New
England’s hidden history - The Boston Globe http://archive.boston.com/
New England’s hidden history
More than we like to think, the North was built on slavery.
(Brian Stauffer for The Boston Globe)
September 26, 2010
In the year 1755, a black slave named Mark Codman
plotted to kill his abusive master. A God-fearing man, Codman had resolved to
use poison, reasoning that if he could kill without shedding blood, it would be
no sin. Arsenic in hand, he and two female slaves poisoned the tea and porridge
of John Codman repeatedly. The plan worked — but like so many stories of slave
rebellion, this one ended in brutal death for the slaves as well. After a trial
by jury, Mark Codman was hanged, tarred, and then suspended in a metal gibbet on
the main road to town, where his body remained for more than 20
years.
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When it comes to slavery, the story that New
England has long told itself goes like this: Slavery happened in the South, and
it ended thanks to the North. Maybe
we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn’t
real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were
practically family. We let them marry, we taught them to read, and soon enough,
we freed them. New England is the home of abolitionists and underground
railroads. In the story of slavery — and by extension, the story of race and
racism in modern-day America — we’re the heroes. Aren’t we?
As the nation prepares to mark the 150th
anniversary of the American Civil War in 2011, with commemorations that
reinforce the North/South divide, researchers are offering uncomfortable answers
to that question, unearthing more and more of the hidden stories of New England
slavery — its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very
places that have become synonymous with freedom. With the markers of slavery
forgotten even as they lurk beneath our feet — from graveyards to historic
homes, from Lexington and Concord to the halls of Harvard University —
historians say it is time to radically rewrite America’s slavery story to
include its buried history in New England.
“The story of slavery in New England is like a
landscape that you learn to see,” said Anne Farrow, who co-wrote “Complicity:
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery” and who is
researching a new book about slavery and memory. “Once you begin to see these
great seaports and these great historic houses, everywhere you look, you can
follow it back to the agricultural trade of the West Indies, to the trade of
bodies in Africa, to the unpaid labor of black people.”
It was the 1991 discovery of an African burial
ground in New York City that first revived the study of Northern slavery. Since
then, fueled by educators, preservationists, and others, momentum has been
building to recognize histories hidden in plain sight. Last year, Connecticut
became the first New England state to formally apologize for slavery. In
classrooms across the country, popularity has soared for educational programs on
New England slavery designed at Brown University. In February, Emory University
will hold a major conference on the role slavery’s profits played in
establishing American colleges and universities, including in New England. And
in Brookline, Mass., a program called Hidden Brookline is designing a virtual
walking tour to illuminate its little-known slavery history: At one time, nearly
half the town’s land was held by slave owners.
“What people need to understand is that, here in
the North, while there were not the large plantations of the South or the
Caribbean islands, there were families who owned slaves,” said Stephen Bressler,
director of Brookline’s Human Relations-Youth Resources Commission. “There were
businesses actively involved in the slave trade, either directly in the
importation or selling of slaves on our shores, or in the shipbuilding,
insurance, manufacturing of shackles, processing of sugar into rum, and so on.
Slavery was a major stimulus to the Northern economy.”
Turning over the stones to find those histories
isn’t just a matter of correcting the record, he and others say. It’s crucial to
our understanding of the New England we live in now.
“The absolute amnesia about slavery here on the
one hand, and the gradualness of slavery ending on the other, work together to
make race a very distinctive thing in New England,” said Joanne Pope Melish, who
teaches history at the University of Kentucky and wrote the book “Disowning
Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780-1860.” “If you
have obliterated the historical memory of actual slavery — because we’re the
free states, right? — that makes it possible to turn around and look at a
population that is disproportionately poor and say, it must be their own
inferiority. That is where New England’s particular brand of racism comes
from.”
Dismantling the myths of slavery doesn’t mean
ignoring New England’s role in ending it. In the 1830s and ’40s, an entire
network of white Connecticut abolitionists emerged to house, feed, clothe, and
aid in the legal defense of Africans from the slave ship Amistad, a legendary
case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court and helped mobilize the fight
against slavery. Perhaps nowhere were abolition leaders more diehard than in
Massachusetts: Pacifist William Lloyd Garrison and writer Henry David Thoreau
were engines of the antislavery movement. Thoreau famously refused to pay his
taxes in protest of slavery, part of a philosophy of civil disobedience that
would later influence Martin Luther King Jr. But Thoreau was tame compared to
Garrison, a flame-thrower known for shocking audiences. Founder of the New
England Anti-Slavery Society and the newspaper The Liberator, Garrison once
burned a copy of the US Constitution at a July Fourth rally, calling it “a
covenant with death.” His cry for total, immediate emancipation made him a
target of death threats and kept the slavery question at a perpetual boil,
fueling the moral argument that, in time, would come to frame the Civil
War.
But to focus on crusaders like Garrison is to
ignore ugly truths about how unwillingly New England as a whole turned the page
on slavery. Across the region, scholars have found, slavery here died a
painfully gradual death, with emancipation laws and judicial rulings that either
were unclear, poorly enforced, or written with provisions that kept slaves and
the children born to them in bondage for years.
Meanwhile, whites who had trained slaves to do
skilled work refused to hire the same blacks who were now free, driving an
emerging class of skilled workers back to the lowest rungs of unskilled labor.
Many whites, driven by reward money and racial hatred, continued to capture and
return runaway Southern slaves; some even sent free New England blacks south,
knowing no questions about identity would be asked at the other end. And as
surely as there was abolition, there was “bobalition” — the mocking name given
to graphic, racist broadsides printed through the 1830s, ridiculing free blacks
with characters like Cezar Blubberlip and Mungo Mufflechops. Plastered around
Boston, the posters had a subtext that seemed to boil down to this: Who do these
people think they are? Citizens?
“Is Garrison important? Yes. Is it dangerous to
be an abolitionist at that time? Absolutely,” said Melish. “What is conveniently
forgotten is the number of people making a living snagging free black people in
a dark alley and shipping them south.”
Growing up in Lincoln, Mass., historian Elise
Lemire vividly remembers learning of the horrors of a slaveocracy far, far away.
“You knew, for example, that families were split up, that people were broken
psychologically and kept compliant by the fear of your husband or wife being
sold away, or your children being sold away,” said Lemire, author of the 2009
book “Black Walden,” who became fascinated with former slaves banished to
squatter communities in Walden Woods.
As she peeled back the layers, Lemire discovered
a history rarely seen by the generations of tourists and schoolchildren who have
learned to see Concord as a hotbed of antislavery activism. “Slaves [here] were
split up in the same way,” she said. “You didn’t have any rights over your
children. Slave children were given away all the time, sometimes when they were
very young.”
In Lemire’s Concord, slave owners once filled
half of town government seats, and in one episode town residents rose up to
chase down a runaway slave. Some women remained enslaved into the 1820s, more
than 30 years after census figures recorded no existing slaves in Massachusetts.
According to one account, a former slave named Brister Freeman, for whom
Brister’s Hill in Walden Woods is named, was locked inside a slaughterhouse shed
with an enraged bull as his white tormentors laughed outside the door. And in
Concord, Lemire argues, black families were not so much liberated as they were
abandoned to their freedom, released by masters increasingly fearful their
slaves would side with the British enemy. With freedom, she said, came immediate
poverty: Blacks were forced to squat on small plots of the town’s least arable
land, and eventually pushed out of Concord altogether — a precursor to the
geographic segregation that continues to divide black and white in New
England.
“This may be the birthplace of a certain kind of
liberty,” Lemire said, “but Concord was a slave town. That’s what it
was.”
If Concord was a slave town, historians say,
Connecticut was a slave state. It didn’t abolish slavery until 1848, a little
more than a decade before the Civil War. (A judge’s ruling ended legal slavery
in Massachusetts in 1783, though the date is still hotly debated by historians.)
It’s a history Connecticut author and former Hartford Courant journalist Anne
Farrow knew nothing about — until she got drawn into an assignment to find the
untold story of one local slave.
Once she started pulling the thread, Farrow said,
countless histories unfurled: accounts of thousand-acre slave plantations and a
livestock industry that bred the horses that turned the giant turnstiles of West
Indian sugar mills. Each discovery punctured another slavery myth. “A mentor of
mine has said New England really democratized slavery,” said Farrow. “Where in
the South a few people owned so many slaves, here in the North, many people
owned a few. There was a widespread ownership of black people.”
Perhaps no New England colony or state profited
more from the unpaid labor of blacks than Rhode Island: Following the
Revolution, scholars estimate, slave traders in the tiny Ocean State controlled
between two-thirds and 90 percent of America’s trade in enslaved Africans. On
the rolling farms of Narragansett, nearly one-third of the population was black
— a proportion not much different from Southern plantations. In 2003, the push
to reckon with that legacy hit a turning point when Brown University, led by its
first African-American president, launched a highly controversial effort to
account for its ties to Rhode Island’s slave trade. Today, that ongoing effort
includes the CHOICES program, an education initiative whose curriculum on New
England slavery is now taught in over 2,000 classrooms.
As Brown’s decision made national headlines,
Katrina Browne, a Boston filmmaker, was on a more private journey through New
England slavery, tracing her bloodlines back to her Rhode Island forebears, the
DeWolf family. As it turned out, the DeWolfs were the biggest slave-trading
family in the nation’s biggest slave-trading state. Browne’s journey, which she
chronicled in the acclaimed documentary “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the
Deep North,” led her to a trove of records of the family’s business at every
point in slavery’s triangle trade. Interspersed among the canceled checks and
ship logs, Browne said, she caught glimpses into everyday life under slavery,
like the diary entry by an overseer in Cuba that began, “I hit my first Negro
today for laughing at prayers.” Today, Browne runs the Tracing Center, a
nonprofit to foster education about the North’s complicity in
slavery.
“I recently picked up a middle school textbook at
an independent school in Philadelphia, and it had sub-chapter headings for the
Colonial period that said ‘New England,’ and then ‘The South and Slavery,’ ”
said Browne, who has trained park rangers to talk about Northern complicity in
tours of sites like Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. “Since learning about my family
and the whole North’s role in slavery, I now consider these things to be my
problem in a way that I didn’t before.”
If New England’s amnesia has been pervasive, it
has also been willful, argues C.S. Manegold, author of the new book “Ten Hills
Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North.” That’s because many of
slavery’s markers aren’t hidden or buried. In New England, one need look no
further than a symbol that graces welcome mats, door knockers, bedposts, and all
manner of household decor: the pineapple. That exotic fruit, said Manegold, is
as intertwined with slavery as the Confederate flag: When New England ships came
to port, captains would impale pineapples on a fence post, a sign to everyone
that they were home and open for business, bearing the bounty of slave labor and
sometimes slaves themselves.
“It’s a symbol everyone knows the benign version
of — the happy story that pineapples signify hospitality and welcome,” said
Manegold, whose book centers on five generations of slaveholders tied to one
Colonial era estate, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Mass., now
a museum. The house features two carved pineapples at its
gateposts.
By Manegold’s account, pineapples were just the
beginning at this particular Massachusetts farm: Generation after generation,
history at the Royall House collides with myths of freedom in New England —
starting with one of the most mythical figures of all, John Winthrop. Author of
the celebrated “City Upon a Hill” sermon and first governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, Winthrop not only owned slaves at Ten Hills Farm, but in 1641, he
helped pass one of the first laws making chattel slavery legal in North
America.
When the house passed to the Royalls, Manegold
said, it entered a family line whose massive fortune came from slave plantations
in Antigua. Members of the Royall family would eventually give land and money
that helped establish Harvard Law School. To this day, the law school bears a
seal borrowed from the Royall family crest, and for years the Royall
Professorship of Law remained the school’s most prestigious faculty post, almost
always occupied by the law school dean. It wasn’t until 2003 that an incoming
dean — now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan — quietly turned the title
down.
Kagan didn’t publicly explain her decision. But
her actions speak to something Manegold and others say could happen more
broadly: not just inserting footnotes to New England heritage tours and history
books, but truly recasting that heritage in all its painful
complexity.
“In Concord,” Lemire said, “the Minutemen clashed
with the British at the Old North Bridge within sight of a man enslaved in the
local minister’s house. The fact that there was slavery in the town that helped
birth American liberty doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the sacrifices made
by the Minutemen. But it does mean New England has to catch up with the rest of
the country, in much of which residents have already wrestled with their dual
legacies of freedom and slavery.”
Francie Latour is an associate editor at
Wellesley magazine and a former Globe reporter.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper
Company.
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