Christopher Seider

Christopher Seider (also sometimes Snider), baptized in Braintree, Massachusetts, in March 1759 [1], was a boy killed in a political fight in Boston on February 22, 1770. His funeral became a major political event, and his killing heightened tensions that erupted into the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.

Life

Seider was the son of poor German immigrants, and apparently worked as a household servant for a wealthy widow. On February 22, 1770, he joined a crowd of boys mobbing the house of Ebenezer Richardson located in the North End, Boston. Richardson was a customs service employee who had tried to disperse the boys' protest in front of a shop selling goods from Britain. The young crowd, joined by some adults, threw stones which broke Richardson's windows and struck his wife. Richardson tried to scare them away with his musket, and then fired a load of birdshot down from his window. Seider was struck in the chest, and died that evening. He is buried in the same grave as the victims of the Boston Massacre of March 1770.

This killing and Seider's large public funeral fueled public outrage that reached a peak in the Boston Massacre eleven days later. Richardson was convicted of murder that spring, but received a royal pardon and a new job within the customs service, on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense; this became a major American grievance against the British government. Seider's death was thus one event that led to the American Revolution, and some historians^[who?] have called him the first victim of that conflict.^{[citation needed]}

References

• Zobel, Hiller B., The Boston Massacre, (1970, reissue 1996) W. W. Norton and Co., pp 164-179, ISBN 0-393-31483-9.

External links

• Boston Massacre Historical Society website