First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory by Mitch Kachun (review)

Very little is known about Crispus Attucks. It appears that he ran away from his enslaved condition in 1750 and then, twenty years later, placed himself at the front of a crowd protesting against British soldiers on King Street in Boston. Attucks was shot and killed, along with four other civilians, on March 5, 1770, an event that became known as the Boston Massacre. He left no letters, journals, or known descendants. The "blank slate" (5) of his life, however, has invited commenters to fill in his story with suppositions, assumptions, wishful thinking, and determined mythmaking that goes on to this day. In First Martyr of Liberty, Mitch Kachun has captured this complex saga of embellished history by providing a full-scale historical memory study of Attucks.

Through the use of newspapers and trial documents, Kachun begins the book by telling readers what they can know with reasonable certainty about Attucks. He grew up a slave in Framingham, Massachusetts, a hamlet close to an American Indian "praying town" (21) where variations of the Attucks name were known to exist. This possibly mixed-race individual ran away from his master in 1750. The description in the resulting runaway advertisement closely matches that of the 1770 victim. Court transcripts and newspaper accounts at the time of the "massacre" labeled him a mulatto and a sailor. On the day of the Boston Massacre, he appears to have led a large group of club-wielding men (one source described them as sailors) to the site of the confrontation. Later, as attorney for the British soldiers, John Adams used hyperbolic language to describe Attucks, highlighting the terrifying countenance of the mulatto whose "mad behavior" (16) unleashed the catastrophe.

Attucks did not immediately assume the starring role in the Boston Massacre's story. The city's commemorations of the event from 1770 through the end of the Revolutionary War described a legitimate protest with Attucks as simply one of the victims. Thereafter, attention to the event waned while Attucks largely disappeared as a distinct historical actor until 1850. Even the War of 1812 against Britain barely mustered an article about the "massacre," let alone Attucks's role that day.

As the slavery debate intensified into the late 1840s, however, African American writers discovered Attucks, labeling him the "First Martyr of the American Revolution" (52) and using grandiose language to describe his sacrifice. Black activist Henry W. Johnson wrote of Attucks's "mangled form … from whose veins flowed the first drop of blood that mingled with American soil, in defence of American liberty" (48). Writers as varied as local historians, children's book authors, and scholars addressed this sailor's story, considering issues such as his ancestry, his life from 1750 to 1770, the extent of his political awareness, his connections to the radical movement, his prominence on the night of March 5, and the character of the event itself.

As the African American community suffered cessation of voting rights in many states, a devastating fugitive slave law, and a Supreme Court decision that decreed that African Americans were not and could never be citizens, Attucks rose to prominence as a symbol in abolitionist circles. If the ultimate offering a citizen could make to his country was the sacrifice of his life, abolitionists argued, surely Attucks and the community he represented deserved an equal place in the nation he helped found. Meanwhile, writers continued to enhance his story. A popular book entitled The Black Man, written during the Civil War by African American William Wells Brown, created "events out of whole cloth" (61), such as a fictitious meeting that Attucks attended in 1769 and the "fact" that Attucks's name was the rallying cry for black soldiers at Bunker Hill. But despite a rising profile among African Americans whose babies, organizations, military companies, and banks adopted his name, Attucks was either vilified or ignored by the white community and in the most popular school...