The Boston Massacre Analysis

The Boston Massacre and subsequent Coercive Acts have long been a focal point in the story of the American Revolution. Over the years it has become common place for historians to argue on the impact that the event had on the colonials and their seemingly inevitable movement toward war. The HBO series John Adams is by no means a historical documentary, taking liberty with the accuracy of some of its material in the name of dramatic gravitas. Director Tom Hooper sets out to show the Boston Massacre with a sense of realism even when falsifying specific details. Hooper’s goal in doing so is to provide both a semi-realistic portrayal of the events, but also of the people of Boston’s general growing outlook toward British duties. Hooper provides …show more content…
Hooper makes it a point to show that the town’s folk did harass the soldiers, trial witnesses, and customs officials. The point of showing these scenes is to convince the notion of neutrality by the main protagonist of John Adams. Adam’s faces a great challenge with the court proceedings as he was in many ways in agreeance with his fellow colonists over the tax laws and is shown as being distraught after returning home from the sight of the massacre. However Hooper makes it clear that Adams is a man who believes in the ‘rule of law’ seemingly doing what no one else would do in representing the soldiers, even if only after hearing their version of the events. John Adams clearly faced a host of challenges and bias surrounding the case and is shown to expertly find witnesses in Mr. Holmes and Richard Palms who contradict the accounts of the prosecution. In reality there were more witnesses who under no pressure (this in contradiction to what was depicted in the show), gave testimony in favor of the defense (Roth, 1). In John Adam’s Summation of Defense it is stated …show more content…
He succeeded by using a neutral perspective of John Adam’s to convey both injustices of the colonists during the trials and the injustices of British restrictions following protests. Many of the inaccuracies were used in an effort to further dramatize the events and in doing so does place certain characters and events out of historical reality, but in most cases the end results were largely unaffected. Future portrayals should focus on the full truth of the subject as in many cases what a viewer sees can become their interpretation of the events whether correct or false. History itself should be dramatic enough as it lies and can provide amazing tales without the need of alteration. However in the case of the show John Adams the viewer is able to grasp the realistic message that neither side was perfect, but more importantly they were clearly ideologically different people. Establishing this notion can make it easy to grasp how to similar peoples could become so