Who fired the first shot at the boston massacre

Library of Congress

Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, died in Boston on March 5, 1770 after British soldiers fired two musket balls into his chest.1 His death and that of four other men at the hands of the 29th Regiment became known as the Boston Massacre. Death instantly transformed Attucks from an anonymous sailor into a martyr for a burgeoning revolutionary cause.

The life of Crispus Attucks is far less documented than his death. Early coverage and investigations into the details of the Massacre refer to Attucks as Michael Johnson,2 a name he may have used as an intentional alias. After uncovering his actual name, newspapers published a few details about his life, notably his profession, a sailor; his birth in Framingham, Massachusetts; his current residence of New Providence in the Bahamas; and his ship's destination of North Carolina.3 His last name, "Attucks," is of Indigenous origin, deriving from the Natick word for "deer."4 Witness testimony during the Massacre trial interchangeably used "mulatto" or "Indian" to describe Attucks, indicating his mixed African and Indigenous birth.5 His first name reflects the trend in the colonial era of enslavers forcing an Ancient Roman name onto their enslaved people.6 Attucks shares the name "Crispus" with the son of Emperor Constantine.7 He also appears in a 1750 advertisement in the Boston Gazette. William Brown of Framingham placed an advertisement to call for the return of a twenty-seven year old escaped enslaved man named "Crispas," described as a six foot two inch "mulatto."8 Contemporary sources at the time of his death do not identify Attucks as enslaved or formerly enslaved. How and when he gained his freedom is unknown, but it is possible that Attucks used the name Michael Johnson to protect himself from a return to slavery.

On March 5, 1770, witnesses placed Attucks at the head of a group of sailors brandishing clubs and marching toward King Street. A crowd formed around a small group of British soldiers, hurling snowballs, ice balls, and insults at the men. Observers noted Attucks leaned his tall frame on his cordwood club.9 Amid the chaos, Private Montgomery and the rest of the soldiers fired into the crowd. Two musket balls ripped through Attucks chest, killing him instantly.10 In the following days, the people of Boston held a funeral procession for the victims of the massacre. Because Attucks and fellow victim and sailor James Caldwell had no family or home in Boston, their bodies lay in state at Faneuil Hall.11

Defending the soldiers in the subsequent trial, John Adams painted Attucks and the rest of those killed as aggressors to justify the killing. He played to the jury's prejudices about race and class, describing those in the crowd as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars."12 In other words, those in the crowd were young, lower-class, Black, Irish, or sailors from out of town. Adams' argument led to an acquittal for the Captain and all but two of the soldiers.

Town officials buried the victims of the Massacre in the Granary Burying Ground. Today, they share a headstone facing toward Tremont Street.

In the 19th century, abolitionists in Boston, led by William Cooper Nell, held up the death of Attucks as the first martyr of the American Revolution. Nell’s seminal work, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, fought the erasure of Black people from the story of the American Revolution. Nell led this work with the story of Crispus Attucks, highlighting his death as the first in the cause for liberty.13 Though Black Bostonians have commemorated the anniversary of Attucks' death since at least the 1850s,14 it took until the early twentieth century when activists, including William Monroe Trotter, pushed the city of Boston to officially recognize March 5 as Crispus Attucks Day,15 a tradition which continues to the present day.

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Footnotes

1. "Boston March 12," Pennsylvania Gazette, March 22, 1770, 2.
2. "Mortuary Notice," The Boston News-Letter, March 15, 1770.
3. "Boston March 12" Pennsylvania Gazette, March 22, 1770, 2.
4. James Hammond Trumbull, "Natick Dictionary" (United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903), 243.
5. William Weems, John Adams, Frederic Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770: Consisting of the Narrative of the Town, the Trial of the Soldiers: and a Historical Introduction, Containing Unpublished Documents of John Adams, and Explanatory Notes (United States: J. Munsell, 1870), 134.
6. Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2020), 14.
7. David Woods, "On the Death of the Empress Fausta," in Greece and Rome 45 (1) (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–86, doi:10.1093/gr/45.1.70.
8. "Advertisement," Boston Gazette, October 2, 1750, 2.
9. Weems, Adams, Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre, 6.
10. "To the Printers," Boston Gazette, December 31, 1770.
11. Boston Post-Boy, March 12, 1770, 3.
12. Weems, Adams, Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre, 255.
13. William Cooper Nell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution: With Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: to which is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans (United States: R.F. Wallcut, 1855), 14.
14. "The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770," The Liberator, March 12, 1858, 1.
15. "Pay Tribute to Attucks on Anniversary of Massacre," The Boston Globe, March 5, 1928, 19.

When in the course of human events . . .

The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry.

"The Bloody Massacre" engraving by Paul Revere. Note that this is not an accurate depiction of the event.

The presence of British troops in the city of Boston was increasingly unwelcome. The riot began when about 50 citizens attacked a British sentinel. A British officer, Captain Thomas Preston, called in additional soldiers, and these too were attacked, so the soldiers fired into the mob, killing 3 on the spot (a black sailor named Crispus Attucks, ropemaker Samuel Gray, and a mariner named James Caldwell), and wounding 8 others, two of whom died later (Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr).

A town meeting was called demanding the removal of the British and the trial of Captain Preston and his men for murder. At the trial, John Adams and Josiah Quincy II defended the British, leading to their acquittal and release. Samuel Quincy and Robert Treat Paine were the attorneys for the prosecution. Later, two of the British soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter.

The Boston Massacre was a signal event leading to the Revolutionary War. It led directly to the Royal Governor evacuating the occupying army from the town of Boston. It would soon bring the revolution to armed rebellion throughout the colonies.

Note that the occupation of Boston by British troops in 1768 was not met by open resistance.

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On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired upon a group of rowdy colonists, killing five and wounding others. “On that night, the foundation of American Independence was laid,” wrote John Adams. “Not the Battle of Lexington or Bunker Hill, not the surrender of Burgoyne or Cornwallis, were more important events in American history than the battle of King Street on the 5th of March, 1770.”

In front of the Custom House on King Street in Boston, British soldiers fired upon a group of colonists, killing three instantly and two later as a result of their wounds. There are varying accounts of what happened, but most people agree that the soldiers were provoked by a group of rowdy colonists and that someone yelled “fire” – though no one knows who.

Before that night, tensions had been rising in Boston for some time. After the Stamp Act was repealed, Britain felt the need to show that it still had control over the colonies, so Parliament passed a series of acts known as the Townshend Acts. These laws were designed to tax the colonies on imports they could only get from Great Britain, such as glass, paper, and tea. The British thought that since this was an external tax – unlike the Stamp Act, which was internal – the colonists would not object. This, of course, was not the case. In 1768, John Dickinson wrote a series of letters in which he outlined how many colonists wished not to be taxed purely for revenue for the British empire.

On March 5, 1770, the Bostonians were fuming over taxes and constant surveillance by the British military, both of which had started two years prior. As a result, a small disagreement between a wigmaker apprentice and a soldier easily escalated to a small riot. Henry Knox, the future Secretary of War, was one of the first colonists on the scene, and told the soldier, Private Hugh White, that if he fired a shot, he would die.

Through the course of the day, a crowd of more than 200 colonists came to the defense of the apprentice. White eventually felt unsafe enough to call for help. He sent a messenger to get Captain Thomas Preston and his battalion of seven troops as backup. Allegedly, the protestors became more violent, throwing objects at the soldiers and jeering at them. As the scene was becoming more and more chaotic, Preston did not make any orders, but someone yelled “fire,” leading the soldiers to shoot into the crowd.

When the dust cleared, three colonists were dead; two others died later as a result of their wounds. The first three were Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and James Caldwell; the other two were Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr. Attucks is considered the most famous African American of the Revolutionary War and eventually became a symbol for the abolitionist movement.

After the Massacre, the soldiers were represented by future President John Adams and Josiah Quincy II. Adams and Quincey took up the defense in order to show the British that the colonies could conduct a fair trial. Most of the soldiers ended up being acquitted, including Thomas Preston, who was found innocent because he never ordered the shots. Two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter, and their hands were branded with “M” as their punishment.

The incident fueled the anger of colonists like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. They used the massacre as propaganda, recreating a Henry Pelham painting and distributing copies all over the Boston area in order to incite the public. Revere in such a way as to cast the British in a more negative light. The biggest misrepresentation was the depiction of each side. The Bostonians look scared and out of sorts, while the British looked as if they were carrying out a planned attack. Although accounts differ, there is agreement that the whole thing was a mess, and that in no way were the British organized.

The British ended up withdrawing their troops from Boston and positioning them on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. While the Revolutionary War would not start for another six years, this first bloody encounter attracted more attention to radical groups like the Sons of Liberty and set the war in motion.