Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks was the first man shot in the Boston Massacre and became the first martyr of the American Revolution, though almost nothing about his life is certain. The likeliest identification is with a man advertised as a runaway from a Framingham slaveholder in 1750, described as of mixed African and Natick descent, about twenty-seven, and knock-kneed; if that is him he spent the following twenty years at sea and on the docks, where a man could live outside the reach of the advertisement. On the evening of 5 March 1770 a crowd gathered outside the Custom House on King Street to harass the sentry, in a town where British soldiers competed with local labourers for casual work. Attucks was at the front, reportedly carrying a cordwood stick. The soldiers fired; he was hit twice in the chest and died on the spot, with four others dying then or later. John Adams, defending the soldiers at trial, described him as a stout mulatto whose looks alone were enough to terrify and blamed him for the whole affair, and secured acquittals for six of the eight. The bodies lay in state and were buried together in the Granary Burying Ground, which crossed the colour line at a time when almost nothing did. Abolitionists made him a symbol in the 1850s and Boston raised a monument in 1888 over the objections of those who thought a rioter unfit for one. Almost every claim in the record is contested, including whether the runaway advertisement is even about him. What is not contested is the use made of him afterwards: the first man killed in the quarrel that produced a republic founded on liberty was a man who had probably escaped from slavery in it. That argument was made by abolitionists in the 1850s and has been made ever since.

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