Old State House & The Boston Massacre

Why is it significant?

Stand right here on the circular ring of cobblestones set into the pavement, looking up at the lion and unicorn statues on the roof of the Old State House. You are standing directly where the first blood of the American Revolution soaked into the frozen earth.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand right here on the circular ring of cobblestones set into the pavement, looking up at the lion and unicorn statues on the roof of the Old State House. You are standing directly where the first blood of the American Revolution soaked into the frozen earth.

Built in seventeen thirteen, the Old State House was the seat of British royal government in Massachusetts. Royal governors looked down from the east balcony, while merchants traded on the open ground floor. But on the snowy evening of March fifth, seventeen seventy, this crossroads erupted in fury. A lone British private on sentry duty got into an argument with a young wigmaker's apprentice and struck him with his musket. A crowd of angry Bostonian ropewalk workers and sailors gathered rapidly, pelting the sentry with snowballs, chunks of ice, and sharp oyster shells.

Captain Thomas Preston marched eight armed soldiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment out to protect the sentry. The crowd pressed against their bayonets, daring them to shoot. Suddenly, someone in the darkness shouted fire! The soldiers discharged a ragged volley into the unarmed crowd. When the smoke cleared, five men lay dying on the red-stained snow. Among them was Crispus Attucks, a forty-seven-year-old sailor of African and Wampanoag descent, who is honored today as the first casualty of the American Revolution.

Samuel Adams branded the clash the Boston Massacre, commissioning Paul Revere to engrave a sensational propaganda print that demonized the British soldiers. Yet in an extraordinary display of legal principle, John Adams stepped forward to defend the accused British soldiers in court, arguing that the rule of law must govern a free society, winning acquittals for six of them.

Six years later, on July eighteenth, seventeen seventy-six, Colonel Thomas Crafts stepped onto the building's balcony to read the Declaration of Independence aloud to Bostonians for the very first time. Ecstatic crowds tore the gilded royal lion and unicorn down from the gables and burned them in a roaring bonfire right here in the street.