Teaching Us How To Die

The story of Crispus Attucks, the escaped slave who became the first person to die for American independence...

The first person to die for American independence was a mixed-race sailor and escaped slave called Crispus Attucks.
 
On this day in 1770, he was the first American protestor shot dead by British soldiers at the Boston Massacre.

Attucks’ story, as a Black Patriot, goes to the heart of the tensions in the American Revolution – and in the American Republic created by it. 
 
Born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in or around 1723, Crispus Attucks was a mixed-race African American and indigenous man. 
 
He seems to have been enslaved but escaped, often going by the alias ‘Michael Johnson’ to avoid recapture.
 
By the 1760s, when the Thirteen Colonies had become discontent with Britain over commercial restrictions and other new regulations, Crispus Attucks was working as a merchant sailor on the Atlantic seaboard routes of British North America.
 
Maritime life in the eighteenth-century was a space of radical politics, and sailors were an important agent of rebellion and revolution. 
 
At their most politically creative, merchant ships became ‘floating republics’ where cross-racial solidarity and egalitarianism were the norm. 
 
And radical shipboard politics left its mark on the port cities of the Atlantic where sailors came ashore. Port cities like Boston…

In March 1770, Crispus Attucks was in town after a voyage to the Bahamas, waiting to set sail again on the route down to North Carolina. 
 
But Boston was about to explode. 
 
Since 1768, British regulars had been deployed in the town to control protests against the Stamp Act and other new taxes intended to pay for the British Army in North America.
 
Soon enough, the relationship between Boston citizens and British soldiers was at boiling point. 
 
It all kicked off on 5 March 1770, when a Boston wigmaker accused a British army officer of not paying his bill.
 
The row escalated into a wider standoff between nine soldiers and a growing crowd of citizens at the Old State House. 
 
Crispus Attucks and a group of Americans were there with clubs, to confront the army or protect the protestors. 
 
Words were exchanged and snowballs were thrown at the soldiers until, as often happens to men with guns in stressful situations, one of them decided to open fire, then the rest did too.

Five protestors were shot dead, the first of them Crispus Attucks. 
 
And although the people at the Old State House might not have known it at the time, they’d just seen the start of the American Revolution. 
 
True, it was another five years until the Battles of Lexington and Concord launched the War of Independence proper.
 
But the Boston Massacre of March 1770 was a watershed moment, when the dispute between American colonists and Britain first slipped into open violence. 
 
That makes Crispus Attucks – a Black indigenous man from New England – the first fatality of the American Revolution.
 
It’s a fact that cuts to the heart of American independence and its contradictions, as both a war of liberation and a war of conquest led by a slaveholding elite. 
 
Alongside the motivating ideas of liberty and equality, the white men who led the Revolution also wanted to end British restrictions on the further conquest of Native American land. 
 
And many of the Founding Fathers were also nervous about British calls to abolish slavery, and how they might spread to North America.
 
This is why so many Native American tribes and enslaved people, unlike Crispus Attucks, decided to ally with the British Army.
 
For some enslaved and conquered people in North America, the Revolution looked like an opportunity. But for others, it threatened more oppression, not less.