Disowning Slavery

Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860

Joanne Pope Melish

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501702921
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well.

Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity.

Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.

1

New England Slavery

“Short of the Truth”: Slavery in the Lives of Whites

On May 2, 1745, Stepney, slave of the Reverend James MacSparran, drowned in Pettaquamscutt Pond. Stepney had been scowing a load of wood when his boat sank, and it was not until the next morning that his body was found. MacSparran, an Anglican minister prominent in the tightly knit aristocracy of southern Rhode Island, owned several slaves, but he referred to Stepney regretfully in his diary entry of May 2 as “my first, best and most principal servant.” On May 4 MacSparran preached a funeral sermon for him in King’s Chapel to “a great Assembly of negro’s.” Three weeks later he still occupied MacSparran’s thoughts: “Stepney, poor boy, is dead and I have no Servant I can now so well depend upon to go and come quick and [do] his errands well.” On June 1, when Harry went to cart and boat wood, MacSparran prayed, “Grant, Good Lord, I may have better Fortune in boating ye wood than the last, in the last Boatload whereof I lost my dear Servant Stepney.”1

Throughout the months following Stepney’s death, MacSparran continued to record the daily events of his life and the lives of his surviving slaves. As a circuit minister, he reported a constant round of visiting, officiating, meeting with, and administering the Eucharist to parishioners spread along a thirty-mile stretch of coastal Rhode Island encompassing villages in Old Warwick and Conanicut (now the island of Jamestown), North and South Kingstown, Charlestown, and Westerly.2 For his slaves, there was the ceaseless farmwork and barter that sustained his household, in which he himself never participated (except once, “when necessity obliged me”): “Harry is gone this morning for Molasses…. Maroca carried a Calf Skin…. Harry and Emblo raking hay.” Each Sunday he preached to the larger slave community: “Catechized ye Negro’s.”3

Many controversies and problems worried MacSparran that summer, and his irritability with his remaining slaves seems to have intensified in the weeks after Stepney’s death. For example, having fretted in the past over the birth of two daughters to the unmarried Maroca—by Mingo, “Col. Updike’s negro”—despite her repeated vows of Christian chastity, MacSparran resorted in June to giving Maroca “one or two Lashes for receiving Presents from Mingo.”4 Although anger was hardly an unusual response for MacSparran, his diary suggests that this particular expression of it was uncharacteristic.

Two and a half months after Stepney’s drowning, MacSparran was troubled by two dreams of water. In the first, he confided to his diary, “a Boat overset with me and [I] was refused Help from ye Shore”; two nights later, as he dreamed of walking toward his brother-in-law, Dr. Silvester Gardiner, “a great Deal of Water stopt us.”5 More than six years later, when his slave Emblo gave birth to a son, MacSparran baptized the child “Stepney.”6 And when, remarkably, a white boy named Benjamin Baker drowned a day after the baptism in the very place and way the first Stepney had done, MacSparran was moved to note that “in the same fatal Pond was my fine Negro Stepney, the best of Servants drowned Some years ago,” and to ruminate on the “great need to be in a [con]stant state of Preparation; lest we are suddenly snatched hence.”7

How shall we evaluate the significance of slavery in New England life? It would be a mistake to suggest that a comprehensive understanding of the institution as it was practiced throughout New England during a century and a half can somehow be extrapolated from the brief record of relations between James MacSparran and his slaves. The plantations of Rhode Island’s Narragansett country in the mid-eighteenth century constituted a form of social and economic organization that was rare among New England communities in its dependence upon slave labor for large-scale agriculture and its unusually dense population of people of color—as many as one to every three whites.8 Narragansett planter society peaked during MacSparran’s life and began to wane after 1760 (although it was still viable on the eve of the American Revolution).9

Nevertheless, the diary of the Reverend James MacSparran reveals much more than the minutiae of material and social relations within one family in one particular slaveholding community. The domestic institution of slavery produced and sustained an ideology, a world view, and a psychology of interpersonal relations that seem to have been widely shared by New England slaveholders, despite differences in the actual work performed by urban, rural, and plantation slaves as well as differences in the ratios of the population of the enslaving to that of the enslaved. The institution also produced distinctive counterparts to that ideology, world view, and psychology which seem to have been widely shared among New England slaves, again despite differences in the nature of the work they performed. I am suggesting that the relations of power and the kind of mutual dependency/antagonism generated by the work relation, rather than the nature of the work itself, were determinative. From the diaries and records of MacSparran and other slaveholders, we can cautiously draw some general conclusions about the significance of slavery and slaves in the everyday lives of white families in New England, as well as in the overall development of the New England economy and culture.

MacSparran made well over a hundred references to his slaves and their activities in a diary that spanned only thirty-four months and had been originally intended as a record of letters received and sent and religious services performed. His household depended upon slave labor. In this, it seems to have been fairly typical of gentlemen’s households in the region, although its staff was somewhat smaller than those of plantations engaged in large-scale market production, which might comprise as many as forty slaves. MacSparran owned seven: Stepney, Harry, Emblo, Maroca, Moll, Peter, and Cujo. Between 1745 and 1751 he purchased two more male slaves, Hannibal and Bolico. At least three children were born to MacSparran’s slaves but did not remain long in the household: Phillis, a child of Moll’s, was baptized and then sold immediately; Maroca’s two daughters by Mingo apparently did not survive long enough to be either baptized or sold.10 MacSparran and his wife were childless; hence the entire household consisted of nine or ten persons, only two of whom were white.

Virtually all of the household labor was performed by the slaves. A partial listing of their physical tasks includes cutting, carting, threshing, and milling wheat and loading wheat straw into the barn; hilling, hoeing, gathering, and husking corn and cutting cornstalks; mowing, raking, and carting hay; digging and sledding stones and building stone walls; building fences; cutting and scowing wood; hoeing and picking peas, beans, and turnips; and mending baskets. Sometimes female slaves participated in the field labor: for example, Moll gathered beans with Harry; Emblo cut and topped haystacks; “the girls” (some combination of Moll, Maroca, and Emblo) dug potatoes with Harry.11

Beyond tasks involving primarily physical labor, both male and female slaves conducted a wide variety of errands that included ferrying MacSparran’s friends and relatives to and from his house, carrying household goods to and from neighboring plantations, and relaying messages.12 The slaves also kept MacSparran abreast of local gossip; for example, it was “my servants” who told him that a Mr. Arnold had left the Anglican church for the Quaker meeting.13 Stepney appears to have enjoyed an exceptional level of trust and responsibility. He conducted many of MacSparran’s commercial transactions—purchasing sugar, nails, salmon, and chocolate; making payments on earlier purchases—and apparently used his own judgment in negotiating the prices of articles on at least some occasions, since the way MacSparran noted the amounts Stepney had paid suggests that this was new information.14

No one reading MacSparran’s diary could doubt that slaves were vitally important to the operation of his household, performing virtually all its services and its productive activities for subsistence and exchange. It is obvious as well that the activities of the slaves were integral to the effective participation of MacSparran’s household in the network of households that constituted its larger economic and social sphere. Other New England slaveholders who left diaries and journals provide overwhelming confirmation of the central role of slaves in their households and communities. But the significance of slavery in the overall development of the New England regional culture is a different question. Since slaves never constituted more than a small percentage of the New England population, most historians have largely ignored the contribution of slave labor to the developing New England economy or have argued that it was incidental.15 Numbers alone seem to suggest that slavery must have been a mere blip on the economic screen; if so, it is hard to argue that such a marginal phenomenon could have had a profound impact on New England culture and regional identity. Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story.

First of all, the slave population was not scattered uniformly across New England but was clustered along the seacoast, in major cities, and in a few agricultural areas such as southern Rhode Island and Connecticut. William Piersen emphasizes this clustering to support his argument that it was possible for a black subculture to develop in New England even though the absolute numbers of Africans were quite small. The phenomenon of clustering is equally important in gauging the impact of slaveholding and the presence of slaves on the politics and culture of white New England, since the concentration of slave populations coincided with the concentration of the region’s merchant elite and its political and cultural leaders, among whom slaveowners were disproportionately represented. In Massachusetts in 1754, for example, near the peak of New England slaveholding, about one-third of the adult black population lived in Boston, as did the majority of the colony’s merchant elite and many of its political leaders.16

The distribution of slaves—as individuals, couples and occasionally small groups—among white families, rather than as individuals among individuals, is also an important factor in the impact of the institution. According to the first general census of New England’s population in 1715, there were 158,000 whites, or about 26,333 white families, and 4,150 “negroes,” or about one “negro” for every six white families. The Massachusetts governor, Sir Francis Bernard, reported that the colony’s 1763 population of 200,000 “souls” included 2,221 “negroes and mulattoes”—noting, however, that “as all returns before mentioned were taken in order to make a rate of taxes…they are certainly short of the truth.”17 It is possible that by midcentury in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts (the three states with the largest populations of slaves), there were as many as one African for every four white families.18 Obviously, slaves were not distributed evenly among families across New England in this way; however, Jackson Turner Main, surveying Connecticut estate inventories, found that in 1700 one in ten inventories included slaves, with the incidence rising to one in four by the eve of the Revolution, confirming the statistical incidence.19 It is reasonable to suggest that the actual service of slaves within families gave them an impact on the culture and society that their statistical existence as randomly scattered individuals outside the household framework could not have had.

A small group of historians who have focused specifically on northern slavery and the development of African American culture in New England have, not surprisingly, argued that slavery and slaves were important economically as well as in other ways. As early as 1942 Lorenzo J. Greene noted, “The impression…has prevailed that because of adverse geographic and economic conditions slave labor was of little value to New England masters.” Not so, he argued persuasively: “from the evidence showing the employment of Negroes in various fields it seems evident, despite frequent assertions to the contrary, that Negroes were a valuable and essential part of New England’s labor supply and that they unquestionably played a role in the commercial and industrial development of that section.”20 Thirty years later Edgar J. McManus offered further evidence that “the slave force everywhere made a vital contribution to the Northern economy.”21

These arguments have largely been ignored or refuted by mainstream historians of the New England economy. For example, from a detailed analysis of probate inventories an...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Archives Cited
• Introduction
• 1 New England Slavery
• 2 The Antislavery Impulse
• 3 “Slaves of the Community”
• 4 A “Negro Spirit”
• 5 “To Abolish the Black Man”
• 6 “A Thing Unknown”
• 7 “We Are the Alphabet”