I Am This Place at Old South This Month

Starting today, the Old South Meeting House will host eight performances of a new play inspired by Crispus Attucks.

Written by Miranda ADEkoje and directed by Pascale Florestal, I Am This Place imagines nine characters, played by actors Maria Hendricks and Dominic Carter, representing Attucks’s parents and ancestors through a century of life in colonial New England.

The contemporaneous record of 1770 has left us very little information about Attucks. In 1860 the abolitionist and historian William Cooper Nell shared a letter about the Attucks family from an unnamed correspondent in Natick, identifying his parents as Jacob Peter Attucks and Nanny.

Later authors linked, however, Attucks to Prince Yongey and Nancy Peterattucks instead, though the dates of their marriage don’t match his reported age.

It’s clear from how people of 1770 described him that Attucks had both Native American and African ancestors. In recent years scholars and genealogists have done a lot of work on how people from those backgrounds, under various pressures from British colonists, formed communities in New England. In other words, Attucks’s heritage was by no means unusual in his time, especially in the area of Natick and Framingham.

I Am This Place creates fictional individuals to explore the lives of black and indigenous people living through wars, slavery, epidemics, religious revival, and other changes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Massachusetts. It also, director Florestal says, shifts Attucks’s own “narrative from martyr to a man with hopes, dreams, ambition and most importantly family.”

Hendricks and Carter will perform I Am This Place at 11:30 A.M. and 1:30 P.M. this weekend and next for anyone visiting Old South. I expect there might be more performances scheduled in the future if the play gets a good reception.

Revolutionary Spaces plans more public art productions like this “to bring people together to reimagine what it means to be a part of America’s Revolutionary story.” Here’s the recording of a panel discussion last fall featuring playwright ADEkoje, Patrick Gabridge of producer Plays in Place, and others on the challenges and rewards of creating such site-specific drama.

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?

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.]

“By You and Them I Mean to Be Cared For”

Yesterday I quoted Samuel Adams’s descendant William V. Wells on an African-American woman named Surry, who came to the second Elizabeth Adams as a slave and remained with the family after emancipation. Wells wrote that when the Adamses gave Surry freedom papers, she “threw them into the fire, indignantly remarking that she had lived too long to be trifled with in that manner.”

That story put me in mind of some anecdotes in William D. Piersen’s book Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England. Piersen pored through many sources, particularly local histories, for clues to how black New Englanders lived in the late colonial and early republican periods.

In particular, he described other resisting attempts to free them:

Slaves who became old in service to a white family often refused a “reward of freedom because they felt at home in their master’s household and because they could have assurance there that they would be cared for in their old age. Prince Jonar [also called Prince Yongey], an African-born slave owned in succession by Joseph Buckminster and his son Thomas, managed a farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he lived in a small cabin overlooking a meadow he had picked for cultivation because it reminded him of the soil of his native country. Offered freedom in his old age, Jonar refused by sagaciously citing a proverb common to Yankee slaves in this situation: “Massa eat the meat; he now pick the bone.”

As William Brown, the son of a Rhode Island slave, explained, “The old bondsmen declared their master had been eating their flesh and now it was the slaves’ turn to stick to them and suck their bones.” Mose Parson’s slave avoided the African proverbial intricacies by commenting more bluntly: “You have had the best of me, and you and yours must have the worst. Where am I to go in sickness or old age? No, Master, your slave I am, and always will be, and I will belong to your children when you are gone; and by you and them I mean to be cared for.”

Domestic slaves were especially apt to remain with their masters or return shortly after gaining freedom. The refusal of freedom was, as might be expected, more common among older women since they would have greater difficulties outside the family and because they usually retained close bonds to the white children they had helped raise.

Wells dated his story to after “the institution of slavery was formally abolished in Massachusetts,” or 1783. He also said that Surry had arrived in the household about 1765 as a “servant girl” and remained “for nearly half a century,” or well into the 1800s. So Surry was apparently only in early middle age when she destroyed the freedom papers. But she felt “she had lived too long to be trifled with.”