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[256]

The officers of the army and navy who heard the

Chap. XXIII.} 1775. Mar. 6.
oration gave no offence during its delivery; but at the motion for ‘appointing an orator for the ensuing year to commemorate the horrid massacre,’ they began to hiss. The assembly became greatly exasperated, and threatened vengeance for the insult; but Adams, with imperturbable calmness, soon restored order; the vote was taken, and the business of the meeting was regularly concluded.

The event of that day maddened the army, and both officers and soldiers longed for revenge. An honest countryman from Billerica inquiring for a firelock, bought an old one of a private; but as soon as he had paid the full price, he was seized by half a dozen of a company for having violated an act of parliament against trading with soldiers, and confined during the night in the guard-room. The next day he was labelled on his back, ‘American liberty, or a specimen of democracy,’ was tarred and feathered, and carted through the principal streets of the town, accompanied by all the drums and fifes of the fortyseventh, playing Yankee Doodle, by a guard of twenty men with fixed bayonets, and by a mob of officers, among whom was Lieutenant Colonel Nesbit himself.

‘See what indignities we suffer, rather than precipitate a crisis,’ wrote Samuel Adams to Virginia. The soldiers seemed encouraged to provoke the people, that they might have some color for beginning hostilities.

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