Land & Labor Acknowledgements: Enslavement in New England

Abstract:
This article examines the lesser-known account book of Cesar Lyndon, an enslaved man in Newport, Rhode Island. Lyndon's extant account book—from 1761 to 1771—chronicles his financial transactions with Newport's famed slave traders as well as free and enslaved persons. Lyndon—by way of double-entry bookkeeping—itemizes the sale and acquisition of goods and services. He notes deaths, marriages, and a pig roast. Lyndon and his nearly thirty-five-page account book invites us to consider the ordinary and to examine the account book as a literary genre, despite the ways in which it may trouble a presentist African American literary tradition. Lyndon's lists document the kinds of everyday living that are complicit in slavery's business rather than decidedly resistant to it.

Abstract:
This essay examines the African colonization movements that emerged in Rhode Island and Nova Scotia to demonstrate the complex ways the American Revolution affected the Black Atlantic. In particular it examines how the repatriation movement in Rhode Island reflects the ways Atlantic creoles and their syncretic cultural and political outlook shaped their vision of African colonization. The essay also explores the political and economic goals of blacks who left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone, arguing that their idea of independence was rooted in a pre-modern view of competency that challenged the larger liberal impulse that defined the broader Anglo-American Atlantic world. Collectively, the African colonization movements in Rhode Island and Nova Scotia represent the apotheosis of the cultural and social exchange that defined the Black Atlantic in the pre-Revolutionary period.

Abstract:
This article examines why Boston's slave and free black population consisted of more than 1,500 people in 1750, but by 1790 Boston was home to only 766 people of African descent. This disappearing act, where the town's black population declined by at least fifty per cent between 1763 and 1790, can only be explained by exploring slavery, abolition, and their legacies in Boston. Slaves were vital to the town's economy, filling skilled positions and providing labor for numerous industries. Using the skills acquired to challenge their enslavement, Afro-Bostonians found freedom during the American revolutionary era. Nevertheless, as New England's rural economy collapsed, young white men and women from all over the region flooded Boston looking for work, driving down wages, and competing with black people for menial employment. Forced out of the labor market, many former slaves and their descendants left the region entirely. Others joined the Continental or British armies and never returned home. Moreover, many slave owners, knowing that slavery was coming to an end in Massachusetts, sold their bondsmen and women to other colonies in the Americas where slavery was still legal and profitable. Thus, the long-term legacy of abolition for black Bostonians was that Boston's original enslaved population largely disappeared, while the city became a hub of abolitionism by the 1830s. Boston's abolitionist community – many the descendants of slaveholders – did not have to live with their forefathers’ sins. Instead, they crafted a narrative of a free Boston, making it an attractive destination for runaway slaves from across the Atlantic world.

Abstract:
This Report from the Field is a post-mortem reflection on a statewide memorialization project on slavery that ultimately failed. In this essay, I attribute the failure of the project in large part to conflicting historical approaches and claims to narrative authority over the representation of a specifically Rhode Island image of slavery. Although the organization studied here no longer exists, other nascent grassroots organizations dedicated to the memorialization of slavery and grappling with issues of emerging narratives and competing claims to local memory may derive benefit from my analysis and the proposed "scaffolded conversations" with which I conclude.

Abstract:
In this article, I use the lens of critical family history—and the history of the Doane family—to undertake an analysis of Anglo-American settler colonialism in the New England region of the United States. My standpoint in writing this narrative is as a twelfth-generation descendant of Deacon John Doane, who arrived in Plymouth Colony circa 1630 and whose family history is intertwined with issues of settler colonial conquest and dispossession, enslavement, erasure, and the creation of myths of origin and possession. This analysis is also grounded in the larger contexts of the history of New England and the history of the United States. I conclude with a reflection upon the implications of settler colonial myths and historical erasure for current racial politics in the United States.

Abstract:
In genealogy, tracing names and dates is often the initial goal, but, for many, desire soon turns to learning about the embodied lives of those who came before them. This type of texture is hard for any genealogist to locate, but excruciatingly hard for those seeking to trace family histories that include ancestors who were enslaved in the northern parts of the colonies that would become the United States. Often, records thin to nearly nothing and frame all lived experiences through the lens of an enslaver. This is true especially of public records, created, maintained, and curated by the state apparatus. By adhering to the proposition that even materials that do not immediately reveal much about Black life may be useful if we consider what is missing and left out, this article suggests that these types of documents might help breathe some fullness into the individual and collective lives of those Black ancestors whose humanity the state denied. Emerging from a larger project to locate stories and histories of Black residents of one of the first colonized spaces in British North America, this article focuses on the ways in which the publicly available Massachusetts pre-1850 Vital Records—which have specific “Negroes” sections—serve as an unexpected source of useful, if fragmentary, evidence of not only individual lives, but collective histories of the communities in which Black ancestors lived. Highlighting creative approaches to analyzing these particular vital records, and centering women’s lives throughout, this article demonstrates what is possible to learn about patterns of childbearing, relationships between and among enslaved persons owned by different families, the nature of religious lives or practices, relationships between enslavers and enslaved, and the movements, over time, of individuals and families. Alongside these possibilities, the violence, limitations, and challenges of the vital records are identified, including issues related to Afro-indigenous persons, the conflation of birth and baptismal records, and differential access to details of the lives of enslaved men vs. women.

Abstract:
In 1839, several white Quaker women in Providence, Rhode Island, founded the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans; they sought to take in the city’s orphans. During the first years of operation, dozens of African American parents admitted and withdrew their children from the Association. The vast majority of the children admitted had living parents or were paid boarders. In 1846, the Association incorporated as the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Children with an enlarged mission to provide for the support and education of black children. During the final collapse of slavery in Rhode Island, black parents transformed an orphanage into an institution that also offered short- and long-term care and education for wards and boarders. In doing so, they expanded the work of white reformers from raising African American children to supporting their needs as working parents.

Abstract:
During the Revolutionary era, two slaves, one named Leander from South Carolina and another named Caesar from Massachusetts, legally verified their new free status after long battles to become free. These two cases expose some similarities in the slave systems of Massachusetts and South Carolina. However, they more strongly show deep differences in the legal status of slaves in the emerging nation. Caesar legally established his freedom by suing his master, and Leander registered his emancipation with the South Carolina Secretary of State's office. While the legal system in Massachusetts protected Caesar's right to own property, to make a contract, to sue and have other blacks testify on behalf of him, Leander's legal action marked a protection for him against re-enslavement since free blacks and slaves had practically no legal status in South Carolina. These two legal systems were always fundamentally different, but it was not until the American Revolution when many slaves like Caesar and Leander demanded freedom that these divisions became evident.

Abstract:
As historians are well aware, emancipation laws like the one in Rhode Island by no means eliminated the significance of race in the cultures or law books of the newly "free" states. What is less well studied, however, are the specific tools that government officials and ordinary people used to hammer race into public policy in the North after slavery declined. This article will focus on early republican Rhode Islanders and their innovative uses of the poor law both to define and police racial boundaries, even in the aftermath of slavery. While liberating black Rhode Islanders from slavery, legislators and other government officials moved quickly to shore up the poor laws as the centerpiece in a new system of coercion for people of color. Increasingly after 1784, Rhode Island elites wrote new poor laws and also reinterpreted old, race-neutral, poor laws in order to corral people of African descent into a new inferior legal and cultural status in place of slavery. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract:
In 1773–74 and again in 1777, people of African descent in Massachusetts successfully lobbied a governing body to take up the question of slavery as it related to an entire enslaved population. The essay examines their petitions, the first such abolitionist activity in the colonies and in England as well.

Abstract:
According to the historiography, eighteenth-century Atlantic slave-traders were primarily wealthy, prominent men who, as a small, elite group of merchants controlled the bulk of the trade. Through an examination of ship-ownership records, estate inventories, tax records and other primary sources, this article will challenge that interpretation, demonstrating that, at least in Rhode Island, the slave-trade was characterized by a fairly large number of slave-traders from diverse occupational backgrounds and levels of society. While some were wealthy merchants, actively pursuing overseas or coastal trade, many more were of a middling sort who invested in only one or two ventures apiece in their lifetimes. Since most large and small investors were engaged in commercial activities directly or indirectly related to the slave-trade, the broad base of the trade underlines the pervasive influence of slavery and the slave-trade within Rhode Island society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Abstract:
In the summer of 1748, authorities in colonial America issued a warrant for the arrest and imprisonment of a baker named Peter Johnson. Acting on these orders, the sheriff apprehended and detained Johnson ‘a negro man’ also known as Primus, for refusing to serve as the slave of George Massey. Massey claimed that he owned Johnson, swearing under oath that Johnson was a ‘slave for life’ and as such had no right to refuse to work for him. Having purchased Johnson for £43 from a man named Joseph Hicks, Massey argued that the slave's ‘stubborn and rebellious’ attitude was criminal. Johnson had to choose between submitting to Massey or remaining incarcerated until he could plead his case in court. He preferred the latter. Despite sworn affidavits and testimony to the contrary, Johnson maintained that he had never been a slave and was not obliged to submit to Massey or anyone else.

Abstract:
In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts pronounced Quock Walker--and all other slaves in the commonwealth--free. In that stroke, the court transformed Massachusetts from the first colony to legalize slavery into the first state immediately to deny its citizenry the right to hold human property.

Abstract:
The present essay explores the ways in which new sensibilities toward the transatlantic slave trade resulted in moments of tension that changed the behavior of the most active slave trading family in U.S. history, the D'Wolfs of Bristol, Rhode Island. Through the trajectory of the D'Wolfs' activities I analyze the characteristics of the late Rhode Island slave trade and how the age of abolition shaped those characteristics. This new context brought tensions that pervaded New England families such as the Browns and the DeWolfs, yet its full effects remain unknown. The article argues that the isolation of Bristol as the main slave trading center in Rhode Island was a product of these tensions. Also taken into consideration is the unique connection between Rhode Islanders and Cuban slavery in the aftermath of the 1807 act abolishing the African slave trade to the United States.

Although the complex role of African Americans, both enslaved and free, in colonial Massachusetts is an important part of our state and local history, the struggle for personal liberty in Massachusetts is central to a full understanding of our national history.

This website features 117 items from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This group of unique manuscripts and rare published materials includes handwritten documents and letters (Phillis Wheatley and members of the Hartford family), the earliest antislavery pamphlet published in Massachusetts (The Selling of Joseph, printed in 1700), petitions of enslaved people requesting freedom, documents certifying the freedom of specific individuals, materials relating to two people involved in landmark legal cases that helped to bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker), warrants and depositions for freedom seekers, bills of sale and account books documenting enslavement transactions, and a series of letters written in 1795 in which some notable men share their perspective on the history and end of slavery in Massachusetts.