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Conceived in Liberty Companion · Volume III, chapter 45 · 5 March 1770

Who fired from the window?

On a snowy night a line of redcoated soldiers fires muskets into a crowd, white smoke billowing, while a tall man at the front of the crowd staggers backward, a stick slipping from his hand, before a two-story building with one lit window.
King Street, Boston, March 1770. Captain Preston’s guard fires into a crowd that has been pelting it with snowballs, and Crispus Attucks, a tall Black sailor, is the first of five men to fall. Rothbard says customs officials fired too, from the upper floor of the customhouse, and that the angle of the bullets helped win the soldiers their acquittal. Chapter 45 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 45 for his account.

British troops had been in Boston since late 1768, and the town had been waging a campaign against them for liberation. On 22 February, the customs informer Ebenezer Richardson fired into a crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Snider. On the night of 5 March a fight between a soldier and a ropewalk worker, then a soldier’s musket-blow to an apprentice, drew a crowd to the customhouse on King Street, where the sentry was pelted with ice and snowballs. The customs officials sent for the main guard. Captain Thomas Preston and seven men pushed through with fixed bayonets, and when one soldier’s gun was knocked to the ground the soldiers emptied their muskets into the crowd. Customs officials fired from the upper floor, Rothbard says. Five men fell, and the first was Crispus Attucks, a tall sailor. The next day Sam Adams’s town meeting demanded that every soldier leave, and before night the governor gave in. Preston and most of the soldiers were acquitted in October; two were branded on the hand. Oliver Dickerson found that the bullets’ angles pointed at the customhouse’s upper story. Adams turned March 5 into a yearly holiday.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 45, ‘The Boston Massacre’, pp. 960-965. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Wikipedia, ‘Boston Massacre’ (read 2026-09-30 through a fetch summary): around 9:30 PM on 5 March 1770; eight soldiers and Captain Preston in a semicircle at the custom house stairs; snowballs and other small objects; Private Montgomery fired first; Attucks led more than 50 Bostonians, and two witnesses put him 12 to 15 feet from the soldiers; Attucks, Gray and Caldwell died at once, Maverick and Carr of wounds. Secondary source
  3. Worcestershire Regiment (29th/36th of Foot) history pages, ‘Boston Massacre 1770’, and the regiment’s 1751 warrant (yellow facings); the 1759 and 1768 grenadier bearskin caps; read through search summaries on 2026-09-30. Secondary source
  4. Don Troiani, research notes for ‘The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770’, as summarized in a search result (snow nearly a foot deep; ice, snowballs and oyster shells thrown; the soldiers in a semicircle before the Custom House with bayonets fixed at chest level); the Scribd document itself was not opened. Secondary source
  5. Historic New England, ‘Behind the Exhibition: In Search of Crispus Attucks’, and National Park Service and Museum of the American Revolution summaries of his appearance and testimony (tall, stout; leaning on a cordwood club; the 1750 runaway advertisement: ‘Crispas’, about 27, six feet two inches), read through search summaries on 2026-09-30. Secondary source