Celebrations of Phillis Wheatley’s Boston Pub Date

At the end of November 1773, the ship Dartmouth was moored in Boston’s inner harbor, watched by a militia-style patrol of volunteers to ensure the tea it carried was not unloaded and taxed.

The Rotch family’s vessel, under the command of James Hall, brought other cargo as well. Among those items were copies of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Wheatley had recently become legally free, and she was counting on sales of those books for her income.

Fortunately, by 1 December the local Whigs made clear that everything could be unloaded from the Dartmouth except the East India Company tea, so the books came ashore.

Historians only recently recognized the connection between Wheatley’s book and the Boston Tea Party because no one mentioned it at the time. Wheatley may have been worried 250 years ago today, but by the time she was writing the letters that survive she had her books on dry land and was busy promoting orders.

Wheatley wrote that her books would arrive “in Capt. Hall,” using the common way of referring to a ship by its master rather than its name. About ten years ago Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, researcher Richard Kigel, and others realized that the captain of that name arriving in Boston around that time had to be James Hall on the Dartmouth.

The sestercentennial of the Tea Party thus coincides with the sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s book in America, and both events are being commemorated this season.

Ada Solanke’s play Phillis in Boston will have its last performances for the year in Old South Meeting House, the poet’s own church, on Sunday, 3 December. That site-specific drama depicts the poet, her friend Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, her recent owner Susannah Wheatley, and abolitionist Prince Hall. Order tickets here.

The next evening, 4 December, the Boston Public Library will host “Faces of Phillis,” a free program discussing the poet from various perspectives. It will start with a staged reading of parts of Solanke’s plays about Wheatley. Then there will be a panel featuring Solanke, sculptor Meredith Bergmann, and Kyera Singleton of the Royall House & Slave Quarters museum. The evening will conclude with Boston’s Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, performing a dramatic reading of her own work and one of Wheatley’s poems.

“Faces of Phillis” is scheduled to last from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Register for that event here.

Learning about Phillis Wheatley in London and Boston

Ade Solanke is a British playwright of Nigerian descent. She earned an M.F.A. in screenwriting at U.S.C. on top of British degrees, and she’s now a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

Solanke specializes in stories about the African diaspora. In 2018 her play Phillis in London debuted at the Greenwich Book Festival. It dramatized the experiences of Phillis Wheatley in the summer of 1773, visiting the imperial capital to promote the publication of her book of poetry.

On Monday, 30 October, Solanke will be at the Massachusetts Historical Society for a reading from that play and a panel discussion about researching it, titled “Bringing Phillis to Life.” The other panelists will be:

• Tara Bynum, author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.
• David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

That event starts at 5:30 with a reception, and the program will begin at 6:00. Admission is $10, free to members. People can also watch online for free. Register to attend one way or the other through this page.

On Friday, 3 November, Solanke’s new play Phillis in Boston will premiere at the Old South Meeting-House—no doubt the event that’s bringing the playwright to Boston. (There will be preview performances the previous two nights.)

Directed by Regge Life, Phillis in Boston explores the life of the poet soon after she returned from London. Revolutionary Spaces says:

The play celebrates friendship, love, community, and joy by centering Wheatley’s relationships with her friend and confidant Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, and the dynamic abolitionist Prince Hall. Phillis in Boston examines slavery in New England through the lens of Wheatley’s complex relationship with her enslaver Susanna Wheatley, who supported Wheatley’s literary ambitions even as she kept her in bondage.

Phillis in Boston is designed to be performed in the meetinghouse where Wheatley and other revolutionaries were congregants.

Solanke’s play will run in that space through Sunday, 3 December, on evenings from Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets cost $15–35. For more information and to reserve seats, visit this page.

(The striking image above comes from the webpage of an event at the British Library earlier this month, all inspired by the sestercentennial of Wheatley’s book.)

Hanson on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, 22 Oct.

On Sunday, 22 October, Old North Illuminated will host two events featuring John G. S. Hanson speaking about the nearby Copp’s Hill Burying Ground.

A tour of that cemetery with Hanson is already sold out, but it’s still possible to take in his talk “The Stones Cry Out” in the church or online.

The event description says:

Many people visit Boston’s historic burying grounds to see the monuments of historical figures like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Crispus Attucks, Samuel Sewall, Prince Hall, and Cotton Mather. But few pause to read the inscriptions on the stones of other early “every day” Bostonians, whose names and lives are now long forgotten.

For those who take the time to look and “listen” closely, these gravestones convey highly personal messages that not only reveal a glimpse into their personal lives, but also the literature that they read, the hymns they sang, and the poetry that moved them. These stones also can tell us a great deal about colonial Bostonians’ attitudes toward life, death, and eternity.

Join burial ground expert John Hanson for “The Stones Cry Out” and explore the history and poignancy of the Copp’s Hill Burial Ground epitaphs, followed by a reception and multimedia presentation at the Old North Church, as we illuminate history through the artistic disciplines of poetry, verse, and music.

Most of the names in that description are buried at the Granary Burying Ground, but Copp’s Hill is the resting-place of Mather and Hall, as well as firebrand merchant captain Daniel Malcom, both men named Robert Newman, Benjamin Edes, and Shem Drowne.

John G. S. Hanson is the author of Reading the Gravestones of Old New England (McFarland, 2021), based on years of research into grave markers and the sources for their texts.

The lecture is scheduled to take place from 5:15 to 6:30 P.M. People can register for in-person or online attendance through this webpage, and Old North Illuminated asks those attendees to donate what they can.

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.

Thousands of Curiosities from the Harvard Libraries

The Harvard Libraries have created a set of webpages called “CURIOSity Digital Collections” which provide “Curated views that provide specialized search options and unique content.”

That content comes from the university’s own holdings, and since the Harvard system adds up to one of the largest libraries on the planet, there’s a lot of content to choose from.

Some of the topics covered by these pages are:

• the South Sea Bubble of 1720
• France in the Americas
• American Currency over the centuries (watch the quantity of bills explode during the Revolutionary War)
• The Artemas Ward House in Shrewsbury
• English Crime and Execution Broadsides of the 18th and 19th centuries
• Joseph Story, justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from Marblehead

The newest collection looks at Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom. Linking to more than a thousand items related to black history and culture, this collection is the result of a university-wide effort that digital collections program manager Dorothy Berry has led since 2020, as reported in the Harvard Gazette.

Some of the eighteenth-century items to explore in that section are:

• Nathaniel Appleton’s Considerations on Slavery; in a Letter to a Friend, printed by Edes and Gill in 1767.
• James Swan’s A Dissuasion to Great-Britain and the Colonies, from the Slave Trade to Africa, printed by Ezekiel Russell in 1772.
• A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving the Africans; held at the Public Commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773, credited to Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson and printed by John Boyle for bookseller Thomas Leverett.
• Jupiter Hammon’s An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York from 1787.
• Prince Hall’s A Charge Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodge on the 25th of June, 1792, printed by the Thomas and John Fleet.

Plus, there are pamphlets from the same years printed in Philadelphia, London, and other important British cities.

This collection extends into the nineteenth century, so there are many items from the fight for (and against) abolition in the U.S. of A. and around the world. Plus, more to come.

Presentations on Phillis Wheatley and Prince Hall

This week Boston’s historical institutions are offering two presentations about notable African-Americans in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

Monday, 27 March, 5:30–6:30 P.M.
A Revolutionary Encounter in London
Massachusetts Historical Society

On May 8, 1773, enslaved African-American poet Phillis Wheatley sailed for London to promote her book of poetry Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published there later that summer. During her six-week stay Phillis would have the opportunity to meet many notables, one of whom was American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

This play by Debbie Weiss imagines the meeting of these two Colonial American icons. Local actors Cathryn Philippe and Steve Auger will present a special version of the full-length play as a staged reading.

This is an online event, and folks can register through this page.

Tuesday, 28 March, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
Who Was Prince Hall?: An Introduction to an Extraordinary Man
The Paul Revere House

For the second event in the site’s 2021 Lowell Lecture Series, Manuel R. Pires, chairman of African Lodge No. 459, Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, will introduce the historical figure of Prince Hall. Exploring the activist and Freemason’s achievements and contributions, Pires will argue for considering Hall as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

This free event will be available both in-person at the Paul Revere House complex and online. For some of the limited number of in-person tickets, register here.

The lecture will be streamed live on the Paul Revere House’s YouTube and Facebook pages, and recorded for later viewing on the GBH Forum Network. Streaming will be provided on YouTube and Facebook.

Historic Holiday Presentations

Lots of local historical organizations are offering special online events to make staying healthy at home this season more interesting. Here’s a selection that caught my eye.

Sunday, 6 December, 5:00 P.M.
Virtual Traditions of the Season
Paul Revere House

Join the Paul Revere House and the Paul Revere Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution to learn about how families like the Reveres observed winter holidays in the colonial era. Period music by R.P. Hale, video segments filmed in the period rooms of the Revere House, and discussion of eighteenth-century foodways will bring the past to life in the comfort of your home. Registration will include access to recipes you can chose to prepare in advance or later in the season.

Register here for $10 per ticket.

Wednesday, 9 December, 7:00 P.M.
The Making of a Reenactment
Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum

The annual reenactment of the Boston Tea Party is a long Boston tradition and one of the largest moving theatrical productions and reenactments in the nation. Sadly, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this large-scale event will not be produced in 2020. To honor the tradition and to commemorate the 247th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, members of the production team will offer a special behind-the-scenes look at the process of researching, planning, creating, producing, and reenacting one of the most iconic moments in American history.

Register here for $15 per ticket.

Friday, 11 December, 7:30 P.M.
The Massacre Orations of Dr. Joseph Warren
History At Play, L.L.C.

The Chicago-based historian and interpreter Spencer Van Herik will portray that Son of Liberty and marvel of modern medicine, Dr. Joseph Warren, in a new livestream event. Herik transports viewers to 6 March 1775 and reinvigorates the orative prowess of the Whig leader and Continental martyr.

Register here for $10 to $25 per ticket.

Wednesday, 16 December, 7:30 P.M.
Taxes, Tea, Revolt, and Revisionism
Revolutionary Spaces

Tune in for local personality Rob Crean on a new comedy talk show, Tea Party Tonight! Along with some of the leading voices in Boston history and research, Rob will explore the roles of our city and its people in the creation and evolution of the American experiment, with plenty of laughs along the way. Broadcast from the historic Old South Meeting House on the 247th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Rob will be joined by scholars William Fowler, Ben Carp, and Chernoh Sesay to dive into the world surrounding the ”destruction of the tea,” what kind of society it wrought, and why eighteenth-century events still have meaning today.

Register here for this free event.

Thursday, 17 December, 7:00 P.M.
The Petition
Revolutionary Spaces

A special remote performance of Cliff Odle’s play about the fight to end slavery at the founding of the nation. Originally written for the Old State House, this historical drama shines a light on the story of eighteenth-century abolitionist Prince Hall. It explores the debates that still inform and divide us: Who counts as an American? What is the obligation of power to serve the people? Do we fight for what is right or what is attainable? The performance will feature actors Alex Jacobs and Stephen Sampson, and will be followed by a talkback with the playwright and cast.

Register here for this free event.

EXTRA: Hanson Plass on “Lancaster Hill’s Revolution,” 8 Mar.

In the wake of the Boston Massacre Sestercentennial, there’s also an interesting talk about a Bostonian not prominent in that event but active in the quest for liberty in eighteenth-century America.

On Sunday, 8 March, at 12:15 P.M. Eric Hanson Plass will speak at King’s Chapel on “Lancaster Hill’s Revolution.”

The event description says:

Lancaster Hill, a free black man living in colonial and revolutionary-era Boston, married Margaret, a woman enslaved by a parishioner, at King’s Chapel in the 1750s. During the American Revolution, Hill joined the ranks of notable activist and abolitionist Prince Hall, and advocated for the abolition of slavery.

In 1777 Lancaster Hill signed his name to a petition with eight other men, demanding that this new independent state of Massachusetts abolish the institution of slavery once and for all. This stroke of a pen, in his own hand, was a distinct moment in this man's transformation into an American revolutionary. Over the span of some thirty years, Lancaster Hill transformed from being a man enslaved by a government, to a man who demanded recognition and accountability of government.

Hanson Plass brings over a decade of experience illuminating Boston’s history as a park ranger with the National Park Service. He holds a master's degree in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This event is free and open to the public. Voluntary donations support the King’s Chapel History Program and its public programs.

Harvard Digital Collections from the Colonial Period

Last month the Harvard Gazette featured some treasures from the university’s Colonial North America collection, “approximately 650,000 digitized pages of handmade materials from the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Most of that material consists of manuscripts, but highlighted in this article are:

• a Charles Willson Peale miniature portrait of George Washington on ivory, slightly over an inch wide, shown here.
• Prof. John Winthtrop’s almanac for 1772, its frontispiece Paul Revere’s woodcut version of his Boston Massacre copperplate engraving.
• a globe three inches across, made in 1757 and encased in a spherical case covered in shark skin that doubled as a celestial globe.

As I type, the collection’s front page features documents created by Dr. John Jeffries and the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, two men from Revolutionary Massachusetts I don’t fully trust. But I can’t hold that against the university.

This week the university announced the launch of the larger Harvard Digital Collections, which contains the material from Colonial North America. That “provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections—from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.”

What’s more, this is the policy on copyright governing this material:

In order to foster creative reuse of digitized content, Harvard Library allows free use of openly available digital reproductions of items from its collections that are not under copyright, except where other rights or restrictions apply.

Harvard Library asserts no copyright over digital reproductions of works in its collections which are in the public domain, where those digital reproductions are made openly available on Harvard Library websites.

So if a person wanted an image of a certificate of initiation into the African Lodge of Freemasons, signed by Prince Hall, George Middleton, and other officers, one has merely to click.

“A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom”

On 13 Jan 1777, the Massachusetts legislature considered a petition from eight black men on behalf of “a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country.”

That petition drew on the natural-rights philosophy that underlay the Declaration of Independence and similar documents in the preceding years. The authors wrote:

That your Petitioners apprehend that they have, in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind, and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever—But they were unjustly dragged, by the cruel hand of Power, from their dearest friends, and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender Parents, from a populous, pleasant and plentiful Country—and in Violation of the Laws of Nature and of Nation and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity, brought hither to be sold like Beasts of Burden, and like them condemned to slavery for Life—Among a People professing the mild Religion of Jesus—A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom—Nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce them to a State of Bondage and Subjection.

Your Honors need not to be informed that a Life of Slavery, like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of every thing requisite to render Life even tolerable, is far worse than Non-Existence—In imitation of the laudable example of the good People of these States, your Petitioners have long and patiently waited the event of Petition after Petition by them presented to the legislative Body of this State, and can not but with grief reflect that their success has been but too similar.

They can not but express their astonishment, that it has never been considered, that every principle from which America has acted in the course of her unhappy difficulties with Great-Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners.

The ask was for a law to free all adults enslaved in Massachusetts, and to ensure the liberty of all enslaved children when they reached the age of twenty-one (essentially treating them as apprentices).

The legislature didn’t enact such a law. The Massachusetts courts eventually made the first big step to making slavery unenforceable in the state.

Here are the signatures and marks of the eight men who submitted the petition, as shown in its digital form, courtesy of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions project.

The most famous of those men was Prince Hall. Others joined with Hall in the first African-American Freemasons lodge.

Today I’m focusing on the sixth man, whose given name was Nero. I’ve seen his surname transcribed as Funelo, Funilo, and even Suneto. I posit that that surname was Funels, a phonetic spelling of Faneuils, and that this man had been enslaved by one of the Faneuil family.

TOMORROW: Nero Faneuil in court.

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.

The Craft of Caesar Fleet

Yesterday I described the travels of Pompey Fleet, a printer born into slavery in Boston around 1746 who ended up in west Africa by the end of the century. He was part of three mass migrations of Loyalists: from Boston in 1776, from New York in 1783, and from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792.

What about Pompey’s younger brother, Caesar Fleet? His life took a different course. He stayed in Boston. The town’s 1780 tax assessments, published several decades ago by the Bostonian Society, list Caesar Fleet as a “Negro” living in Ward 10. The fact that he was tallied as a taxpayer indicates that he was no longer considered a slave, even before Massachusetts’s high court made slavery unenforceable in 1783.

Caesar Fleet’s name appears in another interesting source from the Revolutionary years. One of the earliest documents from Boston’s African Lodge of Freemasons, founded by Prince Hall, shows that “Sesar Fleet” joined in 23 June 1779. That was one of several civic organizations Hall and his circle founded during and after the Revolution in their bid as black men for an equal place in Boston society.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found Caesar Fleet in any other local records or newspapers. I don’t know if he lived long enough to be involved in the printing of Prince Hall’s 1797 oration, shown above. But there might be more sources out there.

Last year Caitlin G-D Hopkins wrote an article for Common-place that mentioned Pompey and Caesar’s father, Peter Fleet. She added thanks to “Gloria McCahon Whiting, whose pioneering work on the life and work of Peter Fleet, woodcut illustrator, has informed and enriched my own research.”

As it happens, Gloria Whiting is sharing a paper this Tuesday on “‘How Can the Wife Submit?’: African Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery in New England” as part of the women’s history seminar series co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. That conversation will take place at 5:30 P.M. on 15 April at the Schlesinger Library, 10 Garden Street in Cambridge. It’s free to the public, but to reserve a seat contact the M.H.S.

TOMORROW: Should I show Peter Fleet’s cartoon about Freemasonry from 1751? It’s “not safe for work,” as the kids say.

Independence Weekend Walking Tours in Boston

The Boston African American National Historical Site is offering two free walking tours focusing on the history and heritage of the American Revolution on the upcoming holiday weekend.

Black Bostonians of the Revolution
Saturday, 2 July, 11:00 A.M.
Come learn about Revolutionary War-era leaders such as Prince Hall and Colonel George Middleton and how they and other early African American activists in Boston laid the foundation for the Abolition Movement and the early struggles for equal rights. Tour begins at the Samuel Adams Statue in front of Faneuil Hall.

The Freedom “on Trial” Trail
Monday, 4 July, 11:00 A.M.
Join us for this great walking tour which focuses on the time when the promises of the American Revolution were “on trial” in Boston’s 19th-century African American community. The tour will take you to places where Boston’s developing black community struggled to realize the full promise of citizenship. Tour begins at the Samuel Adams Statue in front of Faneuil Hall.

Each tour, led by a National Park Service ranger, will take approximately ninety minutes. Check the historic site’s website for more tours on this weekend and throughout the summer.

The Prince Hall Monument in Cambridge

While I was on Cambridge common looking at trees, I also visited the Prince Hall Monument dedicated in May 2010.

I’d heard about this monument for years because of questions about whether it belonged in Cambridge. Prince Hall lived in Boston, where he was the leader of the African-American community in the years after the Revolution. He delivered a published oration in west Cambridge in 1797, but that part of the town became Arlington. There didn’t seem to be any documented connection between Hall and modern Cambridge.

But when I saw the tall dark gray stones, created by local artist Ted Clausen, I was happily impressed. They stand in a circle, evoking both the feeling of being hemmed in, as early American society hemmed in Hall, and of gathering together for strength.

The text engraved on the stones describes Hall’s life and work, going beyond his role in Freemasonry and avoiding myths that have arisen around him. The stones also touch on other milestones and figures in Massachusetts’s civil rights history.

All in all, this monument makes a better case for being rooted where it is than the nearby plaques honoring Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciuszko. Not that those men weren’t important in America’s Revolutionary War, but I don’t think they ever came to Cambridge or lived nearby.

The photograph above was taken by Wally Gobetz, and comes from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

A Certificate from Prince Hall

Harvard’s Houghton Library is showing off a recent acquisition, which came through the university’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute. It’s a 1799 Freemasonry certificate signed by Prince Hall, founder of the African-American Freemason movement. The library’s blog says:

Hall may have been born a slave in Barbados (however, several conflicting versions of Hall’s early life exist). He came to Boston in 1765, and quickly became a leader within the African-American community of Boston. In 1775, Hall and thirteen other black men were initiated into Military Lodge No. 441 in Boston, which was then affiliated with the British Army.

Following the Revolution, facing discrimination, (to be initiated into a Lodge, a Mason needs to gain a unanimous vote, but as votes are contributed anonymously, it would be impossible to identify any one dissenting individual), black Masons began urging Hall to form a separate organization. Hall was elected the first Grand Master of the African Grand Lodge of North America, and the Lodge was later renamed in his honor.

Hall and his comrades were initiated as Freemasons by officers of the British army’s 38th Regiment on 6 Mar 1775 at Castle William in Boston harbor. On that same day, Dr. Joseph Warren—Grand Master of one line of Freemasons in North America—gave an oration commemorating the Boston Massacre, which other officers apparently attended to disrupt.

The Freemasons in the 38th may have made those fourteen men Freemasons in an attempt to win the loyalty of some prominent free blacks. They may have done so to highlight the hypocrisy of rebels who spoke about liberty but kept people in slavery (as Warren did). They may even have been lampooning Warren’s Masonic status, which was disputed by an older and wealthier lodge in Boston, by inducting Massachusetts men of African origin into the “real” movement ahead of him.

After the war broke out, a little over a month later, the 38th fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill, suffering more casualties than any other regiment in the final assault. According to tradition, Hall fought on the provincial side in the same battle, but there’s no documentation for that. His activity during the war is clouded by the fact that “Prince Hall” was a fairly common name.

In 1777, Prince Hall signed a petition to the Massachusetts General Court seeking an end to slavery in the new state. (Another signer, Peter Best, might also be the Peter Bestes who had submitted a similar petition in 1773.) In 1788, a letter from Boston published in the New-York Packet referred to Hall as “one of the head men among the blacks in this town.” He continued to lobby and organize on behalf of African-American rights until he died in 1807.

Thanks to Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos for the pointer.