civil War 222

Acknowledgments 229

Notes 233

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

"Penetrating and lyrical, Zabin’s Boston Massacre offers startling revelations on every page. To read this “family history” is to tread the cobbled streets of eighteenth-century British America, peering into shops, barracks, bedrooms, and government halls along the way. Zabin’s account ripples far beyond Boston on the vexed night of March 5, 1770, offering fresh understandings of the cause of liberty and its consequences. The American Revolution—indeed, early urban warfare itself—will never look the same."  

Jane Kamensky

A lively gem of a book that expands our view of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.

Washington Post

"An intimate, complex, and moving picture of the friendships and family connections between Britons and Bostonians, in the throes of revolutionary change. Zabin’s eloquent account illuminates the ways in which the actors in this nation-making and empire-breaking drama experienced the rupture and transformation of the world they made together.” 

Peter S. Onuf

"Zabin’s engaging history adds nuance and complexity to the political and social aspects of the American Revolution."

Booklist

"Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book does just that."

Kathleen DuVal

"Zabin’s engaging history adds nuance and complexity to the political and social aspects of the American Revolution."

Booklist

A lively gem of a book that expands our view of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.

Washington Post

01/01/2020

Focusing on the years leading up to the Boston Massacre, Zabin (Dangerous Economies) reveals an intermingling between the inhabitants of Boston and the soldiers stationed there to protect the government from riots as tensions increased. Soldiers were housed right in town, in close proximity to residents who considered them an occupying force. Families were stationed with the soldiers, and many soldiers married into Boston families during the occupation. This intermingling created a charged situation leading up to the massacre, pitting soldiers and family members against one other. Zabin spends little time dissecting the massacre itself, which has been studied in detail by other scholars. Instead, the author focuses on the personal lives of those who contributed to the tensions between soldiers and citizens. VERDICT Zabin has done extensive research into the public records of several Revolutionary era archives and has compiled a compelling history of the Boston Massacre, weaving personal stories together to present a comprehensive view of this turning point incident.—Danielle Williams, Univ. of Evansville

Library Journal

2019-11-11
The British army was not just a man's profession 250 years ago but instead "a social world of families, friends, and children."

A popular British song at the time of the Revolutionary War was called "The Girl I Left Behind Me." As it turns out, writes Zabin (History and American Studies/Carleton Coll.; Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York, 2009, etc.), the British army was in the habit of bringing women along with it, or intermarrying with local populations, so that life in a bivouac was a family affair. For four years, writes the author, one unit lived in Boston "on a peninsula hardly bigger than a square mile." Zabin observes that the old term "camp followers" denigrates the contributions of women to these units who contributed work that was useful and necessary. They were also prolific; as the author notes, "in the years 1768 to 1772, more than a hundred soldiers brought their babies into Boston's churches to be baptized." When the British unit quartered in Boston, late of campaigns in Portugal and elsewhere during the Seven Years' War, was caught up in the chain of rebellious events that culminated in the Boston Massacre, a local defended the soldiers who were on trial for murder. That local was John Adams, who was, at the same time, involved in the first stirrings of the revolution. One witness, Zabin writes, was a Massachusetts woman who knew the soldiers well enough to know their first names—and, indeed, married a member of the regiment less than a month later. By that time, such marriages were no longer points of pride, though, and neither defense nor prosecution raised what might have been interpreted as witness bias because "to do so would have cracked open the pretense to which both sides had tacitly agreed: that an enormous gulf separated soldiers and civilians."

A well-written, thoroughly interesting addition to the social history of the American Colonies.

Kirkus Reviews

A lively gem of a book that expands our view of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.” — Washington Post

"A well-written, thoroughly interesting addition to the social history of the American Colonies." — Kirkus Reviews

"Penetrating and lyrical, Zabin’s Boston Massacre offers startling revelations on every page. To read this “family history” is to tread the cobbled streets of eighteenth-century British America, peering into shops, barracks, bedrooms, and government halls along the way. Zabin’s account ripples far beyond Boston on the vexed night of March 5, 1770, offering fresh understandings of the cause of liberty and its consequences. The American Revolution—indeed, early urban warfare itself—will never look the same."   — Jane Kamensky, Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University, and author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley   

"Zabin’s engaging history adds nuance and complexity to the political and social aspects of the American Revolution." — Booklist

“A compelling history of the Boston Massacre, weaving personal stories together to present a comprehensive view of this turning point incident." — Library Journal

"Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book does just that." — Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

"An intimate, complex, and moving picture of the friendships and family connections between Britons and Bostonians, in the throes of revolutionary change. Zabin’s eloquent account illuminates the ways in which the actors in this nation-making and empire-breaking drama experienced the rupture and transformation of the world they made together.”  — Peter S. Onuf, author, with Annette Gordon-Reed, of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

From the Publisher