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During the nineteenth century, freed enslaved Africans in the North designated March 5th a holiday to commemorate the sacrifice of Crispus Attucks. Attucks, who worked as a sailor, had been the first person killed in the long conflict over the question of colonial independence during what has become known as the Boston Massacre in 1770. In the North, among abolitionists his life demonstrated how intertwined Black lives were with the founding of the American republic. They added evidence of Attucks’s sacrifice as well as the sacrifice of many more free and enslaved African patriots to the ledger of proof of African America’s loyalty and as a rationale for the ending of the system of enslavement. <ref> John Ernest, ''Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861'' (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 141.</ref>