Crispus Attucks
Crispus Attucks (c.1723—March 5, 1770) was the first person killed in the Boston massacre, in Boston, Massachusetts, and is widely referred to as the first American killed in the American Revolution. Aside from the event of his death little is known for certain about Attucks. He could have been a Native American slave, or a freeman, or a merchant seaman and dockworker of Wampanoag and African descent. Circumstantial evidence suggests his father may have been Prince Yonger, an African-born slave and his mother, Nanny Peterattucks, a Natick Native American.
Despite the lack of clarity, Attucks became an icon of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-19th century. He was held up as the first martyr of the American Revolution. In the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement gained momentum in Boston, supporters lauded Attucks as an African American who played a heroic role in the history of the United States.
Historians disagree on whether Crispus Attucks was a free man or an escaped slave, but most agree that he was of Wampanoag and African descent. Two major sources of eyewitness testimony about the Boston Massacre, both published in 1770, did not refer to Attucks as “black” nor as a “Negro”; it appeared that Bostonians of European descent viewed him as being of mixed ethnicity. According to a contemporary account in the Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), he was a “Mulattoe man, named Crispus Attucks, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonged to New-Providence, and was here in order to go for North Carolina . . .” Because of his mixed heritage, his story is also significant for Native Americans.
In the fall of 1768, British soldiers were sent to Boston in an attempt to control growing colonial unrest, which had led to a spate of attacks on local officials following the introduction of the Stamp Act and the subsequent Townshend Acts. Radical Whigs had coordinated waterfront mobs against the authorities. The presence of troops, instead of reducing tensions, served to further inflame them.
After dusk on March 5, 1770, a crowd of colonists confronted a sentry who had chastised a boy for complaining that an officer did not pay a barber bill. Both townspeople and a company of British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot gathered. The colonists threw snowballs and debris at the soldiers. A group of men including Attucks approached the Old State House armed with clubs. A soldier was struck with a piece of wood, an act some witnesses claimed was done by Attucks. Other witnesses stated that Attucks was “leaning upon a stick” when the soldiers opened fire.
Five colonists were killed and six were wounded. Attucks took two ricocheted bullets in the chest and was the first to die. County coroners Robert Pierpoint and Thomas Crafts Jr. conducted an autopsy on Attucks. 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 in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground. He had lived for approximately 47 years.
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