After British soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters in Boston on March 5, 1770, that event was described as a “massacre” by famous Bostonians like Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. The Boston Massacre was among the events that paved the way for the American Revolution, and historian/author Serena Zabin — in an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer — draws parallels between British troops’ presence in Boston in 1770 and President Donald Trump’s use of a “private army” in U.S. cities in 2026.
Zabin, author of the book “The Boston Massacre: A Family History” and a professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, explains, “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?'”
Six years after the Boston Massacre, the American Declaration of Independence was signed roughly 300 miles away in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. And the United States’ 250th anniversary was celebrated with 4th of July events in Philly, Boston and many other U.S. cities.
“The death of British protestors at the hands of soldiers was not uncommon in England,” Zabin notes in the Inquirer, “and colonists and officers alike knew that a violent clash was only a matter of time…. 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…. In 1776, Congress highlighted the Boston Massacre in their list of grievances against (King) George III.”
Zabin continues, “The eleventh 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.”
Zabin, 256 years after the Boston Massacre and 250 years after the singing of the American Declaration of Independence, warns that nothing good can come from having “King Trump’s private army” patrolling U.S. cities.
“Despite the striking parallels,” Zabin writes, “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 half, becoming neighbors and sometimes even family. No one claimed that the troops had legal immunity, and even the royal governor who had requested the troops believed in holding individual soldiers accountable for their actions.”
The historian continues, “In those ways, the shooting in Boston defied fewer norms than the activities of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) 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 towards a final break with the British Empire.”