HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

On April 9, 1863, a shooting was carried out in a basement just off of Court Street, behind Boston’s Old City Hall. The gunman was a Union cavalry officer, who belonged to one of Brahmin Boston’s most wealthy families. The victim was a new Irish American recruit in his brigade. The shooting would result in accusations of cowardice and an execution, but was either justified?

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The Court Street Mutiny Charles Russell Lowell Site of the shooting in 1861 Site of the shooting today

• Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, by Edward Waldo Emerson
• Harvard Memorial Biographies, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
• Memoirs of the War of ’61, by Elizabeth Cabot Putnam
• “MILITARY INSUBORDINATION.; A Mutiny in the Second Massachusetts Cavalry The Ringleader Promptly Shot, and the Difficulty Quelled.” New York Times, April 9, 1863
• “Execution at Fort Independence.” Rutland Weekly Herald, June 18, 1863
• 1861 map showing the corner of Williams Court and Court Square, where the shooting took place
• “A Mutineer’s Bullet,” [PDF link] from the research site The Second Mass and its Fighting Californians
• Ragon, Stephen F., “Expendable: Eight Soldiers From Massachusetts Regiments Executed For Desertion During the United States Civil War” (2017). Graduate Masters Theses. 436.
• Finding the grave of Charles Russell Lowell and Josephine Shaw Lowell