Do you know the story of the American Revolution? Many people see them as heroes. Who are we talking about? Crispus Attucks! In history, Crispus Attucks is a bit mysterious. At the start of the American Revolution, he lived in Boston , Massachusetts. He worked as a sailor and rope maker.
What did he do before then? No one is quite sure. However, many think that Attucks escaped slavery before he came to Boston. For proof , they point to a advertisement. If this was Attucks, then he was born in in Framingham, Massachusetts and later ran away to Boston. Once in Boston, Attucks was often in and out of the city with the ships he worked on. In the year , the tension was high between Britain and its American colonies.
Americans were angry about unfair taxes and the presence of British troops. At the same time, Britain wanted tighter control of the colonies. In Boston, things were especially bad. Britain had already sent two groups of soldiers to the city. They were not welcome there. They even lived in many public buildings. Many soldiers also took part-time jobs in the city. This angered Bostonians who had a hard time finding work.
The tension boiled over in On March 5 of that year, a British soldier entered a Boston pub looking for work. There, he found a group of angry sailors. One of them was Attucks. They approached a guard in front of the Boston customs house. They mocked him, throwing sticks and snowballs. Soon, more British soldiers came to help the guard. On the night that he died, Attucks had just returned from the Bahamas, and was on his way to North Carolina.
Attucks was six inches taller than the average American man of the Revolutionary War era, and testimony at the trial of the British soldiers indicted for his death depicted him as having a robust physique.
John Adams , the future U. Crispus Attucks is shown after being shot in the Boston Massacre, along with four other colonists. As Douglas R. Egerton writes in his book Death Or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America , Great Britain paid its soldiers so poorly that many of them found it necessary to take part-time jobs when they were off-duty. Competition from the influx of troops threatened to depress the wages of American workers such as Attucks.
Additionally, as an experienced seaman, Attucks faced the danger of being seized by one of the British press gangs that Parliament authorized to forcibly draft sailors into the Royal Navy. His ire toward the British apparently was intense.
Attucks was among the patrons who cursed the soldier and harassed him until he fled the establishment. His brazen defiance took considerable courage, since he had escaped slavery, he faced the risk of being arrested and returned to servitude. Instead, according to trial testimony, Attucks brandished two wood sticks, one of which he gave to a witness named Patrick Keaton.
The jury acquitted the soldiers of murder in the deaths of the five Americans, though two of them—Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery—were convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter and branded on their hands as a punishment and then released. Some goods could only be had by importing them. Boston merchants had agreed to boycott British goods to protest the tax.
Boston had played a leading role in implementing the non-importation strategy and convincing other colonies to join in. But the cost took its toll. Frustrated by several years of struggling to make a profit, the stage was set for merchants to announce they would no longer honor non-importation agreements and would resume selling British goods.
Theophilus Lillie, a dry goods merchant, was one of the earliest to break the non-importation agreements. Though some merchants disregarded the ban altogether, most did it quietly. Lillie, though not political, did so with a flourish, announcing his intentions in a letter to the Boston Chronicle. His decision led to dueling letters and articles in the newspapers and, on the night of February 22, a protest in front of his house.
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