Mr. Souffard, My High School History Teacher,
Is Saying He Flunked Two Kids Last Year Because in the Final Written
Exam on the American Revolutionary War They Stopped Writing About History
and Started Writing Nasty Rumors About Him, Thinking He'd Never Read
Their Essays
(So We'd Better Be Careful, He's Warning Us)
(continued)
An alarum of church bells rang out all over Boston. From everywhere,
men, women, and children flocked to the scene of the cold, brutal slaughter.
They carried knives, clubs, picks, chainsaws, baseball bats, shovels,
axes — anything they could get their hands on — to the site
of the bloody shooting spree. The British soldiers and the incensed
populace of Boston faced off in the unforgiving moonlight. Had anything
set them off, there might have been a horrifying slaughter, a slaughter
more horrifying than the one that had already taken place. Luckily,
however, Governor Hutchinson, along with Colonel Dalrymple, who was
the commander of all the troops in Boston, arrived and defused the near
fiasco. They ordered the mob to be silent. They commanded the troops
to lower their weapons and stand at attention. Quickly and quietly,
Captain Preston and his men were led away by Colonel Dalrymple's troops.
By three 'o clock in the morning, the crowds had dispersed. It was murder,
the Bostonians claimed, and anyone guilty of murder had to be tried
by the courts. But because of the heated anti-British sentiment in Boston,
no one would defend the soldiers. Nevertheless, two American lawyers,
John Adams and Josiah Quincy Adams, Jr., took the case, no doubt motivated
by the great red, white, and green cause of lining their pockets at
the expense of justice. They went over the case carefully, and by the
fall of 1770, the British soldiers were acquitted. The young sentry,
as well as the other soldiers, the two young lawyers told the court,
had been abused as children and therefore were insane and not responsible
for firing the weapons that had killed the Boston townsmen and women.
The British soldiers were innocent, the lawyers argued further, on the
grounds that they acted in self-defense. Hey, now there's something
you don't hear every day. Whew! A close one! But that's the law for
you. In the end, the fact that the British militia used heavy-duty military
firearms to defend themselves against a host of snowball-wielding women
and teenage girls turned out to be the clincher that rocked the Boston
penal system and eventually went on to serve as one of our country's
most significant court cases as well as one of the most revered and
venerated models of justice in the legal history of the world.
Now, on to the Boston Tea Party, another important event.
On December 16, 1773, a frosty winter night, one hundred and fifty really
boring men from Boston, including Paul Revere, marched down to a place
known as Griffin's Wharf, wrapped in blankets and carrying torches,
their faces daubed in red paint to make them look like Mohawk warriors.
Their petition boring to Governor Hutchinson totally and completely
boring to send the three ships loaded with overtaxed British tea back
to England had been refused. Undeterred, the disguised mob of liberty-lovers
proceeded to board the ships, empty the holds of their cargo, and dump
the boring boring boring crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Admiral Montague,
the commander of the British war fleet, which was moored in the harbor
at the time, saw the whole thing from the window of his house at the
head of Griffin's Wharf. In the long run, the result was the first Continental
Congress, held in Philadelphia in September of 1774. I wonder if what
they're saying about him is true. I wonder if it is. Is it? I wonder
if, after the famous Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere really did ride off
to Philadelphia and New York, bearing the news of the events to the
Boston Committee of Correspondence. I wonder if it makes any difference
to him that this is boring, that, as a direct result of the defiance
of the citizens of Boston to the taxes set on all imported tea, so boring
the harbor was closed on June 1, 1774, to all commerce and trade. This
was a blow to the colonists and their cause for freedom.
