In January, Bruce Springsteen released a passionate anti-ICE ballad, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” in which he named U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “King Trump’s private army.” Dedicated to the memory of two protesters who died at the hands of armed government agents in a frigid Minnesota winter, the song invites comparisons to Paul Revere’s famous and equally passionate engraving of the 1770 Boston Massacre. Revere’s image depicts a bloodthirsty line of soldiers shooting directly into a crowd of unarmed Bostonians, killing five and injuring six more. In calling ICE a king’s private army, Springsteen drew on a long history of protest against standing armies, one built on the belief that accountability to the people and their representatives is the foundation for political liberty.
Since the Magna Carta, Britons had been hostile to the idea of a standing or permanent army, one that existed even in peacetime, and that was paid for through taxes rather than staffed by volunteers. The 1689 Bill of Rights explicitly prohibited a standing army except with Parliament’s blessing. Within a few years, however, Parliament had softened its stance against armies in peacetime, since Britain was engaged in nearly continuous and often undeclared wars against France and Spain. In response, Britons firmed up other ground rules for a standing army: military power must always be subordinate to civilian authority, and some form of legislative consent was necessary. Without these guardrails, people feared, a monarch could simply turn his military might on his own subjects to quell dissent.
The army could be used as a British police force, but not without complications. Magistrates and mayors regularly requested troops to come to their aid as they tried to catch smugglers and control rioting. Although a justice of the peace might occasionally be able to disperse a crowd by reading the Riot Act, those civilian authorities usually required military support. Eighteenth-century soldiers were trained for battle in the field, not to police civilians, and magistrates soon begged the war office to remove rowdy soldiers from their towns, and especially from the public houses where they were quartered.
In 1768, the Massachusetts governor, like so many magistrates before him, asked the British War Office to send him troops in response to colonial protests against new tariffs set by Parliament. Bostonians felt deeply betrayed by the news of arriving troops. As one minister wrote: “To have a standing army! Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of Liberty?” They were less concerned with the violence soldiers might bring than with the threat that a peacetime army posed to society and especially to the political rights of civilians.
When the first two regiments of Redcoats landed in Boston Harbor in October 1768, they marched with flags flying and drums beating along the central Long Wharf into the heart of the city, where they appropriated Boston Common and Faneuil Hall as temporary campsites. Determined to demonstrate to the world that their peaceful town had no need of troops to keep order, Bostonians mostly refused to rise to the bait. For at least a while, there was nothing for the troops to do.
Instead, the Sons of Liberty turned to the press to protest the troops’ arrival. In the year and a half that British soldiers lived in Boston, the newspapers were crammed with examples of how the very presence of a standing army could destroy every part of a civilized society, from church services (when the army band deliberately played music during the sermon) to parental authority (as young women defied their fathers to date Redcoats).
Most of all, colonists feared the impact of a standing army on political freedom. How could a free people debate, much less protest, at the point of a bayonet? When the British army pointed its cannons at the door of the Massachusetts legislature, it was hard to escape the conclusion that a standing army was the king’s way of taking back political power. In sum, as the Massachusetts assembly complained to the governor in 1769, “establishing a Standing Army in this Colony, in a Time of Peace, without the Consent of the General Assembly of the same, is an Invasion of the natural Rights of the People.”
The death of British protesters at the hands of soldiers was not uncommon in England, and colonists and officers alike knew that a violent clash was only a matter of time. On March 5, 1770, troops fired into a crowd of civilians in downtown Boston, killing Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell immediately; Patrick Carr and teenager Samuel Maverick later died of their wounds. Even 256 years later, the exact sequence of events that led to the shooting is impossible to discover. Its importance for shaping the American Revolution, however, is clear.
On the night of the shooting, the acting governor of Massachusetts rushed to the scene and was horrified to see people bleeding to death on the snow before the seat of governmental power, today the Old State House. He swore he would launch a full civilian investigation with local law enforcement, and he promised, “I will live and die by the law.”
The governor was as good as his word. That night, the captain in charge turned himself in to the local jail, as did the men under his command. John Adams, urged by the Sons of Liberty to demonstrate Bostonians’ equally strong commitment to the rule of law, took on the defense of the British soldiers, successfully winning acquittals for most of them. Three years later, Adams reflected that defending the soldiers was “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.” And he was quite convinced that the jury verdict “was exactly right.”
At the same time, Adams agreed that Boston should certainly “call the Action of that Night a Massacre.” In fact, he wrote, “[I]t is the strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.” The experience of living with — and dying at the hands of — a standing army forever damaged Bostonians’ trust in the British empire.
In 1776, Congress highlighted the Boston Massacre in its list of grievances against George III. The 11th complaint drew directly from the Massachusetts legislature’s complaint seven years earlier: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” It was not the violence that so horrified colonists; it was the lack of legislative consent.
Despite the striking parallels, the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year were not just retreads of the Boston Massacre. For the Redcoats, face coverings and anonymity were not options; they had been living among Bostonians for a year and a half, becoming neighbors and sometimes even family. No one claimed the troops had legal immunity, and even the royal governor, who had requested the troops, believed in holding individual soldiers accountable for their actions.
In those ways, the shooting in Boston defied fewer norms than the activities of ICE in Minneapolis two and a half centuries later. Even so, the Boston Massacre and its consequences were no small part of the forces that impelled colonists toward a final break with the British empire.
Serena Zabin is the Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College and the author of “The Boston Massacre: A Family History.”
The “Road to 250” series is an initiative of Historians for 2026, a group of early American academics, public historians, archivists, and educators devoted to shaping an accurate, inclusive, and just public memory of the American Founding for the 250th anniversary.
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