John Adams dismissed Boston Massacre victims as a motley rabble in their murder trial

Evidence

Five colonists lay for calling hours in Faneuil Hall before sharing a grave at the Granary Burying Ground. … They had laid a foundering stone for the Minutemen at Lexington & Concord, first to defy & die, & an echo of the future rose over the courtroom as John Adams defended the Brits, calling the dead a “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes & mulattoes, Irish teagues & outlandish jacktars,” who made soldiers fear for their lives, & at day’s end only two would pay with the branding of their thumbs. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Adams’ dismissal of the dead as a ‘motley rabble’ mirrors the Revolutionary-era race/class framing the reader is tracking in the Wilentz-letter dispute: who counts as an American founder and who is dismissed as peripheral.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s case study of how historical controversy works: the founder of American constitutionalism calling the Revolution’s first martyrs a rabble is a striking juxtaposition of origin-story perspectives.