Honoring Belinda’s Contribution to the Law

In 1936, Harvard University appropriated the heraldry of the Royall family to be the crest of its law school, honoring Isaac Royall for endowing the first law professorship.

Under the holophrastic Harvard motto, that crest shows three sheafs of wheat bound up after harvesting. There’s no sign of who did the harvesting. Of course, most observers would also not be able to identify that crest with Isaac Royall or recall what he had to do with it.

The “Royall Must Fall” campaign at Harvard has adapted that image by showing three workers in dark silhouettes bending under the burden of that wheat (shown here). That’s not actually how people carry such sheaves, I believe, but it’s a clever reappropriation of the Royall imagery. It’s also an emblem of black subservience that the campaign surely doesn’t want to become permanent.

The campaign has floated the idea of renaming the Royall Professorship of Law after Belinda Royall, a woman enslaved on Isaac Royall’s estate in Medford. Her 1783 petition for a pension in compensation for her labor was reprinted across the English-speaking world, thus becoming a more important legal document than Isaac Royall ever produced.

Now it’s not clear Belinda ever used or would have been happy with the surname “Royall.” She was legally “Belinda” until a late marriage, when she started to appear in documents as “Belinda Sutton,” according to the Royall House & Slave Quarters.

But an annual “Belinda Lecture” at the Harvard Law School could be a way to regularly shift honor from the legacy of Isaac Royall to the cause of his former servant, from a man who inherited great wealth and power to a woman who had to repeatedly argue for fair treatment. Would that be the equivalent of reenacting the toppling of George III’s statue, an annual reaffirmation of the more inclusive values we share today?

COMING UP: Visual renewal of old symbols.

Talk on Belinda at Royall House in Medford, 19 Nov.

On Wednesday, 19 November, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford will host an illustrated talk by Richard Douglass-Chin titled “‘And she will ever pray’: Finding Belinda Royall.”

Belinda was a woman born in the 1710s in Africa and held enslaved on Isaac Royall’s estate. The younger man of that name left Massachusetts as a Loyalist in 1776. In his May 1778 will, Royall left Belinda to one of his daughters “in case she does not choose her freedom,” and he also told his executor to pay Belinda a certain amount.

That same year, the Massachusetts legislature confiscated Royall’s property since he was an “absentee” supporting the Crown. In 1783, Belinda—then living in Boston, and caring for an ill daughter—petitioned the state that “such allowance may be made her out of the estate of Colonel Royall.”

Belinda’s petition is not just a legal document but a literary one. Belinda, who could not sign her name to it, might well have had help crafting the written language from Boston’s civil-rights activists, such as Prince Hall. The document succeeded in catching the attention of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some doubted that there even was a real Belinda, but the woman is documented in Massachusetts.

This talk appears to be a historical and literary recreation of Belinda’s life:

Belinda’s voice echoes down the ages through her petition to the Massachusetts legislature in 1783 for a pension, for her self and her invalid daughter, from the proceeds of Isaac Royall Jr.’s estate. Her petition demonstrates a boldness not seen in other African American petitions and autobiographies of the period. Where, in her forced journey from Ghana as a child enslaved, to the Royall sugar cane plantation in Antigua, to the Royalls’ estate in Medford, to an impoverished freedom in Boston, did Belinda acquire the audacity we read so clearly in her petition?

Piecing together the fragments of information we have—her petition, a Royall will, baptismal documents, treasury resolutions—writer and literary critic Richard Douglass-Chin will recreate the story of the remarkable Belinda Royall—an epic journey spanning nearly sixty years.

Douglass-Chin is a professor in the English Department at the University of Windsor in Ontario. He specializes in pre-twentieth-century American literature, and has also published his own short stories and poems.

This program begins at 7:30 P.M. Admission is free to Royall House members, $5 for others. Parking is available on the nearby streets.

Two Talks at the Royall House & Slave Quarters

This spring the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford is hosting two lectures on slavery in the early republic.

On Wednesday, 15 May, Henry Wiencek will speak on his book Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves.

In his provocative study, Wiencek argues that the author of the Declaration of Independence shifted his position on slavery for financial reasons, after becoming convinced that the only way to make a success of his debt-ridden plantation was through what he called the “silent profits” gained from those he enslaved.

Wiencek is also author of The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White and An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. He is a son of Dorchester and graduate of Boston College High School.

This talk starts at 7:30 P.M. It costs $5, or free for Royall House and Slave Quarters members.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 8 June, literary historian Lois Brown offers a presentation titled “Marked with the furrows of time”: Belinda, the Royalls, and Accounts of Freedom. The Medford Historical Society explains how Belinda, enslaved to the Loyalist Isaac Royall, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in 1783 for a pension from his confiscated estate.

Brown is a professor in the African American Studies Program and the Department of English at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution.

Brown’s talk is part of an annual benefit for the site that runs from 3:00 to 5:00. It will include tours and exhibits, music, and refreshments. Tickets are $35 for members, $45 for non-members.

“Speechless in the face of its errors of fact”

In a discussion of sources and previous studies on page 297 of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, C. S. Manegold wrote:

By contrast, the almost bizarre piece, “An ‘Animadversion’ upon a ‘Complaint’ against ‘the Petition’ of Belinda, an African Slave,” by Vincent Carretta, published in Early American Literature in 1997, left me literally speechless in the face of its errors of fact (he posits that Isaac Royall was “an American invention” cooked up as a “slur against the avariciousness, Jewishness, and royalist sympathies of the ‘master’”). I can only say here, what was he thinking?

In fact, those phrases come from a previous paper by E. W. Pitcher that Carretta was quoting and refuting. Carretta’s two-page communication in the journal explained that Royall was a well-documented Medford slaveholder, and that Belinda’s original petition is preserved in the Massachusetts state archives. He stated, “The written account of Belinda’s petition [that the previous author doubted] is almost certainly fictionalized, but that does not render Belinda and her petition fictions.”

Criticizing someone for saying something he was actually quoting to debunk—that’s the sort of thing Mitt Romney does. Except I think Manegold made an honest mistake.

In fact, the previous paper was itself a response to an earlier paper by Joanne Braxton and Sharon M. Harris, so there were multiple levels to keep straight. For the record, this posting is my response to Manegold’s response to Carretta’s response to Pitcher’s response to Braxton and Harris.