For over a century, most American history textbooks focused almost exclusively on the accomplishments and exploits of white men. This presented an incomplete and distorted vision of American history. More recently, historians have sought to present a more balanced and accurate account of American history.

One group of people who were systematically excluded from traditional narratives of American history were African Americans. Every school child in the United States learns of the story of John Smith and the early white settlers of Jamestown. Yet, many are unfamiliar with the remarkable narrative of the life of Anthony Johnson, a free African American man in colonial Virginia. Every school child learns that Paul Revere made a famous engraving of the Boston Massacre; yet, many do not know that Crispus Attucks, a man of African American and Native American ancestry, was among those killed in the Boston Massacre.

Anthony Johnson

Anthony Johnson (b. c. 1600 – d. 1670) was a black Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia after serving his term of indenture. He became a property owner, and was one of the first people in Virginia to have his right to own a slave legally recognized. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years, and was granted land by the colony. He later became a successful tobacco farmer in Maryland. He attained great wealth after having been an indentured servant.

Johnson was captured in his native Angola by an enemy tribe and sold to Arab slave traders. He was eventually sold as an indentured servant to a merchant working for the Virginia Company. He arrived in Virginia in 1621. The Virginia Muster (census) of 1624 lists his name as “Antonio not given,” recorded as “a Negro” in the “notes” column.

Johnson was sold to a white planter named Bennet as an indentured servant to work on his Virginia tobacco farm. Servants typically worked under an indenture contract for four to seven years to pay off their passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. In the early colonial years, most Africans in the Thirteen Colonies were held under such contracts of indentured servitude. With the exception of those indentured for life, they were released after a contracted period with many of the indentured receiving land and equipment after their contracts expired or were bought out. Most white laborers also came to the colony as indentured servants.

Antonio almost lost his life in the Indian massacre of 1622 when his master’s plantation was attacked. The Powhatan, who were the Native Americans dominant in the Tidewater of Virginia, were trying to repulse the colonists from their lands. They attacked the settlement where Johnson worked on Good Friday and killed 52 of the 57 men.

The following year (1623) “Mary, a Negro” arrived from England. She was brought to work on the same plantation as Antonio, where she was the only woman. Antonio and Mary married and lived together for more than forty years.

Sometime after 1635, Antonio and Mary gained their freedom from indenture. Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson. Johnson first enters the legal record as a free man when he purchased a calf in 1647.

Johnson was granted a large plot of farmland after he paid off his indentured contract by his labor. On 24 July 1651, he acquired 250 acres of land under the headright system by buying the contracts of five indentured servants, one of whom was his son Richard Johnson. The land was located on the Great Naswattock Creek which flowed into the Pungoteague River in Northampton County, Virginia.

In 1652 “an unfortunate fire” caused “great losses” for the family, and Johnson applied to the courts for tax relief. The court reduced the family’s taxes and on 28 February 1652, exempted his wife Mary and their two daughters from paying taxes at all “during their natural lives.” At that time taxes were levied on people not property. Under the 1645 Virginia taxation act, “all negro men and women and all other men from the age of 16 to 60 shall be judged tithable.” It is unclear from the records why the Johnson women were exempted, but the change gave them the same social standing as white women, who were not taxed. During the case, the justices noted that Anthony and Mary “have lived Inhabitants in Virginia (above thirty years)” and had been respected for their “hard labor and known service”.

In 1653, John Casor, a black indentured servant whose contract Johnson appeared to have bought in the early 1640s, approached Captain Goldsmith, claiming his indenture had expired seven years earlier and that he was being held illegally by Johnson. A neighbor, Robert Parker, intervened and persuaded Johnson to free Casor.

In 1657, Johnson’s white neighbor, Edmund Scarborough, forged a letter in which Johnson acknowledged a debt. Johnson did not contest the case. Johnson was illiterate and could not have written the letter; nevertheless, the court awarded Scarborough 100 acres of Johnson’s land to pay off his alleged “debt.”

Anthony Johnson moved his family to Somerset County, Maryland, where he negotiated a lease on a 300-acre plot of land for ninety-nine years. He developed the property as a tobacco farm, which he named Tories Vineyards. Mary survived, and in 1672 she bequeathed a cow to each of her grandsons. In 1677, Anthony and Mary’s grandson, John Jr., purchased a 44-acre farm which he named Angola. John Jr. died without leaving an heir, however, and by 1730, the Johnson family had vanished from the historical records.

Source: Anthony Johnson, Wikipedia.

Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks (circa 1723 – March 5, 1770) was the first person to die in the Boston Massacre. After being killed at the Boston Massacre, Attucks became a martyr of the American Revolution. He also became a symbol for the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement, both in the 18th century and the 19th century.

Aside from how he died, historians do not know much about Attucks’ life. His father, Prince Yonger, was a slave who had been born in Africa; his mother, Nancy Attucks, was a Wampanoag Native American. One of Crispus Attucks’ ancestors was John Attucks of Massachusetts, who was hanged during King Philip’s War.

Attucks himself may have been a freeman, or may have escaped slavery. Some evidence suggests that Attucks was born a slave in Framingham, Massachusetts, but escaped from slavery. In 1750, William Brown, a slave-owner in Framingham, put out an advertisement about a runaway slave named Crispus. In the advertisement, Brown offered a reward of 10 pounds to whoever found and returned Attucks to him. The description in the advertisement fit Crispus Attucks.

Attucks may have worked as a dockworker or a merchant seaman. He definitely became a sailor and spent most of the rest of his life at sea. He often worked on whalers, which involved long trips at sea. Many historians also believe that he went by the alias “Michael Johnson” in order to avoid being caught and sent back to slavery. He may only have been temporarily in Boston in early 1770, having recently returned from a voyage to the Bahamas. He was due to leave shortly afterwards on a ship for North Carolina.

The five people killed in the Massacre were buried as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground, which also contains the graves of Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

The deaths of five Americans in the Boston Massacre enraged the American people and helped trigger the start of the American Revolution. Paul Revere, a silversmith in Boston, created a famous image depicting the Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks was not included in the image. All of the men in Revere’s image of the Boston Massacre are white. Crispus Attucks was excluded from this depiction of an important event in American history on the basis of his race.

Attucks became a symbol of the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement in the 18th century. In the early 19th century, as the abolitionist movement gained strength in Boston, supporters praised Attucks as an African American who played a heroic role in the history of the United States. Because Attucks was of mixed African and Native American heritage, he also became an important figure in Native American history.

Source: Crispus Attucks, Wikipedia.

Anthony Johnson

There was a time in North America, in the early days of the first colonies, when whites and blacks enjoyed some legal equality. Slavery existed but had not yet adopted the character of economic pillar of those territories and, as a legal figure, coexisted with another job category, the servant.

One of those servants that was so frequent in Virginia was Anthony Johnson , a black originally from Africa, allegedly born around the year 1600 and captured in what is now Angola by an enemy tribe that, as usual, sold to slavers and, in turn, passed him on to the slave dealers of the Virginia Company .

Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1621 aboard the ship James. Its authentic name is ignored because it was registered in the census simply with the qualification of “a negro”, although later he was baptized as Antonio. He was sold to a certain Bennet, a white landowner who had a tobacco plantation.

It is interesting to note that he was not sold as a slave exactly, but as servant , which implied a legal work contract and the manumission at the end of it, normally after a period between four and seven years, provided that he promised to stay in the country. Servants working conditions, although harsh, were better than those of the slaves, with a certain margin of freedom in their movements.

The majority of the blacks of the British colonies of that initial period were attached to that modality, not to slavery; in fact, not only blacks since there were also white servants from other countries (mainly Scotland and Ireland).

Except for those who had a lifelong commitment, which de facto turned them into slaves, by fulfilling the contract the others obtained freedom along with land to work. Some who prospered even bought servants in turn.

On March 22, 1622, on Good Friday, Native Americans attacked Jamestown to avenge the death of one of their own at the hands of a white man. The city was warned in time and could defend itself but not the thirty homes that were distributed in the surroundings, which produced a tremendous massacre that ended with about four hundred settlers killed, a third of the population.

One of the assaulted plantations was that of Bennet, in which Native Americans killed almost everyone: only five people out of a total of fifty-seven were saved but Antonio was one of them. He had just been reborn. The following year when he married an African woman named Mary.

Both were released around 1635 and it was then that Antonio went on to adopt the name of Anthony Johnson.

With freedom they received a lot of lands that later expanded until becoming owners of a hundred hectares in Naswattock (Northampton, Virginia) in 1651. Johnson appears in the official register for certain transactions, such as the purchase of livestock and the hiring of five servants, four of them white and the fifth black.

However, his life was not easy and although there were some joys, such as the birth of several children, they also encountered adversity, in the case of a fire that almost destroyed everything they had in 1652.

In order to face it, they requested by judicial means a tax exemption that was granted to them by the mother and the two daughters -then it was taxed by family members, not by the properties-, which in practice equaled the Jonhsons with the females white, which were also free of encumbrances. According to the words of the judges, it was a working and esteemed family in the community.

This did not prevent a year after a new issue in the courts, after John Casor , the black servant , denounced Johnson on the grounds that his contract had expired seven years ago. The case, somewhat confused, became more tangled when a neighbor named Robert Parker meddled in hiring the plaintiff.

Johnson felt cheated and denounced Parker demanding that his servant be reinstated. After an adverse judgment and the corresponding appeal, in the spring of 1655 the court of Northampton ignored the testimony of two white farmers who corroborated Casor’s story and ordered that he be returned to Johnson, remaining in his possession for life .

It was the first sentence in the history of the Thirteen Colonies that condemned someone to perpetual servitude without committing any crime. Or put another way, the first one that made someone a slave in practice; John Punch, whom we mentioned at the beginning, had preceded him in 1640 but as a consequence of a punishment for his attempt to escape, not for a civil suit, and there was the nuance.

The times when the law was above the race began to change before the evidence of the convenience of slavery as the basis of the economy and the ease for it, since most blacks were illiterate and many barely spoke English, so they still knew how to interpret their contracts.

Anthony Johnson himself is a perfect example. Although he did not know how to read or write, in 1657 a neighbor of his, Edmund Scarborough, presented to the court an alleged letter from him admitting a debt to him. Johnson did not sue and the judges decreed that forty hectares be seized to compensate the plaintiff.

Seeing the outlook, aggravated by the growing racism in Virginia and finished with the approval in 1665 of the Partus sequitur ventrem , which changed the current law in England to grant the mother rather than the paternal way the legal consideration of the child (so that the children of slaves were born slaves), the Johnson chose to move to Maryland .

There, in the county of Somerset, he leased one hundred and twenty hectares for a period of ninety-nine years to grow tobacco. The plantation was called Tories Vineyards and in it lived Anthony and Mary, thriving economically, until his death in 1670; she followed him two years later.

In 1677 one of his grandchildren expanded the properties buying another farm which he named as Angola, in homage to the original land of his family. This one stopped appearing in the official documentation in the second quarter of the 18th century and its trace was lost, fused with other surnames.

Anthony Johnson is considered the dean of the Africans who achieved their freedom and became owners. Until a few years before the Civil War there were almost four thousand black slave owners, which in some states such as South Carolina was equivalent to forty-three percent of free blacks.

In that same state, without going any further, the greatest slaveholder of the first half of the nineteenth century was not white but a black ex-slave manumitido called William Ellison- name taken from his former master-who achieved more wealth than most of the white settlers.

Not all of them were rich landowners, of course, but there were also small entrepreneurs and artisans, but in total they had more than twelve thousand seven hundred slaves. Business is business and does not make distinctions between races.

Source: Alvarez, Jorge. Anthony Johnson, the dean of the black slavers of North America. 2017, May 6.

Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks (c.1723–March 5, 1770) was a Bostonian laborer killed at the Boston Massacre. Very little is known for certain about his life. He is thought to have been a runaway slave with mixed African and Native American ancestry. An October 2, 1750 advertisement placed in the Boston Gazette may refer to him: “ran away from his Master William Brown from Framingham, on the 30th of Sept. last, a Mollato Fellow, about 27 years of age, named Crispas, 6 Feet two inches high, short curl’d Hair, his knees near together than common: had on a light colour’d Bearskin Coat.” The owner offered a reward of £10 for his return.

Attucks had become a sailor and laborer. He is remembered for being part of a crowd of 30 or more workers protesting against the presence of British troops in Boston. Boston had been under military occupation since 1768. Colonial sailors resented the presence of the British because of the danger of press gangs. Other workers in Boston were disturbed because British soldiers worked part-time jobs at low wages in order to supplement their army pay, which potentially took away jobs and drove down wages for the colonial workers. Revolutionaries such as Samuel Adams actively encouraged these protest against the soldiers.

Tensions had been rising over the weekend when the crowd appeared before the British barracks, where some teenage boys were involved in an incident with the soldiers. Attucks has been often depicted as one of the leaders of the crowd. Eventually, despite attempts by their officer to prevent it, the eight soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot fired, killing five members of the crowd: Attucks and three white men.

Samuel Adams’s cousin, John Adams, successfully defended the British soldiers against a charge of murder, calling the crowd “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.”

Samuel Adams, on the other hand, gave the event the name of the Boston Massacre and assured that it would not be forgotten. The five who were killed were buried as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground, despite laws against burying blacks with whites.

The Boston Massacre was an important event that underscored the commitment of ordinary Americans to the ideas of the coming revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to Crispus Attucks in the introduction of Why We Can’t Wait as a specific example of a man whose contribution to history has been overlooked by standard histories.

Source: Herschel Levit. Crispus Attucks – First Patriot Killed in Boston Massacre, March 6, 1770. Flickr.

Summary

American history should not be presented as exclusively the history of white males. America has been a very diverse nation throughout its history. Unfortunately, the lives of African Americans have often been omitted from traditional narratives of American history.

Anthony Johnson was one of the first African American men to reside in colonial Virginia. He began his life as an indentured servant. Ultimately, he gained his freedom, married, and acquired a 250 acre estate in Northampton County, Virginia. Anthony Johnson was quite prosperous and owned several indentured servants.

Crispus Attucks likely began his life as a slave. He escaped from slavery. He participate in protests against British taxation in 1770 in Boston. He was among five Americans killed in the Boston Massacre. He was excluded from Paul Revere’s depiction of the Boston Massacre on the basis of his race.