Crispus Attucks in American Memory. by Mitch Kachun

BOOK REVIEWS 359 First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory.By Mitch Kachun. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 308. Illustrations. $29.95 cloth.) Perhaps no character in American history about whom so little is known has achieved the posthumous renown of Crispus Attucks. What does it mean to write the biography of a person who left so few traces in the historical record, but about whom so much has been written and for whom so much has been claimed? Through painstaking research, sustained analysis, and artful prose, Mitch Kachun pro- vides a compelling answer to that question. The question of Attucks’s origins and life experiences is important, and Kachun devotes a chap- ter to the task of reconstructing the knowable facts of his life, but the balance of the book—an additional eight chapters—compellingly an- alyzes the ways in which Attucks has been forgotten, remembered, and interpreted in the two hundred and fifty years since his death. The paucity of information about Attucks makes him an especially sensitive barometer with which to gauge the shifting pressures of historical memory—a “convenient blank slate upon which Americans continue to inscribe a wide variety of cultural meanings,” as Kachun puts it (237). In particular, evolving attitudes toward Attucks help to mark the place of African Americans in the public life of the United States. Attucks is known to posterity only because he was one of the vic- tims of the Boston Massacre. Accounts of his involvement in the crowd action that led up to the shootings are scattered and indeter- minate. At the soldiers’ trial, John Adams stressed Attucks’s “mad be- haviour” (16) and helped to ensure that he would be remembered as a central figure in that night’s events. Attucks was a sailor; circum- stantial evidence suggests that he had previously been enslaved by William Brown of Framingham and had escaped some twenty years before his death, and that one of his parents may have been a Na- tive American, probably from Natick. Kachun assesses each of these claims carefully and considers each to be strongly probable. Almost nothing more is known of Attucks’s life, nor is it possible to say what attitudes or circumstances led him into the street on the night he was killed. Absent such details, biographers have had to invent almost every- thing they have written about Attucks. And Attucks has had an ex- traordinary number of biographers, including Frederic Kidder and J. H. Temple in the nineteenth century and Dharathula H. Mil- lender, who produced an especially long and detailed “fictionalized Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00677 by guest on 01 October 2021 360 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY biograph[y]” (23) of Attucks in 1965. Kachun briefly characterizes and summarizes many of these biographical treatments. One thread of the book traces the genealogies of invented claims about Attucks and highlights the ways in which questionable or falsified details have gained credence through repetition. More important than the expanding and shifting array of accumu- lated details in these accounts of Attucks, however, is the ongoing contest over the significance of his life and death. Kachun carefully traces the long and winding history of Attucks’s reputation, in the process charting the color line that runs through American cultural history from the early nineteenth century to the present day. At- tucks was largely forgotten for seventy years. He was first championed by William Cooper Nell and other black abolitionists beginning in the 1840s, who used his death to highlight African American patri- otism and to legitimate their claims to citizenship. To this end, they downplayed his Native American heritage and stressed his heroic at- tributes. The Attucks who emerged from their efforts was, as Kachun writes, “a shrewd construction” (66). In the era of Jim Crow, Kachun demonstrates that white Americans largely continued to ignore At- tucks, but among African Americans his reputation and significance grew. As African American institutions grew stronger beginning in the 1920s, and with them an emphasis on “race pride and collective identity” (97), Attucks became increasingly important. Holidays and celebrations, schools, churches, hotels, fraternal organizations, and community councils came to bear his name. From World War II through the 1976 bicentennial, Attucks en- tered more fully into the mainstream of American culture, appearing in books by white and black authors, in musicals, school curricula, periodicals, and in various commercialized forms. At the same time, Kachun demonstrates, debates over his legacy grew more complex. Should Attucks be regarded as a martyr and hero of the Revolution, a token figure championed by “an increasingly influential black mi- nority” (178), an icon of integration, a pawn to white interests, or a model of black influence and power? From the culture wars ofthe late twentieth century to the Black Lives Matter movement of the present day, Attucks has remained a potent and polarizing symbol of the contested place of African Americans in the national narrative. While representations of Attucks have steadily proliferated since the 1840s, and with them a growing range of interpretive possibilities, Kachun’s painstaking and wide-ranging research demonstrates that Attucks has appeared, in every age, both as a powerful representation Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00677 by guest on 01 October 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 361 of African American identity and an enduring embodiment of racial tensions and hostilities. Was Attucks a patriot, an enraged rioter, an innocent bystander? We cannot know, and Kachun does not press a strong interpretive agenda of his own. In the end, he argues, it is enough simply to rec- ognize that Attucks was present in the Boston streets on a momentous night in 1770. He “embodies the diversity of colonial America and the active participation of workers and people of color in the public life of the Revolutionary era” (234). This is a balanced and judicious assess- ment, one that validates Attucks’s ongoing importance while backing away from extravagant claims about his contributions or significance. In all his manifestations, as Kachun demonstrates so well, Crispus At- tucks illustrates the never-ending contest for meaning that shapes our historical consciousness. Eric Hinderaker is professor of history at the University of Utah, spe- cializing in early America. He is the author of Boston’s Massacre (Harvard University Press, 2017). Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage. By Sarah E. Chinn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 264. $70.00.) Reading early American dramas and a range of texts that describe and prescribe performance, Spectacular Men represents the latest foray into questions of the collective construction of American masculinity. Chinn’s new study approaches the problem of masculinity, and collective identity formation in general, through a relatively narrow but carefully selected range of textual and theatrical ex- amples. Acting manuals, memoirs, and biographies of actors show the codification of behavior and character in early national culture, while popular male character types (revolutionary heroes, Native Americans, and Romans) demonstrate the different masculine styles that contributed to “Americanness” in the early national period. Chinn’s account extends the work of scholars such as Dana D. Nel- son, whose National Manhood (1998) serves as a touchstone for this study’s understanding of the political work that the rhetoric of gender could accomplish in early American culture. If, as Nelson has ar- gued, the rhetoric of manhood and brotherhood could be used to pa- per over class differences, Spectacular Men suggests that the theatre Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00677 by guest on 01 October 2021.

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