Preceding this entry is a gap of nearly four months in the Diary record, with no space left for it in the MS. Accordingly there is no strictly contemporary mention by JA of the episode known as the Boston Massacre, in the consequences of which he was to be so deeply involved, though in his Autobiography he gave an account of what he did and saw on the evening of 5 March and of the circumstances under which he agreed, next day, to defend Capt. Thomas Preston.

On 6 June JA was elected a delegate to the General Court from Boston in the room of James Bowdoin, who had been elected to the Council. He was at once caught up in the bitter and protracted 351dispute between the legislature and Lt. Gov. Hutchinson over the meeting-place of the General Court; see the House Journal for this year, passim. From June 1770 to April 1771, his single term as a member of the House, JA’s name, as CFA remarked, “appears upon almost every important committee” (JA, Works , 1:109). An impressive tabulation of these committee assignments will be found in a long note in the same, 2:233–236.