Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks

Portrait of Crispus Attucks
Born c. 1723
United States
Died March 5, 1770 (aged 46-47)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation Dockworker [1]

Crispus Attucks (c. 1723 – March 5, 1770) was a dockworker of Wampanoag and African descent. He was the first person shot to death by British redcoats during the Boston Massacre, in Boston, Massachusetts.[2] He has been called the first martyr of the revolution.[3]

Little is known for certain about Crispus Attucks beyond that he, along with Samuel Gray and James Caldwell, died "on the spot" during the incident.[4] Two major sources of eyewitness testimony about the Boston Massacre, both published in 1770, did not refer to Attucks as a "Negro," or "black" man; it appeared that Bostonians accepted him as mixed race. Historians disagree on whether Crispus Attucks was a free man or an escaped slave; but agree that he was of Wampanoag and African descent.

While the extent of his participation is unclear, Attucks became an icon of the anti-slavery movement and was held up as an example of the first black hero of the American Revolution. The other victims of the attack were Samuel Gray and James Caldwell who, like Attucks, died immediately during the attack; Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr died from their wounds afterward. In the early nineteenth century, as the Abolitionist movement gained momentum in Boston, supporters lauded Attucks as a black American who played a heroic role in the history of the United States [5] Because Attucks had Wampanoag ancestors, his story also holds special significance for many Native Americans.[6]

Contents

Boston Massacre

Main article: Boston Massacre

In the fall of 1768, British soldiers sent to Boston to help control growing colonial unrest. Tensions increased with those colonists who opposed the presence of troops. After dusk on March 5, 1770, a crowd of colonists confronted a sentry who had struck a boy for complaining that an officer was late in paying a barber bill.

Both townspeople and the British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot gathered. The colonists threw snowballs and debris at the soldiers. Attucks and a group of men led by Attucks approached the Old State House armed with clubs. A soldier was struck with a piece of wood and some accounts credited Attucks. Other witnesses stated that Attucks was "leaning upon a stick" when the soldiers opened fire.[8]

Five Americans were killed and six were mortally wounded. Attucks took two bullets in the chest and was the first to die.[9] County coroners Robert Pierpoint and Thomas Crafts Jr. conducted an autopsy on Attucks.[10] Attucks’ body was carried to Faneuil Hall, where it lay in state until Thursday, March 8, when he and the other victims were buried together in the same grave site.

Based on the premise of self-defense, John Adams successfully defended the British soldiers against a charge of murder. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter. As soldiers of the King of England, they were given the choice of hanging or being branded on their thumbs. They both chose to be branded. In his arguments, Adams called the crowd "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs."[11]

Two years later, Samuel Adams, a cousin of John Adams, named the event the "Boston Massacre," and helped assure that it would not be forgotten. Boston artist Henry Pelham (half-brother of the celebrated portrait painter John Singleton Copley) created an image of the event. Paul Revere made a copy from which prints were made and distributed. Some copies of the print show a dark-skinned man with chest wounds, presumably representing Crispus Attucks. Other copies of the print show no difference in the skin tones of the victims.

The five who were killed were buried as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground, which contains the graves of John Hancock and other notable figures. While custom of the period discouraged the burial of black people and white people together, such a practice was not completely unknown. Prince Hall, for example, was interred in Copp's Hill Burying Ground in the North End of Boston 35 years later.

Folklore

The fragmentary record of Attucks' life and death gave rise to speculation which, over the years, assumed the status of folk-history.

In popular versions of his life, Attucks was born to an enslaved, African-born father named Prince Yonger, and a Wampanoag mother named Nancy Attucks, who was from either the Natick-Framingham area of Middlesex County, just west of Boston, or from the island of Nantucket, south of Cape Cod. Attucks grew up in the household of Colonel Buckminster, his father’s master, until he was sold to Deacon William Brown of Framingham. Unhappy with his situation, Attucks escaped and became a ropemaker, a manual laborer, and/or a whaler. His quarrel with the British soldiers on March 5, 1770 was rooted in indignation regarding the impact of the Townshend Acts on the local economy, as well as the incidents that took place earlier that day.

Legacy and honors

In popular culture

And to honor Crispus Attucks who was the leader and voice that day: The first to defy, and the first to die, with Maverick, Carr, and Gray. Call it riot or revolution, or mob or crowd as you may, such deaths have been seeds of nations, such lives shall be honored for aye...

He is one of the most important figures in African-American history, not for what he did for his own race but for what he did for all oppressed people everywhere. He is a reminder that the African-American heritage is not only African but American and it is a heritage that begins with the beginning of America.[14]

References

  1. ^ "Africans in America - Part 2 - Crispus Attucks". http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p24.html. Retrieved 1 November 2011. 
  2. ^ Lowery, Malinda Maynor. "African and Native Americans in Colonial and Revolutionary Times." Teachinghistory.org. Accessed 13 July 2011.
  3. ^ "Crispus Attucks", InfoPlease. Quote: "John Adams, later the 2nd President of the United States, defended the soldiers and won an acquittal, arguing that Attucks and the others were common thugs, not political freedom-fighters. After the trial, patriots said it proved that even a British soldier could get a fair trial in independence-minded Boston, and Attucks was called a martyr for defending political liberty".
  4. ^ I. Kimber, The London Magazine, or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, Vol. 39 p. 251.
  5. ^ Margot Minardi, The Inevitable Negro: Making Slavery History in Massachusetts, 1770-1863 (Harvard University: PhD Dissertation, 2007);
  6. ^ W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600-1871 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); as well as two histories by Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
  7. ^ Thomas H. O'Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. 56.
  8. ^ The Trial of William Wemms, James Hartegan, William M'Cauley, Hugh White, Matthew Killroy, William Warren, John Carrol, and Hugh Montgomery, soldiers in His Majesty's 29th Regiment of Foot, for the murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr, on Monday-evening, the 5th of March, 1770 at the Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize, and General Goal Delivery, held at Boston, the 27th day of November, 1770, by adjournment, before the Hon. Benjamin Lynde, John Cushing, Peter Oliver, and Edmund Trowbridge, Esquires, justices of said court (Boston: J. Fleeming, 1770); and A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1849).
  9. ^ The Trial of William Wemms; and A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston.
  10. ^ Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1970)
  11. ^ The Murder of Crispus Attucks
  12. ^ USmint.gov, United States Mint: "Plinky's Coin of the Month February 2000"
  13. ^ Molefi Kete Asante, 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002).
  14. ^ James Neyland, Crispus Attucks, Patriot (Holloway House, 1995)

External links