More Glimpses of Sylvia and Worcester

Yesterday I left Sylvia and Worcester, a mother and grown son enslaved to John Chandler when he died in 1762, in the household of Sarah and Timothy Paine, Chandler’s daughter and son-in-law/stepson.

The town chroniclers of Worcester left a couple of glimpses of Sylvia and Worcester—not enough to see them in full, but enough to remind us of their individuality.

A Harvard graduate with powerful connections, Paine held many offices, appointed and elected, in Worcester. In 1774, for example, he was in is twenty-third year as clerk of the county court and his thirteenth year as register of deeds.

In the pre-Revolutionary turmoil, Paine favored the Crown. The government in London rewarded his support by appointing him to the new governor’s Council in the summer of 1774. He took the oath as a “mandamus councilor” in late August.

And then all hell broke loose. Crowds in the western part of the province started closing the county courts. The “Powder Alarm” mobilized thousands of militiamen and showed that the royal government had no power outside Boston. And on 6 Sept 1774, more than 5,000 men flooded into Worcester to make sure its courts wouldn’t open, either.

As a court official and a councilor, Paine was the main target of the crowd. He wrote out a resignation for the five-man committee representing those thousands. The committee deemed that sufficient, and one read the document aloud, but the crowd insisted that Paine read his resignation himself—and with his hat off, as a sign of respect.

According to Caleb A. Wall’s Reminiscences of Worcester from the Earliest Period (1877):

Mr. Paine hesitated, and demanded the protection of the Committee; finally he complied, and was allowed to go to his dwelling. Tradition declares, that in the excitement attendant on the scene, Mr. Paine’s wig was either knocked or fell off.

Be this as it may, from that day he abjured wigs, as much as he had done whigs, and never wore one again. The now dishonored wig in question, he gave to one of his negro slaves, named ‘Worcester.’

Worcester thus benefited from the Revolution to the extent of a used wig. I haven’t found any more references to him, but the fact that he was named after the town he lived in makes that search a lot harder.

As for Worcester’s mother Sylvia, she was remembered in the town for two things. Based on the memories of Eliza Bancroft Davis, a great-granddaughter of John Chandler, George Chandler’s The Chandler Family (1883) described how Sylvia welcomed the “young children of widows” who came to her master’s house on legal matters:

She would sit swaying to and fro with them in her arms, and sing, “Pretty baby, pretty baby! Looks jist like its farder, dear! Who is his farder, dear?”

Through the dialect we can see a woman with a maternal instinct. Perhaps that feeling helped inspire John Chandler’s bequest that Worcester be kept “at as little distance from his Mother as may well be.” It also makes me wonder who Worcester’s father was, and what happened to him.

The Chandler Family twice describes Sylvia rocking those babies. One version says she did it when enslaved to Chandler, who was a probate judge before he died in 1762; the other said it was a habit of “her last days,” decades later. One version also spells her name “Silvia.” The details might be foggy, but there’s a sight of a real woman there.

As for Sylvia’s “last days,” they came in 1805, over forty years after John Chandler died, almost thirty years after his widow did, and more than twenty years after Massachusetts’s highest court ruled slavery unenforceable. The 25 May issue of Boston’s leading newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, reported that “In Worcester, Sylvia, a female African, [died aged] Æt. 105.” Worcester’s National Aegis reported the same four days later.

Sylvia may have still been living with Sarah Paine, who survived to 1811. Eliza Bancroft Davis recalled that at age fourteen she had made a shroud for the old family retainer, marveling at how Sylvia had lived about a century longer than she had.

TOMORROW: Another family connection to slavery.

(The building shown above is Worcester’s 1803 courthouse, designed by Charles Bulfinch.)

John Chandler’s Human Property

The Worcester Art Museum recently added a label to its John Singleton Copley portrait of Lucretia Murray noting that her father had two slaves named Sylvia and Worcester when he died.

According to the museum’s old webpage for this picture (which doesn’t mention slavery at all), Copley painted Lucretia Murray in 1763. Her father, John Chandler of Worcester, had died the previous year. His will had granted Murray £340 in two installments.

That same will assigned Sylvia and Worcester to other relatives. That means Lucretia Murray had almost certainly grown up with them as part of the family’s domestic staff but was no longer benefiting from their labor when her portrait was made. And to learn more about those two people as individuals, we have to follow another path.

John Chandler’s will was the topic of a 1905 study by Charles A. Chase. Chandler had married twice. By his first wife, born Hannah Gardiner, he had nine children who grew to adulthood. His second wife was Sarah (Clark) Paine, a widow with children of her own. In writing his will Chandler wanted to provide for his widow Sarah, but only as long as she didn’t become a third husband’s responsibility, while preserving as much property as possible for his own children.

Therefore, Chandler set up a bequest in which his wife could live in his house and receive $40 of silver every six months from his estate as long as she didn’t remarry. And part of living in his house was being served by the enslaved woman Sylvia:

I give to my said Wife in Lieu of her Right of Dower or Power of thirds in my Real Estate as follows namely that she be decently and honorably Supported by my Executors for one Year from my decease, and live in my present dwelling house and that my Negro Woman Sylvia serve my said Wife said Year, and be Also supported by my Executors. . . .

And in case my said Dear Wife shall dwell in Worcester my Will and pleasure is that my Negro Sylvia aforesaid serve her mistress during her continuing my Widow. . . .

And Whereas I have given to my Dear Wife the Service of my Negro Woman during her continuing my Widow and dwelling in Worcester, I also order my said Negro woman to have a proper bed and beding to ly on said time.

Thus, Sylvia remained property of Chandler’s estate but was assigned to work for his widow.

To add to the family complexity, John Chandler’s daughter Sarah had married Sarah (Clark Paine) Chandler’s son Timothy Paine. Chandler left a legacy to her, adding a special proviso about his other slave:

…if my son in Law Timothy Paine Esqr. and my Daughter Sarah Paine his Wife incline to have my Negro boy (Worcester) they may for fifty three pounds Lawfull money in part of her Legacy and towards the first third part thereof desiring whoever has him he may be Treated with humanity & Tenderness and at as little distance from his Mother as may well be, and I desire their Spiritual good may be promoted.

The clear implication is that Sylvia was the mother of the enslaved “Negro boy” Worcester. He was probably a grown man at the time, based on later reports of her age. The phrase about “their Spiritual good” strikes me as an afterthought, like the proviso for Sylvia’s “proper bed and beding” above—Chandler thinking first of how he wanted to bequeath his human property and then remembering he had some responsibility to those people as well.

When the widow Sarah Chandler died in 1778, Sylvia became part of Timothy and Sarah Paine’s household, possibly reuniting with her son Worcester at the house shown above.

TOMORROW: Further glimpses of Worcester and Sylvia.

New Light from Museum Labels

Last month the Hyperallergic site published an interesting essay by Sarah E. Bond titled “Can Art Museums Help Illuminate Early American Connections to Slavery?”

The essay describes how the Worcester Art Museum has added information about forced labor to its presentation of this 1763 portrait of Lucretia Murray:

While the older museum label for the portrait had underscored the characteristic style of 18th-century painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) and pointed to his allusion to styles adopted by the British nobility, a new label now caught my eye. It informed me that Lucretia’s father owned two enslaved persons whom he later left in his will to family members. One was named Sylvia and the other Worcester.

The mere mention of those people enslaved to John Chandler reminds us as we view the painting that the wealth evident in it—evident even in its existence—arose from a slave-owning economy.

Bond elaborates:

The economic benefits of slavery are now explicit on the labels at WAM. Beside a painting by John Wollaston of Charles Willing (1746), a newly added label notes that the Philadelphia merchant owned four slaves. Using a copy of Willing’s will and articles from the Philadelphia Gazette, WAM invites viewers to grapple with the fact that Willing owned: a “Negroe Wench Cloe,” a “Negroe Girl Venus,” a “Negro Man John,[”] and a “Negro Boy Litchfield.” These facts make it harder to deify eighteenth and nineteenth century New Englanders and profoundly alter how we view the portrait.

I’m not sure anyone was “deifying” those New Englanders before, but it was easier for visitors to look at them with unabashed nostalgia.

That said, labels that spotlight slavery may leave other fundamental injustices in shadow. In particular, the land under John Chandler’s home, and under the Worcester Art Museum, and under the house I’m typing in, and probably under the place where you’re reading this, was taken from indigenous peoples without fair compensation.

Highlighting slave ownership by people in portraits can remind us of how slavery was enforced in Massachusetts before 1783. But for decades after that date Massachusetts remained part of the U.S. of A.’s slavery economy. The textile industry that fueled industrialization depended on slave-raised cotton.  And some of the other big fortunes of nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and thus some of the other big philanthropic bequests, grew from trafficking opium into China.

Another set of questions involves the labels themselves. If I read Bond’s essay correctly, the Worcester Art Museum’s label for the Lucretia Murray simply notes two people enslaved to her father. Making those names visible is important; it’s the first step to recognizing them as individuals. But more digging produces more information about Sylvia and Worcester.

TOMORROW: Mother and son.