Pealing church bells called John Adams into the moonlit Boston street on the night of March 5, 1770. Erroneously supposing that they tolled for a fire, he joined the streaming crowd—firefighting in those days was a community effort. He was carried along to King Street, where a file of redcoats was formed up at a distance from some blood-stained ice. Nearby two townspeople lay dead; three were mortally wounded.
Adams, who had been spending a convivial evening in the South End with members of his club, now thought of home. A month before, Abigail and he had buried their baby girl, Susanna, whom they called Suky. This night Abigail, once again pregnant, was alone except for her maids and “a boy” (presumably John Quincy, not yet three). Hearing the news, she would want him by her side, as he would want to be there. He turned for home and passed more British troops, bayonets fixed in their shouldered muskets. They were as still as “marble statues.”
In the wee hours of March 6 a warrant was issued for the arrest of Captain Thomas Preston, forty years old, an Irishman and the officer in charge of the troops who did the shooting; he was jailed at about 3 a.m. Eight soldiers under Preston's command were clapped into prison later the same day. Preston, regarded even by the Whigs as a competent and level-headed officer, was identified by certain witnesses as the source of an order to fire upon the innocent Bostonians. Evidence later would show that Preston had done no such thing. Boston at the moment, however, was in no mood for an impartial sifting of the facts. Extreme patriots regarded the absence of a lynching of Preston and his men as proof of the impartiality of Boston justice.
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