Paul Revere’s Crispus Attucks as a Man of Color

People often say that Paul Revere’s print of the Boston Massacre leaves out Crispus Attucks.

I’ve questioned that received wisdom, pointing to copies of the print in which a particular face in the lower left appears to be painted a shade darker than all the other faces. Often that figure is also painted with two bleeding chest wounds, matching Dr. Benjamin Church’s description of Attucks’s body. (The figure is lying supine on the ground, mostly hidden by the crowd, with his face shown upside-down.)

Earlier this year I ran across the digital copy of Revere’s print that belongs to the Free Library of Philadelphia. Here’s the corner of that print showing the wounded and the crowd.

In this print, the figure in question clearly has brown skin and two wounds on his chest. Thus, at least some Revere Massacre prints, and perhaps quite a number, were colored to depict Attucks as an individual man of color.

That conclusion brings up other questions. Was that figure deliberately painted differently in different prints? If so, was that the artists’ choice or the customers’?

“Paul Revere’s Pictures of the Massacre” in Boston, 9 Mar.

On Saturday, 9 March, I’ll speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Paul Revere Chapter, about “Paul Revere’s Pictures of the Boston Massacre.”

Here’s the description we came up with:

Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre is famous, but he didn’t design that image. He did, however, produce three additional visual depictions of what happened on March 5, 1770. This talk will dive deep into Revere’s pictures of the fatal violence on King Street and explore what they tell us about the event and its political implications.

Here, as a taste, is the first picture that Revere produced to illustrate the Massacre: a “woodcut” of four coffins representing the first four deaths, carved for the Edes and Gill print shop and used in the Boston Gazette and broadsides.

Revere must have made this image after Crispus Attucks’s real initials became known; in the first week that big corpse was called “Michael Johnson.”

The scythe, hourglass, and “Æ. 17” on Samuel Maverick’s coffin signal his youth—he was only seventeen when he was killed, cut down too soon.

This D.A.R. chapter meeting will take place at the Fenway Community Center, 1282 Boylston Street in Boston. The gathering will start at 11:00 A.M., and I’m scheduled to speak at noon. People who aren’t D.A.R. or S.A.R. members are welcome (but might expect to be recruited as potential members). There will be refreshments and books for sale afterward.

Two Images of the Boston Massacre at Auction

The next Seth Kaller auction of manuscripts and printed Americana includes a print of Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre. The auction is scheduled for 24 January, and the price estimate is up to $200,000.

This is a second-state copy, shown by the clock on the Old Brick Meetinghouse tower. Its hands point to 10:20 P.M. while the earlier copies say 8:00. (The shooting probably occurred around 9:30.)

This copy is hand-colored, a luxury touch that customers paid extra for. That coloring offers further support for one of my arguments about this engraving.

Some people complain that Revere either didn’t show Crispus Attucks or portrayed him as white. That’s based on interpreting the figure lying face down in the center foreground as Attucks, and on seeing uncolored images.

I think that central victim is ropemaker Samuel Gray. In the colored prints, that man often has blood coming from wounds on his head, and Gray was indeed shot in the head.

There are multiple victims in the crowd at the left, as shown in the detail above. One face is colored to be darker than the others. That face is even more dark in the Philadelphia library’s copy. In addition, that victim is often painted with two bloody wounds in his chest, which is how Attucks was shot. At least in this colored print, it’s easy to identify Attucks and recognize him as a person of color.

If an original Revere engraving is beyond your price range, Boston 1775 friend Charles Bahne alerted me to a variation on that image being sold closer to home.

CRN Auctions of Cambridge is offering a hand-drawn copy of Revere’s print for sale on 27 January. It came from the Doggett family, who moved from Boston to Maine in the early twentieth century.

Above the drawing is the same title that Revere engraved on his copperplate, minus the word “Bloody.” At bottom is the rhyming verse from the Revere print. That text wasn’t written to match the lettering on the print. Instead, it’s in an eighteenth-century business hand, using the long s.

All in all, I’m baffled at why this picture was made. Was it a drawing and handwriting exercise for a teenager? A patriotic memento? An attempt to replace Grandpapa’s beloved picture after it got damaged (“Quick, Judah, make a copy and he’ll never notice!”)?

The auction house’s description seems to hold out the possibility that this painting was produced by Christian Remick and served as the model for Revere’s print. But we know that Revere copied the image from Henry Pelham, whose perspective and figure drawing was better than both Revere’s and this unknown artist.

In addition, the hand-drawn copy shows the clock at 10:20, meaning it was based on Revere’s second state.

The Survival of Crispus Attucks in American Memory

Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, recently shared Stephen G. Hall’s interview with Mitch Kachun, author of First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory.

Here are some extracts from Kachun’s remarks:

Every nation needs a story that tells themselves, and others, who they are as a people. The broader society didn’t recognize that Blacks had any history or coherent collective identity, so Black speakers at these celebrations very consciously challenged dismissive mainstream historical narratives. They created an empowering story to bind African Americans together as a people with a rich history, a heritage, and a set of heroes in which they could take pride. They recounted the glories of ancient African empires; the prosperity and stability of early modern West African kingdoms; and the accomplishments of Blacks in America—in science, religion, education, activism, and military service.

In these speeches, I started encountering references to Crispus Attucks, first during the 1840s and even more during the 1850s and 1860s. Black speakers telling the story of their people used Attucks to demonstrate that Blacks had been part of the American nation from the beginning. They revised existing mainstream stories of the American Revolution to include one of their own, presenting Attucks as the first to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of the American nation. Yet, as you note, we know almost nothing about Attucks’s life. . . .

Since his death, Crispus Attucks has remained a malleable figure in American memory. With so little documentary evidence about his life, he is a virtual blank slate upon which different people at different times have inscribed a variety of meanings—patriotic martyr; unsavory thug threatening the social order; Uncle Tom who sold out his race for the white society enslaving them; or irrelevant nobody with no historical significance whatsoever. . . .

One thing that fascinated me was that Black activists didn’t incorporate Attucks into their narratives until around 1850—some 80 years after his death. Boston abolitionist William C. Nell was foremost in recovering Attucks and promoting him as the First Martyr of Liberty; Attucks immediately became a frequently used symbol for bolstering Black activists’ arguments for abolition and full citizenship. By the time of emancipation Attucks was widely known, but during Jim Crow he was erased from mainstream histories and popular culture; it was left to African Americans to preserve his memory and his status as an American hero. . . .

I could not find a single American history textbook published between the 1880s and 1950s that mentioned Attucks in its coverage of the Boston Massacre. This began to change in the 1960s, and by the 1990s it was hard to find a textbook that did not mention Attucks.

Kachun goes on to discuss how “the mythic histories that inhabit the realm of collective memory cannot be contingent or ambiguous—they are constructed to provide empowering stories with clear resolutions.” But those mythic histories are at odds with evidence-based histories, which are full of holes, wrinkles, and ambiguities, and don’t carry the same appeal for a people as a whole.

(I wrote about the misty memory of Attucks in Boston before William C. Nell did his work as a historian and activist back here.)

Colonial Comics “make history come alive in a potent time”

For the School Library Journal website, Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed the second volume of Colonial Comics: New England, focusing on the years 1750 to 1775.

Carlson wrote:

This anthology of 18 historical comic stories aims “to focus on the people and events that tend to get ignored in American history classes.” It’s an admirable goal, and one that succeeds, opening readers’ eyes to lesser-known but involving figures and events.

Stories such as

• “The Devil and Silence Dogood”, by J.L. Bell and Braden Lamb, humorously shows Benjamin Franklin’s early days as a printer’s devil (apprentice) and writer of satire
• “A Lonely Line”, by Sarah Winifred Searle and Carey Pietsch, introduces Molly Ockett, a Native American and Maine legend known for her knowledge of medicine
• “The Newport Riots”, by James Maddox and Rob Dumo, portrays the coming changes and public protest from the scared perspective of crown officials
• “The Grand Illumination”, by Kevin Cooney and Matt Dembicki, illustrates how it’s possible to tweak authority while pretending to honor it in the light of the repeal of the Stamp Act
• “The Stranger’s Corpse”, by J.L. Bell and Jesse Lonergan, tells of the first American casualty during the Boston Massacre
• “The Spunker Club”, by Lora Innes, digresses from politics to look at the mishaps of a group of Harvard medical students trying to option a corpse for their studies
• “Join, or Die!”, by Josh O’Neill and James Comey, sheds light on the first, best-known American political cartoon

bring to life the period and make history come alive in a potent time of pending rebellion. Coincidentally, it’s a particularly timely period in analogy, as debates continue today around whose voice should count in determining the future and politics of the country.

These stories encourage empathy with a variety of viewpoints, as we see and follow lives, whether humorous or tragic. Each story has a text introduction to put them into context and explain any background needed, which aids in comprehension and understanding why the story was selected.

You may have noticed my name a couple of times in there. I scripted two of those stories for some great Massachusetts artists, and contributed research and editorial input on other stories.

A Map of the Massacre to Explore

I mentioned this in a comment a few days back, but thought it deserved more space.

The Boston Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts department has just made a digitized image of its overhead view of the Boston Massacre, credited to Paul Revere, available to everyone here.

The Town House (now called the Old State House) is at the upper center. The arc of circles at the right middle represents the soldiers in front of the Customs house.

As for the victims, they are laid out and labeled, with full sketches for the first four:

• 1 (looking like a J), A – Crispus Attucks
• 2, G – Samuel Gray
• 3, C – James Caldwell
• 4, G – Samuel Maverick, apprentice to Isaac Greenwood
• 5 – no initial, and kind of crossed out, in front of the Exchange Tavern
• 6, P – Robert Patterson or David Parker
• 7, P – David Parker or Robert Patterson [Not helpful here, Paul]
• 8, P — Edward Payne, standing in his own doorway
• 9, M – Christopher Monk

In addition, there’s one circle marked M without a number, a possible circle at upper right with neither number nor initial, and three victims without locations: Patrick Carr, John Green, and John Clark.

It might seem to make more sense for “4, G” to be John Green and one “M” or an unlabeled circle to be Samuel Maverick, but we know Maverick was shot at the back of the crowd where that “4, G” body is shown. Revere knew the Greenwood family in the North End, so he surely heard of the apprentice’s death on the morning of 6 March. On the other hand, he used the boy’s own initials, not the master’s, when he engraved a woodcut of four coffins for the Boston Gazette a few days later.

(For Charles Bahne’s analysis of this image in 2013, see this post.)

This diagram also labels the streets and alleys leading off of King Street, plus many of the shops and houses in that part of central Boston. We can thus get a sense of this neighborhood, with the homes of some high-powered businessmen like Edward Payne and Thomas Marshall, and shops that catered to them.

One theory suggests that Revere created this picture for use in one of the trials that followed the Massacre. There’s no mention of such a map in the court records, however, and we have unusually good documentation of those proceedings. Furthermore, by the time those trials started, Patrick Carr had died, so he should have been shown as well.

Another interesting detail is that some of the sketches of dying people resemble figures in Henry Pelham’s engraving of the Massacre, which we know Revere got his hands on and copied by the end of March. Did Pelham or Revere sketch miniature versions of the those figures on this view to create more drama than circles could impart?

Tom Feelings and Revolutionary Black History

I had the honor of meeting the artist Tom Feelings shortly before his death in 2003 when I drove him to a writers’ conference in New Hampshire.

Feelings was then speaking about his monumental book of drawings depicting the transatlantic slave trade, The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo. He had earlier illustrated such award-winning children’s books as To Be a Slave by Julius Lester and Moja Means One by Muriel Feelings.

Feelings’s career as an illustrator spanned nearly half a century. On returning from service in the Air Force in 1958, he created a comic strip for the New York Age, a Harlem weekly. At a time when mainstream American culture ignored almost all of African and African-American history, Tommy Traveler: In the World of Negro History put those stories in front of young black readers.

In 1991 Black Butterfly Books collected several series of Feelings’s strip, had them colored and relettered, and published them in picture-book form. The new title was Tommy Traveler in the World of Black History. That volume is now out of print, but some libraries still have copies.

Tommy is a young black boy who’s read all of his local library’s books on black history. The librarian sends him across town to Doctor Gray, who has an extensive library. Tommy starts reading, and “with his active imagination he quickly slides into another world,” ending up alongside various historical figures. Two stories in the Tommy Traveler collection take place during the American Revolution.

The strip began by taking Tommy to New York in 1776 for an eight-page story set at the Fraunces Tavern. In the mid-1900s there was a widespread belief that its proprietor, Samuel Fraunces, was of African descent. That was evidently based on his nickname, “Black Sam”; his birth in the Caribbean; and his work as a caterer. But at a time when black men were labeled “Negro” in legal documents, there’s no corroboration that Fraunces was black, and his portrait shows a pale man.

The story starts with Tommy meeting the tavern-keeper’s daughter, Phoebe. Again, there’s no evidence Samuel Fraunces had a daughter of that name. She first appeared in a story in the January 1876 Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, inspired by a tale that Benson J. Lossing had told sixteen years earlier. Thus, in depicting Samuel and Phoebe Fraunces as part of African-American history, Feelings was retelling a myth, but one that many earlier authors had already presented as true.

In Feelings’s version, Tommy sees that Phoebe has fallen in love with a soldier named Tom Hickey, a deserter from the British Army to the Continentals. Gen. George Washington is also staying at Fraunces’s inn (as in Lossing, but not in historical sources). Hickey gives Phoebe a poisoned pear to feed to the general, but—warned by Tommy—she knocks it out of the general’s hand just before he eats it. (Lossing wrote that the poison was in a dish of peas.) Hickey goes to the gallows, as his real-life equivalent did in 1776.

Later in this collection, Tommy travels to 1770 for a fourteen-page story. Working on a ship called the Romney, he meets Crispus Attucks. This black man turns out to be a political leader on the streets of Boston, calling meetings and announcing such things as: “Otis is right. Stand up and fight for your rights!” The crowd roars back, “Lead us and we’ll follow!”

Again, Feelings’s depiction reflects how the few African-American history books published at that time portrayed Attucks. They showed him as a leader of the crowd—which he was on the night of 5 Mar 1770, according to other men’s testimony, but which he probably wasn’t when it came to political organization. The comic strip doesn’t mention Attucks’s Native American heritage. Indeed, the character speaks of being “sold into slavery when I was just a young boy.”

Attucks’s protests against Crown taxes lead to a fight against mitred grenadiers. Captain Preston orders a soldier named Montgomery to capture “that tall, dark fellow” as the crowd’s leader. Instead, the soldiers fire their guns, killing Attucks and other men. Tommy identifies his friend by name to Lt. Gov. Hutchinson, adding, “His beliefs won’t ever die. Someday we will have our independence, someday…”

Other stories in this volume profile Aesop, Joe Louis, Frederick Douglass, and Emmet Till (killed only three or four years earlier). In the eighteenth-century tales, the clothing and hair styles (especially women’s) are a hodgepodge of past fashions rather than appropriate for the 1770s. The stories are dreadfully didactic. As for the art, Feelings was talented but not yet practiced. All in all, Tommy Traveller is interesting as a period piece—a snapshot from early in the modern civil-rights era of how African-Americans were making their rightful claim to have been part of western civilization all along.

About a decade after Tommy Traveler ran its course, Feelings returned to the story of Crispus Attucks in the comic book Golden Legacy. Bertram Fitzgerald developed that series, he stated, to “implant pride and self-esteem in Negro youth while dispelling myths in others.” The third issue is titled “Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen.” (Other issues cover Toussaint L’Ouverture, Benjamin Banneker, and figures from other historical eras.) Reprints are still available. I haven’t seen the Attucks issue, but I assume it reflects the same understanding of the Boston Massacre as in Tommy Traveler.

In depicting African-American history, Feelings’s masterpiece remains The Middle Passage.

Wheatley and Attucks “Against All Odds” Advertisements

On his Black Quotidian website, Matt Delmont shares material from African-American newspapers—the news stories, opinion pieces, and advertisements that black Americans in larger cities were reading in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Earlier this week the site featured a comics-style advertisement for Black and White Ointment and Skin Soap from the 17 Sept 1938 Pittsburgh Courier. That ad featured the Boston poet Phillis Wheatley—shown as a little girl coming of a slave ship at left.

Another ad in the same “Against All Odds” campaign highlighted Crispus Attucks, shot and killed at the Boston Massacre. It looks like twelve such pages might have been combined to create the Against All Odds booklet one could buy with three Black and White Beauty Creations labels and 25¢. I haven’t found any trace of that booklet today.

I can pick holes in the history that both ads relate. Wheatley didn’t meet King George III or, as far as the contemporaneous evidence tells us, Gen. George Washington. (But she did meet the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the colonies, and Washington did invite her to visit him at Cambridge.)

Likewise, no witness spoke of Attucks making a “speech” that incited opposition to the British troops on 5 Mar 1770, though he was at the front of the crowd that confronted the soldiers on King Street.

Still, these ads are valuable evidence of how the memory of Wheatley and Attucks was preserved and shaped in popular culture—not just in schoolbooks and formal histories but also in commercial communications. At a time when mainstream America was openly hostile to citizens of African ancestry, they upheld the memory of “the terrible ‘Middle Passage’” and of blacks’ role in the nation’s origin.

Hannigan on Crispus Attucks, 23 June

Tonight the Framingham Historical Society will hold its annual meeting, approving officers and a budget for the coming months.

Then they’ll hear from John Hannigan, doctoral candidate in history at Brandeis University, about one of the town’s well-known inhabitants: Crispus Attucks.

Hannigan will examine the facts embedded with the Crispus Attucks mythology. Had Crispus escaped from the Framingham farm where he was enslaved before being the first to die at the Boston Massacre?

Hannigan’s research on the relationship between slavery and war in 18th-century Massachusetts leads to questions like: How do we know what we know about Crispus Attucks? What can we learn by excavating around the margins of the historical record?

As I learned when I starting posted about Attucks’s tea kettle last year, John Hannigan offers new clues and new thinking on the man. The talk is bound to be fascinating, and—darn it—I can’t be there.

The meeting will start at 7:00 P.M. in the Edgell Memorial Library at 3 Oak Street. There will be refreshments afterward.

Who Was Crispus Attucks’s Father?

Many websites and books identify Crispus Attucks’s father as Prince Yongey (or Young or Jonar), based on the fact that Framingham records say a man of that name married Nancy Peterattuck on 19 May 1737.

However, according to William Brown’s runaway advertisements, “Crispas” was about twenty-seven years old in 1750. That means he would have been about fourteen when Nancy Peterattuck married Prince Yongey.

Furthermore, in 1860 someone from Natick informed William C. Nell that Attucks’s parents were “Jacob Peter Attucks” and “Nanny,” which might have been another form of Nancy. This source said there were other children in the family—Sam, Sal, and Peter—and that they were all “uncommonly large.”

William Barry’s 1847 history of Framingham says Jacob Peterattucks was in that town by 1730 working for “Col. Buckminster.” There was a series of prominent men with that surname, including Joseph (1666-1747) and his sons Joseph (1697-1780) and Thomas (1698-1795).

It seems more likely, therefore, that Prince Yongey was Crispus Attucks’s stepfather, marrying his mother in 1737 after his father Jacob Peterattucks’s death. There are, of course, many other possible scenarios, including multiple people with the same name, unreliable informants, or a church marriage performed years into the relationship because the couple’s owner got religion.

Jacob Peterattucks was previously listed as a member of John Shipley’s military company in 1722, described as “Servt. John Wood.” On 16 May 1723, he was one of several men dismissed as “Sick, lame and unfit for Servis, by thear own Requests.” Notably, the lieutenant of that company was Joseph “Buckmaster.” Crispus Attucks was born around that year.

(In addition, a Moses Peter Attucks of Leicester served as a private at Fort Massachusetts under Lt. Elisha Hawley and Capt. Ephraim Williams in 1747-49. Another member of the family?)

We have no way of knowing whether Prince Yongey had any influence on Crispus Attucks, who was enslaved to Brown by 1750 and perhaps earlier, and therefore may never have lived with a stepfather. Yongey did become a Framingham fixture, as local historian Barry learned from townspeople who had known him:

But the most noted individual of the class under consideration, was Prince, sometimes called Prince Young, but whose name is recorded as Prince Yongey, and Prince Jonar, by which last name he is noticed [and “rated”] in the Town Rec. in 1767. He was brought from Africa when a young man of about 25 years, having been a person of consideration in his native land, from whence, probably, he derived his name. He was first owned by Col. Joseph Buckminster, and afterwards by his son, the late Dea. Thomas. He married, (by name Prince Yongey) in 1737, Nanny Peterattucks, of Framingham, (the name indicating Indian extraction) by whom he had several children, among them a son, who died young, and a daughter Phebe, who never married.

Prince was a faithful servant, and by his general honesty, temperance and prudence, so gained the confidence of his first master. Col. Buckminster, that for about a quarter of a century, he was left with the management of a large farm, during his master’s absence at the General Court. He occupied a cabin near the Turnpike, and cultivated, for his own use, a piece of meadow, which has since been known as Prince’s meadow. He chose the spot as resembling the soil of his native country.

During the latter part of his life he was offered his freedom, which he had the sagacity to decline; pithily saying, “massa eat the meat; he now pick the bone.” Prince shunned the society of persons of his own color, and though accustomed to appear in public armed with a tomahawk, was a great favorite with the young, whom, under all provocations, he was never known but in one instance to strike.

He had been sufficiently instructed to read, and possessed the religious turn characteristic of the African race. In his last sickness, he remarked with much simplicity, that he was “not afraid to be dead, but to die.” He passed an extreme old age in the family of Dea. Thos. Buckminster, and died Dec. 21, 1797, at the age of 99 years and some months. Numerous anecdotes are yet related, illustrating the simplicity, intelligence, and humor of “Old Prince.”

This description of Prince Yongey is evidently based on people who knew him as an old man, probably after his wife and perhaps his children were gone. He outlived the institution of slavery in Massachusetts, though he insisted that the Buckminster family was obliged to look after him in his old age, and he even outlived Deacon Buckminster.

It occurred to me that some elements of Prince Yongey’s life might have gotten mixed in with locals’ memories of Crispus Attucks, especially if they were indeed part of the same extended family. Brown’s descendants recalled Attucks being allowed to “trade cattle upon his own judgement”; locals recalled Yongey managing the Buckminster farm for his master. And did ”Prince’s meadow” become remembered as the “cellar hole” where the Attucks family lived?

Sorting Out the Versions of Crispus Attucks

This is a view from the Crispus Attucks Footbridge in Framingham, built near the area where he was reportedly born and worked for William Brown. And it looks like a good place to pause and reflect about how to reconcile the conflicting traditions about Attucks’s life.

The standard modern story (which I’ve repeated myself) is that Attucks escaped from slavery in Framingham in 1750, when he was about twenty-seven years old, and made a new life for himself as a sailor traveling to the Caribbean and North Carolina. At least while he was back in Boston, he used the alias “Michael Johnson,” presumably to preserve his freedom; that was how he was identified immediately after he was killed. We don’t know how within three days printers knew he was “born in Framingham,” nor how his real name became known the next week.

The Brown family traditions don’t fit easily with that story, but they aren’t easy to dismiss, eoither. Descendants of William Brown told their story of his slave Crispus by 1857. We might suspect they were trying to seize on the celebrity that abolitionists like William C. Nell had conferred on Attucks, but in 1859 antiquarians found the Boston Gazette advertisement that backs up the family’s claim.

Brown descendants also brought forward a cup, teapot, and powderhorn that Attucks reportedly owned. The provenance of these “relics” is impossible to confirm, but the two items that survive do appear to date from the early 1700s. They’re also cheap and misshapen, unlikely to have been saved unless the family had invested them with some meaning.

The biggest contradiction between those two stories is that the Brown family said Attucks returned to his master after 1750 and remained in Framingham for the rest of his life. In the late 1800s, that tradition expanded to say that Brown also let Attucks go to sea, apparently to accommodate the documentary evidence from 1770. But there’s still no explanation why Attucks would be using the name “Michael Johnson” if he had his master’s permission to travel to Boston, trade cattle, and work on ships.

One possibility is that in the confusion after the Boston Massacre people misidentified the big mulatto man shot in the chest as the sailor Michael Johnson. William Brown alerted the authorities to their mistake. and they corrected the dead man’s name to Crispus Attucks in legal papers by the next week, but the printers didn’t catch up, leaving us with newspapers that still erroneously called that man a sailor.

This scenario raises more questions:

• Why did the first reports about “Johnson” already connect him to Framingham?
• Why did Boston bury Attucks as a “stranger” if he had a master and family still in close touch and living less than a day away?
• Why didn’t William Brown seek compensation from the Crown for the loss of his slave?
• Why did Bostonians like William Pierce (cited in Traits of the Tea Party) continue to say Attucks was a sailor for years afterward?

Another possibility is that the Brown family preserved the memories of Crispus Attucks working for their ancestor, trading cattle “on his own judgment,” but forgot the part about how he escaped and never came back. That may not have been his 1750 departure; Attucks may have returned then but left permanently later, and Brown didn’t bother advertising for him again. Other members of the extended Attucks family continued to work in Framingham for years, and the family could have attached memories of them to Crispus after he became famous.

Again, that scenario has a big hole:

• If one of your family slaves has run away and you later learn he’s been killed in a riot in Boston, wouldn’t you remember him as a miscreant who got what was coming? Why would your family memory drop the fact that he’d run away when to you that was probably one of the most significant facts about his life?

Finally, there’s the Natick tradition that William C. Nell spoke about in 1860, one which named other members of the Attucks family. Nell’s informant said that his or her mother had heard Attucks’s sister Sal speak about him, apparently in the 1770s or 1780s. Nell didn’t name his source, and his papers have probably disappeared, leaving us with less to evaluate. To my knowledge that tradition never got into books, and no historians have grappled with it.

The Natick information emphasized Attucks as a big man, a bold man, and a law-breaker (smuggling horses, fighting soldiers). It said nothing about Attucks being enslaved to the Brown family, though it did identify him as a likely son of Jacob Peterattuck, “who lived with Capt. Thomas Buckminster of Framingham.” That tradition also said nothing about Attucks’s work at sea, saying instead that he had visited home “with three or four horses” shortly before the Massacre. Again, that’s hard to reconcile with the 1770 reports about “Michael Johnson” awaiting work on a ship south.

A lot of recent historical scholarship has used Crispus Attucks as an example of a politically aware sailor, not so much tied to Boston as part of a roving maritime working class within the British Empire. It emphasizes his life in the shadows as a runaway slave.

However, if the Brown family and Natick traditions are correct, then Attucks had much stronger links to life in rural Massachusetts than the standard profile suggests, though he may also have worked on ships. If not legally free, Attucks had at least some practical freedom within his bondage to William Brown. And he had an extended family out in the Framingham and Natick area, some of them known for carrying on Native American traditions (“the gourd-shell squaw”). That would provide new areas for historical consideration. But still, how did “Michael Johnson” enter that scenario?

The Last Relics of Crispus Attucks

William Cooper Nell wasn’t the only Boston author researching the Boston Massacre in the nineteenth century. Another was Frederic Kidder, who published his History of the Boston Massacre in 1870. In one footnote he wrote:

Crispus Attucks is described as a mulatto; he was born in Framingham near the Chochituate lake and not far from the line of Natick. Here an old cellar hole remains where the Attucks family formerly lived.

Kidder didn’t state a source for this information, but we can hope he went out to Framingham to see for himself.

In his 1887 history of that town Josiah H. Temple cribbed language from Kidder and added some more information:

Crispus Attucks...was a mulatto, born near the Framingham town line, a short distance to the eastward of the State Arsenal. The old cellar-hole where the Attucks family lived is still visible. He was probably a descendant of John Auttuck, an Indian, who was taken prisoner and executed at the same time with Capt. Tom, in June, 1676. . . . Probably the family had intermarried with negroes who were slaves, and as the offspring of such marriages were held to be slaves, he inherited their condition, although it seems likely that the blood of three races coursed through his veins. He had been bought by Dea. William Brown of Framingham, as early as 1747. . . .

[Temple here quoted the Gazette advertisement from 1750.]

A descendant of Dea. Brown says of him: “Crispus was well informed, and, except in the instance referred to in the advertisement, was faithful to his master. He was a good judge of cattle, and was allowed to buy and sell upon his own judgment of their value.” He was fond of a seafaring life, and probably with consent of his master, was accustomed to take coasting voyages. The account of the time says, “he lately belonged to New Providence, and was here in order to go to North Carolina.”

He was of huge bodily proportions, and brave almost to recklessness.

It’s notable that the words quoted from the Brown family descendant used some of the same phrases as in statements from 1857-1860: “well informed,” “allowed to sell and buy upon his own judgment,” and of course “faithful.” The family seems to have all been working from the same script.

Temple’s town genealogies offered this information about William Brown: He was born in Lexington in 1723 to Joseph and Ruhamah Brown, married and moved to Framingham in 1746, served in several town and church offices, and died in 1793.

Finally there’s the teapot this inquiry started with, the small pewter vessel now on display at the Boston Public Library. “Miss S. E. Kimball” donated it to the Bostonian Society about a century ago, and in 1918 that society donated it to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. With the teapot Kimball gave a note that said:

This relic, once the property of Crispus Attucks, has been in possession of different members of the Brown family since his death. Deacon William Brown, who owned Crispus, was the younger brother of my mother's great-grandfather, Jonas Brown.

I believe that donor was Sarah E. Kimball, born 23 Jan 1831 and living in Westboro toward the end of the century. She was a daughter of Noah Kimball (1804-1876) and Martha Warren Brown, born in 1811 in Topsham, Maine. From what I see on the internet, Martha Warren Brown was a daughter of Gardner Brown (1769-1837), granddaughter of William Brown (1746-1829), great-granddaughter of Jonas Brown (1711-1772), and great-great-granddaughter of the same Joseph Brown who fathered the Framingham slaveowner. So that checks out.

(Incidentally, Jonas Brown married a daughter of the man who built the Munroe Tavern in Lexington. So there’s a family connection between the Boston Massacre and the fighting in that town five years later: the man who had owned Attucks and the man who owned that tavern in 1775 were first cousins. Massachusetts was a much smaller place in the eighteenth century.)

Historic New England also owns a small pewter cup, “twisted and dented,” said to have belonged to Attucks (shown above thanks to this Harvard site). Presumably this is the same “pewter drinking cup” seen in 1859, which Nell displayed as a “goblet” in 1860. The previous year, C. H. Morse told the New England Historic and Genealogical Register that Attucks had “worn” that cup when he was killed. But we don’t seem to have any information about how it was preserved or how it came to the society.

The powderhorn described in the 1850s has disappeared. And the cellar-hole has no doubt been filled in.

TOMORROW: So is that really Crispus Attucks’s teapot?

More Information about the Attucks Family

In 1860 the historian and activist William C. Nell addressed a crowd at the ninetieth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. That event took place in an auditorium called the Meionaon, part of the Tremont Temple. [Why don’t we have a Meionaon anymore?]

As part of his speech, Nell shared some new information he had gathered about the family of Crispus Attucks, by then a symbol of African-American patriotism. Nell’s speech was printed in The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper.

Later that year, a writer in the Boston Transcript argued that Attucks was an Indian rather than a black man. (He in all likelihood had both African and North American ancestry.) Nell drew on the same new information when he wrote into that mainstream newspaper to refute that claim.

First, a Massachusetts legislator from Framingham named James W. Brown wrote to Nell on 18 Feb 1860 to say:

He (Crispus) was the slave of my great grandfather, Deacon William Brown, of Framingham. He returned after his runaway excursion, and was a faithful servant. He was allowed to buy and sell cattle on his own judgment. It was probably upon one of these trading tours that he was drawn into the affray of March 5th. He pressed close upon the British troops, who received him and the other people with loaded muskets.

Attucks beat down their guns with a heavy stick, and shouted, “They dare not fire!” They did fire, and with what effect was known to all. Of stout and vigorous frame, athletic, bold and patriotic, had he lived, he would, doubtless, have acted a conspicuous and useful part in our great revolutionary struggle.

That was basically the same thing the Brown family had published three years before, down to the statement that their ancestor had let Attucks trade cattle “on his own judgment.” This letter made explicit that Attucks had returned to Framingham after the months in late 1750 when William Brown had advertised him as a runaway, and was still working for the Brown family when he died.

We should expect that story to reflect what the Browns wanted to believe, or wanted people to believe about them. It portrays William Brown as a lenient master, and Attucks as “faithful” and “patriotic.”

Nell didn’t name the person who had sent him a second letter from Natick dated 17 Feb 1860. It said in part:

Several persons are now living in Natick, who remember the Attucks family—viz., Cris, who was killed March 5th; Sam, whose name was abbreviated into Sam Attucks, or Smattox; Sal, also known as Slattox; and Peter, called Pea Tattox.

My mother, still living, aged 89, remembers Sal in particular, who used to be called the gourd-shell squaw, from the fact that she used to carry her rum in a gourd shell.

The whole family are described as having been uncommonly large, and are said to have been the children of Jacob Peter Attucks, who lived with Capt. Thomas Buckminster, of Framingham.

It has been conjectured that Jacob and Nanny were of Indian blood; but all who know the descendants, describe them as negroes. Crispus lived in many different places in Natick and Framingham.

When the inhabitants were detained in Boston, he used to smuggle their horses out of the town. He brought out three or four horses, which he took to Framingham, and then returned to kill the red-coats. His sister used to say that if they had not killed Cris, Cris would have killed them. Cris is said to have been in every street fight with the soldiers for some time previous to March 5th, 1770.

In addition, in writing to the Transcript Nell said, “Crispus Attucks was born in Framingham. A portion of his early life was passed in Sutton (now Millbury).” I’m not sure what the basis for that last statement is. Of course, all this information was second- or third-hand, about a man who had died ninety years before and had been born nearly a half-century before that.

But some parts seem to check out. There was indeed a prominent Thomas Buckminster (1698-1795) in Framingham. William Barry’s 1847 History of Framingham reported that Jacob Peterattucks “was in F[r]am., 1730, and worked for Col. Buckminster,” and that in May 1737 Nancy Peterattuck married Prince Yongey, a man enslaved to the Buckminster family. At that date Crispus Attucks was evidently in his teens. Was he indeed a son of Jacob Peterattucks? Was Nanny/Nancy his mother, remarrying? Or was this a more extended family?

Other parts of Nell’s new information raise questions, however. Though Framingham and Natick are next to each other, Sutton is twenty miles away. How did young Crispus go from one area to the other and back as Nell described?

Usually the phrase “inhabitants were detained in Boston” refers to the siege of 1775-76, but Attucks was dead by then. I know of no reason for people to “smuggle horses out of town” earlier.

Finally, all these stories about Crispus Attucks working steadily for his Framingham master until 1770 don’t square with the newspaper reports after his death that he was a sailor, nor with how Boston officials at first called him “Michael Johnson.” Those contemporaneous details fit better with the picture of a man who escaped from slavery by going to sea and then protected himself from recapture through an alias while back in Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: The teapot finally surfaces. You remember the teapot, right?

[My great thanks to Boston 1775 readers Joe Bauman and Liz Loveland for giving me the resources to transcribe the 16 Mar 1860 Liberator items fully and accurately. With their help I’ve revised this posting. Folks can find images of all Liberator issues here.]

The Brown Family Memories of Crispus Attucks

As I quoted yesterday, in 1857 the descendants of William Brown of Framingham published a claim that he had been the owner of Crispus Attucks, victim of the Boston Massacre.

They made that statement in a small book published to celebrate a wedding anniversary; it’s unlikely that any historian outside the family would have challenged it, or even seen it. So how credible was their claim?

And yet, two years later both the New England Historical and Genealogical Register and The Liberator reprinted an advertisement that William Brown had placed in the Boston Gazette on two dates in 1750. As quoted here, Brown was seeking an escaped slave named Crispas.

Because Crispas/Crispus was a rare name, and because both the escapee in 1750 and the man who died in 1770 were unusually tall mulatto men from Framingham, most readers then and now have assumed that notice described Attucks. The ad thus offers contemporaneous evidence to support the Brown family’s claim.

By the 1850s, Attucks was a significant figure in the American past. After decades of being largely forgotten, he had become a symbol of African-American patriotism and martyrdom. That was principally the work of William Cooper Nell, Boston’s leading black historian and abolitionist (shown above). Nell organized commemorations of the Boston Massacre that put Attucks front and center.

A member of the Brown family attended one of those ceremonies, as Nell wrote in that Liberator item from 1859:

It will be remembered that, at the Faneuil Hall commemoration of the Boston massacre, (March 5th, 1858,) Samuel H. Brown, Esq., a grandson of the above William Brown, was present, and narrated to several persons the traditions extant in the family relating to Crispus Attucks—of his goblet, powder-horn, &c.

That same year C. H. Morse of Cambridge wrote in the N.E.H.G.R.: “The descendants of Mr. Browne have a pewter drinking cup, worn by Attucks when he fell, which I have seen. They have also his powder horn.”

Those are the earliest mentions I’ve found of any objects said to be linked to Attucks. In 1860 Nell’s broadside announcing the ninetieth-anniversary commemoration of the Massacre promised a look at “a GOBLET, which belonged to CRISPUS ATTUCKS,” and a copy of the Boston Gazette with William Brown’s ad. (No teapot, though.)

TOMORROW: More information gathered by W. C. Nell.

The Crispus Attucks Teapot

Among the artifacts in the “We Are One” exhibit at the Boston Public Library is a teapot linked to Crispus Attucks, now owned by Historic New England. (And shown here thanks to a Harvard course on material culture.)

I read about this teapot years ago, but I’d never seen it before. It’s smaller than I expected, about the size of one of those little individual pots a restaurant with airs brings out when one orders tea. It‘s pewter, plain, and poorly made. In short, it was a cheap teapot.

But is it Attucks’s?

The evidence from 1770 suggests that Attucks was working as a sailor under an assumed name, at least while he was in Massachusetts. Documents from the coroner’s inquiry immediately after he died in the Boston Massacre called him “Michael Johnson.” The Thursday newspapers identified him as:

A Mollatto Man, named Johnson, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonging to New-Providence [Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina, killed on the Spot, two Balls entering his Breast.

That day was both market day and the day of the funeral for Attucks and three other shooting victims. It’s conceivable those events brought people into Boston with new information. Alas, the Boston Gazette on Monday offered no explanation for identifying that same man as “Crispus Attucks,” and the legal system followed suit. Every source from 1770 agrees that Attucks was a sailor.

In the 1850s, after Attucks had become a touchstone for American abolitionists, a Framingham family named Brown came forward to claim part of his memory. In 1857 that family published a small anniversary book titled The Golden Wedding of Col. James Brown and His Wife. It included a “Speech of Mr. Wm. D. Brown” about his ancestors’ Revolutionary history, including this:

In the month of March 1770, a collision occured between the people of Boston and a portion of the King’s troops, then quartered in the town. The soldiers were very obnoxious to the citizens and a slight provocation was sufficient to raise a mob against them. The old school books tell us, that at this time the mob was led on by a stout negro whose name was Attucks. The mob pressed close up to the troops who received them with leveled muskets! Attucks beat down the guns with a heavy club and cried “they dare not fire!” They did fire, and Crispus Attucks, our great grandfather[ William Brown]’s slave, was shot dead!

Attucks was a well informed and faithful negro. He was a good judge of cattle and was allowed to sell and buy upon his own judgment. Crispus was sensible of the oppressions of Great Britain, and as indignant as the most patriotic, at the presence of hireling soldiers in the country, to enforce unjust laws.

It’s a curious passage, setting down family lore yet apparently relying on “old school books” for information about Attucks’s actions on 5 Mar 1770. In this description of a “faithful negro,…sensible of the oppressions of Great Britain,” there’s no hint that Attucks had become a sailor or used the name Michael Johnson.

TOMORROW: The Brown family and William C. Nell.

A Modern Look at Crispus Attucks

The new Digital Public Library of America is now aggregating public-domain material from other websites. I tried a search for “Boston Massacre” and saw this image for the first time.

This image, “Crispus Attucks,” was painted by William H. Johnson (1901-1970) about 1945, which would make it one of his last works before he was institutionalized for mental illness.

It literally reflects the famous 1770 engraving of the Massacre by Henry Pelham with the soldiers lined up and firing together (on the left instead of the right) and the spires behind. But this portrayal emphasizes the civilian reaction to the soldiers, with the three lamenting women.

Johnson put Crispus Attucks alone at the center, gave him a Christ-like beard and pose, and named the painting after him. That reflects the importance of his memory in the African-American struggle for rights.

This painting is now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.

Adams Revisits Attucks

In July 1773, John Adams returned to the figure of Crispus Attucks in an odd new way. Adams wrote this passage into his diary:

To Tho. Hutchinson

Sir

You will hear from Us with Astonishment. You ought to hear from Us with Horror. You are chargeable before God and Man, with our Blood.—The Soldiers were but passive Instruments, were Machines, neither moral nor voluntary Agents in our Destruction more than the leaden Pelletts, with which we were wounded.—You was a free Agent. You acted, coolly, deliberately, with all that premeditated Malice, not against Us in Particular but against the People in general, which in the Sight of the Law is an ingredient in the Composition of Murder. You will hear further from Us hereafter.

Chrispus Attucks

Some authors have interpreted this as something Attucks himself wrote. However, since it refers to the shots on King Street and those had killed Attucks immediately, he couldn’t have been the author.

Instead, Adams appears to have adopted the voice of Attucks and the other people killed in 1770 as ghosts, astonishing and horrifying Gov. Hutchinson. The editors of Adams’s papers theorize that Adams was thinking of publishing the letter as a pseudonymous newspaper essay, but no one has found it in print. (Adams’s newspaper essays were usually long and legalistic.)

At the time, Massachusetts Whig politicians were angrily discussing letters that Hutchinson and other friends of the royal government had sent to London over the preceding years, recently leaked by Benjamin Franklin. Adams perceived Hutchinson as conspiring against Massachusetts’s traditional constitution. Hence his accusation in this paragraph that the governor had acted with “premeditated Malice, not against Us in Particular but against the People in general.”

The letter also hints at Adams’s mixed feelings about helping to defend Capt. Thomas Preston and the British soldiers back in 1770. By arguing that those men “were but passive Instruments” in Hutchinson’s conspiracy, he could justify defending them while still treating the government they worked for as oppressive.

“Enough to Terrify Any Person”?

Kellie Carter Jackson at Harvard recently posted an essay at WBUR’s Cognoscenti opinion site invoking the Boston Massacre as a touchstone for some of our current debates about racial stereotypes. Jackson tied John Adams’s method of defending the soldiers in the Massacre trial to recent conflicts that started with a belief that law-abiding black men or boys looked threatening:

When presenting his case, Adams described the men killed as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.” To put this in contemporary language, he was basically describing the men as nothing more than a group of “thugs.” He centered his defense of the British soldiers on the charge that [Crispus] Attucks struck the first blow and led the “dreadful carnage.” Adams concluded the “mad behavior” of Attucks provoked the soldiers’ response, claiming that the group was “under the command of a stout molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person.”

This defense sounds eerily familiar. . . .

Adams emphasizes Attucks’ race several times within his summation. Why would this emphasis be important? Moreover, why is Attucks’s behavior alone singled out? Why, of the several men killed, is Attucks the only one we know? Furthermore, why is Attucks physical description the primary focus of the threat? . . .

It is clear that in over 250 years of history, the racially charged perceptions of black men as bearers of a physique so innately menacing that their “looks” alone are “enough to terrify any person” has not changed. The Attucks case provides an implied precedent that powerfully explains the lack of justice present when whites cite self-defense in criminal cases against black people.

Attucks was in the front ranks of a big, angry, violent crowd. He was carrying a stick of cord wood, and on the way to King Street he’d pressed a similar club into the hands of another man, Patrick Keaton. Witnesses reported him grabbing a soldier’s bayonet and “twitching” it, and shouting, “Kill the dogs! Knock them over!” Adams was right to describe Attucks as threatening because he, and those other guys, were threatening the soldiers.

On the other hand, Adams singled out Attucks from that large crowd and all those other aggressive men. Someone else threw the stick that knocked down Pvt. Edward Montgomery and set off the shooting. Adams clearly played off stereotypes of “negroes and molattoes,” as well as the other social outsiders he named, for the sake of the (all or mostly Irish) solders he was defending.

Furthermore, the evidence that Attucks was threatening just highlights the difference between his behavior and that of the boys and men killed in recent incidents, as Jackson discusses: Trayvon Martin, walking home alone from a store; Jonathan Ferrell, seeking help after an auto accident; and Jordan Davis, sitting in a car with friends. None of them was at the head of a riotous mob or carrying a club.

Jackson is quite right that the stereotype of frightening black males has very old roots. As just one piece of evidence, on 1 Nov 1769 Boston’s selectmen swore in a special new Constable of the Watch with this instruction:

6thly. You are to take up all Negroes Indian and Molatto Slaves that may be absent from their masters House after nine o’Clock at Night and passing the Streets unless they are carrying Lanthorns with light Candles and can give a good and satisfactory Account of their Business that such offenders may be proceeded with according to Law.

Since it was impossible to tell if a person of color was free or enslaved just by appearance, that meant the town watchmen were supposed to stop all blacks and Natives walking at night and demand to know their business.

That was less than a year after Samuel Adams had written to the Boston Gazette objecting to how army sentries were stopping (white) people: “to call upon every one, who passes by, to know Who comes there as the phrase is, I take it to be in the highest degree impertinent, unless they can shew a legal authority for so doing.” But black or Native people, simply by walking outside at night, were seen as threats to the town. Those people didn’t even have to be at the head of a crowd of angry men.

New Myths of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite differently. It’s been mythologized in many ways, and myths and misconceptions continue to crop up. Here are some that I’ve seen repeated recently.

Did Crispus Attucks work at Gray’s ropewalk?

Boston’s official report on the shooting, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre…, gave a lot of attention to a brawl between soldiers and workers at John Gray’s rope-manufacturing facility on 2 March. That fight involved two soldiers, Mathew Kilroy and William Warren, and one ropemaker, Samuel Gray, who faced off on King Street three days later. Another soldier, John Carroll, was part of a follow-up brawl on 3 March. Thus, the town suggested, those soldiers had not shot in self-defense but out of anger at townspeople, and perhaps at Samuel Gray in particular.

In all that attention to the ropewalk fight, however, no witness identified Crispus Attucks as being involved. Testimony does put a big man of African descent in the brawl: Drummer Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment. But justice of the peace John Hill recalled shouting at Walker, “you black rascal, what have you to do with white people’s quarrels?” That suggests that no man of color like Attucks had been prominent in the fights before. Newspapers described Gray as a ropemaker but Attucks simply as a sailor.

In 2008 I noted a Boston Globe essay that said, “According to lore, Attucks reappeared [in Boston] just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker.” But there’s no evidence for that guess and some to suggest it was mistaken. I suspect people trying to find a tight link between the ropewalk fight and the shooting on King Street assumed Attucks was involved in both, but historical events aren’t always so neat.

Did Attucks work on a whaling ship?

In Traits of the Tea-Party, published in 1835, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher cited an old barber named William Pierce as his source that Attucks “was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor…” But Pierce also told Thatcher that he’d never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he didn’t have inside information.

Boston’s 1770 newspapers directly contradict Pierce. They said Attucks was from Framingham, not Nantucket. They reported Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence [in the Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—meaning he worked on trading voyages to the south rather than hunting whales.

I suspect that Pierce’s memory of Attucks from sixty-five years before had gotten mixed with his memory of the Prince Boston legal case, which did involve a man of African and Native descent, whalers from Nantucket, and a captain named Folger.

TOMORROW: The myth of the tombs.

Commemorating and Considering the Boston Massacre

Wednesday, 5 March, is the 244th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, and there are a number of commemorations and discussions of the event coming up.

At 6:30 P.M. that evening, Old South Meeting-House will host a free program with authors Audrey and Frank Peterman speaking on “The Future of Our National Parks.” This talk is co-sponsored by Boston National Historical Park to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. The event description says, “The Petermans will reflect on a few of many Boston stories—including Crispus Attucks, the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, and internationally famous African American poet Phillis Wheatley—that evoke the voices and invite the participation of our diverse communities in the history that shaped our nation.”

On Saturday, 8 March, the Bostonian Society has a full day of activities at the Old State House museum commemorating the Massacre. These include the “Trial of the Century” program at 11:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.: “Watch patriot lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy defend the British soldiers accused of murdering five Bostonians at the Boston Massacre. Audience members are invited to act as witnesses and jurors for this celebrated case.” Tickets will go on sale at 9:00, and are free with Old State House admission.

At 7:00 P.M., the live reenactment of the Massacre will take place outside the Old State House. Some of the region’s best historical reenactors will portray the men of the 29th Regiment and the people of Boston as they move toward their fatal confrontation. I’ll be there as the narrator. This event is outdoors and free. Sight lines aren’t excellent, but being stuck in a crowd is part of the historical experience. Folks can also follow on Twitter through @BostonianSoc and #bostonmassacre.

Next Wednesday, 12 March, at 6:00 P.M., the Old State House will be the site of a talk on “The Legacy of Crispus Attucks in Boston in the Twentieth Century.” Maureen McAleer, a graduate student at Harvard University, will discuss her thesis work on how activists, politicians, and the public have remembered, commemorated, and used Attucks’s name over time. This event is free, but please register on Eventbrite.