Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (2 of 2)

The concept of a secular and/or patriotic “martyr” is conceptually a little dicey. But people do see certain figures as martyrs in the kind of secular sense that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. are seen as martyrs.

So I’m not inclined to split hairs over that concept here. Despite the gaps in the available documentation, the specifics of the 1770 Boston Massacre are clear enough to say there were five American colonists killed by British soldiers on that day and that they were then and later seen by American patriots as secular martyrs in the event.

Just a week after the massacre, Paul Revere engraved a story reporting on a funeral procession for four of the five victims: Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Calwell, and Crispus Attucks. The coffin on the right is for C.A. and he is named in the story. (1) The fifth martyr of the event, Patrick Carr passed away soon afterwards.

As the text in that story notes, their fellow citizens staged a procession for the bodies on their way to the cemetery of “the unhappy Victims who fell in the bloody Massacre of the Monday Evening proceeding.”

Thomas Jefferson also invoked the martyr theme when he wrote in 1787, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots..." The quote in its original context is followed by a sentence that sounds a bit odd in the context of 2026: (2)

[W]hat country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. [my emphasis]

Couldn’t he have said “fertilizer” instead of “manure”? :)

Paul Revere also did this engraving of the Boston Massacre later that month, which was titled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or the Bloody Massacre." (3)

The Wikimedia page on the image describes it as a “sensationalized portrayal of the skirmish, later to become known as the ‘Boston Massacre,’ between British soldiers and citizens of Boston on March 5, 1770.” It also notes that the image is “Not entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.”

And it notes Revere’s published version included these verses, likely from him, as part of the pamphlet A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston:

Unhappy BOSTON! see thy Sons deplore,

Thy hallow'd Walks besmear'd with guiltless Gore:

While faithless P--n and his savage Bands,

With murd'rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;

Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey,

Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.

If scalding drops from Rage from Anguish Wrung

If speechless Sorrows lab'ring for a Tongue,

Or if a weeping World can ought appease

The plaintive Ghosts of Victims such as these;

The Patriot's copious Tears for each are shed,

A glorious Tribute which embalms the Dead

But know, FATE summons to that awful Goal, 

Where JUSTICE strips the Murd'rer of his Soul:

Should venal C--ts the scandal of the Land,

Snatch the relentless Villain from her Hand,

Keen Execrations on this Plate inscrib'd,

Shall reach a JUDGE who never can be brib'd.

The “P—n” in the first verse clearly refers to Captain Thomas Preston, the British commander of the massacre. He was acquitted. Eight other soldiers were tried for murder, of whom six were acquitted and two were convicted of manslaughter. Revere obviously did not take a generous view of the killer – nor should he have!

In a 1918 article for a American historical journal by Lousie Pehlps Kellogg – whose account is notable for its sympathetic description of the British killers – wrote, “Revere was an ardent patriot, and in all probability formed one of the crowd of spectators in King Street Square when the soldiers fired upon the populace. In the Boston Public Library is still preserved a sketch by his hand.” Even though it doesn’t seem that she meant it as a compliment, her description of Revere as “an ardent patriot” was certainly true!

And she does give a detailed account of the effects the image itself conveys. Including the backhanded compliment that the picture has “the charm peculiar to primitive productions.” But she also notes, “The passionate appeal for sympathy for the slain made by these inscriptions indicates the depths of feeling aroused by the massacre.” She also notes that a another Boston engraver, Henry Pelham, accused Revere of having plagiarized his work in the image, a claim to which she seems all too eager to give credence.

She closes by criticizing Revere’s image for being too patriotic: From a trivial encounter between imperial troops and the Boston mob, the incident [the Boston Massacre] arose to a position of international importance.” An outcome she obviously regretted! (4)

Karsten Fitz over a century later called attention to the problem of Crispus Attucks getting shortchanged in images of the massacre. She also examines the Revere engraving, noting that the image was “originally engraved-though most likely not produced - by Paul Revere.” She considers it likely that he took the image from an original engraving by Pelham. (5)

It’s notable in Revere’s color image that there are no dark-skinned individuals on the Patriot side. But Revere himself knew that Attucks was one of the victims, and he was very likely from the available evidence of African and indigenous American descent. The Wikimedia source page notes image is “[n]ot entirely an accurate depiction of the event that transpired.” But it doesn’t elaborate.

Fitz argues unambiguously, “All available textual sources consider Crispus Attucks as the leader of the Boston crowd which harassed the guard of the Custom House on March 5, 1770.”

She notes that John Adams himself in his closing arguments for the British defendants that Attucks was the leader of the protesters, quoting from the following passage:

... this Attucks ... appears to have undertaken to be the hero of the night; and to lead this army with banners, to form them in the first place in Dock square, and march them up to King street with their clubs ... this man with his party cried, do not be afraid of them . . . to have his reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear? He had hardiness enough to fall in upon them, and with one hand took hold of a bayonet, and with the other knocked the man down: this was the behaviour of Attucks ... a Carr from Ireland, and an Attucks from Framingham, happening to be here, shall sally out upon their thoughtless enterprizes, at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they can collect together. ...

Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan make a strong argument for Attucks as the leader of the protest. They write, “At the trial of the king's officers, the fallen Attucks seemed very much alive. The evidence given in court, the newspaper reports, the earliest tradition, all single him out, in praise or blame, as the shaper of the event.” (6)

There is no official register of Martyrs Of The American Revolution. But Phyllis Wheatley, a slave who according to the Kaplans, one of the two “first black poets whose poems were in print at the time of the Revolution, and who they also identify as the first slave and third woman to publish in a book of poems in the US, gave the first-martyr designation to Christopher Steel. Steel had protested against British soldiers in Boson and was executed for the murder of a Tory customs officer the 1769, a year before the Boston Massacre. She eulogized him in one of her poems:

In heaven's eternal court it was decreed
Thou the first martyr for the cause should bleed
To clear the country of the hated brood
He whet his courage for the common good.

Notes:

(1) Photo: Four coffins of men killed in the Boston Massacre. Library of Congress - Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-45586. <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a45777> Originally appeared in The Boston-Gazette, and Daily Journal 03/12/1770. Also included in: Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 14. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(2) The tree of liberty... (Quotation). Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. <https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(3) Gallery Slideshow File:Boston Massacre high-res.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massacre_high-res.jpg> (Accessed: 2026-26-06).

(4) Kellogg, Louise Phelps (1918): Paul Revere Print of the Boston Massacre. Wisconsin Magazine of History 1:4, pp. 377-387. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4630108>

(5) Fitz, Karsten (2005): Commemorating Crispus Attucks-Visual Memory and the Representations of the Boston Massacre. Amerikastudien/American Studies 50:3, 463-484. <htps://www.jstor.org/stable/41158169>

(6) Kaplan, Sidney & Kaplan, Emma Nogrady (1989): The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, Revised Edition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Crispus Attucks, first martyr of the American Revolution (1)

The Boston Massacre of 1770 is generally considered to be the opening act of the American Revolution. The famous slogan of “no taxation without representation” referred to the facts that Americans shippers and merchants resented the restriction and demands for tax revenue imposed by London on their American colonies.

The Seven Years War of 1756-63 in Europe grew out of the military struggles between King Frederick the Great’s Prussia and the Habsburg Empire ruled from Vienna over the Polish province of Saxony. It wound up expanding in 1740 to a war pitting Britain and Prussia against France and Russia. And it included Britain and France fighting it out over territory in North America, which was known to the American colonists as the French and Indian War. That was the conflict in which Washington gained the military experience he would apply to great effect as head of Continental Army in the American Revolution.

France maintained its Canadian colony and claimed colonial ownership of much of what is now the eastern half of the United States until President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But the post-1763 period ended the direct challenges of France to the British colonies that became the United States. It also gave a boost to Britain’s imperial plans for its North American subjects. But new successes bring new problems:

The immense acquisitions of the Seven Years War persuaded British statesmen that their bigger empire required more ships and soldiers. These would cost money; and unless the British taxpayer supplied it all, the colonies, which also benefited, should contribute to the cost. Revenue could be extracted from the colonies only through a stronger central administration, at the expense of colonial self-government. As Governor Hutchinson [colonial governor of Massachusetts 1771-1774] wrote in a sentence that lost him his job, 'There must be an abridgement of so-called English Liberties in America.' Furthermore, the Acts of Trade were strengthened to an extent that began to impose real hardships on important colonial interests. [my emphasis] (1)

The Seven Years War also carried a particular significance for the city of Boston. The intensification of military preparations and fighting in that war meant that, as Eric Hinderaker explains:

... the town of Boston and the colony of Massachusetts Bay had been enthusiastic partners. With deeply rooted militia traditions and a strong, assertive sense of Protestant English identity, New Englanders Were especially well prepared to join in the task of fighting Catholic New France. Massachusetts Bay soldiers participated in the military campaigns of the eighteenth century in large numbers, while its merchants supplied the provisions and ships that carried the effort forward. Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War validated New Englanders’ confidence in the righteousness of their cause and the efficacy of their institutions. (2)

The beginning of the American Revolution is conventionally taken to be the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. Tensions between British soldiers and the citizens of Boston had been growing due to the increased pressure being exerted by the British for revenue and against smuggling by the colonists to evade British regulations. A Boston man name Crispus Attucks became famous as the “first martyr” of the Revolution when he became one of several people killed by British occupying soldiers on March 5 in front of the Boston Customs House. There were no mobile phones in those days, and photography was yet to be invented. So the available evidence from the time is considerably less clear and explicit than, say, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota earlier this year by masked ICE Gestapo thugs. Presumably the British killers in the Boston Massacre were the same kind of cowardly goons that Good’s and Pretti’s murderers are. Nevertheless, as Eric Hinderaker writes, “the facts of the case and their meaning were examined repeatedly in the months and years following the massacre.” And that included a formal trial of the soldiers for murder.

Captain Thomas Preston was the commander of the soldiers that committed the massacre.

Crispus Attucks likely worked as a sailor and dockworker out of Boston. He is also thought to have had a black father and an indigenous mother and was very likely a fugitive slave. He has often been described as the leader of the protest at which the massacre took place and the first of the five patriots to be killed. (3)

Henry Wilson wrote a three-volume work after the US Civil War, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Abolitionists before and during the war referred to the hostile, subversive slavery-based regime and economy in the slave states as the Slave Power. And it was an apt label.

Some of these bore an honorable part in the War of Independence. Crispus Attucks, a colored patriot, was a leader, and the first martyr in the Boston massacre, on the 5th of March, 1770, which so fired the hearts and aroused the patriotism of the people. One of that race mingled his blood with the fallen patriots of the 19th of April, 1775. The sons of Africa fought side by side with their countrymen of the white race at Bunker Hill, where Major Pitcairn, as he stormed the works, fell mortally wounded by the shot of Salem, a black soldier. soldier. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that some of the most heroic deeds of the War of Independence were performed by black men. (3)

There are some historical ironies surrounding the Boston Massacre. John Adams, who decades later would serve as Washington’s Vice President and then as the second President, defended the British soldiers who were arrested and prosecuted for the massacre. He claimed that he did so because he supported the principle that even the worst villains deserved competent counsel at trial. And his claim to that effect may well have been sincere. On the other hand, as President he later supported and enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which in today’s terms we would say was an attempt to turn the new government in an authoritarian direction.

Paying attention to facts in history is critical for honest history writing. But history in the broader sense is also a source of icons and of reflections of how tradition can inform and inspire contemporaries on topical questions. Eric Hinderaker writes of the evolving image of the Boston Massacre, which “occupies a timeworn niche in the American memory palace” as “a half-forgotten event in a shared patriotic past.” But that also makes it available as a framework for understanding contemporary events.

[N]ew contexts can bring new meanings to the fore. Initially, memories of the Boston Massacre provided a vital spark of outrage in the growing conflict with Great Britain. But at the end of the American Revolution, the usefulness of that function faded. Recollections grew more ambivalent, and the event fell into disfavor in public memory. When memories of the Boston Massacre were revived in the nineteenth century, they came with a surprising new twist: Crispus Attucks, one of the men killed in King Street, was recast as the most important figure in the shootings. A sailor of mixed African American and Wampanoag ancestry, Attucks was taken up by Boston’s African American community in the decades before the Civil War as the first martyr in the struggle for American liberty. This rhetorical move triggered a decades-long dispute in Boston about whether Attucks and the other victims were lawless rioters or a patriot vanguard. Eventually that conflict was settled and the Boston Massacre resolved, once again, into a vague and uncontroversial memory.

In more recent times, the Boston Massacre has been invoked for political purposes when the firepower of the U.S. government has been directed against its citizens. It happened during the Vietnam War; more recently, it has framed discussions of the militarization of policing in the twenty-first century. And as race has become increasingly salient to those discussions, Crispus Attucks has again been invoked, this time as a new kind of symbol of African American citizenship. Identified in the nineteenth century as the first martyr of American independence, in the twenty-first century he has become the first African American victim of unrestrained police brutality. [my emphasis]

Hinderaker describes the available contemporary accounts as often vague and contradictory. But there is no doubt that the massacre of five people occurred, their names were known and published immediately after, and news of the event was popularized in the colonies and in Britain, particularly in a pamphlet issued two weeks after the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. As the title indicates, it expressed outrage against the British killers. Boston justices of the peace and British officials also collected testimony about the event. The published British versions of the story, true to imperialist practices to this day, accused the uncivilized natives of attacking the soldiers, forcing the poor, put-upon Brits to reluctantly murder them. They protesters were accused of throwing snowballs at the soldiers.

And here’s where democratic sentiments (including the expectation that government officials act within the law), nationalist impulses, and the rapidly developing patriotic sentiments among the colonists turned outrage at murderous official misconduct into a wider sentiment of identity and rebellion. As Hinderaker writes:

Events of the 1770s would show that this small port community, perched on a tiny North Atlantic peninsula, had the power to shape the fortune of the Western world’s greatest empire. Even as [the exact details of] the Boston Massacre remains an enigma, Boston’s massacre – a global event shaped by local sensibilities - rises in sharp relief.

He also describes how the after-effects of the Seven Years War in British policy wound up promoting democratic resentments against the British. And also how some colonists criticized the British by referring to older democratic principles:

When Parliament decided to station a large body of troops in North America following the Seven Years’ War, and political and military leaders subsequently chose to dispatch four regiments to Boston as a peacekeeping force, they were marching onto an unmapped landscape. The shootings in King Street that came to be called a massacre were one result. But they occurred only after seventeen long months of military occupation: a period marked by confusion, outrage, and endemic conflict. The clash between local and imperial authorities derived from Bostonians’ deep attachment to older republican principles, which were incompatible with the eighteenth-century rules under which British officials sought to manage imperial relations. [my emphasis]

In the British world prior to the eighteenth century, the English Magna Carta tradition demanded popular participation in the governments that made their laws, albeit to a very limited degree compared to today’s standards. (King Charles referred to that tradition in his 2026 address to the US Congress). This was very much a part of the notion of the rule of law. Which was not just a concept that laws should exist. It was a concept that for laws to be legitimate, they must be enacted by a government that provided representation for its citizens and that those laws should be applied equally. Democracy and the rule of law are inextricably bound together, really two sides of the same thing.

Those “older republican principles” were given expression in the colonists’ protest of “No Taxation Without Representation.” That slogan was not an earlier equivalent of rightwing libertarians today bitching and moaning about having to pay taxes. It was a demand for democratic representation in the making of the laws applied to the colonies, very much in Magna Carta tradition. They were making that argument as British citizens appealing to a fundamental British political tradition.

It’s both important and interesting to look at the political theories motivating the Revolution and key documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that formalized and institutionalized the democratic ideas and sentiments motivating it. And it was very much part of a democratic awakening and the development of democratic movements. And that is so despite the fact that democracy in 2026 means something much more expansive than it did in 1776. A redwood tree spouting out of the ground early in its life looks very different than it does after a few hundred years of growth.

The reference to democratic sentiments in this context is not an anachronism. The Massachusetts colonial charter, writes Hinderaker, despite imposing a royally-appointed colonial governor, was “more democratic than that of any other royal colony” due to the role of the elected assembly. When people get the idea that the government is there to represent the people and establish stable and fair legal justice, that tends to make them not really open to the idea of foreign troops just being able to gun down protesting citizens just because they feel like it that day. We don’t have to rely on history books to see that. We’ve seen it on the daily news from the US in 2025 and 2026 as citizens resist the depredations of Trump’s ICE Gestapo.

Notes:

(1) Morrison, Samuel Eliot et al (1977): A Concise History of the American Revolution, 62. New York: Oxford University Press.

(2) Hinderaker, Eric (2017): Boston’s Massacre, 1-32. Belknap Press: Cambridge & London.

(3) "Crispus Attucks," by Herschel Levit, mural at the Recorder of Deeds building, built in 1943. 515 D St., NW, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

(4) Wilson, Henry (1875): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 1 (4th edition), 18-19. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.