by Patrick Nathan Cardamone

Created on: June 06, 2009   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

Whiging Out:

An Unfortunate Incident on King's Street

The Boston Massacre, as it is today called, has often been sighted in primary school texts as one of the defining moments leading up to the American Revolution. While this may be true in so much that the propaganda constructed around the incident did in fact help shape perceptions of the war before, during, and even after its onset, it was for the most part a relatively urbane matter. Based upon the information revealed in the testimonies given before, during, and after the actual trials of British soldiers involved, it was clearly just an unfortunate collision of civil unrest and justifiable attempt to enforce the law.

According to the testimony of Edward Gerrish, the unfortunate incident that claimed five lives and came to be known as the Boston Massacre was started by none other then himself.[1] Mr. Gerrish was a wigmaker's apprentice and who caught notice that a soldier walking near the guard on duty on the street that night was Captain Lieutenant John Goldfinch, a man that he claimed still owed a fellow apprentice (his own master actually) for services rendered, presumably the purchase of a wig. Captain Goldfinch ignored him, as he had actually already paid the debt. Mr. Gerrish later returned with friends confronting Captain Goldfinch and Hugh White, the guard on duty, about his debt, to which the White responded that as a gentlemen, Goldfinch would repay any debt he owed promptly. Mr. Gerrish then felt obliged to insult White and his fellow soldiers by insisting that none of them were in fact gentlemen. In a short altercation that followed, White struck Mr. Gerrish across the head with the butt of his musket. With wounded pride, Mr. Gerrish retreated while others, mostly young men, commenced pelting White with snowball and chunks of ice. According the testimony of Mr. Gerrish, there were only somewhere short of a dozen individuals engaged in this activity by the time White felt frightened enough to call the guards. Other reports claimed that the crowd of assailants and other various hecklers had grown to at least thirty to forty strong.[2]

While Gerrish and his fellows were engaging Goldfinch and White at the Custom House, elsewhere in Boston more mischief was apparently afoot, so much in fact that the possibility of the entire incident having been a conspiracy contrived by certain radicals in the city to incite undo violence and unrest is not unfounded. To the north of the Custom House, a similar

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