Despite immense public pressure and personal risk to his reputation, John Adams successfully defended British soldiers accused of murdering colonists in the Boston Massacre ten months earlier. The jury acquitted six of the eight soldiers outright, convicting two of manslaughter with reduced sentencing. Adams's insistence on a fair trial for deeply unpopular defendants became, in later American memory, a foundational example of legal principle triumphing over political passion.
On March 5, 1770, British soldiers had fired into a taunting Boston crowd, killing five colonists and inflaming revolutionary sentiment throughout Massachusetts. Finding a lawyer willing to defend the soldiers proved difficult, but John Adams, already a rising patriot lawyer, took the case, believing every defendant deserved counsel regardless of the political cost to himself.
The trial captivated Boston. Adams argued that the soldiers, pelted with ice, oyster shells, and clubs by an aggressive crowd, had acted in reasonable self-defense rather than out of malice. He carefully distinguished between the culpability of individual soldiers based on evidence of who actually fired, a nuanced approach that ran against the prevailing mob sentiment demanding collective punishment.
On December 6, 1770, the jury returned its verdicts: six soldiers acquitted entirely, two convicted only of manslaughter and punished with a branding on the thumb rather than execution. Adams later called his defense of the soldiers one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country, a testament, he believed, to the rule of law functioning even amid revolutionary fervor that would soon consume the colonies entirely.
Key people: John Adams, Thomas Preston