“With child Quaco, about nine months old”

Here’s another connection between the Worcester Art Museum’s portrait of Lucretia Murray and the institution of slavery in Massachusetts.

John Singleton Copley painted that portrait in 1763, two years after Lucretia Chandler had married John Murray of Rutland. Copley’s portrait of John, also at the Worcester Art Museum, appears here. (This Murray is often called “Col. John Murray” because he held that rank in the militia and it helps to distinguish him from the Rev. John Murray, the pioneering Universalist.)

Murray was Rutland’s leading gentleman, which meant he had a hand in a lot of legal matters. In 1754, he witnessed this bill of sale, quoted here:

Rutland District, May 4th, 1754

Sold this day to a Mr. James Caldwell of said District, the County of Worcester, & Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, a certain negro man named Mingo, about twenty Years of Age, and also one negro wench named Dinah, about nineteen years of age, with child Quaco, about nine months old—all sound and well for the Sum of One hundred & eight pounds, lawful money, recd. to my full satisfaction: which Negroes, I the subscriber to warrant and defend against all claims whatsoever as witness my hand

Zedekiah Stone.

James Caldwell thus became the owner of a young family consisting of Mingo, Dinah, and baby Quaco.

Nine years later, Caldwell died unexpectedly. How unexpectedly? According to Hurd’s History of Worcester County:

James was killed in 1763, he, with one of his slaves, having taken refuge under a tree during a heavy thunder-shower. The tree was struck by lightning, and falling, killed him and broke a thigh of the negro.

Not expecting a lightning strike, Caldwell didn’t leave a will. John Murray got involved in settling the estate by becoming guardian for Caldwell’s children, preserving their interest in their father’s property. That property included the enslaved family, assigned to Isabel Caldwell as part of her widow’s third.

A lot happened to those families over the next decade:

• Mingo escaped from Isabel Caldwell, as shown by an advertisement she placed in the Boston News-Letter on 13 and 20 June 1765. 
• Dinah Caldwell, the wife Mingo left behind, married a black man named Cumberland Chandler in Worcester on 29 Nov 1767. He was no doubt linked to Lucretia Murray’s relations. 
• Lucretia Murray died in 1768, and John Murray married again at the end of the following year. 
• On 28 Mar 1769, Isabel Caldwell married Nathaniel Jennison. They lived in the part of Rutland that had become the town of Hutchinson in 1774 and then the town of Barre in 1776. She brought Mingo and Dinah’s enslaved son, now named Quock and in his late teens, to the new household. 
• In 1774, Isabel Jennison died, and her property went to her husband, Nathaniel.  
• The uprising in central Massachusetts late that same summer sent John Murray, recently appointed to the Massachusetts Council, fleeing into Boston for safety. He eventually settled in New Brunswick.

According to Quock, James Caldwell had promised him freedom on his twenty-fifth birthday. And Isabel Caldwell reportedly amended that to freedom on his twenty-first birthday, a promise Nathaniel Jennison committed to when he married her. But as the late 1770s went on, Jennison refused to manumit the young man.

In April 1781 Quock, now using the surname Walker, left Jennison’s house and went to the farm of John and Seth Caldwell—sons of the man who had bought him as a baby in 1754. (John Murray had served as their guardian in the mid-1760s.) The Caldwell brothers, who had probably grown up with Quock Walker, were ready to employ him as a free, wage-earning laborer.

Days later, Jennison violently forced Walker back to his own farm, ignoring the Caldwells’ objections that he deserved to be free. Walker sued Jennison. Jennison sued the Caldwells. The dispute landed in the Superior Court in the spring of 1783, becoming one of the cases by which judges declared that Massachusetts’s new constitution provided no protection for slavery.

(Historical Digression has an excellent discussion of this case.)

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.