John Adams and the Boston Crowd

On March 5, 1770 five colonists in Boston died amid an entanglement with British soldiers. In the aftermath of the subsequently labeled Boston Massacre, a painful splitting occurred between Bostonians and John Adams — the city’s thirty-four-year-old homegrown, rising legal star and eventual second President of the United States. This paper analyzes Adams’s moral foundation, his growing political ambitions, and his connection to the Boston Crowd — a convoluted mix of lower-class seamen, carpenters, enslaved Africans, servants and semi-skilled workmen. Two theses arise in this paper. The first thesis is that a paradoxical relationship arose between Adams and the Boston Crowd in the aftermath of the Massacre. The second is that because of the Massacre, a radical strand of English political theory, Whiggism, was applied as a legal doctrine for the first time in a notable case, which ultimately led both Adams and the Crowd to define themselves as distinctly American. <a href="https://medium.com/@wiriley/john-adams-and-the-boston-crowd-623dc39cd2ab">Read More</a>