All Men Are Created Equal Slavery and the American Revolution "How is it," asked Samuel Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes ?" The British author was only one of many Europeans who thought it strange that a nation run by slave owners should be so noisily demanding its own freedom.

This same bitter inconsistency was embodied in the death of Crispus Attucks.

A mulatto slave who had run away from his Massachusetts master in 1750, he spent the next twenty years working as a seaman and living in constant fear of capture and punishment.

In 1770, he, with four others, was killed in the Boston Massacre.

Ironically, the first man to die in the Colonial fight for freedom was both an Afro-American and a runaway slave.