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America at 250

The Birth of Our Nation

 

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Speculative portrait of Crispus Attucks

Speculative portrait of Crispus Attucks (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Most Americans point to the publication of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 as the birth our Nation, but the genesis of the American Revolution actually occurred six years earlier in Boston.

The Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770 was the culmination of growing tensions between the colonists and British Parliament over taxation and representation. It began just after dusk on 5 March on Boston’s King Street with the taunting of a single British soldier by a wigmaker’s apprentice. A crowd formed, already angered by the British and its presence in Massachusetts, and rapidly grew larger and more boisterous. The people in the crowd began throwing snowballs, ice balls, and insults at the British soldiers. Amid the chaos, British soldiers, on no official orders, fired into the crowd, wounding six and killing five. Struck in the chest with two musket balls, Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American ancestry, is believed to be the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and the subsequent American Revolution.

Not much is known about his early life, including whether he was a free person or a runaway slave prior to his death. What is known is that he was a sailor and whaler who often went by the alias Michael Johnson to protect himself from a return to slavery. That fateful night, he and his fellow sailors marched toward King Street. Some witnesses stated that Attucks struck one of the soldiers with a piece of wood; however, others stated that he was leaning on a stick when soldiers opened fire. He and the four other men killed that night were buried as heroes on 8 March 1770 at the Granary Burying Ground. Attucks’s death transformed him from an unknown sailor to a martyr for the revolutionary cause.

Boston Massacre painting

Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770, painting by William L. Champney, 1855, reproduced as a chromolithograph by Henry Q. Smith. In the center is Crispus Attucks, a Boston resident of African and Native American descent who was the first to die during the confrontation. Champney’s painting was modeled after the famous hand-colored engraving by Henry Pelham. (Image courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum)

 

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January-February 2026