Puritan. Patriot. Protester.

On the evening of August 25, 1765, Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, was having supper with his family in their three-story mansion in Boston’s North End. Mid-meal, a friend burst in to warn the Hutchinsons that they were about to receive unexpected guests. The lieutenant governor and his kin barely had time to escape to a neighbor’s home before an ax came through the front door. The mob that followed proceeded to destroy furniture, rip down wall hangings and wainscoting, demolish interior walls, plunder the cellar, and tear up the garden. For good measure, a party of marauders climbed to the roof, there to spend three hours toppling the cupola. Everything of value not nailed down was stolen—clothing, plate, £900 in cash. By four o’clock the next morning, all that remained of the house were bare walls and floors. The attack was, as historian Bernard Bailyn would write, the most violent mob action in the history of colonial America.

Proper Boston was shocked. Even Samuel Adams, a local political leader and a frequent critic of the colonial administration Hutchinson served, branded the onslaught “a high-handed enormity,” which Adams blamed on “vagabond strangers.” Three months later, one of the leading rioters—no vagabond stranger but a local cobbler named Andrew Mackintosh—marched arm in arm in a parade with a colonel of the Massachusetts militia, as if promising a new era of social peace.

The protestations of shock and the parade were all a sham. From Sam Adams’s point of view, the only enormity of the home invasion was excessiveness: its intensity conferred on its target, for a while at least, the aura of martyrdom.