[On March
5th, 1770, the events that came to be known as the Boston Massacre took place on
King Street. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that
pivotal pre-Revolutionary moment, leading up to a special Guest Post from my
sons based on their elementary school studies of the massacre.]
On adding layers
to collective memory, and what we do when we can’t know for sure.
As I mentioned
in last
week’s post on Revolutionary slaves, my perspective on Crispus Attucks has
significantly shifted over the last few years. As I imagine is the case for
most American schoolchildren, today as for many decades (if not centuries,
thanks in no small measure to the Paul
Revere engraving about which more later in the week), I learned in some of
my earliest social studies classes that one of the first casualties of the
American Revolution was an African American man. While historians now believe
that Attucks’ mother was the Natick (Wampanoag) Native American slave Nancy
Attucks, and his father the African-born slave Prince Yonger, that doesn’t
change the basic and important fact that this Boston Massacre protester and
casualty was indeed an American of color. Remembering Attucks as such, and
linking the story of the Boston Massacre to this compelling side to his
identity, is thus a good example of a somewhat simplified but still accurate
and productive form of longstanding collective memory, and a helpful reminder
that mythic images of the past can at least occasionally gibe with complex
historical realities.
Yet as I also
noted in last week’s post, the complex historical realities linked to Attucks
include another that is generally not included in our collective memories (and
certainly not in those taught to schoolchildren, at least not in my experience
with either my own or my sons’ educations): he was a fugitive slave. Twenty
years before the Boston Massacre, Attucks’ master William Brown, owner of a
farm in Framingham, placed
an ad in the Boston Gazette and Weekly
Journal, seeking help capturing a runaway slave: “A Mulatto fellow,
about 27 Years of Age, named Crispus, 6 feet 2 inches high, short cur'l hair,
his knees nearer together than common.” Brown apparently never found Attucks,
and perhaps by 1770 he had given up on the search; but perhaps not, and in any
case every moment of Attucks’ subsequent life had to have been lived under the
cloud of a possible return to slavery (if not far worse punishment). In the
chapter on Revolutionary slaves in Exclusion
& Inclusion: The Battle to Define America, I make the case that we have
to understand Attucks’ presence on King Street and defiance of the British in
conjunction with this crucial and under-remembered part of his identity; I can
imagine few circumstances that better highlight the fragile yet vital nature of
freedom than the multi-decade experience of a fugitive slave.
As for what
Attucks did with those two decades of freedom between his October 1750 escape
and the events of 1770, information
seems to be partial and fragmented. Apparently he worked on a whaling ship
for some of the early years, likely using the alias Michael Johnson; at some
point he left that job to become a merchant sailor, and also seems to have
worked as a ropemaker near Boston Harbor when he wasn’t aboard a ship. Perhaps
we’ll learn more, although given the scanty nature of personal records for
working-class Americans of the period, this might well be the most we’ll ever
know about the twenty years between Attucks’ running away and his role in the
Boston Massacre. That doesn’t necessarily change the facts that we do know, of
course; but it does caution against extrapolating from those facts to imagine
we can fully understand the 47 year-old man (if we take the age in Brown’s
advertisement as accurate) who found himself clashing with British soldiers on
King Street. Like so many historical figures, Attucks is and will likely remain
a combination of compelling details, frustrating uncertainties, and an
overarching story that reflects important histories while reminding us of the
enduring gaps between the past itself and our collective memories of it.
Next massacre
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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