“If he could get there he should be Free”

From 19 Aug 1771 to 9 September, an advertisement from John Hunt appeared in the Boston Gazette and the Boston Evening-Post.

Hunt (1716-1777) was a prosperous farmer in Watertown, a local trader and former town representative to the Massachusetts General Court.

His house, demolished in 1935, appears here courtesy of the Watertown Public Library and Digital Commonwealth.

The advertisement read:

Ran away from John Hunt of Watertown, on Tuesday last, a Negro Man named Prince, a tall streight Fellow, walks with a small Hitch. He is about 33 Years old, has been used to farming Business, is a handy Fellow on most Accounts, talks pretty good English.—Had on when he went away a striped Jacket, a Frock & Trowsers almost new.—

His Design was to get off in some Vessel so as to go to England, under the Notion if he could get there he should be Free.

Whoever takes up and secures said Fellow so that his Master receives him again shall be well rewarded for their Trouble.

He carried with him a good Pair of Deerskin Breeches.

All Masters of Vessels are cautioned against carrying off said Servant, as they would avoid the Penalty of the Law.

Hunt had advertised for escaped workers twice in the 1740s, once guessing his quarry would head for part of New England where he had lived before. But this man Prince had a more ambitious idea of reaching Great Britain and liberty.

This was two years after Customs officer Charles Steuart had left Boston with his enslaved manservant James Somerset. But it was months before Somerset tried to escape in London, leading to what in 1772 became a landmark court case over slavery in England.

This advertisement indicates that the “Notion” that a slave could “go to England” and “be Free” was circulating in New England even before the Somerset legal case confirmed, by some readings, that idea.

Noting this advertisement in the Massachusetts Historical Review, Antonio T. Bly declined to guess at why Prince believed he might be free in England. But once John Hunt was announcing it in the newspapers, the idea must have spread even wider than before.

The Thanksgiving Proclamation at Old South

The controversy over Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s Thanksgiving proclamation in 1771 caused particular trouble in Boston’s largest meetinghouse, the Old South.

That church had not had a placid year. In 1769 its minister, the Rev. Samuel Blair, had suddenly resigned and moved out of the colony. The congregation spent more than a year recruiting a new permanent minister, finally deciding in January 1771 to hire two men:

• The Rev. John Hunt, a 1764 graduate of Harvard College who had grown up in Northampton.
• The Rev. John Bacon (shown above), a 1765 graduate of Princeton College who had grown up in Canterbury, Connecticut.

But then Blair got back in touch, and church committees spent several more months settling with him. That meant the new team of Hunt and Bacon wasn’t installed until 25 September.

A month later, Gov. Hutchinson issued his holiday proclamation. Boston’s Whigs started to organize congregations into pressing their ministers not to read it, aiming their efforts for 10 November because by custom ministers in Boston shared such announcements two Sundays before the Thanksgiving.

But on 3 November, with Hunt home in Northampton, Bacon read that proclamation at Old South.

Ten days later, Samuel Adams wrote to Arthur Lee:

[Bacon] being a Stranger in the province, & having been settled but about Six Weeks, performd the servile task a week before the usual Time when the people were not aware of it, they were however much disgusted at it.

The 11 November Boston Gazette went further:

It is said the Worshipping Assembly at the Old South Church, whose Pastor had so prematurely as well as unexpectedly in the Absence of his senior Colleague, read the Governor’s Proclamation with the exceptionable Clause, stopped after divine Service was ended Yesterday, and express’d their great Dissatisfaction at that Part of the Rev. Mr. Bacon’s conduct.

The “senior Colleague,” Hunt, was actually younger and had fewer years as a minister than Bacon, though he had graduated college a year earlier.

The 25 November Gazette ran a longer commentary on the controversy at Old South. The Thanksgiving holiday had already passed, but printers Edes and Gill said that the letter had been left at their office the previous week when they didn’t have space in the newspaper.

That article tried to lift the blame off Bacon, saying:

Mr. Bacon desired the brethren of the church and congregation to stop after divine service was ended, in order (as is usual before our anniversary thanksgiving) to vote a collection for charitable and pious uses; after which a motion was made, the import of which was to consider whether our public thanks should be agreeable to the tenor of the exceptionable clause in the Proclamation; not a word was said in the meeting about Mr. Bacon’s conduct.

It is generally supposed (and I have reason to think justly) that Mr. Bacon being a stranger, and not having been informed of the usual time of reading the proclamation, conceived a propriety in its being read as soon as might conveniently be done after it came to hand. Nor do I know of any reason that can be given why it is not as proper to be read three Sabbaths before the day appointed for publick thanksgiving, as two; especially as custom is various in this respect.

It seems to be represented as a great piece of imprudence in Mr. Bacon to presume to read the proclamation in the absence of his Senior colleague. As to the terms Junior and Senior, I think them hardly worth mentioning, and I hope our kind Pastors will never be disposed to contend for the chief rooms, or who shall be the greatest. . . .

The essay was signed “S.C.” Those were the initials of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper of the Brattle Street Meetinghouse, one of Boston’s most respected and politically active ministers. Did Cooper write this letter to exonerate Bacon? Did someone else borrow his initials to do so? There’s no way to know, but it’s notable that in his detailed letter on the Thanksgiving controversy Cooper claimed that the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton was the only Boston minister to read the proclamation, shielding Bacon.

Bacon didn’t have a long tenure at Old South. The church dismissed him in February 1775 after the congregation had come to dislike his theology and preaching style. He moved to Stockbridge, took up the law, and entered politics, eventually serving one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As for Hunt, he died back home in Northampton in December 1775. Which meant that after the siege ended, Old South had to look for a permanent minister again. That process took until 1779.

“A Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers”

There’s an old joke in academic science that the authors of a paper believe the theory it puts forward but know the data is really crap. In contrast, all their colleagues believe the data and think the theory is crap.

I was reminded of that knee-slapper while reading the third of the three eighteenth-century papers in the 2012 issue of the Massachusetts Historical Review: Antonio T. Bly’s “A Prince Among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited.”

Prof. Bly recently published a compendium of newspaper advertisements titled Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England. That’s part of a larger project he calls the Inter-Colonial Runaway Slave Database, based on about 5,000 ads printed from Massachusetts to South Carolina between 1700 and 1789.

His paper includes some of the data from that study, and the findings are quite interesting. He can chart when people were most likely to flee slavery in Massachusetts, peaking in summer and in their twenties. He can document the rise of “Country born” and “Mulatto” escapees in the second half of the century. He can show that runaways in Massachusetts were more likely to be described as speaking English well than people in Pennsylvania, and far more than people in Virginia and South Carolina. Many more female escapees appeared in ads from South Carolina. There was a spike in Pennsylvania ads relative to the enslaved population during the 1760s.

But this paper starts with the nominal goal of deducing more about a particular man who escaped from New Hampshire in 1760, an effort that gets off on the wrong foot and never recovers. That man is described in a notice in the 28 Apr 1760 Boston Post-Boy signed by James Rogers which began like this:

RAN-away from the Widow Rogers of Rumford, in New-Hampshire, about a Month ago, a Negro servant Man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers, named Prince, of a middling Stature, about 30 Years of Age, has had the Small-Pox, looks very serious and grave, and pretends to a great deal of Religion.—

Since his Departure, he has sold most of his Cloaths, and now is but meanly dressed; he was in the Service the last Year, and has offer’d to inlist sundry Times, pretending himself to be a Free-man: He was lately taken up, but by his insinuating Discourse made his Escape again.

There’s a lot to be picked out there, but I think the paper sails right past the crucial starting-point. Bly writes of Prince, “In all likelihood, he fought alongside his master, who had been an officer in the militia. Had he seen Major Rogers fall in battle?”

No, he hadn’t, because Maj. Robert Rogers of New Hampshire was the founder of the famous Rogers’ Rangers, later the captor of Nathan Hale and a Loyalist exile until his death in 1795. His life is quite well documented. At the time this advertisement was placed, Maj. Rogers was commanding soldiers at Crown Point, New York, and his younger brother James, a captain, was recruiting more men. That’s why, even though the major was Prince’s master, his relatives were handling the search for him.

It might be possible to find the will of Rogers’s father James to determine if he had owned Prince years before. It does seem likely that Prince accompanied Rogers in the previous year when the major’s men destroyed the Abenaki town of St. Francis. We also know that Rogers and his eventually estranged wife Elizabeth had enslaved servants when they lived in Portsmouth in the later 1760s, including a youth captured at St. Francis.

We even have another data point about Prince. In the 22 Nov 1762 Boston Post-Boy James Rogers ran another ad:

RAN away from me the Subscriber at Londonderry, in the Province of New Hampshire, on the 18th of September, a Negro Man Servant named Prince about 40 Years of Age, about 5 feet 5 inches high, speaks good English, had on when he went away a green Coat, blue plush Breeches, diaper Jacket, several pair of thread Stockings with him; he looks very serious and grave, and pretends to be very religious: He is the property of Major Rogers and has been several Years to the Westward, and pretends to be free.

Aside from aging ten years in two, this appears to be exactly the same man, returned and gone again. (There’s supplemental data about black soldiers in Rogers’s company in yet another ad, in the 30 July 1759 New-York Mercury, describing an African man named Jacob who claimed to have earned his freedom by serving for three years. Did Prince feel he was entitled to the same status?)

Instead of spotting that clue and following it up, Bly theorizes based on little evidence. He treats the widow Rogers as the author of this ad even though James Rogers signed it and his mother was hundreds of miles away. One paragraph says that Prince left “with nothing but an additional suit of clothes,” and the next that he had “gone off with quite a bit of clothing”; the ad isn’t specific either way. Bly suggests that Prince was “a gifted orator,” but that’s a different skill from “insinuating Discourse.” He concludes that Prince’s ability to move within New England society meant he must have been born here, but there are examples of Africa-born captives learning to maneuver well.

Almost a full page of the essay and two pages of notes are devoted to the idea that Prince’s parents might have been inspired to give him that name by the “Election Day” celebrations documented in New England from about eleven years after his birth. But I see no evidence that Prince was born in America, that his parents raised him, that they saw such a celebration, that they had the freedom to name him, that the term “prince” was linked to those festivities, &c.

The paper even acknowledges another escapee named Prince, from Watertown’s John Hunt in 1774. Prince was, in fact, a fairly common name among New England slaves, probably chosen by white owners with the same sarcasm that inspired them to name so many other baby boys Caesar, Pompey, and Scipio. (A study by Gary Nash shows that African-Americans in Philadelphia swiftly dropped those names in the generation after emancipation.)

After those four pages of conjecture, Bly’s paper settles down to a much more solid examination of the information to be found in runaway-slave advertisements. There are still occasional odd glitches, like citing a 1675 law about periwigs in the context of an ad from 1767, when fashions in hairdressing had completely changed. One detail I didn’t see discussed is “country marks,” or facial scarring and dental mutilation characteristic of some west African cultures (PDF download). Perhaps those were rare in New England, though Bly quotes a 1714 ad for a man who had “lost his Fore-upper Teeth.”

So in the end I had strongly mixed feelings about this paper. I was impressed by the data and would have been happier with much less theorizing. I hope Bly uses the Robert Rogers lead to draw a more grounded profile of the man named Prince.

“Imprisoned some time past”

In 2007-08, I transcribed the diary of selectman Timothy Newell during the siege of Boston, but somehow I managed to miss this entry:

14th [July 1775]. Last night was awoke by the discharge of cannon on the lines—

Master James Lovell, Master [John] Leach, John—Hunt, have been imprisoned some time past—all they know why it is so is they are charged with free speaking on the public measures.

Dorrington his son and daughter and the nurse for blowing up flies in the evening, they are charged with giving signals in this way to the army without.

John Hunt was charged on 19 July with “speaking treason,” and five days later the prison provost—William Cunningham may already have held that post—added that “Mr. Hunt had hurt his puppy dog and by God he should be confined a month longer.” But that apparently didn’t sway the military authorities, and Hunt was freed on 25 July.

Lovell and Leach were schoolteachers. British officers found some letters on Dr. Joseph Warren’s body that appeared to come from a teacher inside Boston, perhaps signed with the initials “J.L.” The army arrested both men on 29 June. Leach was set free in October, but Lovell (who had in fact sent those letters) was shipped to Halifax as a prisoner in March 1776.

TOMORROW: The Dorrington family.

(Irresistible puppy courtesy of the Massachusetts Department of Animal Health.)