Crispus Attucks is widely considered to be the first person to die in the “Boston Massacre,” an event that would be a rallying point for American independence from Great Britain. In many ways, the death of Attucks along with four other colonists sparked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Born in 1723, Attucks’s early life remains largely unknown, but many believe that he was of both African and Native American descent. His father was likely Prince Yonger, an African slave, and his mother, Nancy Attucks, was a member of the “Natick Indians” (part of the Wampanoag tribe) and also a slave. Legend has it that as a young man Attucks became very adept at trading livestock, especially horses and cattle. Attucks proved quite valuable to William Brown, his master in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, so that when he ran away at age twenty-seven, Brown offered ten pounds for his return in a notice carried in the Boston Gazette. The posting describes Attucks as “6 Feet two Inches high, short curl’d Hair, his knees nearer together than common.” Never captured, Attucks is believed to have spent the next twenty years under the pseudonym of “Michael Johnson” while he worked as a sailor, largely on whaling ships off the New England coast. When he was not working aboard ships, Attucks worked as a rope maker.
On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks was shot and killed by British troops during a protest in Boston in what many regard as the first bloodshed of the American Revolution. Attucks was an African American sailor, and according to legend was a runaway slave. The death of Attucks and four other protesters became known as the Boston Massacre in anti-British propaganda, and the incident served as a catalyst for the budding American independence movement. (Library of Congress)
During this time, unrest was growing between Great Britain and the American colonies, largely due to the many taxes thrust upon the colonists by Parliament and the occupation of Boston by British troops. Eleven days prior to the Boston Massacre, a young boy named Christian Seider was part of a crowd that threw stones through the windows of a British customs house. The customs official, Ebenezer Richardson, fired his musket into the group, fatally wounding Seider.
The Seider affair set the stage for the Boston Massacre almost two weeks later. Between sailing jobs, Attucks was eating dinner at a Boston tavern on the night of March 5, 1770, when he heard bells ringing. In Boston, these were used to signal either fire or trouble. Curious, Attucks left his meal and investigated. He was not alone, as a large crowd took to the streets, many of whom were carrying buckets in case of a fire. However, the commotion was caused not by fire but by the taunting of Private Hugh Montgomery, a British soldier posted at Dock Square, a waterfront neighborhood in Boston. The taunting escalated, with groups of men and boys throwing snowballs at him. Feeling threatened, Montgomery rang the sentry bell, which drew the interest of the crowd and of Attucks.
Another group was also drawn to the ruckus of the alarm bells: a group of British soldiers stationed at nearby King Street under the command of Captain Thomas Preston. They pushed through the throng to reach Montgomery, presenting the impression that they might use force. Confronted by the British soldiers, most of the crowd did nothing. A small group, however, continued to engage the British, both with words and with weapons. Perhaps they felt emboldened because no government official had yet read the Riot Act, a British law that allowed police (or here, soldiers) to disperse a crowd of twelve or more armed people or of fifty or more unarmed people. Once the Riot Act was read, the crowd then had one hour to disperse before the soldiers could use force. The Riot Act was not read on the night of March 5, 1770.
According to most witnesses, Attucks was at the head of a group of thirty or so men carrying sticks and clubs and joined the side of the snowball-throwing colonists, taunting the soldiers to retaliate. Depending upon the source, the taunting took the form of either “Come on you rascals, you bloody scoundrels, you lobsterbacks, fire if you dare, we know you dare not” (“Lobsterback” is slang for a British soldier, so called because of the red color of their uniforms) or “Damn them, they dare not fire, we are not afraid of them.” Regardless, the scene escalated, and Attucks threw himself into the fray and struck a British soldier. The reaction was immediate. The British fired upon the colonists, and Crispus Attucks was shot and killed by two bullets in his chest. He was the first of five men to die from the shooting, a list that included James Caldwell, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, and Samuel Maverick. Six others were wounded.
The Sons of Liberty
Formed in Boston in 1765, the Sons of Liberty comprised a veritable “Who’s Who” of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including such notable figures as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. This group formed in direct reaction to the Stamp Act, a form of tax that required all legal papers, commercial documents, newspapers, and the like to have a government stamp to help defray the costs of the defense of the colonies. “Taxation without representation” was so hated in those colonies, however, that Americans rally around such battle-cries even to this day. The Sons of Liberty became a driving force toward revolution, and after British soldiers fired upon a mob on March 5, 1770, killing five men—including Crispus Attucks—the Sons of Liberty seized upon this incident as another example of callous British oppression, dubbing the event forevermore “The Boston Massacre.”
C. Fee
Attucks was buried along with the four other victims of the shooting at the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, which also is the resting place for Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and other notable patriots from the Revolutionary War years. Captain Preston and the eight British soldiers were placed on trial for the murder of the five men. John Adams, the future president of the United States, defended them in court. Preston and six of the soldiers were acquitted, while the remaining two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter. After the ruling, these two soldiers asked for the “benefit of the clergy,” which reduced their sentence from incarceration to the branding of their thumbs.
The outcome of the trial was largely viewed as unsatisfactory and incited colonial grievances, especially among the Sons of Liberty, who demanded separation of the colonies from Great Britain. Paul Revere’s widely circulated broadside, “The Bloody Massacre in King Street” (in which Attucks is conspicuously absent), proved among the most effective anti-British propaganda. To further highlight the tragedy of March 5, 1770, Boston held a “Massacre Day” memorial from 1771 to 1783 to commemorate those who were killed and to warn against the dangers of British occupation.
Crispus Attucks, as the first to die in the Boston Massacre, became a national martyr, celebrated long after the Revolutionary War. He was an important inspirational figure for Civil War abolitionists, symbolizing the right to freedom and liberty for both Americans and slaves. In 1858, Boston-area abolitionists established “Crispus Attucks Day” to bring his story to the public and to garner support for antislavery movements. Thirty years later, the Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks monument was erected, and on a bronze plaque at the base, Attucks is portrayed as fallen at the feet of the British soldiers. In 1998, to honor Black American Revolutionaries, the U.S. mint issued the Crispus Attucks silver dollar. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widely read Why We Can’t Wait (1964) used the figure of Crispus Attucks to show how men of great courage are often overlooked. To this day, Crispus Attucks remains an important, if sometimes misunderstood, American symbol of resistance and liberty.
Stephen M. Fonash
See also Allen, Ethan; Founding Myths; Ross, Betsy; Washington, George; Yankee Doodle
Further Reading
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, and Alan Steinberg. 2000. Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement. New York: Perennial.
Buckley, Gail. 2001. American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm. New York: Random House.
Haskins, Jim. 1992. One More River to Cross: The Stories of Twelve Black Americans. New York: Scholastic.
Lanning, Michael Lee. 1997. The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell. Seacaucus, NJ: Carol.
Rausch, Monica. 2007. Crispus Attucks. Milwaukee, WI: Weekly Reader Early Learning Library.
York, Neil Longley. 2010. The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents. New York: Routledge.