The First to Fall

Crispus Attucks died in the snow outside the Custom House, shot through the chest by British musket fire. He was approximately forty-seven years old, a sailor and rope-maker, a man of African and Native American descent who had lived free for twenty years after escaping slavery.

We do not know why he was there that night. Perhaps he had grievances against British soldiers—sailors and soldiers competed for work, and fights were common. Perhaps he was drawn by the crowd gathering in King Street. Perhaps he simply walked into history.

Witnesses placed Attucks at the front of the crowd, reportedly wielding a stick. Some accounts say he struck a soldier; others dispute this. What is certain is that when the soldiers fired, Attucks was among the first to fall.

His death made him a symbol, but the symbol has always been contested. Patriots celebrated him as a martyr while holding enslaved people themselves. Abolitionists claimed him as evidence that Black Americans had bled for liberty from the beginning. Historians have tried to recover the man beneath the meaning.

Crispus Attucks lived for forty-seven years before the few minutes that made him immortal. Almost nothing of those years survives.