Mercy Leroux

Obviously, I’m a fiction writer. I obsessively research so I may use details as a trampoline to spring into a (hopefully) compelling story. And I like to think I’m very explicit about that fact that I write fiction inspired by real events. I aim for as much historical detail as possible, but it is not, you know, real.

Then there’s narrative history – see people like Nathaniel Philbrick, David Hackett Fisher, or Hiller B. Zobel. They use primary and a few secondary sources to construct scenes, with extensive footnotes that detail why they made the decisions they did. Some of my favorite parts reading Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution or The Boston Massacre are when they explicitly suggest that something might have happened, but explain that there’s contradictory evidence, or a lack of evidence altogether.

For instance, I found it very interesting that John Rowe reports in his diary that a grenadier from the 29th injured by the pistol that went off during the Mein riot, but since there’s no additional evidence for that, Zobel suggests it is a rumor. By and large, while every writer makes mistakes and misses pieces of information (Fisher’s Margaret Gage theory, for example), you leave their books with both a vivid picture of who these people were, and a decent grasp on facts.

And that brings me to The Boston Massacre: A Family Affair, by Serena Zabin. She’s a fantastic writer, really getting you into the scene and mindset better than most. Unfortunately, I worry the historical facts were sacrificed as a result.

For instance, let’s compare the following small anecdote regarding Lt. Colonel William Dalrymple’s suspicions on the freed Massacre defendants.

First, this article by my research idol J. L. Bell, who quotes Dalrymple as follows:

A bad disposition appearing in the Soldiers who were confined I shall send them round by sea, we have but too much reason to suspect their ententions to desert they are not at all to be depended on.

“I do not chuse to trust them any other way,” he added on 17 December. It would be great to know why Dalrymple was suspicious, but we don’t.

I love this, in that it’s explicit that something was up with the soldiers coming off about nine months of confinement, and we can certainly speculate what led to this conclusion (*stares in nine months confinement*), but Bell is crystal clear that we have no specifics.

Here’s Zabin’s description:

Disgusted after their long months in prison, the soldiers wanted nothing more to do with the army. Fearing that they might desert, Dalrymple decided to send them both by boat to join their regiment in New Jersey, thus giving them much less opportunity to slip away.

This is certainly vivid writing. My problem is that the first line is presented as fact, when it’s actually just filling in details and ideas and motivations we don’t know. That is fiction.

The most concerning portion to me was how Zabin handles Isabella Montgomery, wife to defendant Edward. (This caught my attention because, at the same time I read Zabin’s book, I had been working on our previous article on the wives featured in the Short Narrative.)

I’ll repeat the deposition here:

Caleb Swan, of lawful age, testifies and says, that last Monday night, the 5th of March 1770, being at Mr. Sample’s door, at the north part of the town near the north battery, at the time of the bells ringing for fire, he heard a woman’s voice, whom he knew to be the supposed wife of one Montgomery, a grenadier of the twenty-ninth regiment, standing at her door, and heard her say it was not fire; the town was too haughty and too proud; that many of their arses would be laid low before the morning. Upon which Susanna Cathcart said to her, I hope your husband will be killed, on which the woman replied, My husband is able and will stand his ground.

Here’s Zabin’s retelling of this event:

Eleanor Park was not the only woman contemplating violence in Boston that winter. In early March, two women – a native Bostonian and a soldier’s wife – stood on their stoops and exchanged threats.

First, I was shocked that Zabin failed to emphasize that this occurred the night of the Massacre. Boston was, at the time, a little over one square mile large. They were hearing bells for fire and there were multiple confrontations occurring in the streets. There’s an enormous possibility Isabella wasn’t contemplating violence, she was hearing it.

Second, from the records I’ve found, Cathcart was not even a woman. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, which certainly changes the dynamic here.

Isabella Montgomery had not found living in Boston easy. When she and her soldier husband and three children were living near Milk Street in 1769, no fewer than eleven neighbors had complained that she and her husband were loud and disorderly.

On one hand, it’s super cool that Zabin found this record – I’ve never seen anyone else mention it (and bless her for her citations).

However… here’s the actual court record:

That’s indeed eleven people signed onto this. But the complaint never mentions Isabella. It only mentions Edward (which I assume is because, as the man, he’s the head of the house). As Zabin herself points out in a different section of her book, many of these complaints tracked with complaints against the army in general. The problem could have been Edward, could have been Isabella, could have been their three children, all of the above, etc. We just don’t know, and neither does Zabin.

Let’s continue.

After they moved to the North End, Montgomery found their new neighbors no easier to get along with, and the feeling was mutual. On the night of March 5, while her husband, Edward, was on duty at the guardhouse next to the Town-House, Montgomery and her neighbor got into a heated argument about Boston itself. Standing on the stoop, Montgomery shouted loudly enough for people in the surrounding houses to hear, “The town was too haughty and too proud, and their arses would be laid low before the morning.” The Bostonian Susannah Cathcart, tired of both Montgomery and her husband, shot back, “I hope your husband will be killed.”

This… is fiction.

We don’t know anything about the neighbors other than Swan and Cathcart. The court index reveals no further complaints filed against the Montgomeries after they moved.

Furthermore, Swan never describes Isabella as shouting, nor does he claim multiple people heard her while they were inside the surrounding houses. He says he overheard this exchange because he was at Mr. Sample’s door. Whether he stood inside or outside isn’t specified.

Moreover, we don’t know why Cathcart responded by hoping for Edward’s death. Clearly, there was animosity at least on Cathcart’s side, and animosity toward the city on Isabella’s. But again, this is the night of the Massacre. Is it not possible that Swan, Cathcart, and Montgomery all ran to their doors once they heard bells… and may have also heard a mob, and gunshots (which, um, tend to be loud) and both were speaking in high emotions?

Moving on. Zabin then omits Isabella’s reply that Edward was “able and would stand his ground.” To which I have to ask, was it too calm and collected? Omitting this, along with neglecting to emphasize that this whole exchange was the night of the Massacre, is at best a baffling oversight and at worst borders on deliberate obfuscation. Did it not fit the portrait of Isabella as an obnoxious bitch?

To be clear, I’m not saying Isabella was this innocent, sweet lady maligned by angry Bostonians. I’m saying we don’t know what happened, and that Zabin’s description, whilst sensational, is simply not backed up by Swan’s testimony. It’s a fictional retelling that casts a long-dead woman in the worst possible light, and that troubles me in a book that is supposed to be nonfiction.

I haven’t looked further into the many other tales Zabin relayed, so it’s possible this was an outlier. But ultimately, I felt like this was an egregious enough example of personal bias twisting facts that I no longer trusted Zabin’s storytelling. I simply can’t recommend this book because I don’t trust the stories actually happened anywhere close to how Zabin portrays them. Which sucks, because she clearly found some fascinating long-ignored documents, and she is a vivid writer!