Reddit reviews The Boston Massacre

> That sure sounds like a unbiased court proceeding to me.

It was incredibly biased. Against the British soldiers. The entire town wanted to summarily lynch them. Which is why the evidence that they were acting in self defense had to be so overwhelming and incontrovertible to acquit them.

I dont know where you got that quote because it is nowhere in the document you linked. I did find this quote which undermines your conclusion:

>Thomas Preston had not expected to walk away a free man. Surrendering himself to local civilian authorities on the night of the incident, he awaited trial in the town jail for over seven months. Knowing that Massachusetts judges would preside over a provincial court held in Boston, before a jury drawn from Suffolk County freeholders, with local lawyers to represent him, he - with seemingly good reason - thought his chances of a fair trial slim. Seeing nothing but gloom ahead, he was sure that witnesses would perjure them- selves in court to secure his conviction and presumably his execution, despite his "clear conscience" and certainty that he was innocent of the charge. Were the trial before impartial judges and jurors in another venue, he believed that he would be exonerated. But in Boston he anticipated "a shameful end."

In fact I dont think you read any of this document at all because it very clearly and directly contradicts the point you are trying to make repeatedly. And for the most part this article is about the trial and its aftermath, not the massacre itself. Among the few mentions of the events leading up to the massacre is this quote:

>No one could deny that the sentry had been ridiculed by passing boys or that some had thrown snowballs at him...It was evident that the men of the relief party had been roughed up a bit. People taunted the soldiers and tugged at their weapons; the troops were hit by flying objects

The story of Garrick being hit by the butt of a rifle comes from the Short Narrative which was not evidence from the trial but a propaganda pamphlet printed by Boston newspapers to sway public opinion in Britain and the rest of the colonies. It was not used as evidence in the trial, because it was a propaganda story and by that point it had already served its purpose

More quotes from the document you linked:

>The Fair Account challenged the validity of the story presented in the Short Narrative...Hutchinson had sent twenty-five depositions from twenty-seven deponents in all, five civilians and twenty-two soldiers. Another two depositions (also from civilians) were sent later and added in London, bracketing the original set. As in the Short Narrative, a long introduction designed to shape readers' impressions preceded the depositions. Likewise, deeper causes were located years before, but there the similarities end. As the Fair Account told it, those underlying causes were not traceable to flaws in the navigation system but instead to selfish Bostonians who had wrongly denied Parliament's authority to regulate their trade. Petty, mean-spirited, ultimately treasonous, their behavior on March 5 showed their willingness to levy "war against the King" by accosting his "troops who were sent thither to preserve the public peace." Soldiers trying to do their duty encountered "the utmost malice and injustice" from the moment they stepped ashore.

>....according to this rendition, the soldiers had been lured into an ambush of fists and clubs. Gangs of local ruffians disingenuously turned their acts of self-defense into a pretext to roam the streets, indiscriminately waylaying and accosting any soldiers who crossed their path - officers or enlisted men, members of the Twenty-ninth

>...It was a civilian witness who claimed that Preston "spoke often to the mob, desiring them to be quiet and disperse," and that the soldiers fired raggedly, not in volley, only after being assaulted

Again, go read the book and stop trying to take out of context quotes to preserve the myth fabricated in American elementary schools. Particularly since the source you linked to prove me wrong says about this same book in the second paragraph:

>For more than thirty years readers have relied on legal scholar Hiller Zobel to walk them through the "massacre" maze. Zobel spent a great many pages setting the scene before telling his rigorously researched tale...Zobel's rendition is still considered authoritative on the "massacre" itself as well as the sequence of events leading up to the trials...