Boston Massacre: Have We Remembered, or Surrendered?

By: Michael Boldin
Published on: Mar 4, 2026

“Remember, my friends, from whom you sprang”

Commemorating the anniversary of the Boston Massacre – March 5, 1770 – John Hancock was issuing a challenge to all of us.

And he was far from alone.

For 13 years, from 1771 to 1783, the Sons and Daughters of Liberty held annual events to remember, with a keynote speaker each year. These speeches provide us with an uncompromising blueprint for a free people – the foundation of the Revolution.

As you read through them all, a number of themes become obvious. They tell us what they fought for – and against. And they leave us with a brutal question for today:

Have we remembered, or have we let this country become a den of thieves?

NATURAL RIGHTS

First, the basis of everything else. As Joseph Warren put it, you are born free.

“Personal freedom is the natural right of every man.”

From this naturally flows an essential principle of the revolution: What’s yours is yours, and no one has a right to steal any of it from you.

“And that property or an exclusive right to dispose of what he has honestly acquired by his own labor, necessarily arises therefrom, are truths which common sense has placed beyond the reach of contradiction.”

William Tudor kicked off his speech in 1779 with a phrase that should sound familiar.

“Ever vigilantly attentive to the sacred, unalienable rights of man; equally studious in the glorious princi?ples of liberty as intrepidly determined to preserve inviolate the inestimable privileges she bestows; you are now convened, not more to commemorate this anniversary, than solemnly to renew the resolves, which freedom, wisdom, virtue, honour inspire”

As Thomas Dawes put it, these unalienable rights don’t come from government. They’re from your creator.

“Liberty, sent from above, was their peculiar inmate: that Liberty, whose spirit, mingling with the nature of man at his formation, taught him, unlike the other animals, to look upward and hope for a throne above the stars”

ARBITRARY POWER

What’s the greatest threat to your natural rights?

For the American Revolutionaries, it was absolutely, without a doubt, a government that doesn’t stay within the limits of the constitution, even the unwritten British Constitution.

They called this arbitrary power.

No one hit this harder than Joseph Warren.

“Nothing was so much the object of their abhorrence as a tyrant’s power: – They knew that it was more safe to dwell with man in his most unpolished state than in a country where arbitrary power prevails.”

And here’s the trick. Tyrants don’t always just take power. They often just convince you you’re too stupid for self-government. That’s exactly what Rev Peter Thacher called out in 1776.

“With Machiavellian subtilty, they have laboured to persuade mankind, that their public happiness consisted in being subject to uncontrouled power; that they were incapable of judging concerning the mysteries of government; and that it was their interest to deliver their estates, their liberties, and their lives, into the hands of an absolute Monarch.”

In the first Massacre Day Oration of 1771, James Lovell pointed to the greatest example of arbitrary power the colonists were facing, which guaranteed death to liberty.

“The declarative vote of the British Parliament is the death-warrant of our birthrights, and wants only a Czarish King to put it into execution.”

John Hancock explained exactly what Lovell was talking about – the Declaratory Act of 1766, where the British claimed unlimited power over the colonies, the root of all the other arbitrary power they toiled under.

“They have declared that they have, ever had, and of right ought ever to have, full power to make laws of sufficient validity to bind the colonies in all cases whatever: They have exercised this pretended right by imposing a tax upon us without our consent”

STANDING ARMIES

But arbitrary power doesn’t enforce itself. And Hancock saw it play out in real time.

“And lest we should shew some reluctance at parting with our property, her fleets and armies are sent to inforce their mad pretensions.”

As Benjamin Hichborn explained, the very existence of a standing army means someone is likely enforcing arbitrary power.

“Every military force must necessarily imply a right of exerci?sing an arbitrary power, so far as respects the objects against which it is to be directed; and what will be the objects against which it will be in constant exercise in proportion to its extent, we may collect from the experience of ages, and the well-known source of human actions.”

Joseph Warren took this right back to the root cause of the Massacre. The British knew they couldn’t convince the people to voluntarily shackle themselves, to get on their knees and submit. So they did what all empires do – they sent in the troops

“As it was soon found that this taxation could not be supported by reason and argument, it seemed necessary that one act of oppression should be enforced by another … a standing army was established among us in a time of peace … namely for the enforcement of obedience to acts which, upon fair examination, appeared to be unjust and unconstitutional.”

And once the occupying army arrived? John Hancock knew the result was guaranteed.

“It was easy to foresee the consequences which so naturally followed upon sending troops into America, to enforce obedience to acts of the British parliament, which neither God nor man ever empowered them to make.”

More on link:
https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2026/03/04/boston-massacre-have-we-remembered-or-surrendered/