Soldiers had been brought to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the Townshend Acts and keep the peace in the restive city. They were under orders not to use their weapons against the citizenry. The soldiers found themselves the object of Boston's hatred. The workers on the docks and at the city's ropewalk were particularly belligerent. They taunted and insulted the soldiers and brawled with individuals or small groups of them, sometimes using cudgels.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, on King Street, a soldier guarding the Customs House sent word for reinforcements because he was being confronted by a group of rowdy men and boys, some of whom had armed themselves with staves. A small detachment of soldiers appeared as the crowd in the street also increased. Taunting and jeering led to physical fighting and some of the soldiers then fired into the crowd, killing five people.

The following day, a town meeting was held in Boston's Faneuil Hall and a committee of 15 men was formed, among them Samuel Adams. Adams had already addressed the crowd, although what he said was not recorded. Accounts of the events of the few days after the affair described Adams as the "controlling mind" of the committee, even though he was not always officially in its front rank. The committee immediately met with the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and demanded that the troops be removed from the city.

The town meeting did not dissolve, but instead adjourned, giving a warrant to a committee—formally consisting of James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton but also consisting of four others, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams—that they investigate the affair and report back to the reconvened meeting on March 12. The committee's warrant read, "What steps may be further necessary for obtaining a particular account of all proceedings relative to the massacre in King-street . . ." This is the first evidence of the mention of the word "massacre," but newspaper accounts a week after the incident said that on the day following the incident, as people in the surrounding regions heard news of the "massacre," they began streaming into Boston.

The committee's report, delivered to the reconvened meeting on the 12th, gave an account of the affair. It contained the sentence, "An inquiry is now making into this unhappy affair; and by some of the evidence, there is no reason to apprehend that the soldiers have been made use of by others as instruments in executing a settled plot to massacre the inhabitants." The members of the committee, including Samuel Adams, signed the report.

The committee may have admitted that there was no evidence that the affair was the result of a premeditated "plot to massacre the inhabitants," but it did not hesitate to characterize it as a "massacre." Newspaper and broadside accounts, dated from the day of the committee report, called it "this horrid Massacre." Paul Revere's well-known and somewhat inaccurate colored engraving of the affair, which was labeled, "The Bloody Massacre," was issued on the same day.

The town meeting's committee, of which Samuel Adams was a member, then wrote a longer account, called "A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre," and submitted it a week later under the signatures of the formal heads of the committee, Bowdoin, Pemberton, and Warren. The meeting accepted it and had it printed, and copies of it were immediately sent to England in order to give an account of the events that would help shape the reporting of the event there. Calling it a "massacre," rather than a "riot," a "tragedy," or a "disturbance," as the soldiers and colonial officials were inclined to do, went far toward absolving the residents of Boston of blame for the incident and indicting public opinion against the soldiers. In addition, calling it a "massacre," rather than a "murder," suggested that it might have been organized, and not a spontaneously unfolding event.

Aside from that, however, the word "massacre" had a particular resonance that was well understood on both sides of the Atlantic. Calling the event in Boston a "massacre" evoked an event that had occurred two years earlier, in 1768, in a section of London known as St. George's Fields. A crowd of almost 15,000 people gathered there to protest the imprisonment of John Wilkes, a radical member of the House of Commons convicted of libeling the King and his ministers. Soldiers had been guarding the prison, and under provocation, fired into the crowd, killing 7 people, including one young man mistaken for a rioter by several soldiers who pursued, cornered, and shot him in a stable. The St. George's Fields riot was quickly termed the St. George's Fields "massacre" by some of the London press.

From prison, Wilkes had corresponded with the Sons of Liberty in Boston, who were inspired by his radicalism. He had written them a letter referring to the "horrid Massacre," meaning the affair in St. George's Fields. In another letter, he suggested that the massacre had been planned in advance by the government, and that, for this reason, forces of a standing army were brought in to use against civilians. The members of the Boston Committee, in reporting that they found no evidence that the event in Boston had been premeditated by the government or the soldiers, may have been primed by Wilkes to consider that possibility.

After the St. George's Fields massacre, Dr. John Free, Chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, preached a fiery sermon, denouncing the deaths as murders. The sermon was printed as a pamphlet and quickly found its way across the Atlantic. London broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets also rapidly appeared in the American colonies, where they were reprinted in local papers. Essentially, many Americans believed that they were one in a cause with Wilkes and other English radicals who were being oppressed by arbitrary laws and an oppressive "ministerial conspiracy."

Historian Pauline Maier points to the reporting in the Boston Gazette of March 12, 1770, which said, "A more dreadful Tragedy has been acted by the Soldiery in King-Street, Boston, New-England, than was sometime since exhibited in St. George's Field, London, in Old England, which may serve instead of Beacons for both Countries." Some London papers also linked the two events.

After the Boston Massacre, John Lathrop, Pastor of the Second Church in Boston, preached a sermon entitled "Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston," which very deliberately echoed Dr. Free's earlier sermon.

Bostonians interpreted the events in their city as an eerie repetition of the "St. George's Fields Massacre," and their labeling of the affray in Boston as a "massacre"—and even "this horrid Massacre," echoing Wilkes' description of St. George's Fields—cemented that connection.

It is fascinating to consider what might have happened had the American patriots lost their war against Great Britain. Certainly British victory in the conflict was entirely plausible. Indeed, given the significant disparities in resources between the British and the colonists, such an outcome seemed not just possible but likely early on, and at numerous points during the conflict. The Patriots lacked a professional army, a central government, and a navy; the 13 colonies were geographically dispersed and lacked Britain’s political unity. The Patriots waged their war for independence against the world’s premier military and its most powerful empire, only a decade and a half removed from its great triumph over France in the Seven Years’ War.

It is impossible to know with certainty what would have happened if the colonies had lost the War of Independence. Historians refer to such “what if?” as counterfactuals—because they occur in an imagined world where a different sequence of events took place, there is by definition no factual evidence on which to base historical analysis. Without documentary sources to work with, answers to these questions are speculative by nature. Nevertheless, it is possible to make some educated guesses about the nature and probability of different outcomes.

Certainly the timing of the Patriot defeat would have had an important effect on the events that followed. The War of Independence was a protracted struggle (it remained America’s longest war until the Vietnam War in the 1960s), and throughout the conflict the British alternated between coercive policies and conciliatory policies. At moments, the British seemed intent on punishing the rebelling Patriots so harshly that they lost the will to continue their military struggle; at other moments, the British pursued far more generous policies intended to pacify the colonists and persuade them to willingly give up their struggle for independence. (Several historians have suggested that the vacillation between the two policies itself undermined the royal cause. When pursuing a policy of coercion, they appeared cruel; when pursuing policies of conciliation, they appeared weak. Refusing to commit fully to either strategy since it made the British seem indecisive and weak-willed.) Some historians have argued that the consistent application of either of these policies might well have resulted in British victory in the war’s first few years. Instead, their alternation between carrot and stick dragged out the war and contributed to the colonists’ growing resolution.

Whether the Patriots surrendered during a period of British conciliation or during a period of more punitive British policy would have had significant impact on the terms of the peace that followed. Had the British prevailed during one of the periods in which Parliament took a more severe approach to prosecuting the war, it is not difficult to imagine fairly harsh treatment for many of the rebellious colonists. Certainly some of the most influential instigators and leaders of the independence movement would have received unforgiving treatment from their conquerors: in the eyes of Parliament, of course, the Patriot cause was not an independence movement but blatant treason against the crown.

Surrender during one of these punitive phases would have had some serious consequences for the defeated. At least some key figures in the rebellion would have been tried and imprisoned if not executed outright. Larger numbers of Patriot supporters would likely have been stripped of their land or possessions; some may have been forced to flee. Here the real-life experience of British loyalists in the colonies following the British defeat at Yorktown is instructive. British surrender forced many of those families to forfeit their land and businesses; finding the newly-independent colonies an extremely unwelcoming place for those who had supported the losing side, many fled to British-controlled Canada to avoid further persecution.

Had the British defeated the colonists during a more conciliatory phase, it seems likely that their treatment of most of the Patriots would have been substantially more generous. Many of Parliament’s attempts to persuade the rebelling colonists back into the empire rather than force them militarily were, after all, predicated upon fairly liberal terms: in many cases, Patriots who surrendered their arms and took oaths of loyalty to the crown would be spared the most harsh punishments. Because failure to abide by those promises could have been politically disastrous for the British, it is plausible to imagine much more forgiving terms at particular junctures in the war.

Speculating as to the long-term results of a British victory in the War of Independence is necessarily even more vague. It is somewhat difficult to imagine the British ruling the expanding colonies indefinitely; as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the notion of a relatively tiny island ruling a land so great in both territory and population in perpetuity was a difficult one to reconcile. Here again the real-life experience in North America may provide some useful insight: it is not difficult to imagine that, like Canada, the colonies might ultimately have broken away, gradually and peacefully, to become an independent political entity several generations later.

Given that it took enormous determination, military aid from the French, and more than a little luck for the colonists to defeat the British in the War of Independence, it is perfectly reasonable to speculate as to what might have happened if the colonists’ military fortunes had stumbled. By definition, counterfactual questions can never be answered with precision; in this case, the combination of historical guesswork and real-life examples can lead us to a number of plausible outcomes depending on the nature of the Patriots’ defeat.

The battle at Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862, ended Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia faced Union General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac near Sharpsburg, Maryland; by the end of the day, 6,000 Americans lay dead or dying and another 17,000 were wounded. It remains the bloodiest single day in American history.

The Confederate Army fielded two corps (Longstreet’s and Jackson’s), organized into nine infantry divisions and a cavalry division and comprising more than 130 individual regiments, together totaling more than 38,000 men. The Union Army of the Potomac fielded six corps (I, II, V, VI, IX, and XII) organized into 18 infantry divisions and a cavalry division; more than 191 individual regiments numbering some 75,000 federal troops fought in the battle at Antietam. (An exhaustive list of every corps, division, brigade and regiment, along with the officers that commanded them—known as the order of battle—can be found in Stephen Sears’ Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, pp. 359-372.

Union General Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps held the left side of the Federal line south of town, where a single bridge spanned Antietam creek. Burnside’s men spent hours attempting to cross the narrow bridge in the hopes of flanking the Confederate line on the western bank. (The flanking maneuver, in which the attacker attempted to get around the side of the defender’s line and attack it at right angles, formed a critical part of Civil War military tactics. Because a flanked line was extremely vulnerable to enemy fire, and because it could not level its own return fire very effectively, Civil War commanders repeatedly tried to flank their opponents while trying to avoid having their own lines flanked.)

Though Antietam creek was shallow enough to be forded at several places, Burnside focused his corps’ attacks on the lone bridge near the Rohrback farm—a bridge that would later bear his name, thanks to his troops’ bloody attempts to cross it. Because the bridge was only twelve feet wide, a relatively small number of Confederate defenders was able to prevent Burnisde’s entire corps from crossing for hours. Beginning at around 10 a.m., two Georgia regiments held off attacks by some 12,500 Union soldiers.

Finally, at around 2 p.m., two Northern regiments hand-picked for their toughness and promised a ration of liquor after capturing the bridge, attempted to cross at a run. The 670 men of those regiments charged down the hill facing the bridge and fanned out behind cover on the eastern banks; the Georgian defenders, exhausted and nearly out of ammunition after three hours of fighting, began to withdraw. In a rush, color-bearers led the two units across the bridge and finally secured a foothold on the western shore. More than 500 Federals and 120 Rebels had died in the fighting there. George McClellan, commanding general of the Union forces at Antietam, later received significant criticism for the uncoordinated attacks along the Federal line, for not pushing to cross the creek more quickly, and for failing to exploit the crossing effectively. Most observers judged the battle at Antietam a draw; McClellan had ended Lee’s invasion of the North, but the rebel army remained an effective fighting force. Lincoln and others viewed the battle as a lost opportunity to end the war.

Burnside’s ineffective leadership at the bridge during led McClellan to write to his wife little more than a week later describing him as “very slow” and “not fit to command more than a regiment.” McClellan’s evaluation may have been correct; nevertheless, McClellan’s own performance at Antietam led to his removal by Abraham Lincoln on November 7, 1862. The Army of the Potomac’s next commander would be none other than Ambrose Burnside, who led the Union forces in the even more disastrous and lopsided defeat at Fredericksburg that December.