How Did the 8th of July Become Quock Walker Day?

Back in 2006, while discussing a proposed Juneteenth holiday and how the Quock Walker cases had more relevance to Massachusetts, I wrote:

…despite the Walker decision, Massachusetts didn’t become a slavery-free zone right away. That case wasn’t reported or publicized, so only in retrospect did it become a landmark. We still don’t know the exact date of the decision (which makes it hard to observe its anniversary).

At this remove, I’m not sure where I read that scholars didn’t know the date of the decisions that confirmed Walker’s freedom, but I certainly didn’t find any.

When I read that in 2020 the Massachusetts General Court passed a law stating that the decision came out on July 8 and making that date Quock Walker Day in Massachusetts, I naturally became curious. Had new documentation come to light?

First I went back through the scholarly articles studying the case, from the 1960s to the 2000s, seeing if any of them cited a date or a newfound document. Nothing.

Then I looked for books stating the decision came on 8 July. Most of those have been published just in the last few years. The earliest I found was Charles M. Christian’s Black Saga: The African American Experience, published in 1995:

MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME COURT ABOLISHES SLAVERY

On JULY 8, the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Commonwealth v. Jennison abolished slavery in the commonwealth by virtue of the Declaration of Rights of 1780.

A similarly organized book, Junius P. Rodriguez’s Chronology of World Slavery (ABC-Clio, 1999) said:

In a landmark judicial decision on July 8, slavery was abolished in Massachusetts by action of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the case of Commonwealth v. Jennison, which involved the efforts of a slave, Quock Walker, to obtain his freedom. The decision was based upon an interpretation of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.

Neither of those books cited sources. Nor did any of the more recent books that echo the same date. This timeline from the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Case for Ending Slavery website, a teachers’ resource created in 2010, gives the 8 July date, based on the Chronology of World Slavery quoted above.

Massachusetts’s official guide to the constitutional cases that ended slavery in the state, the Long Road to Justice website, and Historical Digression’s narrative of the cases don’t state a specific date.

I took another look in my newspaper database, again finding nothing.

I decided to go to the expert on both state government records and the end of slavery in Massachusetts, John Hannigan of the Massachusetts Archives. I asked him, Do we know when the Massachusetts Supreme Court issued its decision in the commonwealth’s case against Nathaniel Jennison?

Hannigan swiftly replied:

Jennison appeared before the Supreme Judicial Court to answer the indictment during the April session, which opened on April 15 and adjourned on April 24, 1783. [Chief Justice William] Cushing issued his now-famous instructions and the jury found Jennison guilty at some point during the course of those ten days. I don’t think it’s possible to pinpoint a more accurate date, as none of the documents are specifically dated beyond the month and year of the session. Indictments were usually entered at the end of the record book for each session, possibly indicating that the justices reserved those for last, but there's no way to prove that.

Ironically, the SJC was not even in session on July 8, 1783. The justices adjourned the session for Cumberland county on July 5, 1783; they didn’t meet again until the Suffolk county session opened on August 26, 1783.

The image above is from the surviving record of the Jennison indictment. Clerk Charles Cushing (brother of the chief justice) wrote “April Term at Worcester A.D. 1783” with no further detail.

Thus, there appears to be not a scrap of historical documentation that the final decision in the Quock Walker cases happened on 8 July 1783, and some strong evidence that it couldn’t have. However, the 8th of July observance is now a matter of state law.

TOMORROW: What Nathaniel Jennison was doing in July 1783.

Quock Walker Day and Juneteenth

Back in June 2006, just weeks after I launched Boston 1775, I shared my thoughts on whether Juneteenth should become a Massachusetts holiday.

Juneteenth would be a synecdoche for the end of slavery in the U.S., I wrote. The 19th of June was the date in 1865 when slavery ended in some parts of Texas, but it stood for the process of liberation over a broader range of space and time.

As Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book On Juneteenth relates, some African-American citizens have celebrated that date for generations.

Most of my 2006 posting focused on the end of slavery in Massachusetts, more than seventy-five years before the U.S. Civil War. I quoted state Chief Justice William Cushing‘s charge to the jury in one of the legal cases arising between Quock Walker and the man who claimed him, Nathaniel Jennison.

Publicizing the full history of slavery in Massachusetts was, I argued, more important for this state than observing Juneteenth, which shifted the problem to another corner of the country.

Last year the Massachusetts legislature voted to make the 8th of July Quock Walker Day, commemorating the end of legal slavery in this state. This is the first year to observe the holiday, and the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington is hosting a community celebration online this evening at 7:00 P.M.

In addition, last month the U.S. Congress voted to make Juneteenth the national celebration of the end of slavery. All too predictably, the far right opposed that. The only votes in Congress against the resolution were from fourteen Republican members of the House.

Many progressives also noted the irony that endorsement of the holiday was coinciding with a push in many states to make voting more difficult. The current U.S. Supreme Court said that state legislators can impose obstacles to voting even when they know those measures don’t solve serious problems and would affect African-American citizens most.

TOMORROW: A question of timing.

“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.)