Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks was born around 1723, most likely in Framingham, Massachusetts, to an African father and a Natick mother. He was enslaved through his teenage years. The Boston Gazette of October 1750 carried an advertisement by his master, Deacon William Brown, offering a reward for his return; Attucks had escaped, age approximately twenty-seven. He spent the next twenty years as a free sailor and ropemaker on the New England coast.

On the evening of the fifth of March 1770, a crowd of dockworkers, sailors, and apprentices gathered outside the Custom House on King Street in Boston to confront British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot. The dispute had been building for weeks over jobs the British troops had been taking from local laborers, including ropework on Attucks's specialty. Attucks led the crowd. He carried a cordwood club. He confronted Private Hugh Montgomery directly; Montgomery fired the first shot. Attucks was struck by two musket balls in the chest and died on the spot. Four other men died of the wounds they received in the ensuing volley.

He was approximately forty-seven. He was the first man killed in the engagement that came to be called the Boston Massacre — and, by the consensus of subsequent historiography, the first man to die in the cause that became the American Revolution.

Eight British soldiers were tried for the killings. John Adams defended them at trial; six were acquitted, two convicted of manslaughter and branded on the thumb. Attucks was buried alongside the other four in a single grave at the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, in the only known instance of integrated public burial in colonial Boston.

He is honored here as the first man to die in the American Revolution.