Echoes of John Adams and the Boston Massacre

by: Ted Frier

Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 12:06:53 PM CST

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Ropemaker Samuel Gray, mariner James Caldwell, and a mixed-race sailor named Crispus Attucks were killed instantly. A 17-year-old boy, Samuel Maverick, was hit in the throat with a ricocheting musket ball and died shortly thereafter.  A 30-year-old Irish immigrant, Patrick Carr, died two weeks later.  Several others were wounded.

Boston demanded revenge.  Instead, Captain Preston and eight British  soldiers under his command were given a fair trial according to British law.  A young John Adams volunteered to provide their defense.  A jury later determined that Captain Preston and six soldiers had acted in self-defense.  Two others were found guilty of murder but their convictions were reduced to manslaughter, punishable by a branding of their thumbs.

In his diary marking the third anniversary of what since been passed down to history as the Boston Massacre, Adams recalled:  "The part I took in Defence of Captain Preston and the soldiers, procured me anxiety, and obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole Life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. Judgment of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or witches, anciently. As the evidence was, the verdict of the jury was exactly right."

Mrs. Adams was none too sanguine that John had exposed both himself and their family "to infamy and death" by taking the side of terrorists who killed their kinsmen.  Yet, "that excellent Lady, who has always encouraged me, said she was very sensible of all the danger to her and to our children as well as to me, but she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust in Providence."

After the trial, a grateful Captain Preston and the soldiers sent Adams 18 Guineas "for the most exhausting and fatiguing causes I ever tried: for hazarding a popularity very general and very hardly earned: and for incurring a clamour and popular suspicions and prejudices, which are not yet worn out and never will be forgotten as long as the History of this Period is read."

On March 5, 2010 -- on the 240th anniversary of the Boston Massacre -- the Washington Post spotlighted another case in which lawyers were under siege for representing unpopular defendants.  Former acting Solicitor General and former head of the Department of Justice's office of legal counsel, Walter Dellinger, came to the defense of nine attorneys in the DOJ who who are currently under mob assault from the right wing for providing legal counsel to suspected terrorists held at Gitmo.

"The only word that can do justice to the personal attacks on these fine lawyers -- and on the integrity of our legal system -- is shameful. Shameful," said Dellinger.  

A smear attack against these lawyers has been launched by a group called Keep America Safe, whose board members include Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.  A video produced by the group questions the lawyers' loyalty to the United States, asking: "DOJ: Department of Jihad?" and "Who are these government officials? ... Whose values do they share?"

"That those in question would have their patriotism, loyalty and values attacked by reputable public figures such as Elizabeth Cheney and journalists such as Kristol is as depressing a public episode as I have witnessed in many years. What has become of our civic life in America?" Dellinger wrote.

Torture apologist and newly hired Post columnist Marc Thiessen threw in his two cents, attacking not only the DOJ attorneys but also senior partners in their firms, excoriating them for allowing pro bono work "on behalf of America's terrorist enemies."

In his new shameful polemic -- Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack -- Thiessen goes further, accusing attorneys who took on these cases of "aiding and abetting America's enemies."  As Media Matters notes, this is pretty close to the Constitutional definition of treason.

In its own March 5th editorial, the Post echoed John Adams when it declared: "No less an authority than the Supreme Court ruled that those held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay must be allowed to challenge their detentions in a U.S. court. It is exceedingly difficult to exercise that right meaningfully without the help of a lawyer. It took courage for attorneys to stand up in the midst of understandable societal rage to protect the rights of those accused of terrorism. Advocates knew that ignorance and fear would too often cloud reason. They knew that this hysteria made their work on these cases all the more important. The video from Keep America Safe proves they were right."

Writing in 1937 in the shadow of an approaching world war fought to preserve Western Civilization against what Churchill called the "new Dark Age" of continental fascism, Walter Lippmann reminisced that "in the occasional intervals when the world is quiet, men quickly take for granted those first and last things which in the ages of disorder are matters of life and death."

Recalling that Cardinal Richelieu once said it would be impossible for the king to govern France "without the power of arbitrary arrest and exile," and that Descartes had advised kings to "crush all who might resist their power," and that it was Thomas Hobbes who taught that authority was always in the right, and that it was Pascal who thought it absurd to prefer "ideal justice" to "actual force," Lippmann said that such extreme deeds and views "are no longer the curiosities of polite learning" to the readers of newspapers in the 1930s, when the whole world was turned upside down.

For readers following the rise of the German police state with their morning coffee, the discredited ideas from some long-forgotten barbaric past "are virulently alive once more," said Lippmann.  "His world is turbulent with the violence of men who really do such deeds and really hold such views."

Those living on the edge of a war in which the future of civilization was at issue, Lippmann concludes, are reminded "that the struggle of his forefathers continues, that even the rudiments of the good life have still to be wrested daily from the earth in sweat and trouble and defended against implacable enemies."

As Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney and assorted blasphemers like them stop at nothing to usher in a new American dark age through their protection of the embryonic police state begun by Dick Cheney when he still held power, it is important, as Walter Lippmann says, to remind ourselves of the struggles waged by our forefathers like John Adams so that we will never forget whose heirs we truly are.