blessing, although it is also possible he simply ran away to sea.
What is known is that in early 1770 Crispus Attucks was in Boston, waiting to ship out on a boat bound for North Carolina. He recently had come from New Providence, in the Bahamas, but contemporary newspaper accounts all emphasized that he hailed from Framingham. The city Attucks came to was filled with discontent, with British soldiers stationed there since 1768, charged with enforcement of a series of ever-changing revenue laws that had been flouted by the colonies since the Stamp Act riots of 1765.
The British government was trying to fund the debt it had acquired in waging the Seven Yearsâ War, as well as establish the principle that Parliament had the power to levy direct taxation on its colonies in North America. Since the colonies had benefited directly from the war through the conquest of Quebec and the removal of the French threat on the continent, Parliament thought it reasonable that they be asked to shoulder some of the costs of the war. On the other hand, the colonists believed the sole power to tax lay with their own colonial assemblies since they had no representation in Parliament. They felt they possessed the same rights as his majestyâs subjects living in Britain, and yet they were being treated like a conquered country, with the British regulars acting as an army of occupation. So while it has sometimes been observed that the actual financial burden on the colonies was smallâand most of the duties were indeed repealed shortly after they had gone into effectâboth sides were standing on principle, important principle, about what the rights of the British subjects living in America really were.
It was into this cauldron that Crispus Attucks, a sailor on shore leave with abundant free time, plunged himself fully on the evening of March 5, 1770. There had already been unrest in Bostonâan eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Seider had been killed eleven days earlier, shot by a British customs service officer who had fired his musket into a mob throwing rocks at his house. At about nine oâclock, a scuffle broke out in the street between British soldiers and young boys armed with sticks, one of whom was wounded in the arm by a cutlass. Soon a crowd assembled at the customhouse, taunting the sentry and pelting him with snowballs and ice. A squad of eight soldiers came to his aid when a second group appeared, led by a âstout mulattoâ brandishing a cordwood stick, charging up from Dock Square on the waterfront. This was Attucks, whoâaccording to John Adams, an attorney defending the British officer from manslaughter chargesâwas bold and strong enough to grab one of the British muskets by the bayonet and throw the soldier to the ground. It was at this point that the soldiers opened fire. Attucks and Samuel Gray were the first to be hit, Gray dying immediately, Attucks surviving long enough to be brought into a nearby house before expiring. Three others also diedâSamuel Maverick, Patrick Carr and James Caldwell. That night has gone down in history as the Boston Massacre, a key event galvanizing Patriot opposition to British rule.
There has been much argument about Attucks over the yearsâwhether he was a hero or a bully, whether he was a leader or the leader of the crowd or simply the man standing at the front, whether he was the first to be shot at the Boston Massacre and so on. But much of the debate seems to miss the point; he was a man from Framingham who challenged British power in one of the pivotal events of our history and paid the ultimate price. As such, in 2000 the town rightly honored his memory by naming after him the bridge over the Sudbury River on Old Connecticut Path, just south of the Deacon William Brown house where he had worked as a slave 250 years before.
S PIES AT B UCKMINSTER â S T AVERN
Relations between Britain and its American colonies continued to
What is known is that in early 1770 Crispus Attucks was in Boston, waiting to ship out on a boat bound for North Carolina. He recently had come from New Providence, in the Bahamas, but contemporary newspaper accounts all emphasized that he hailed from Framingham. The city Attucks came to was filled with discontent, with British soldiers stationed there since 1768, charged with enforcement of a series of ever-changing revenue laws that had been flouted by the colonies since the Stamp Act riots of 1765.
The British government was trying to fund the debt it had acquired in waging the Seven Yearsâ War, as well as establish the principle that Parliament had the power to levy direct taxation on its colonies in North America. Since the colonies had benefited directly from the war through the conquest of Quebec and the removal of the French threat on the continent, Parliament thought it reasonable that they be asked to shoulder some of the costs of the war. On the other hand, the colonists believed the sole power to tax lay with their own colonial assemblies since they had no representation in Parliament. They felt they possessed the same rights as his majestyâs subjects living in Britain, and yet they were being treated like a conquered country, with the British regulars acting as an army of occupation. So while it has sometimes been observed that the actual financial burden on the colonies was smallâand most of the duties were indeed repealed shortly after they had gone into effectâboth sides were standing on principle, important principle, about what the rights of the British subjects living in America really were.
It was into this cauldron that Crispus Attucks, a sailor on shore leave with abundant free time, plunged himself fully on the evening of March 5, 1770. There had already been unrest in Bostonâan eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Seider had been killed eleven days earlier, shot by a British customs service officer who had fired his musket into a mob throwing rocks at his house. At about nine oâclock, a scuffle broke out in the street between British soldiers and young boys armed with sticks, one of whom was wounded in the arm by a cutlass. Soon a crowd assembled at the customhouse, taunting the sentry and pelting him with snowballs and ice. A squad of eight soldiers came to his aid when a second group appeared, led by a âstout mulattoâ brandishing a cordwood stick, charging up from Dock Square on the waterfront. This was Attucks, whoâaccording to John Adams, an attorney defending the British officer from manslaughter chargesâwas bold and strong enough to grab one of the British muskets by the bayonet and throw the soldier to the ground. It was at this point that the soldiers opened fire. Attucks and Samuel Gray were the first to be hit, Gray dying immediately, Attucks surviving long enough to be brought into a nearby house before expiring. Three others also diedâSamuel Maverick, Patrick Carr and James Caldwell. That night has gone down in history as the Boston Massacre, a key event galvanizing Patriot opposition to British rule.
There has been much argument about Attucks over the yearsâwhether he was a hero or a bully, whether he was a leader or the leader of the crowd or simply the man standing at the front, whether he was the first to be shot at the Boston Massacre and so on. But much of the debate seems to miss the point; he was a man from Framingham who challenged British power in one of the pivotal events of our history and paid the ultimate price. As such, in 2000 the town rightly honored his memory by naming after him the bridge over the Sudbury River on Old Connecticut Path, just south of the Deacon William Brown house where he had worked as a slave 250 years before.
S PIES AT B UCKMINSTER â S T AVERN
Relations between Britain and its American colonies continued to
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