The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle Christopher Blakley (bio) The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom james a. delle University Press of Florida, 2019 224 pp. African slavery shaped the society, economy, and culture of northeastern North America beginning as early as 1626, when Dutch settlers forcibly relocated Atlantic Africans to New Netherland. Twelve years later William Pierce sailed the Desire from the Caribbean to Boston, where he hoped to sell a cargo of captive Africans, possibly including Dorcas "ye blackmore," in exchange for enslaved Indigenous people seized by settlers during the Pequot War. James A. Delle's study of the archaeology of northern slavery and freedom explores the materiality of enslavement, fugitivity, and emancipation in the Northeast and New England from the early seventeenth century to the antebellum era and Reconstruction. He argues at the outset that "American slavery was not born in the tobacco fields of Virginia or the rice plantations of the Carolina Low Country but in the villages of Puritan New England and on the streets of Dutch New Amsterdam, the settlement that would eventually become New York City" (31). Drawing on previous scholarship—including archaeological field excavations led by colleagues and his own research conducted with field school teams on multiple sites in the Northeast—Delle makes use of an abundance of archival and archaeological materials to consider the lives of enslaved, self-emancipated, and free people of color over the longue durée. The book fuses analysis with historical documents to a range of material cultural evidence from architecture to ceramics, metal and glass artifacts, cultural landscapes, tools, musical instruments, conjure bundles, and children's toys to reconstruct the everyday lives of diverse communities. A central thesis of the book is that enslaved people experienced and survived violence from slaveholders in the North in much the same way as others did in the South, and Delle's efforts to challenge commonplace notions among the public of kind and benevolent northern slaveholders is worthwhile. The book is divided into eight chapters organized into five sections that examine the themes of the history of northern slavery, the materiality of enslavement in the North, the forms of resistance the enslaved practiced in opposition to their enslavers or slave-catching gangs, the kinds of freedoms [End Page 575] that formerly enslaved people pursued, and the commemoration of northern slavery. Delle begins by providing an overview of northern slavery and archaeological investigations, first with the form of critical community archaeology developed at the African Burial Ground in New York. This excavation conducted in Lower Manhattan raised the methodological question of how to "decolonize the field" of historical archaeology, and it is surprising that beyond this brief mention Delle does not explicitly return to this question throughout his book. Other sites of either enslaved or free African Americans discussed include Lucy Foster's Garden in Andover, Massachusetts; two communities of free people—Skunk Hollow, New Jersey, and Parting Ways, Massachusetts; and provisioning plantations in Rhode Island, principally at Newport, a center of Atlantic slaving throughout the eighteenth century. Following his survey of archaeological projects, Delle turns to reviewing the historiography of slavery in the Northeast and New England, and he discusses the scholarship of Wendy Warren and Christy Clark-Pujara. A third chapter takes up a number of archaeological sites in the North, including another African burial ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the provisioning manors of Long Island, and plantations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In addition to domestic objects like clay pipes and ceramics, Delle draws attention to artifacts associated with conjure and medicine, such as cowrie shells, glass beads, bundles of iron objects, and a stone pestle. Moving to a single case study, Delle presents his research of one plantation, Rose Hill, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Descendants of the well-known Carter family of Virginia purchased the estate in 1802 and relocated the enslaved families they possessed to the Genesee Country to produce and sell wheat flour for the Baltimore flour trade as food for provisioning captives on Caribbean plantations. Delle and colleagues investigated the remnant buildings at Rose Hill and its environs, including a home that...