Teapot

Teapot Unknown Historic New England
Maker Unknown
Title Teapot
Date of Creation 1750–70
Location Boston, Massachusetts, or England
Materials Pewter, wood
Institution Historic New England
Credit Line Gift of Miss S.E. Kimball through the Bostonian Society
Accession Number 1918.1655
Photo Credit Peter Harholdt
Category Metalwork

At first glance, this teapot with its broken foot and worn handle merely suggests a long and productive history of use in a Colonial New England household. However, its association with Crispus Attucks—the first casualty of the Boston Massacre of 1770—transformed this humble household object into an important historical relic. Crispus Attucks (1723–70) was a man of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, formerly enslaved by William Brown of Framingham, and who by 1770 was working as a sailor and dockworker in Boston with plans to travel south to North Carolina on his next voyage. On March 5, 1770, Attucks was among the group of sailors who clashed with armed British soldiers, a conflict that would later be called the Boston Massacre. Eyewitnesses described how Attucks was the first of the colonists to die, “killed instantly” by British musket fire. Immediately following the event, the Sons of Liberty condemned the attack on Boston citizenry. Paul Revere included Crispus Attucks in his iconic engraving of the Boston Massacre, immortalizing him as a martyr for the American Revolution. In the decades following the Boston Massacre, descendants of William Brown inherited this teapot and a small pewter cup with a history of them belonging to Crispus Attucks. Such a claim suggests that the Brown family recaptured Attucks after he ran away in 1750 and permitted him to work as a sailor, during which time the pewter items came into his possession. By the 1850s, Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell made Attucks the center of the Boston Massacre story and commemorated the anniversary by exhibiting this teapot alongside other “relics” of the Revolution. This process transformed Crispus Attucks—and by association this object—into a powerful symbol of Black patriotism and resistance.