The Boston Massacre's Most Inconvenient Victim

The building behind you, the Old State House, was the seat of British colonial government in Massachusetts in seventeen seventy. On the night of March fifth of that year, a crowd gathered in the street below, in front of what was then called the Custom House on King Street. There were catcalls, thrown ice, and the kind of escalating tension that colonial Boston had been building toward for years. When British soldiers opened fire, five people died.

Their names were Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr. Of the five, Attucks was the first to fall, and his story is the most complicated to tell. He was a sailor of mixed Wampanoag and African descent, a man who had lived most of his adult life outside the legal categories that colonial Boston imposed on people like him. He was not a property-owning citizen in the English sense. He was exactly the kind of person whose death was most inconvenient to the patriot cause as its leaders preferred to present it.

Samuel Adams made effective propaganda of the event, commissioning Paul Revere's famous engraving, which depicted the soldiers as executioners and the crowd as innocent bystanders. John Adams, in the more complicated role of defense attorney for the soldiers, successfully argued that the crowd had been a dangerous, unruly mob. Both men were right about different things, and neither account left much room for Crispus Attucks.

The five victims were buried together at the Granary Burying Ground, a few blocks from where they died. Their shared grave is one of the very few integrated spaces in colonial Boston: a Black and Indigenous man buried alongside white workingmen, in a city that would maintain legal and social segregation for another two centuries.

Attucks has been claimed by American patriot mythology as the first martyr of the Revolution, which is true enough. What is less often said is that the republic his death helped bring into being would not have recognized him as a citizen.