In this episode, we’ll revisit two murder trials that were held in revolutionary Boston. The first case was against four ordinary sailors accused of murdering an officer of the Royal Navy on a ship in Massachusetts coastal waters, and the other was against nine British prisoners of war who were accused of murdering a guard aboard a prison ship in Boston Harbor. The sailors were accused in 1769, when Boston was under military occupation and the tensions that would result in the Boston Massacre were coming to a head. The redcoats stood trial over a decade later, in the midst of a bloody war that had touched the lives of all Bostonians by 1780. In both cases, attorneys and judges worried whether a jury could deliver justice in a polarized city. Both cases were argued by signers of the Declaration of Independence, with John Adams defending the American sailors in 1780 and Robert Treat Paine prosecuting the redcoats in 1780. In both cases, the defendants argued that they had acted in self defense, and amazingly, both cases ended in acquittal.
Tag: Robert Treat Paine
The Prison Ship Uprising (episode 228)
On August 10, 1780, British prisoners of war being held on a ship on Boston Harbor conspired to disarm their guards and escape. In the end, they were all caught, but an American guard was killed. This case gives us a fascinating insight into what life was like for POWs in the American Revolution, but there’s very little record of it in historical sources. If the prosecutor in the murder case hadn’t signed the Declaration of Independence four years earlier, his papers may not have been considered worth saving, and we might have no record of this interesting case at all. Amazingly, the defense basically argued that all’s fair in love and war, and that since the redcoats had been taken prisoner by force, they had a right to seek freedom by force. Even more amazingly, it worked!