250 years ago, the first shots were fired in the American Revolution

IT was 250 years ago today on March 5, 1770, that the first shots were fired at the start of the American Revolution.

The Boston Massacre in which British redcoats fired on unarmed civilians in the Massachusetts city is seen by most historians and the American public as the incident which kicked off the revolutionary fervour that eventually led to the Declaration of Independence.

The first man to die on that fateful evening was Crispus Attucks, and he is acclaimed as the first martyr of the American Revolution. Given the nation’s subsequent history there is no little irony in the fact that Attucks was a mixed-race man, most probably of African-American and Native American descent.

WHO WAS CRISPUS?

AT the time of his death, Attucks was a man of around 46 or 47 years of age who worked as a stevedore in the port of Boston. He had been born into slavery in Framingham in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the Crown Colony as it then was, sometime around 1723. His father was said to be a slave and his mother was a Native American. There has long been debate about his exact ethnicity.

Attucks had also run away from his slave life. In 1750, Deacon William Brown advertised for the return of a slave named Crispus and offered a £10 reward. It seems that Attucks took up the life of an itinerant sailor and ropemaker, and may have changed his name. By 1770 he was working in the Boston docks as he prepared for a shipping trip to North Carolina.

WHAT HAPPENED ON MARCH 5, 1770?

BOSTON was one of the seedbeds of the American Revolution. By the 1760s, the townsfolk were deeply divided between the Loyalists who wanted their province to remain under the Crown and the Colonials who wanted separation from Great Britain.

One of the leading groups among the latter was a secret organisation called the Sons of Liberty who devised the slogan “no taxation without representation”. It was the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765 which fired the colonists’ anger – basically London imposed a tax on the colonists to pay for the large army in the colonies.

Though it was repealed a year later, the Stamp Act caused huge resentment among the colonists and in Boston this anger became protests, and sometimes violent ones at that, so much so that 4000 redcoats were billeted in the town which then had a population of about 15,000. Feelings were running high in Boston after a number of clashes between colonists and loyalists, and the redcoats really were trying to keep the peace – there is evidence that many of the soldiers enjoyed good relationships with Bostonians.

On March 5, a wintry evening, a small incident exploded into violence and death. A young boy complained that a redcoat officer had refused to pay his barber’s bill and a soldier stepped forward to defend the officer.

The crowd soon gathered to remonstrate with the soldier. He summoned help from his regiment, the 29th (Worcestershires) and soon a confrontation developed between colonists and redcoats, the former throwing snowballs and other objects.

Outside the Old State House, men armed with clubs approached the soldiers who opened fire, killing five men.

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The first to fall dead was Attucks, shot twice through the chest. He may or may not have been a ringleader but he was certainly in the vanguard of the colonists.

The others killed were Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, who was just 17, and Irish immigrant Patrick Carr who died of his wounds a fortnight later.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS?

THE dead men were all interred together in the Granary Burying Ground.

Under pressure, Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson ordered an inquiry and one officer, eight soldiers and four civilians were arrested and charged with murder.

They were defended by future President John Adams who made much of the fact that the mob was led by a black man. Six soldiers were acquitted and the other two were convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter, being sentenced to branding on their thumbs.

The Boston Massacre caused fury among the colonists, not least when Paul Revere produced an engraving of the incident which has been called the most inspiring piece of propaganda in American history.

Monuments to the dead of the Massacre abound, and at the unveiling of the main monument to the Martyrs of the Massacre, the poet John Boyle O’Reilly wrote:

And to honor Crispus Attucks who was the leader and voice that day: The first to defy, and the first to die, with Maverick, Carr, and Gray. Call it riot or revolution, or mob or crowd as you may, such deaths have been seeds of nations, such lives shall be honored for aye.

The name of Crispus Attucks was revered by those who fought slavery.

Martin Luther King Junior paid tribute to him during the Civil Rights movement.

The poet Melvin Tolson in his poem “Dark Symphony” wrote the lines:

Black Crispus Attucks taught / Us how to die / Before white Patrick Henry’s bugle breath / Uttered the Vertical / Transmitting cry: / ‘Yea, give me liberty or give me death.’”

In the song Black Man by Stevie Wonder there is this line: “First man to die for the flag we now hold high was a black man.

Surveys have shown that the vast majority of the white population of the USA have no idea that a coloured man was the first to die in the cause of American liberty.