SYNOPSIS

American Independence was not won easily. Americans went up against Mother England, the World Power in those days who already had a significant military presence in the Colonies and an impressive Navy off shore. Few Americans had fought the French and Indian War and the great tradition of American military prowess was a Century away. English leaders were steeped in combat experience many times—such being the fate of a World Power that had a significant Colonial Empire to suppress—one that the Sun never set on.

The reasons why we won the war were as followed: The Atlantic Ocean that was a great barrier to supplying an occupational Army, The French intervention at Yorktown Harbor which gave the American Patriots the opportunity to deliver the knockout blow that brought Cornwallis to the surrender table. Also important was the surprise morale-building attack on foreign mercenaries in Trenton. Most historians discount the active participation of the Southern Colonies who fought valiently with Northern Colonies, acting against their own economic interests. England was a big customer of tobacco and their mills were supplied handsomely with Southern Raw Cotton. The Northern Colonies counted on the upcoming Industrial Revolution for future riches, and the British did not like competition.

Crispus Attucks was the major figure in the early struggle. A sailor who rallied Bostonians to walk into certain death from an assembled firing squad of British Regulars. His ethnic background was half African-American and half Native American. He was born into slavery in 1723 and escaped his enslavement to become a dockyard worker, a whaler and a contract farmer.

His actions on March 5, 1770 in front of Custom House, on King Street, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, England were so noted and heroic that he was buried with all his other honored American brethren in the Granary Burial Grounds. Imagine a fugitive slave laid to rest next to such noted Bostonians as John Hancock and James Otis.

We know he used an alias(Michael Johnson) to escape recapture. History is filled with remarkable irony. Why would an escaped fugitive slave lead such a revolt after spending much of his life in bondage? Many historians say it was drunkenness, Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, came up with the same assessment of the all the ‘Wild Irishmen’ he met in his Colonial days despite the fact that old Ben was no stranger to the bottled grape himself.

I have to ask my readers to not suspend their disbelief but to reread Colonial History and come to their own conclusions. I shop my novels before I publish (telling the tale in a social setting usually a working class bar). The number one objection to my narrative is the regional pride in liberal Massachusetts. Massachusetts was neck deep in the slave trade. John Hancock not only owned slaves but his family shipping business ferried slaves from Africa to the New World, making him the richest man in New England because of this heinous trade. Hancock only became a true Revolutionary Patriot when the British seized his pleasure yacht named Liberty, in recompense of a shipment of untaxed smuggled Madera, The Sons of Liberty took him in as one of theirs because waging war costs money and Hancock had it. Before he became an ardent big-signature Patriot, he informed on his competitors smuggling activities to Custom House officials. So the next time my fellow holier-than-thou New Englanders buy a sledge hammer to mow down statues of Washington and Jefferson, you might want to buy another one for Hancock and the other Northern slave owners. Most people I encountered rejected the tale because they were never taught in school that slavery existed in Colonial Massachusetts, It was abolished 1n 1833 a few decades before the Civil War.

I take these few facts we know on the man whom I consider was most responsible for the start of the American Revolutionary War.

I take Attucks from birth to death and fill in the blanks of which there are so many. I chronicle his days of freedom, his life on the sea and his many travels, the conflicts between his heritage of a one-God and a many God dogma.