Who Was Crispus Attucks? Constructing and Unpacking an Early American Icon

Crispus Attucks was a mixed-race former slave and Atlantic sailor who was the first to die in the 1770 Boston Massacre, a key event leading to the American Revolution.  Few primary sources document Attucks’s life, so circumstantial evidence, casual assumptions, and wild fabrications have informed our collective sense of who this man was and how he viewed his world.  Forgotten for decades after his death, Attucks was rediscovered by antebellum American abolitionists and used as a symbol of African American heroism, patriotism, and citizenship, still the most persistent construction.  Yet other versions abound.  In 1770 future president John Adams characterized Attucks as a dangerous rabble-rouser, another interpretation that has endured.  Some modern historians fashion a cosmopolitan Attucks representing the multiracial working classes who helped foment revolution in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.  A 1990s punk-rock band took the name “Crispus Attucks” in homage to his rebellion against repressive authority.  Currently an African-American-led unit of the “Minutemen Movement,” patrolling the southern U.S. border to deter illegal immigration, calls itself the Crispus Attucks Brigade.  Another political organization calls itself the “Crispus Attucks Tea Party.”  Attucks can be many things to many people.

This paper explores the context of Attucks’s world and interrogates the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources that inform the most widely accepted accounts of Attucks’s life.  These include period newspapers, letters, diaries, and trial transcripts; later reminiscences from Attucks’s contemporaries; and nineteenth-century published histories and genealogies.  Unpacking these sources and the various constructions of Attucks’s story allows us to analyze the creation of collective memories, understand how Attucks has been appropriated by different constituencies in different time periods, and posit a plausible version of who Crispus Attucks may have been.