Before there was a declaration, before there was a congress or president, before there was a Constitution, there was a boy.
On February 22, 1770, eleven-year-old German immigrant Christopher Seider, an apprentice, protested outside the home of loyalist Ebenezer Richardson.
He shouted one word: “Importer!”
A customs officer fired into the crowd and Seider was shot.
In 1770 Boston, “importer” was synonymous with traitor.
It was an accusation—an indictment—because importers represented far more than merchants. They represented something far more wide-reaching, far more insidious. The implications went straight to the heart of a conflict that would follow the burgeoning union all the way to the Civil War.
After Parliament imposed taxes through the Townshend Acts, colonists organized non-importation boycotts, refusing imported goods. Yet some merchants continued importing anyway.
And what moved through this system?
The West Indian Company slave-made goods: sugar, molasses, rum. Delicious extravagances. These were the staples that would become the wealth of an empire—growing by bondage.
Dockworkers and sailors apprentices watched powerful men profit while ordinary people sacrificed.
So when young Christopher Seider shouted “Importer!” his words carried weight. He was denouncing a cancerous institution.
When the customs officer named Richardson fired into the crowd moments later, and his shot struck the 11-year-old Seider, a child became one of the first martyrs of the American struggle for liberty.
The death of the child drove a political shockwave through Boston and Seider's funeral drew thousands. The city mourned and tensions rose.
Among those who attended the funeral and delivered speeches was John Hancock—merchant, patriot, and one of several men who would serve as president of the Continental Congress thirteen years before the Constitution created the office of President that Americans know today.
Less than two weeks later, on March 5, 1770, another protest erupted.
This time, among the crowd stood Crispus Attucks—a sailor, rope-maker, dockworker, and man of African and Indigenous ancestry.
Like Seider, Attucks understood the provenance of the imported goods arriving regularly in Boston Harbor. As a sailor and dockworker, he lived in the world of ships, cargo, and Atlantic commerce. This enabled Attucks to understand commerce not as theory, but through labor. He saw firsthand the economic machinery of empire: goods flowing through ports and wealth accumulating among the elite, while ordinary laborers carried the burden. And what moved through those ships? Again it was the West Indian Company’s slave-made goods.
The effect of Seider’s death was still fresh in the mind when tensions escalated between colonists and British soldiers on that cold evening of March 5 that would become known as the Boston Massacre. Colonists were frustrated by heavy taxation and military oversight. Attucks stood among a group of colonists resisting the military occupation and economic oppression when shots rang out.
Attucks fell first and the Boston Massacre had begun.
An immigrant child’s death followed by a dockworker of African and Indigenous ancestry eleven days later. Both victims of imperial violence, but equally so, both helped awaken a movement.
Next came the music of resistance.
Five years later in 1775, in the first major battle of the American Revolution at Bunker Hill, another Massachusetts patriot enters our story: Barzillai Lew.
A free Black man born in Groton, Massachusetts, Barzillai (pronounced bar-ZIL-eye) Lew was a cooper, a laborer who made barrels, a soldier, and a musician. Like Attucks, he understood labor. Lew was also a husband who reportedly secured his wife’s freedom.
And when war came, Lew became a Minuteman—ordinary colonists trained to be ready to fight at a minute’s notice. Minutemen were not professional soldiers but were community members. They were workers, tradesmen, neighbors. Men expected to be prepared to leave off work and home in a moment's notice to defend their community.
Barzillai Lew brought more than courage to the battlefield. He brought a fife. During the Revolution the fife was not only a source of entertainment but it provided vital strategic information amongst the ranks. Across smoke-filled battlefields, where voices disappeared beneath cannon fire, the fife clearly communicated commands to march, advance, regroup, or hold formation.
Among the songs associated with the Revolution was “Yankee Doodle”—once sung by the British to mock colonists, later reclaimed by the revolutionaries as a badge of pride. So while the fife’s tune became communication, its rhythm became resistance.
At Bunker Hill, Lew reportedly played while British fire rained down, helping sustain morale among colonial troops.
Barzillai Lew’s fife survives today, preserved at the DuSable Black History Museum, founded by descendants determined to preserve the very stories too often pushed to the margins...
Then came the signatures.
The Revolution ended and the work of building a nation would consume the fledgling nation. The four years between the end of the war and the signing of the Constitution brought financial uncertainly and regulatory chaos.
John Hancock—merchant, patriot, president of the Continental Congress, later governor of Massachusetts—did far more than sign boldly. Long before George Washington became president under the Constitution, Hancock was already presiding over a nation struggling to be born.
John Hancock served as president of the Continental Congress from 1975 to 1977. He was one of several men to hold that office before there was a constitutional presidency.
Hancock presided over the Congress that declared independence. He helped place George Washington at the head of the Continental Army. And many expected Hancock himself to become the nation’s first president after the war.
Notably, John Hancock never purchased human beings and, as governor of Massachusetts, he stood with the abolitionist movement during the period that slavery collapsed under constitutional and legal challenge.
On July 4, 1776, Hancock signed boldly. So boldly, legend says, that King George could read his name without spectacles. The message was unmistakable: there would be no hiding, no backpedaling, no anonymous rebellion. Only commitment.
Yet here is what many forget: the United States had no president when it was signed into being in 1776. George Washington would not become president until thirteen years later, in 1789.
A political gap in time roughly equivalent to the years separating the leadership of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Meaning a lot changed. Politics shifted, power shifted, priorities shifted. And many men who signed the Declaration were not present at the signing of the Constitution. Only a handful signed both.
Which raises a question: Whose America are we remembering?
The child martyr’s? The dockworker’s? The Black fifer’s? The president-before-the-presidency’s? Or only the men who later held office?
On this Juneteenth, remember that before George Washington there was Christopher Seider, there was Crispus Attucks, there was Barzillai Lew. And there was John Hancock, the man whose signature became legend and whose leadership predated the presidency by thirteen years. This Juneteenth, remember the revolution that had already been written in the labor, music, courage, and blood, of ordinary people.
