There is No Statue of Crispus Attucks

The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre, by Henry Pelham, an evocative depiction of soldiers firing in unison at the Boston Massacre which Paul Revere reproduced without crediting Pelham. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1910)

There is no Crispus Attucks statue. There is a Boston Massacre monument nicknamed “the Crispus Attucks statue” but it is not a statue of Crispus Attucks. Yet the history of Attucks’ martyrdom is there to learn and his story has all the ambiguity necessary for quality folklore and mythology.

From what we know, Crispus Attucks was a complicated character in American Revolutionary history but not any more complicated than your random Founding Father. Encyclopedia Britannica confesses that the only thing they know for sure about Attucks begins and ends with the events around the March 5, 1770, Boston Massacre, where he and four other American colonists were killed when jumpy British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of Bostonians who had mobbed a barracks of the 29th Regiment, one of two regiments stationed in Boston resulting from tensions over new authoritative British policies attempting to deal with the burden of French-Indian War debt. The crowd had isolated a sentry stationed at the Custom House and the commander of the barracks, Captain Thomas Preston, ordered a squad of seven soldiers with fixed bayonets out into the crowd to support the lone sentry. Receiving steady verbal and physical resistance from the crowd, one of the outnumbered and confused soldiers fired his musket, causing the others to open fire in the confusion.