Did John Adams' successful defense of British soldiers rely on racially defaming Crispus Attucks?

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Sherrilyn Ifill V@Sifill_LDF 20m20 minutes ago
I’m halfway through reading this magnificent and spell-binding piece “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre,”’by @UVALaw Prof. Farrah Peterson, and my mind is blown. This will take more coffee... https://t.co/Ds9rDa08rG

Black Lives and the Boston Massacre
John Adams’s famous defense of the British may not be, as we’ve always understood it, the ultimate expression of principle and the rule of law

{snip}

___Adams started by rejecting the characterization of those who surrounded the sentry as just a group of rowdy local teenagers—“shavers” in 18th-century parlance. “We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases,” he said, “to avoid calling this sort of people a mob.” Adams had to rectify that. In “plain English,” this was “most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars. — And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.” And then Adams likely drew a laugh by observing, “The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers.” Here is one under-celebrated aspect of Adams’s genius on display: he transformed the crowd into outside agitators, and then he tried to make the jurors laugh. He created the intimacy of the inside joke, the coziness of a dinner table conversation among the like-minded. In doing so, he gave the jury permission to despise the victims...

But aside from Attucks, there is little evidence that “negroes” made up much of the “motley rabble” taking part in the violence. We know that at least two other black men were present that night because they testified at the trial. But one of these men came as a spectator, not as a participant, and when the fighting started, he said he did his best to slip away. Witnesses also remembered that as the crowd of sailors and laborers passed under windows calling, “Town-born turn out! Town-born turn out!” a lot of town-born did turn out to join them. Some of these were white Bostonians who testified at the trial, proudly describing how they gave as good as they got that night...

Adams also described Attucks charging at the soldiers. He argued that the soldiers were justifiably frightened when Attucks “had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down.” I would pause here again, because Adams has fastened on the least plausible version of the facts, drawn from a single witness’s description of the actions of a man he “thought” was Attucks. Many witnesses testified that they saw Attucks there, stood near him, or watched him fall, but only one described him taking part in the active fighting. Two witnesses directly contradicted Adams’s narrative. Both testified that Attucks remained 12 to 15 feet from the soldiers when the shooting began, too far away to “take hold of a bayonet” or to knock a man down. And one of them remembered that Attucks stood resting his chest on the end of a long stick, and that this was how he was shot—in a posture of repose.

But having decided on a useful story, Adams ran with it: “This was the behavior of Attucks;—to whose mad behavior, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night, is chiefly to be ascribed.” Again, Adams drove the wedge between Attucks and the Boston jury. The true victims here were Boston itself and white Bostonians, the jurymen included. “It is in this manner,” Adams explained, that “this town has been often treated; a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together,” and afterward many would “ascribe all their doings to the good people of the town.”

read more: https://theamericanscholar.org/black-lives-and-the-boston-massacre/#.XBaBjmlOlyS

...I have to confess, I knew nothing about this, even the fact that the British soldiers were tried, much less that Adams got them off. Fascinating history!

Maybe give this article a bit more than a DU brush-off. I'm going to archive this in my journal if anyone wants to look at it.