Crispus Attucks Custom Leather Briefcase
A briefcase made to look old on purpose, named for a man the record barely holds
I made exactly one Crispus Attucks, style 2056. Single gusset, suede lining, a flat handle, rings at the top corners for a strap, every stitch by hand. It was a good idea that nobody wanted, and that’s why this is a history lesson now instead of a product page.
Video: “Marcellino Latch – How It Works,” Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube, November 11, 2016. This is a different briefcase from the Crispus Attucks. It shows the latch I put on my cases, the same latch that got painted on this one.
Brown bridle leather, sanded until it fought back
English bridle leather is made to be smooth. It is vegetable tanned, then stuffed with waxes and tallows, and the result is a hide that sheds water and takes a polish (Buckleguy). A tanner works for weeks to get that surface.
I took a brown bridle hide and sanded it down on purpose. Rough. The idea was to cut through the smooth, slick face and leave something with tooth, then repaint it antique brown, so a new briefcase would look as if it had been carried for a hundred years before it left the shop.
The original Marcellino latch got the same treatment. Brass hardware, painted antique brown to match.
Sanding finished leather is a strange act. Everything the tannery did to make the surface perfect, I undid by hand. Then I had to put a color back on it, and the color had to look like time rather than like paint.
Hand stitched, one gusset
The construction is simple. One gusset, where most of my cases have two. A flat handle, and rings at the top corners for a strap. Suede inside.
I cut and stitched it by hand, the way I stitch everything. A single gusset makes a slimmer, more upright case, and it leaves fewer seams to catch the eye. On a piece whose whole point was the look of age, fewer seams meant a calmer surface for the finish to sit on.
Suede is the lining I reach for when I want the inside to feel quiet. Papers slide against it without a sound.
The man on the name
I named it for Crispus Attucks because the finish looked to me like something dug up rather than made, and he is a figure the record carries in pieces.
According to the National Park Service, Attucks was of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1723, and worked as a sailor (NPS). His last name is of Indigenous origin, from the Natick word for deer. On March 5, 1770, witnesses placed him at the head of a group of sailors marching toward King Street in Boston, where a crowd had gathered around a small group of British soldiers. The soldiers of the 29th Regiment fired. Attucks was killed, along with four other men, and is generally counted as the first person killed in the American Revolution.
The NPS page says plainly that his life is far less documented than his death. How and when he gained his freedom is unknown. It also links him to an advertisement for an escaped man called “Crispas,” then notes that it can’t confirm the two are the same person.
Even his image moved around. Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the shooting left him out, and John Adams, defending the soldiers, painted him as the aggressor, while other witnesses said he stood aside leaning on a stick (The Henry Ford). By 1855 an artist put him at the center of the scene, and abolitionists called him the first martyr of the Revolution.
A man whose face and role were repainted by each generation. Then a briefcase with a repainted face. I didn’t plan the parallel, but I saw it the moment the paint dried.
Where it would have gone
I built it with a lawyer’s desk in mind, and I say that from experience: the latch came out of requests from lawyers who wanted a bag they could open fast without giving up a traditional look, and I’ve said in my videos that it came to me from them. A rough, antique-brown case suits a historian, a professor, a trial lawyer who wants a briefcase that looks like it already has stories in it. Someone who walks into a room and wants the bag to say that this work has a past.
It also suits the person who hates scratches. A finish that starts out worn can’t be ruined by wear.
Why it never caught on
Nobody asked for a second one. I made it, I showed it, and the market answered with silence. I can’t tell you precisely why. Maybe a customer who pays for bridle leather wants to watch the bridle leather become old on their own shoulder, not receive it already finished that way. That is a guess, not something anyone told me.
So there’s one. Style 2056, the Crispus Attucks, made once, and not offered for sale.
