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:	9780544911192
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	245,930
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

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.

Read an Excerpt

June 7, 1765. A young Irishwoman made her way through the crowded streets of Cork to the harbor. Following the red coat of her husband to the dock, Jane Chambers approached a man in uniform and gave him her name. To her relief, he let her pass. The name of her husband, Matthew, had also been checked off the list, but the uniformed man did not bother to note the name of the couple’s child. At last, after weeks of waiting, Jane and Matthew Chambers, along with their child, boarded the HMS Thunderer, where they joined Matthew’s mates in the British army’s Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot. Three days later they set sail for America.
 
It may seem strange to begin an account of the Boston Massacre with a woman in Ireland, yet she and women like her are the threads that tie together the range of people and the complexity of the forces that led to that dramatic moment. The complete story of the death of Bostonians at the hands of British troops is more than the political upheaval that followed the shooting. It is also the story of personal connections between men and women, civilians and soldiers. Over time, the women and children associated with the eighteenth-century British army have been forgotten. In the American imagination, most of the men too have been reduced to anonymous “troops” rather than considered as individuals.
 
Jane Chambers was not and is not famous. Her early life is lost to historians. We know neither when she was born nor in what year she married. Could she read or write? Was Matthew Chambers her first love? Had she ever dreamed of a life beyond Ireland? The sources are silent on these questions. But other parts of her life, including the choices she made, the family she created, and the voyages she took, have left traces. The everyday life of an ordinary woman would become part of an extraordinary moment.
 
The faint path of Jane’s life events merged with the far better documented path of the army regiment with which she traveled, from Ireland to Canada to Boston, and beyond. This was the same regiment whose soldiers in 1770 would live with civilians in Boston, marry civilians in Boston, and finally shoot civilians in Boston. Jane’s attempt to keep her Irish family together collided with British imperial politics in ways that few understood at the time and that no one in 1770 acknowledged. When she traveled with her husband’s regiment, Jane would become an unwitting teacher to Bostonians, helping them understand exactly what it meant to be a member of the British imperial family.
 
As the wife of a soldier, Jane, like tens of thousands of other women, became a part of the British army. Where they went, she went too. In this way, the eighteenth-century British army was quite unlike a present-day fighting force. Early modern armies were family institutions, comprising women and children as well as men.
 
A watercolor dating from the end of Matthew Chambers’s time in the army shows how army and family life were then one and the same. As far as the eye can see, a long line of red-coated soldiers marches through an empty landscape. In the foreground, with a splash of blue to mark her off from the reds and browns elsewhere, trudges a woman. She carries a baby in one arm and grasps an older child by the hand. Her husband carries a third child piggyback while leading a horse, on which a second woman sits, talking earnestly with the soldier at her side. The march looks long and slow. The woman in front hikes up her skirt to free her legs for walking, while the young boy whose hand she holds is burdened, like his father, with a large backpack. The older members of the family—mother, father, and son—all wear red coats like the hundreds of men ahead of them. Even as they stumble along behind the train of soldiers, they are part of the regiment, in appearance and in fact.
 
I imagine Jane’s life resembled that of the blue-skirted woman. She too followed a regiment. Like her husband and other soldiers, she went where she was sent, not where she chose. Lugging a child in her arms, close by her husband, she was not a casual visitor to the world of the British military but a member of it.
 
Women like Jane who accompanied the army were—and still are—often dismissed as prostitutes or parasites. Their usual label is “camp followers,” an undeservedly derisive term. But Jane and thousands of women like her tell a different story. Jane did more than accompany the army as part of a family unit; she was a genuine part of the army itself.

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

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

"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