A confrontation between a British sentry and a group of Bostonians escalated when soldiers of the 29th Regiment fired into the crowd, killing five colonists including Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent. Paul Revere's engraving of the scene became a piece of revolutionary propaganda, and the event is remembered as one of the sparks that lit the fuse of the American Revolution.
It began, as so many riots do, with snowballs. A young wigmaker's apprentice taunted a British sentry outside the Custom House on King Street, and within minutes a crowd of dockworkers, laborers, and apprentices had gathered, hurling ice, oyster shells, and insults at the lone soldier. Captain Thomas Preston brought reinforcements, eight men with loaded muskets, and the mob pressed closer, daring them to fire.
Someone did. Historians still argue who gave the order, or whether anyone did at all, but when the smoke cleared five colonists lay dead or dying, among them Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of mixed African and Wampanoag ancestry who became an early martyr of a revolution he would never see. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty seized the moment, and Paul Revere's widely circulated engraving depicted a disciplined line of redcoats gunning down unarmed civilians.
The soldiers were tried for murder, defended improbably by John Adams, who won acquittals for most on grounds of self-defense. But the political damage was already done. "Massacre" was a word chosen for effect, and it worked, transforming a chaotic street brawl into a symbol of British tyranny that colonial pamphleteers would invoke for the next five years.