Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth

by Holger Hoock

Then the grenadiers fired a round of shots. By the time Preston managed to stop the firing, three men lay dead in the snow, two more were dying, another half dozen were wounded. One bullet had hit the rope maker Samuel Gray, “entering his head and beating off a large portion of his skull.” Through the streaming blood, one bystander ascertained a hole “as big as my hand.” Crispus Attucks, a forty-seven-year-old former slave of Native American and African heritage who was passing through Boston, was felled by two bullets to his chest, one of them “goring the right lobe of the lungs and a great part of the liver most horribly.” Two bullets killed James Caldwell, a ship’s mate. Apprentice Samuel Maverick, seventeen, was hit in his stomach by a bullet that had ricocheted off a wall; although a doctor was able to remove the projectile, the teenager died in the morning.