The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Benjamin L. Carp (bio) Boston Massacre, American Revolution, Violence The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. Pp. 296. Cloth, $30.00.) After a demonstration of Jacques Charles's hot air balloon in Paris in 1783, skeptical observers asked Benjamin Franklin what good the invention might do. "Eh!" Franklin supposedly replied. "Of what use is a new-born baby?" We might ask Serena Zabin a similar question about The Boston Massacre: A Family History: of what use is a family history of the Boston Massacre? Zabin takes a refreshing new look at the residents and relationships of late-colonial Boston as British troops arrived in autumn of 1768. With her rich knowledge of Boston's physical and social geography, she sets the scene in a small but tempestuous town of 16,000 people, where the arrival of "roughly 2,000 men, 380 women, and 500 children" made a difference (67). Zabin shows how they became sociable neighbors and amiable coworkers, how they formed young couples and made newborn babies. These stories are new, because we are accustomed to thinking of the years 1768–70 as a time of tension over a hostile troop presence. Then, on March 5, 1770, a brawl turned into a violent tragedy: the redcoats fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. Zabin offers us a different way of looking at the months preceding that night, and a world that was lost. Other historians emphasize colonial protests and parse the evidence about who provoked the shooting. Zabin's book, instead, concisely notes the politics of the Quartering Act or the machinations of higher officials, and then analyzes "Bostonians' ability to socialize across political hostilities" while hinting at the lessons we might learn (39). Samuel Adams, Crispus Attucks, and Christopher Monk recede from the story. Army wives like Jane Chambers and neighbors like Jane Crothers Whitehouse emerge. The clash over enforcing Parliament's customs duties may have been intractable. The violence was certainly shocking. And the mystery of blame may never be solved, however compelling. Regardless, Zabin asks us to set those questions aside and focus on what ought to matter more: the ways that marginalized people and quotidian exchanges offer a vital context for understanding the full tapestry of early-modern urban life. Soldiers often traveled with families. They courted and married local women. They weren't quite strangers, because they made connections with [End Page 168] townspeople, as did the women and children who arrived with them. They encountered not just radical Liberty Boys, but Boston's men, women, children, free and enslaved, many of whom valued sociability or economic exchange over the divisive issues of the day. Zabin uncovers their sympathy for flogged British soldiers, as civilians shielded deserters. Knowing better than to trust newspapers, Paul Revere's cartoon, or John Adams's self-serving memoirs, she uses warning-out records, church records, and court records to map the integration of army families into every neighborhood in town. And so, she argues, "general threats of violence went hand in hand with neighborly concern" (74). Bostonians wondered about the redcoats: "Should they be thought of as invading soldiers or as sons in law?" (101). The traditional narrative of the American Revolution casts them as the former, but Zabin treats them as the latter. Along the way we learn about sex and marriage, civil and military justice, social welfare, and desertion. Evidence of enmity between soldiers and civilians certainly emerges, but rebel propaganda overemphasized these disagreements. The truer world of Boston in the late 1760s was one of personal connections, including loving connections. In Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia, 2009), Zabin similarly argues that the violence of the New York Conspiracy of 1741 (and its subsequent punishments) was less important than the wider Atlantic world of social relations that the trial records reveal. Zabin's focus on Boston necessitates some sacrifices. While she describes the British soldiers' previous experiences in Cork and Halifax, she makes no comparison to the equally controversial army presence in New York City, where family issues also became central. The Golden...