Passing over intervening dissensions and tumults, we now come to the so-called "Boston Massacre," on the 5th of March, 1770, an occasion on which loss of life was inevitable, and the only question was whether it should be among the soldiers or their assailants. The riot was evidently predetermined, as one of the bells was rung about eight o'clock, and immediately afterwards bands of men, with clubs, appeared upon the streets. Early in the evening there had been some interchange of hostilities, chiefly verbal, between the soldiers and town people, but an officer had ordered his men into the barrack-yard, and closed the gate. The "main guard," for that day's duty, was from the 29th regiment. About nine o'clock a solitary sentinel in front of the custom-house on King street, now known as State street, was assailed by a party of men and boys, who pelted him with lumps of ice and coal, and threatened him with their clubs. Being forbidden by the rules of the service to quit his post, he called upon the "main guard," whose station was within hearing. A corporal and seven soldiers were sent to his relief. They were followed by Captain Preston, who said, "I will go there myself to see that they do no mischief." By that time the crowd had become a large one, intensely angry, and determined on violence. The mob supposed the soldiers were helpless and harmless; that they were not permitted to fire unless ordered by a magistrate. The rioters repeatedly challenged the soldiers to fire if they dared, and the torrent of coarse and profane abuse poured upon the soldiers is astonishing even in its echoes across the century, and would furnish material for an appropriate inscription on the Attucks monument. The soldiers stood on the defensive while their lives were endangered by missiles, and till the crowd closed upon them in a hand-to-hand conflict. The leader of the assault was "Crispus Attucks," a half Indian and half negro, who raised the blood-curdling war-whoop, the only legacy save his Indian surname and his strength and ferocity, that he is known to have received from his savage ancestry. He knocked down one of the soldiers, got possession of his musket, and would, no doubt, have killed him instantly had not the soldiers fired at that moment and killed Attucks and two other men, two more being fatally wounded. There is no evidence that Captain Preston ordered the firing, though if he did he certainly deserved no blame, as the shooting was, for the soldiers, the only means of defence. There is no doubt that the mobs on these occasions were set in movement and directed by some persons of higher rank and larger views of mischief than themselves.