Episode Details

On the night of March 5th, 1770, 8 terrified British soldiers, pelted with ice and clubs by a Boston crowd screaming at them to fire, fired. 5 colonists died. Samuel Adams called it a massacre, and Paul Revere engraved a picture of it that was a masterpiece and a lie. This is the story of the killing on King Street, and of the trial that followed, where a young patriot lawyer named John Adams stood up to defend the redcoats who had shot his neighbors, because he believed even hated men were owed the law.

It is a story of a town learning to be two things at once: a people who could turn 5 dead men into a revolutionary myth, and a people who could still, in a court of law, refuse to take a single life in revenge. Crispus Attucks, Christopher Seider, Captain Preston, the dying Patrick Carr who forgave the man who shot him, and Adams himself, who called the defense one of the best things he ever did, all meet on the cold cobbles of King Street. Facts, Adams told the jury, are stubborn things.