Northern Slavery Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

Missing Colonies in American Myths of Slavery: Where Is the “Deep North” in Sociology Textbooks?

This exercise in reflexive sociology consists of a comparative analysis of the standard verbiage of Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Race/Ethnicity textbooks on the subject of American slavery. We interrogate whether narratives about slavery in sociology textbooks present the system as a peculiar Southern institution, or as a cross-regional institution that includes the Northern colonies. The study found that a majority of the Introductory books present the system as Southern. The majority of the Race/Ethnicity books prominently feature Southern slavery, yet some are more likely to detail Northern slavery and the broader Atlantic World context. Given that the field of sociology is a key carrier of collective-memory institutionalization in its role as a remembrance environment, we argue that it has the potential to impact historical revisionist understandings of American history in public collective memory. Such revisions carry implications for transregional responsibility for racial injustices.

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

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...

“Fit for Town or Country”: Black Women and Work in Colonial Massachusetts

Slaveholders in colonial Massachusetts sold, traded, purchased, and employed black women on a regular basis throughout much of the eighteenth century, a fact that is evinced in scores of newspaper advertisements. Through exploring the experiences of enslaved women as workers in colonial Massachusetts, I highlight black women’s value as productive laborers, thereby complicating our understanding of enslaved women as so-called drudges and menials. While the experiences of enslaved women in Massachusetts diverged from those of enslaved women working in plantation colonies, enslaved women throughout the colonies shared the condition of unremunerated, lifelong servitude. Exploring these differences yields a deeper, more nuanced, and complex portrait of slavery in the North American colonies and complicates ideas of northern slavery as being gentler and more benign than its southern and Caribbean plantation counterparts.

Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross

Reviewed by: Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory by Marc Howard Ross Christy Clark-Pujara Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory. By Marc Howard Ross. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 304. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5038-1.) Marc Howard Ross insightfully examines how and why Americans have forgotten the history of slaveholding in the North. He diligently unpacks how the nation and northerners in particular fail to recall the expansive, long, and persistent history of bondage in the northern colonies and states. By investigating the histories we have chosen to forget, Ross highlights how the stories we tell about our past convey who we want to be, rather than who we are. Ross contends that the vast majority of Americans have little to no knowledge of the practice of slavery in the North. Anyone who has ever taught, written, or participated in any public history exhibit or display about northern slavery knows this to be true. Ross carefully notes that historians, professional and lay, have been writing about northern slavery for decades and that the descendants of enslaved northerners never forgot about it. He centers the study on how people like himself—white, well-rounded, and well-educated—were [End Page 904] unaware of the long history of northern bondage. Ross asks two primary questions: “Why and how was the collective memory of almost 250 years of enslavement in the North forgotten so widely and for so long? And why and how has public awareness and a collective memory of Northern slavery been partially recovered in recent decades?” (p. 1). Ross begins by carefully defining and explaining collective memory and forgetting, and he then lays out a brief summation of slaveholding and slavery-related businesses in the North, such as the slave trade and the textile revolution. Ross then examines various memorializing efforts in the North, paying special attention to the President’s House Site in Philadelphia (where George Washington lived with nine enslaved people), black burial grounds, such as the New York City African Burial Ground, and other public spaces. I particularly appreciated his concern for various interest groups and the tensions that arise when communities decide to remember the lives of enslaved people and those who held them in bondage. Ross ends the study with some suggestions on collective recovery. Ross asserts that collective memories “are socially constructed accounts that change in response to contemporary political events and social conditions” (p. 37). He further asserts that collective forgetting is rooted in “the disappearance of narratives about past events and people involved in them,” the diminishing of rituals about them, and the “loss or destruction of visible public, commemorative landscapes and objects that earlier marked the existence of Northern slavery” (pp. 89, 90). He argues that Americans have forgotten about northern bondage because there are few stories, rituals, or commemorative sites that remind the public that people were enslaved in the North, unlike in the South where Civil War memorials and plantation tours abound. He also argues that northerners fail to remember northern slaveholding because the emancipation process was long, protracted, and complex. Unlike the end of slavery in the South, there was no major event—like the Civil War—that precipitated an end to slaveholding. Ross further contends that avoidance, self-silencing, reframing, shame, and guilt have encouraged most northerners to forget northern bondage. Ross contends that northern slavery has become more visible as African Americans have become more socially and politically prominent and as historians have increasingly focused on the experiences of marginalized peoples. Ross suggests that the recovery of the history of northern slavery necessitates compelling personal narratives, public ceremonies, and physical memorials throughout the North to educate and remind Americans that generations of Africans and African Americans lived, labored, and died in bondage in the North. Ross, however, underestimates the impact of primary and secondary education, Hollywood, and many museums. These institutions have contributed to a simplistic narrative of an abolitionist North and a proslavery South; this one-dimensional history does not allow for a complex understanding and acknowledgment of 250 years of slaveholding in the North. Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and...

Creating Mindful Heritage Narratives: Black Women in Slavery and Freedom

Attempts to complicate New England history and counter the amnesia of northern slavery must be done in ways that responsibly account for the diversity of experiences throughout the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This transitional period from slavery to emancipation laid the foundations for how slavery is remembered and how race is understood, even to this day. Reading through the historical and archaeological records allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which captive and free Blacks were marginalized in New England's landscape and historical memories through gendered and racialized processes of erasure. This article examines the experiences of three women from early rural Massachusetts through a lens of Black feminist theory with the goal of creating mindful narratives of what it meant to be Black in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic

Historians’ standard narrative arc of sectional politics from the Missouri Crisis of 1819-1821 through the Civil War – a tale of recurring and increasingly polarizing sectional conflicts – has enormous benefits, but also encourages a uniform picture of the political impact in the North of debates centered on slavery. In this rendering, Northern politicians who voted for compromise with the South (“doughfaces”), being at least functionally proslavery, suffered at the hands of an antislavery electorate whenever slavery formed the subject of national debates. But taking doughfaces seriously shows that their popularity ebbed and flowed across space and time depending on the priority voters assigned to slavery amongst the mix of political questions vying for their attention. Indeed, looking at the Missouri Crisis from the Maine point of view necessitates a change in something as fundamental as this episode’s name. The local dynamics of the struggle allowed Maine’s doughfaces to negotiate their stance from a position of strength that most doughfaces did not enjoy. This essay not only sheds light on aspects of well-known events in American history – from the Missouri Crisis in general to Jefferson’s famous “firebell” letter in specific – but also offers a case study meant to exemplify the advantages of attention to particular Northern sub-regions and states. Moreover, by attending as much to the middle ground as to the diverging sectional poles in their study of slavery debates, scholars will come to a more complete understanding of the complexity of the United States’ politics of slavery.

Eavesdropping at the Well

Tracing the history of northern slavery in a narrative exhibition at the New-York Historical Society required overcoming the silence of archival and museum collections. Despite the centrality of slavery to the colonial city, the first two centuries of black lives left few traces. In the archival record, African voices were unheard and never registered. A careful deployment of interpretive media—display techniques, audio-visual programs, graphic annotations, commissioned art objects, and architectural design—aimed to bring visitors physically and emotionally ever closer to the experience of New York blacks, while staying rooted in primary sources. The sequence of media elements thus itself paralleled the historical narrative.

Sojourner Truth's America (review)

Truth's America. By Margaret Washington. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.Pp. 520. Cloth $34.95, Paper, $25.00.)Reviewed by Edward CountrymanSojourner Truth is an American icon, one of those figures of whom many people have heard. Mostly, her fame stems from a phrase that she never actually uttered, Ar'n't I a woman? Nell Irvin Painter demolished that story in 1996, showing that phrase was an editor's addition, although, as Painter herself notes, tale of Truth punctuating a women's rights speech with those words refuses to die.1 Now Margaret Washington has treated Truth's words and her life in full, rich detail that woman deserves.Washington's title echoes David Reynolds' prize-winning account of another iconic nineteenth-century figure, Walt Whitman.2 Whether or not Washington intended reference, comparison is well taken, even to point that her book's opening vignette took place while the Sojourner was crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Washington reveals an American life that was every bit as rich and just as revealing about their shared time as Whitman's was. Like Whitman, Truth found she possessed a powerful voice, and she honed it throughout her long life. Unlike him, she spoke rather than wrote, because she never learned to read or write.Sojourner Truth chose both name by which history knows her and wandering, restless identity name suggests. She had grown up as Isabella, or Bell. It was a slave name, and to abandon it was to follow a ritual that was common among Black Americans who freed themselves, as she did. But as Washington shows, Isabella was not simply a name that her enslavers had imposed. It carried an independent heritage that reached back to Truth's grandmother and, deeply, to Catholic heritage of Kingdom of Kongo, from whence her ancestors had been taken and whose memory was not lost.Washington's first great achievement is to evoke African-Dutch world of Ulster County, New York, in which Isabella spent childhood and young womanhood. Northern slavery was dying, and in Ulster County it died hard. Young Isabella suffered through physical work, deprivation, sexual exploitation, and having one of her children sold south, despite that practice being forbidden by law. But Washington shows more than suffering. Hudson Valley practice included a customary right for slaves to seek a new owner if their situation required. Truth did so. After she claimed her own freedom she successfully used legal system to retrieve her son from south. But though he returned, there was no happy ending. He had been traumatized for life.Rather than wait for New York's gradual emancipation law to reach her, Isabella walked away from her enslavement. She did not need to make a furtive journey north, just a twelve-mile dawn trek to another Dutch household, where she found refuge. The man who claimed her came after her, but her enslavement was over. That she succeeded was a sign that Ulster County slavery finally was softening, but primarily it shows her own intense determination. That walk began a life of journeying, both through American space and within herself. In map terms, her journey took her first to New York City, and then on to Long Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, back to upstate New York, and ultimately to Michigan, where she finally settled. In social terms it took her through failed Utopian Commune of Matthias and far more practical abolitionist, but still Utopian, community in Northampton, until she found her own way. …

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England. By Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xii, 265 pp. Cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-19-538909-8. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-19-538908-1.)

Love of Freedom attests to the power and possibility of interdisciplinary partnership. In this accessible, lively, and well-researched volume, Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck blend their respective expertise in literary and legal history to explore how black women experienced freedom in colonial and revolutionary New England. In so doing, they add to the growing literature on northern slavery by locating black women at the center. The region they recover, urban and rural, seacoast and hinterland, attests to the varied forms and functions of enslavement in early America. By interweaving the history of race and gender, Adams and Pleck illustrate how marriage and slavery combined to circumscribe freedom for many black women. Adams and Pleck begin their investigation with a three-fold mission: to chronicle the assumptions about family, masculinity, and femininity embedded in the love of freedom, the meaning of freedom for both black women and men, and the significance of gender to the development of the free black community right after emancipation from slavery. (p. 3)

Phillis Wheatley's Ghosts: The Racial Melancholy of New England Protestants

This essay corrects the inattention of Wheatley scholarship to the contexts of gender, both racially—and regionally—inflected, in which she lived and worked, in order to reread Wheatley's family elegies and to revise and extend Anne Anlin Cheng's model of "racial melancholy." Northern "family slavery" differed from Southern slavery in its anti-reproductivity: where Southern slavery valued fecundity in enslaved women, the shared living quarters and different functions of Northern slavery relative to its economy led to a valorization of female sterility, as is evident above all in newspaper ads of the day seeking sale of fecund women and giving away unwanted slave children. Missing Wheatley's sexuality is of a piece with missing her slavery; both reflect the persistent effacement of the gendered particularities of northern slavery and of the complex ways that Protestantism was enlisted both to defend and to challenge chattel slavery in New England. This perspective sharpens our sense both of Wheatley's typicality and atypicality as alate eighteenth-century female New England bondswoman, and it illuminates her poetry.

Plainfield's African-American: From Northern Slavery to Church Freedom. Edited by Leonard L. Bethel and Frederick A. Johnson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. xxvi + 146 pp. $32.50 cloth.

Plainfield's African-American: From Northern Slavery to Church Freedom. Edited by Leonard L. Bethel and Frederick A. Johnson. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. xxvi + 146 pp. $32.50 cloth. - Volume 68 Issue 3

Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775-1865.

Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775-1865 challenges prevailing ideas about the passivity of African Americans in the antebellum North. At the same time, the work clearly demonstrates that the methods blacks used to respond to their political and social milieus were not merely reactions to white racism. Instead, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century blacks are shown to have been motivated by human and social needs that, by and large, have been ignored by historians. Harry Reed reveals how, during this era, American blacks created a cultural identity and, at the same time, attacked the remnants of Northern slavery and the entire institution in the South. Taken collectively, the pre-Civil War activities of blacks in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia provided strong cultural underpinnings for the sense of black community that emerged after 1865. To the extent that they were able to confront racism, their spiritual strength was visibly reinforced by a strong cultural sense and an instinct for survival. What emerged during these nine decades was a marvelously complex, organic community, one that possessed its own rationale for existence, its own forms for enhancing collective life, and its own structures for meeting physical and spiritual needs, as well as the means for addressing external power centers that often had severe, negative impacts on blacks themselves.

Jupiter Hammon and the biblical beginnings of African-American literature

This critical edition of the works of Jupiter Hammon, the first black writer in America, modernized for 20th-century readers, includes vital background on Jupiter Hammon's life and times. Lack of information on striking similarities between northern slavery (particularly in Hammon's home state, New York) and the southern colonies, and on the slaves' survival strategies, has led to misinterpretation and lack of evaluation of works by 18th-century slave writers like Hammon, Wheatley, Occum, Equiano, and others. Equally important is the explication of Biblical symbolism that these writers used in surreptitious code to inspire rebellion against slavery.