The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin Lauren Duval The Boston Massacre: A Family History. By Serena Zabin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 314 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. On a frosty March evening, Jane Crothers—who may have been a bar-maid at Boston’s Royal Exchange Tavern—crossed the street to speak with Private Hugh White, the sentry stationed outside the Custom House. An Irishman who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Regiment in 1759, thirty-year-old White had arrived in Boston a year and a half prior. Tensions occasionally flared between the troops and the local population, but for the most part, he—like many of his fellow soldiers—had found friendship and community in Boston. That evening, as he stood outside the Custom House, he chatted with neighbors, inquiring after their wives and children. A few blocks away, the clamor of angry voices echoed through the snow-covered city. Did the private know the cause, Crothers wanted to know. He did not. Tolling bells abruptly ended their conversation as the square in front of the Custom House flooded with angry, shouting Bostonians, hurling wood and ice. Guns drawn, seven soldiers rushed to Private White’s aid. As she would later testify, Crothers inched closer to the soldiers for protection, giving her a clear view of a man in a dark coat who, she alleged, clapped one of the soldiers on the back and encouraged them to fire—which they did shortly thereafter. Revealing her familiarity with the officers residing in the city, Crothers was “positive the man was not the Captain [Thomas Preston]” (155).1 Her witness testimony would prove key in exonerating Captain Preston from a charge of ordering the troops to fire on civilian inhabitants. This was not the end of Crothers’s engagement with the British army. When, three weeks later, Crothers married Private Joseph Whitehouse of the Fourteenth Regiment, she became an official part of Britain’s military establishment. By the time she testified as a witness for the defense at Captain Preston’s trial the following October, partisan narratives crafted to explain the violence of that night deliberately overlooked the experiences of women such as Crothers who bridged Boston’s military and civilian communities. Instead, as they pointed fingers at one another, Bostonians, lawyers, military officials, and politicians proclaimed that “an enormous gulf separated soldiers and civilians” (207) and that the two populations were—and always had been—separate. But such assertions, Serena Zabin shows in The Boston Massacre: A Family History, are more reflective of political posturing and legal maneuvers than the lived experiences of the men, women, and children who made their lives together in revolutionary Boston. [End Page 198] In her masterful retelling of the events that would become known as the Boston Massacre, Zabin reorients the familiar story of British troops firing into a rowdy crowd around the family ties of women such as Crothers and the neighborly relationships displayed in Private White’s conversations outside the Custom House. “From the moment their guns went off, the spotlight of history has focused its narrow beam on those British soldiers” (137), Zabin writes. But, she contends, there is so much more to the story—“a much wider and richer catalog of . . . events” that includes “women as well as men, friends as well as foes” (150). Focusing on the period from the troops’ 1765 embarkation for the North American colonies through the soldiers’ trials in December 1770, Zabin brings revolutionary Boston to life. British troops and their families, she shows, were enmeshed in Boston’s local community. Residing for nearly four years “on a peninsula hardly bigger than a square mile” (xvi), military families lived in the same neighborhoods, shopped in the same markets, and attended the same churches as civilian inhabitants. In their spare time, soldiers worked in local businesses and forged relationships with their coworkers. They got drunk with their neighbors in Boston’s many taverns, alcohol occasionally inflaming partisan tensions and leading to brawls. Such conflicts were not limited to men; soldiers’ wives, whose domestic and caretaking labors were essential to the functioning of early modern armies, befriended local woman, often socializing—sometimes...