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This chapter examines how black Bay Staters in the 1850s strove to claim “manhood” and “citizenship” by representing themselves and their ancestors as agents in history. This endeavor was especially pressing after 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act made African Americans vulnerable to slave catchers, even on the professedly free ground of the North. In this context, Crispus Attucks, who had largely been forgotten in early national commemorations of the Revolutionary War, assumed his place as black America's finest example of patriotism and heroism. The leading figure in the effort to recover the agency of Attucks and other black patriots was William Cooper Nell, an abolitionist, integrationist, and historian who published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855. This chapter interprets the revival of interest in black Revolutionary heroism in the context of the struggle for African American civil rights in Massachusetts, with particular attention to the effort to allow black men to serve in the militia.

With a focus on early representations of the Boston Massacre and the Battle of Bunker Hill, this chapter argues that the individuals publicly honored as heroes of the Revolutionary War in the period up to the War of 1812 were primarily those with recognized political, social, and cultural authority: elite white men. Early accounts of these pivotal Revolutionary events noted the presence, but not generally the political agency, of people of color. This chapter develops this argument by exploring the commemoration (or lack thereof) of the Revolutionary contributions of Crispus Attucks and black military veterans, including Primus Hall, Peter Salem, Salem Poor, and Edom London. The sources include both visual culture and print culture, including an analysis of John Trumbull's painting of Bunker Hill.

The epilogue follows the commemoration of Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, and other Revolutionary‐era blacks through the Civil War and beyond. It also considers how William Cooper Nell's call for black citizenship was — and was not — fulfilled in the formation of the Fifty‐fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1863. Drawing on the famous monument to the Fifty‐fourth and other post‐Civil War memorials in Boston, the epilogue assesses the ongoing significance of commemorative spaces and activities in Massachusetts.