The 1770 Boston Massacre was far more than an isolated incident.
Warner Todd Huston’s essay No Isolated Incident: Why Was the Boston Massacre so Shocking? provides a perspective unknown to most of us on the impetus for our 1776 War of Independence.
The essay fleshes out the words of the Declaration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.
Back to summary...