Black New Englanders Rescued from Out-of-State Enslavement

The natural-rights argument of the Revolutionary War inspired the New England states to end slavery or at least start phasing it out.

However, with most of the U.S. of A. and all of the territories around the Caribbean still gobbling up enslaved labor, there was a terrible ongoing market for people of African heritage who couldn’t prove they were free.

This month brought two online articles about black New Englanders being dragged away from their homes in the first years after independence, and how the new state governments responded.

At Small State, Big History, Christian McBurney discusses a dispute that began in early 1779 when John Rice came from North Carolina to Rhode Island and bought an enslaved woman named Abigail and three of her children. Rice then hired local farmer Lodowick Stanton to drive his new human property in a wagon to Connecticut. Apparently Abigail communicated her fears to Stanton before the caravan stopped at his house. McBurney writes:

The next morning Rice awoke and was informed that Abigail and her daughters were nowhere to be found. Stanton was not a good liar. At first he said that they had all gone to Block Island. Then he blamed [neighbor] John Cross for their disappearance.

In a petition Rice later submitted to the General Assembly, he stated: “In making enquiry for his Negroes, [he] has great reasons to believe that a number of people had combined against him to deprive him of his property.” In addition, Rice wrote that he “was informed his person was in danger if he . . . pursued after” Abigail and her children. Stanton and likely John Cross, among others, kept Abigail and her children hidden at their own expense for several weeks.

The Rhode Island legislature ultimately sided with Abigail. It passed a law that took no property from Rhode Island slaveholders but barred the sale of people out of state without their consent (unless a court held the enslaved person had “become notoriously unfaithful and villainous”). That slavery-limiting law has received little attention, overshadowed by the gradual emancipation law that Rhode Island enacted five years later. As for Abigail and her children, they evidently remained in the state, but their individual fates can’t be tracked.

McBurney’s next book is Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade, about the wartime cruise of the Marlborough to attack British shipping along the African coast.

At the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Beehive blog, Benjamin D. Remillard shared “What then are our Lives and Lebeties worth”: The 18th Century Kidnapping Case that Shook Boston”:

Cato Newell…was a twenty-three-year-old baker from Charlestown, MA, when he enlisted alongside the rebels after the violence at Lexington and Concord. Boston’s Wenham Carey was a bit older by comparison, enlisting multiple times for short periods when he was already in his thirties. Luke (or Luck) Russell, meanwhile, while not a veteran, is believed to have been a member of Prince Hall’s growing African Freemason Lodge.

Life after the war, however, did not come without risks. Newell, Carey, and Russell discovered this for themselves when they were hired by a man named Avery to make boat repairs in February 1788. They travelled to Boston Harbor’s Long Island, where their employer directed the trio below deck to begin their work. After locking away his human cargo, the ship’s captain set sail for warmer waters.

It was not long before word of the abduction reached the men’s families. Writing from Charlestown, they decried the capture of those “three unhappy Africans,” and insisted that their loved ones were “justly intitled” to “the protection of the laws and government which they have contributed to support.”

The three men’s families, Hall, local Quakers, and others raised an outcry about this abduction. The Massachusetts establishment, led by Gov. John Hancock, responded with a new law and diplomatic correspondence. The situation was resolved happily by July 1788.

Benjamin Rice and the Boston Tea Party

Yesterday I noted how the appendix in the back of Traits of the Tea-Party (1835) listed “Benjamin Rice” among the men who had helped to destroy the East India Company tea on 16 Dec 1773. What do we know about that man?

In Tea Leaves (1884), Francis S. Drake reprinted that list, but he couldn’t find anything more about Benjamin Rice. His book offered capsule biographies of every possible participant he could identify, but not Rice.

After that, authors identified two men as being or possibly being the Benjamin Rice of the Boston Tea Party, and in neither case is the evidence strong.

The first candidate was Benjamin Rice (1723-1796) of North Brookfield. He was a militia captain and occasional town representative. On 7 Dec 1773 he was one of a five-man committee, which also included Jeduthan Baldwin, that wrote this about the tea tax:

We think it our indispensable duty, in the most public manner to let the world know our utter abhorrence of the last and most detestable scheme, in the introduction of Tea from Great Britain, to be peddled out amongst us, but which means we were made to swallow a poison more fatal in its effects to the national and political Rights and Privileges of the People of this country, than ratsbane would be to the natural body—

Therefore, Resolved, that we will not by any way or means, knowingly encourage or promote the sale or consumption of any Tea whatever, subject to a duty payable in America, but all persons whoever they may be, who shall be concerned in a transaction so dangerous, shall be held by us in the utmost contempt, and be deemed enemies to the well being of this country.

This quotation appears in J. H. Temple’s History of North Brookfield, published in 1887. That book didn’t connect Rice to the actual destruction of the tea, however.

Twenty years later, Ellery Bicknell Crane supervised the publication of Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, one of many local histories produced by the Lewis Publishing Company for sale to libraries and prominent families in the area. And that book says:

Captain Benjamin Rice, great-grandson of Edward Rice, was of the party of “Mohawks” who threw the tea into the Boston Harbor, was a town correspondent of the committee of safety, and served in the legislature in 1776-77 and in 1783-84. He married Sarah Upham, a descendant of Lieutenant Phineas Upham, who is written of elsewhere in this work.

The four-volume set offers no evidence for that statement, however.

I suspect that Crane’s team saw Benjamin Rice’s name on the North Brookfield’s committee report and in Tea Leaves, and concluded it was the same man. But from North Brookfield to the old part of Boston is more than sixty miles. It’s hard to imagine a fifty-year-old farmer making such a journey in December 1773 on the chance that Boston’s tea dispute would still be unresolved when he reached the capital. Furthermore, the Boston radicals who planned the secret, risky raid on the tea ships surely recruited men they knew and trusted, not men who happened to show up from out of town. So I don’t find this identification convincing.

Another Benjamin Rice appears to have been in Boston in 1773. He had been born in Westborough in 1749, graduated from Harvard in July, and started to study medicine. He would marry Martha Bent in January 1774, and die eight years later. However, this Benjamin Rice had grown up in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, from the age of eleven. Like the farmer from North Brookfield, he was probably not a familiar and trusted face to Boston’s radicals. The earliest suggestion I’ve found that this Benjamin Rice was involved in the Tea Party dates from 1974, and again seems to be based on no more evidence than his name.

In sum, the list in Traits of the Tea-Party appears to be our only document or tradition dating from before 1900 to indicate that a man named Benjamin Rice participated in the Boston Tea Party.

Which brings me back to John Rice, the subject of yesterday’s posting. According to William Cooper’s notes on public meetings, Harvard student John Rice (or his forty-six-year-old father) volunteered to help keep the tea from landing in November. He held important positions in town during and after the Revolution, and married into a family of Tea Party participants. As I wrote yesterday, some current descendants of John Rice report a family tradition connecting him to the destruction of the tea.

So which story seems more likely: that John Rice joined in the Tea Party in 1773, but six decades someone misstated his first name as Benjamin, or that one of the men named Benjamin Rice participated in the Tea Party but never left any other evidence of radical political activity in Boston?

Of course, both of those scenarios are possible, and I can imagine still more ways to explain why the name “Benjamin Rice” appears in Traits of the Tea-Party. It’s quite easy to think that the Rice family tradition stems from how their ancestor patrolled the docks in November 1773, not from the tea destruction the next month. Still, I think John Rice deserves more scrutiny.

And what about the tradition “that one of his shoes, filled with tea, was in the Boston Atheneum”? A John Rice, possibly the son of the Boston official born in 1783, was one of that library’s founding members.

John Rice and the Boston Tea Party

In July I received emails from David and Alice H. Rice of North Carolina relaying a “family story” that David’s ancestor John Rice (1754-1803) was part of the Boston Tea Party. “It was said that one of his shoes, filled with tea, was in the Boston Atheneum,” Alice wrote.

And my first thought was the vaunted “double positive”: Yeah. Right.

Individuals and families have made incredible claims that they or one of their ancestors was involved in the Boston Tea Party almost as long as it’s been a celebrated event—since the 1830s. Among the claims I’ve looked at:

• David Kennison of Chicago, who claimed to be the “last survivor” of the Tea Party and 115 years old when he died in 1852. He was actually only 85, which made him six years old in 1773, and he didn’t even live in Boston.
• Admirers of Samuel Smith of Topsfield, discussed here.
• The anecdote told by Samuel Bradlee Doggett in 1884, of an ancestor hiding her husband and brothers from British officers after the event. Nice story, but there were no British officers hunting anyone that night.

So I was polite to the Rices, and started to look into the possibility of John Rice being at the Tea Party, but doubted that I’d find anything convincing.

The earliest list of Tea Party participants appears at the back of Traits of the Tea-Party, an 1835 book based largely on the memories of George R. T. Hewes. I’ve written about my best guess on the source of that list. While not free of error or omission, it was published within the lifetime of people alive in 1773, and is thus our most reliable source. And that list doesn’t include John Rice; instead, it names Benjamin Rice.

John Rice’s name also isn’t named among the tea destroyers in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves, the book with the longest list of Tea Party activists. Drake cast a very wide net, and included some men on very little evidence. Nevertheless, John Rice was not among them.

Finally, because John Rice graduated from Harvard in 1774, there’s a short biography of him in a 1999 volume of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, compiled and published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The researchers there have tremendous resources, and the book doesn’t link Rice to the Tea Party. I asked the series editor—Conrad E. Wright, also author of the recent Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence—whether he’d come across any rumors or hazy leads about Rice, and he hadn’t.

And yet, I don’t feel ready to dismiss this family tradition.

My first reason is that on 30 Nov 1773 John Rice (or his namesake father, who was forty-six years old instead of nineteen) volunteered to patrol Griffin’s Wharf with other men to ensure that the tea wasn’t taken off the ships—which would have triggered the tea tax back in London. So he was definitely active in the conflict between the town and the royal authorities. Several of the other men who volunteered in the same way on that or the previous night went on to help destroy the tea a couple of weeks later.

Second, during the war John Rice served in a number of important positions in the Massachusetts militia. By 1780 he oversaw the Boston garrison as “Town Major” and “Acting Adjutant General for the State"—top administrative roles. After the war, the U.S. government gave Maj. Rice more jobs: as deputy naval officer for the port of Boston under James Lovell, then deputy collector of impost and excise under former general Benjamin Lincoln. When the United States Bank was established in 1793, Rice was the first teller in the Boston branch. None of this proves that Rice was at the Tea Party, of course. But the Patriot establishment seems to have given such jobs to men who had offered reliable service before and during the war.

Third, John Rice’s wife was Elizabeth Hunnewell, and her father and two of her brothers are on the 1835 list of men participating in the Tea Party. That doesn’t mean he went along with them, but it does offer yet more evidence that he hung out with that crowd.

TOMORROW: But what about Benjamin Rice?