Updated: February 10, 2026
Reassessing the Boston Massacre and the Path It Paved to Revolution
Long before open hostilities, revolutionary thinking was shaped by Enlightenment ideas, as Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explains in our program. These intellectual developments—the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Age of Revolutions—reshaped how people in Europe and the American colonies thought about authority, governance, and rights.
But Dr. Rosenfeld also emphasize that ideas, intellectual or otherwise, do not by themselves start revolutions. Rather, actions and events ignite revolutions..
So, to fully grasp the American Revolution, we have to look closely at the events that shaped colonial perceptions of and posture toward British authority in the Pre-Revolutionary Era, generally understood as 1763 to 1775. I personally lean toward 1774 as the end of this period, because by 1775 the Revolution had truly begun with open hostilities at Lexington and Concord.
In Analyzing American Revolution, we explore this era through multiple perspectives. I examine the organizational foundation of the Revolution, principally the Committees of Correspondence and later Committees of Safety. Dr. Robert Gross examines the lead-up to Lexington and Concord, and Dr. Dael A. Norwood explores the China trade that underpinned the Boston Tea Party. I will link both interviews here when they publish.
This interview with Dr. Serena Zabin about the Boston Massacre contributes to the program by showing how moments of tension and conflict illuminate broader patterns in colonial life—linking social networks, civic organization, and decision-making across communities.
Here’s how I’ve structured this post:
- Part I: What really happened on the night of March 5, 1770? Paul Revere’s propaganda that shaped our perceptions.
- Part II (this post): Boston Massacre on Trial: How John Adams Defended the British and Bostonians
- Part III: Breaking Up an Imperial Family — British Living Among Bostonians and Dr. Zabin’s Contribution to the Ken Burns Documentary (Part III will be published on Jan. 26, 2026.)
Rethinking the Boston Massacre with Dr. Serena Zabin
The Boston Massacre of 1770 is often remembered as a straightforward story of British soldiers firing on innocent colonists, but in this interview, Dr. Serena Zabin reexamines the event through the lens of people’s choices, social networks, and political tension.
Dr. Zabin explores how ordinary and elite colonists interpreted, responded to, and acted upon these events. She also enhances our understanding of how ordinary British soldiers, as well as officers and government elites, reacted to this rupturing event. She further reassesses whether revolutionary action was inevitable.
By tracing the choices, agency, and civic engagement of everyday people, she shows how revolutionary sentiment took root in practice—through social networks, community decision-making, and collective judgment—long before battles erupted at Lexington and Concord.
In essence, the Boston Massacre was more than a moment of violence; it was a subtle revolution of choice and action, unfolding in Boston streets and taverns, which Dr. Zabin thoughtfully brings to life in this interview.
Dr. Zabin in this interview.
About My Guest – Dr. Serena Zabin
Dr. Zabin is a professor of history and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.
She is the Vice President of the Teaching Division of American Historical Association, a distinguished fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library for 2024-25, and a former president of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
Her research focuses on Early America and Public History, subjects about which he has published extensively, including the following books:
- Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York,
- The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s “Journal of the Proceedings” with Related Documents, and
- The Boston Massacre: A Family History, which received the 2024 George Washington Book Prize and is the focus of this interview.
Dr. Zabin is the 199th guest scholar of the History Behind News Program, and Analyzing American Revolution is a special series of our program.
To learn more about Dr. Zabin, you can visit her academic homepage.
Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Zabin
The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my November 2026 interview with Dr. Zabin. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.
The Trial: Politics & Performance?
Adel: So… Okay. Paul Revere is involved. Many others are involved.
We know that. And I forget the timing. I think it’s October of that year, 1770, a trial starts.
I think there’s actually two separate trials. One for the captain and one for the soldiers, if I remember correctly.
What happens in this trial? Does anything, is there anything unearth that, you know, people have revelations and they realize what the story is, or is it all politics?
What happens here?
Dr. Zabin: So it is a lot of politics, certainly.
So the Sons of Liberty, we’re pretty sure, decide early on that the way to win this is going to be to take a kind of political high ground, to say that we are so sure that what the soldiers did was so out of bounds that we will get our best legal talent to represent them, right? And even so, right, we’re going to be able to show that they were, you know, that the soldiers overstepped.
But we’re going to do our best to perform, right, for the world how sure we are of this, right?
The Boston Massacre on Trial
Adel: So they go to John Adams, right, who is a Son of Liberty at this point, and Josiah Quincy, and they say, will you take this on, right?
Not all the Sons of Liberty think that this is a great politics, and not all of them are convinced that having John Adams do his best job is going to actually help them, right? So there’s some division there, but he does that.
Adams is not thrilled about essentially feeling like he is the governor’s client, that doesn’t make him feel good.
And meanwhile, the person who really is supporting the government, right, who would be the king’s attorney essentially, is the one prosecuting the soldiers, right? So no one’s convinced that he’s going to work very hard.
I noticed that’s kind of flipped. It’s kind of flipped.
Was John Adams’ Defense Ethical—or Political?
Dr. Zabin: It feels flipped. Exactly. So it’s flipped.
So then Adams does this move that I think lawyers nowadays would say is not considered ethical, right, in which he separates out the trial of the officer from the trial of the soldiers.
And so his technique is to say that it’s going to be too impossible for anybody to convict the officer. Nobody’s going to be able to say that he gave the command to fire, right? There’s just not beyond a reasonable doubt.
John Adams
By Benjamin Blyth, circa 1766 (Public Domain)
Dr. Zabin: It feels flipped. Exactly. So it’s flipped.
So then Adams does this move that I think lawyers nowadays would say is not considered ethical, right, in which he separates out the trial of the officer from the trial of the soldiers.
And so his technique is to say that it’s going to be too impossible for anybody to convict the officer. Nobody’s going to be able to say that he gave the command to fire, right? There’s just not beyond a reasonable doubt.
And so he decides that that’s going to be what that case is going to turn on.
The soldiers themselves, when they hear that Preston is going to be tried separately from them, are completely panicked.
They actually write Adams and some of the judges a note, and they say, you’re just throwing us under the bus. They say, we just followed the command we heard.
And if you get rid of this defense, what will happen to us? They’re very worried. They think this is wrong.
But Adams goes ahead.
And indeed, he gets one jury of Massachusetts men to say that they cannot, beyond a reasonable doubt, say that Preston actually gave a command to fire, so he’s acquitted.
And then a couple of weeks later, he starts this trial for the soldiers. And in that one, his argument is self-defense.
And that’s a very hard argument for a Son of Liberty to make, because he needs to say somehow that these soldiers fired in self-defense, but the people that they’re defending themselves against were not these out-of-hand Bostonians, right?
He wants to say Bostonians look just like those people in the Revere print, right?
These very respectable, middle-class people that no woman would be afraid of.
Adams: Soldiers’ Self-Defense… Against Non-Riotous Bostonians!
Dr. Zabin: And so he’s like, how am I going to say that these soldiers are both defending themselves in this moment on Boston streets, and that Bostonians have not been a riotous people, right? That’s the fear.
Adel: Those two don’t fit in the same box.
Dr. Zabin: No, it’s a tiny little eye to thread in this needle.
And so what he says is, oh, well, the people who are rioting, they weren’t real Bostonians. They were sailors.
They were apprentices that came from outside.
And I will say, he plays a race card, and he says, Crispus Attucks, he’s a person of color.
There’s guys like him.
There’s Irish people.
These are not real Bostonians. And that’s how he gets them off.
John Adams and the Defense of British Soldiers
Adel: Wow. That would not fly in today’s course, obviously. Oh, wow.
That is wild.
So this is something that I have thought about in the past before reaching out to you for this interview.
I remember watching, this is now about 10, 15 years ago, the HBO series on John Adams. And I’ve read the book, McCullough’s book.
And I forget how this works out. John Adams represents the British government, soldiers essentially, right? Right.
Yet later, he has a future political life in Boston. Heck, he becomes the president.
So there must not have been this overwhelming Bostonian resentment towards him.
Was there?
Dr. Zabin: No. I mean, he says in his autobiography much later that it’s the most manly act he’s ever done. He’s very proud of himself.
And, you know, that’s Adams for you.
But at the time, it’s not a huge risk to his political reputation.
Some, as I said, some of the Sons of Liberty are not sure about this move.
And we know that Josiah Quincy’s father writes to him and says, what are you doing? Right. Why are you representing these beasts?
And Quincy Jr. writes back and he says, oh, I was asked to do this by people that you would approve of.
And in the end, you know, everybody understood they won the PR war, right? They do come out looking like they took the high road.
And so it doesn’t actually ever hurt Adams.
He’s very proud of it. It looks like a moment of, you know, later he places a moment of his kind of independence and his commitment to the rule of law, which is genuine, to be fair.
He’s genuinely committed to the rule of law.
But so is Hutchinson. Right.
I mean, it was a deeply held belief of the 18th century, right? And it’s sort of one of the core principles that, you know, this moment of this, we won’t quite call it revolution, but of the imperial crisis is founded on.
Josiah Quincy II
By Gilbert Stuart
Painted posthumously, c. 1825 (Public Domain)
Adel: You know, one thing, and this is a digression, it’s not even a question, it’s just an observation. Dr. Zabin, the more I learn about the American Revolution, you know, we go back to our history, you realize how different it was, the British, the bad British that we think of in our early years in education, they were so much more progressive than, let’s say, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, perhaps even the Austrian Empire or the Spanish Empire.
You see what I mean? I’m not even sure if there would have been a trial, let’s say, had this happened in China and Russia or Ottoman.
Dr. Zabin: Yeah. Oh, my God.
Or probably even in France.
Adel: Or probably even in France. Yeah.
Let’s take a break here. In the next segment, I’ll ask Dr. Zabin about the full story of the Boston Massacre, one important point that we’ll talk about, and we’ll also chat about Ken Burns documentary. We’ll be right back.
Discover more about the Boston Massacre, its trials and aftermath, and broken imperial family in Parts I and III:
What really happened on the night of March 5, 1770? Paul Revere’s propaganda that shaped our perceptions.
Breaking Up an Imperial Family — British Living Among Bostonians and Dr. Zabin’s Contribution to the Ken Burns Documentary (Part III will be published on Jan. 26, 2026.)
About the Featured Image
The featured image brings together images of Dr. Serena and Adel Aali from the interview, superimposed on the Betsy Ross flag, alongside a portrait of John Adams (c. 1766) by Benjamin Blyth, with the following text banner: The Boston Massacre on Trial.
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