The people now began to disperse, but slowly, however.  Meanwhile, the court of inquiry on Captain Preston was in session, and, after an examination that lasted three hours, he was bound over for trial.  Later, the file of soldiers were also arrested.  It was three o’clock in the morning before the Lieutenant-Governor left the scene of the massacre.  And now all, excepting about a hundred of the people, who formed themselves into a watch, left the streets.  Thus wise action by the crown officials, the activity of the popular leaders, and the habitual respect of the people for law, proved successful in preventing further carnage.  “It was Royal George’s livery,” said Warren, “that proved a shield to the soldiery, and saved them from destruction.”  Hence, a contemporary versifier and participator in these scenes was able to write,—­

    “No sudden rage the ruffian soldier bore,
    Or drenched the pavements with his vital gore;
    Deliberate thought did all our souls compose,
    Till veiled in gloom the low’ry morning rose.”

During the night, the popular leaders sent expresses to the neighboring towns, bearing intelligence of what had occurred, and summoning people from their beds to go to the aid of Boston; but as the efforts to restore quiet were proving successful, the summons was countermanded.  This action accounts for the numbers who, very early in the morning of the sixth of March, flocked into the town.  They could learn details of the tragedy from the actors in it,—­could see the blood, the brains even, of the slaughtered inhabitants,—­could hear the groans of the wounded,—­could view the bodies of the dead.  This terrible revelation of the work of arbitrary power, to a people habitually tender of regard for human life, naturally shocked the sensibilities of all; and thus the public temper was again wrought up to a fearful pitch of indignation.  It required the strongest moral influence to restrain the rash, and to guide in the forms of law a righteous demand for a redress of grievance and for future security.

The Lieutenant-Governor, during the night, had summoned such members of the Council as were within reach to meet in the Council-Chamber in the morning; and on joining them, he found the Selectmen, with most of the justices of the county, waiting for him, to represent, as he says, “their opinion of the absolute necessity of the troops being at a distance, that there might be no intercourse between the inhabitants and them, in order to prevent a further effusion of blood.”  Such was the logic of events which now forced the seventeen months’ question of the removal of the troops on the civil and military authorities with an imperativeness that could not be resisted.