Lincoln’s Sestercentennial Series

The town of Lincoln is observing the Sestercentennial with a series of exhibits at the library and a series of events.

The January exhibit was about Lincoln’s vote to send delegates to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress 250 years ago this month. The February exhibit will be on the theme “Enslaved in the American Revolution.”

Here are the presentations and other events announced so far.

Thursday, 30 January, 7:00 P.M., online
Causes of the American Revolution
Dane Morrison

Increasing taxation created dissent in Massachusetts. In 1774, Great Britain issued more punitive measures to suppress dissent and restore order, such as the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter of 1691. Former Salem State Professor Dane Morrison will discuss Lincoln at the beginning of the Revolution, exploring why an inland agricultural village would feel threatened by the new royal and Parliamentary initiatives. Register here.

Sunday, 2 February, 12:30–4:00 P.M., in and around Bemis Hall
The Lincoln of 1775
Co-hosted by the Bemis Free Lecture Series, the Lincoln Historical Society, the Lincoln Minute Men, the Middlesex County 4-H Fife & Drum, and Lincoln250

What was life like for families 250 years ago in Lincoln? Talk with reenactors about the attire, the food, and the amusements of family life of the day. The event will include musket demonstrations and music. At 2:00 P.M., a dance party will begin with instruction for all who wish to join. Refreshments will be served.

Thursday, 27 February, 7:00 P.M., online
Entangled Lives, Black and White in Lincoln, Mass.
Don Hafner

In the 18th century, the town of Lincoln had dozens of Black residents, enslaved and free, who helped the town thrive. They plowed the fields, hoed the gardens, and harvested the food. They did the cooking, they did the laundry, they cared for the children, they tended the sick and the elderly. They worked the blacksmith shops and the sawmills, made the nails and cut the boards for Lincoln’s first meeting house and houses that still stand. More than a hundred white residents of Lincoln lived in a household with an enslaved person. Come hear what we know about their entangled lives with historian Don Hafner. Register here.

Saturday, 8 March, 2:00 P.M., at the library
Meet Abigail Adams
Sheryl Faye

Lincoln250 celebrates Women's History Month! All ages are invited to Sheryl Faye’s engaging portrayal of Abigail Adams, wife of second President John Adams and sister of Lincoln Minute Men captain William Smith. Ms. Faye will portray Abigail as an adult and a child as she navigates life in colonial New England and stands up for the rights of women during the turbulence of War for Independence. All ages welcome. No registration necessary.

Thursday, 13 March, 7:00 P.M., at the library
Women in the American Revolution
Audrey Stuck-Girard

While the experiences of individual women during the American War of Independence have been largely left out of the historical record, they were nonetheless active participants of the cultural shift known as the American Revolution. Rural Massachusetts women in 1775 managed household budgets and property while being legally barred from owning any of that property. As the primary influence and educators of young children, they instilled moral and cultural values and ethics to the first generation of independent Americans. And when many of the men in their lives were away serving or killed in the war, women endeavored (with varying levels of success) to fulfill both male and female roles in their absence. Register here.

The Ongoing Story of Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery

In 2016, Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust stated publicly:

Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage from the College’s earliest days in the 17th century until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783, and Harvard continued to be indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties to the slave South up to the time of emancipation.

A historian of America’s antebellum South, Faust established a committee to investigate that history further, building on various faculty members’ work. Caitlin Galante DeAngelis, Ph.D., led much of the new research, producing an internal report for the administration.

In 2022, the university issued a public report on how the institution had benefited from slavery. This initiative followed similar efforts at Brown, Georgetown, and many other old American universities, not only to uncover that history but to seek ways to repair the damage of past slaveholding today.

Brown is named after a transatlantic slave trader, and profits from that business helped to endow the university. Georgetown received an infusion of funds in the 1830s from the Maryland Province of Jesuits’ sale of more than 200 people to Louisiana planters. Harvard was actually founded before Massachusetts made chattel slavery legal, but the college undoubtedly benefited directly and indirectly from coerced labor in the following centuries.

Among other responses, the university’s 2022 report recommended creating “a public memorial for the enslaved people who helped shape the institution.” A committee started to solicit ideas from artists, but in May 2024 the committee chairs resigned, saying that university administrators were rushing the process and not consulting enough with descendant communities.

That disagreement appeared to be only the most visible sign of trouble. In September, the Harvard Crimson published a story about the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery project that began:

A $100 million University initiative intended to make amends for Harvard’s ties to slavery has been hamstrung by infighting, high staff turnover, and senior University officials seeking to limit the project’s scope, multiple current and former staff members told The Crimson.

This long article described various forms of dysfunction, including interpersonal friction, but the problem underlying everything else seemed to be disagreement on the scope and purpose of the project.

As to the scope, one issue is whether the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program’s research should cover people enslaved by “members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers…in their personal homes.” In colonial Massachusetts, those governing board members tended to be ministers or wealthy men—the classes of people most likely to own other people. As with any board, some were more involved in the working of the college than others.

The month after that story, the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program’s director, Richard J. Cellini, published his own opinion essay in the Crimson, reiterating one detail:

Last year, I formally notified the Office of the President and the Office of General Counsel that a small number of senior University administrators pressured me not to find “too many descendants” and not to do my job “too well.”

Obviously Cellini was challenging the university to keep the scope of the program wide.

On 17 January, the college newspaper reported:

Members of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative met with Prime Minister Gaston A. Browne and Governor General Rodney E.L. Williams of Antigua and Barbuda on Wednesday after the initiative’s research team determined that “several hundred people” had been enslaved by Harvard affiliates in the island nation between the 1660s and 1815.

That article said researchers had identified four “four Harvard-affiliated enslavers” with property on Antigua. However, it didn’t say how the program had defined those “affiliates.” Antigua was where Isaac Royall, a Harvard overseer and benefactor, derived most of his wealth.

Members of the initiative at that meeting included Cellini, his program’s senior research fellow, and Vincent A. Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African-American Studies. Brown’s 2020 book Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, James A. Rawley Prize, and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction.

Yesterday, six days after the Crimson reported on that meeting on Antigua, the university suddenly laid off the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program’s staff. The genealogical work will reportedly be outsourced to American Ancestors (the New England Historic Genealogical Society). The program itself has not been formally ended, though it’s unclear how many people remain and what they’re assigned to do.

No doubt there will be more drama to come.

“The Judge supposes he is possessed of the secret”

Before returning to Dr. John Newman, I’ll share some other sources on the treatment of cancers in New England on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

In January 1773, the Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver went to Rhode Island to serve on the royal commission investigating the attack on H.M.S. Gaspée.

Politically the Rev. Ezra Stiles was opposed to Oliver and the inquiry, but he was still polite enough to host the man.

On 11 January, Stiles wrote in his diary:

This Afternoon the hon. Judge Oliver came to drink Tea with me and spent the Evening at my house in Company with Mr. [Robert?] Stevens, Major [Jonathan] Otis and Dr. Jabez Bowen of Providence.

The Judge told us that his Wife had been last year cured of a Cancer in her Neck of 30 years standg. by a young man Mr. [John] Pope of Boston. . . .

His remedy is a secret, but he explained the operation of it to Mr. Oliver in a philosophical Manner, though Mr. Pope is not a man of Letters nor does he make pretension to any other part of Medicine or Surgery.

Peter and Mary (Clarke) Oliver’s son Peter (1741–c. 1831) was a respectable sort of doctor: upper-class, male, practicing standard medicine for his time. Nonetheless, Mary sought treatment from John Pope.

How good that treatment was over the long term is another question. Mary Oliver died on 24 Mar 1775 at the age of sixty-one. Among the pictures of Judge Oliver is one, reproduced above, showing the man mourning at his wife’s grave. It’s one of the rare portraits from the time of a person displaying strong emotion.

Stiles wrote down some of Oliver’s other medical remarks in 1773:

The Judge said that the late Mr. Little of Plymouth found an absolute Remedy for the Quincy, called white Drops, and offered me the Receipt. I suppose it the same as Dr. Bartlets which is only volatile Sp[iri]ts. as Hartshorn or Salarmoniac mixed with Oyl Olive. . . .

The Judge knew an illiterate physician to cure his (the Judge’s) Negro of a bilious Colic or perhaps the Illiac passion in a few Minutes—but would not disclose his Remedy. But the Judge supposes he is possessed of the secret, though that physician died without communicating it even to his own son. For being on the Circuit of the Superior Court in the Co. of York he found a Countryman to the Eastward [i.e., in Maine] who had a Cure for the bilious Colic, which Dr. Lyman had proved infallible in 100 instances.

The Judge bought it of the Man for 30. and it was only the Root of Meadow Flags, or Flower de Luce. Not every flag—but such only whose Root was flat with prongs—that flag root which was surrounded with bushy Fibres will not answer.

The most common name for those flowers today is wild iris.

Tesiero on Elizabeth Freeman, 4 Dec.

On Wednesday, 4 December, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a virtual program with Donna Tesiero speaking on “A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman & the Abolition of Slavery in the North.”

The event description says:

At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians.

The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick pursued would bring freedom to her and her daughter, as well as thousands of other enslaved people. Freeman left her enslaver to be employed by Sedgwick. After Sedgwick's wife, Pamela, became a chronic invalid, Freeman effectively became the foster mother to his seven children, enabling him to pursue a political career.

Donna Tesiero is the author of A Revolutionary Woman, published by McFarland this year. Trained as an attorney, she has studied history and government and also writes historical fiction for young people.

This free event is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. To register and receive a link for logging on, go to this page.

Darius Parkhurst, “deprived of Sight and hearing”

On 27 May 1774, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westboro wrote in his diary about a trip to Boston:

At Mr. Joseph Coollidge’s bought me a new pair of Gold Buttons, and paid him for them 8£ 6/. Undertook my Journey home. Called at Mr. [most likely the minister Amos] Adams’s at Roxbury where I saw Mr. [blank] of Woodstock [Connecticut], who was blind and deaf. The way to Converse with him, was by writing in his hand.

Parkman had forgotten the name of the deaf and blind man he met, and mistaken his home town. But the minister still remembered that encounter months later because on 12 August he wrote:

Mr. [the minister Aaron] Putnam of Pomfret and his Sister Bethiah dined here.

N.B. He gave me a further account of Mr. Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret (whom I saw at Mr. Adams’s at Roxbury last May) and his accomplishments though deprived of Sight and hearing about 11 AEts [i.e., age eleven]. Is now about 34. You must write in his hand, with your or his finger, to convey your meaning. Blessed be God for my sight and hearing! May I have grace to improve them!

Those details about the man match genealogical records of a Darius Parkhurst born in Pomfret on 7 June 1739 and dying there on 12 May 1792. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

Now it’s possible there was a cousin or other man of the same name and approximate age in Pomfret, but I haven’t come across one. So for the rest of this posting I’m going to assume that all the sources refer to one man. There are no mentions in newspapers, but he does appear in government records.

In September 1776 Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret married Joanna (sometimes called Anna) Sabin. Darius’s mother had also been a Sabin, but I can’t trace the family link to his wife.

The Parkhursts started having children, including a little Darius (1777–1778) memorialized on the same stone as his father. There were three more kids by 1785: Darius, Simeon, and Sarah.

In 1783, the town paid Darius Parkhurst for “keeping Seth Sabin.” That might have been Joanna’s father, then nearing seventy.

Joanne Pope Melish’s Disowning Slavery mentions another member of the household:

In 1790, when Jacob Dresser of Thompson, Connecticut, apprenticed “a Negro Girl Named Peggy” (apparently a child of his slave) to Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret, he wrote, “During the aforesd term Sd Dresser Doth fully impower Sd Parkhurst to Control, order & command said Peggy in all Respects, and to all Intents & Purposes a sthrough She were born his Servant.”

This reflected Connecticut’s slow move away from slavery. If Peggy had been born after 1784, she was legally free and would become a free adult at the age of twenty-one. Until that time, however, she was a child (of an enslaved woman, furthermore), and therefore not free but in need of both care and governance.

Remarkably, none of those local and legal records say anything about Darius Parkhurst himself being disabled. (Once again, assuming there was only one man in town by that name.) Legally Darius was the recipient of the town’s relief payments and the master of Peggy, but it seems likely that Joanna provided most of the care and oversight. In fact, the household might have received that money and that indentured child because people knew Darius couldn’t do ordinary farm work.

Still, Darius Parkhurst must have had some way to support himself since he did inherit land, marry, raise kids, travel as far as Roxbury, and so on. His minister told Parkman about “his accomplishments.” Yet he doesn’t seem to have been remembered in any local history. Without Parkman’s diary entries, we’d have no way of knowing that he’d lost his sight and hearing.

“Others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants”

An extract from Daniel N. Gullotta’s review for Providence magazine of Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield by Sean McGever.

McGever highlights:

…the deeply hierarchical view of the world held by [Jonathan] Edwards, [John] Wesley, [George] Whitefield, and their evangelical contemporaries. From their perspective, just as God ordains some to be princes and governors, so too are others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants, laborers, and even slaves.

Slavery, therefore, was believed to be ordained by God and, in the words of Puritan clergyman William Gouge, such an understanding was “clearly and plentifully noted in the Scripture, that any one who is any whit acquainted therewith may know them to be so.”

While such views seem counterintuitive to our modern-day egalitarian norms, McGever adeptly explains why 18th-century evangelicals would have perceived our anti-hierarchical tendencies as nothing but a “hellish confusion” to borrow a description from the Puritan theologian John Owen.

Despite their divinely ordered view of the world, 18th-century evangelicals, following their theological ancestors, acknowledged that slavery was a sinful product of the fall. The question for most Christian thinkers was not whether slavery was biblical, but rather how it could be practiced biblically.

The book discusses how Whitefield promoted importing enslaved Africans as a solution for Georgia’s labor problems. Edwards wrote little on slavery for public consumption but defended and practiced it privately. As for the last of these prominent evangelists: 

Later in life, Wesley felt compelled to speak out as the abolitionist movement, driven primarily by Quakers in the 1770s, gained momentum. Readers might be surprised at how little Scripture he used in his shift to opposing slavery, favoring instead ideas drawn from natural law and reasoning. McGever…theorizes that Wesley would never have adopted his abolitionist stance had he been raised in America or even just spent more time there, arguing for the essential contingency of many deeply held beliefs.

Three Events on Saturday, 28 Sept.

This Saturday, 28 September, will see a number of local events linked to Revolutionary history.

10:00 to 11:00 A.M.
How We Remember
Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington

The Arlington Historical Society, Arlington 250, and Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area host a walking tour of Revolutionary sites in central Arlington, including a newly installed monument.

Historical references point to a mass grave of 40 British regulars who died on April 19, 1775 in the retreat from Lexington and Concord. A recent Ground Penetrating Radar study revealed disturbed soil in this location consistent with a mass grave. A permanent monument, dedicated September 7, 2024, now marks this historic site.

Our program will begin with a brief tour of the Jason Russell House where British bullet holes from April 19th, 1775 can still be seen. We will then walk a flat and easy 0.3 miles to the Old Burying Ground, passing Robbins Memorial Town Hall, a statue by Cyrus Dallin, the Winfield Robbins Memorial Gardens and the Whittemore-Robbins House.

Arriving at the Old Burying Ground, we will see the recently dedicated Monument to the Fallen Crown Soldiers who Died on April 19, 1775 and the 2023 Monument to Enslaved and Free Persons of Color in Menotomy who are buried in the same area. Before returning to the Jason Russell House, we will visit the 1848 Revolutionary War Monument that marks the burial site of Jason Russell and 11 of his fellow Patriots who fell on April 19th, 1775.

Space is limited to twelve people, so register in advance. 

10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
Sudbury Ancient Colonial Faire and Fife & Drum Muster
Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, Sudbury

The annual fair in Sudbury includes a colonial encampment, militia and crafts demonstrations, contradancing, and dozens of food and craft vendors. Twenty-five fife and drum corps from across the Northeast are scheduled to perform.

The Grand Parade of fifes and drums will begin at noon; this year there is a new route that starts in front of the camping area. After the groups reach the fair grounds, each performs in turn, providing music through the afternoon.

Admission is $3 cash at the gate. Nearby parking is free.

4:00 to 5:30 P.M.
Battle of Menotomy: Myth, Lore & History
Rebecca Nurse Homestead, Danvers

Prof. Donald Hayes, a longtime member of the Danvers Alarm List Company, will present his recent research on the role that the Danvers militias played in the fighting at Menotomy during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Danvers lost seven men that day, second only to Lexington itself. He will highlight what is lore and what is documented fact. Reserve free tickets here.

Duane on “The Hidden History of America’s Children,” 25 Sept.

On Wednesday, 25 September, Old North Illuminated will host an online talk by Anna Mae Duane titled “Cradle to Revolution: The Hidden History of America's Children.”

The event description says:

When we think about Americans who changed the course of history, we rarely think about children. In the popular imagination, young people usually stand on the sidelines of history, sheltered and coddled by the adults who really make things happen. In reality, however, children have played a vital part in American politics and culture since the colonial era.

In this online talk, Dr. Anna Mae Duane of the University of Connecticut will explore the often-overlooked role of children in shaping the course of early American history. From the Salem Witch Trials to the Revolutionary War and the fight against slavery, Dr. Duane will reveal how young voices and actions influenced pivotal moments in our nation's past, including revolutionary changes in social and political structures.

Duane is a professor of English and director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. She is particularly interested in “how definitions of youth and childhood shape culture and policy in ways that require the abdication of rights in order to claim care.” Duane has written and edited six books, including Suffering Childhood in Early America.

To register for this virtual event, go to this page, press the Get Tickets button, and make a donation of any amount to Old North Illuminated. You’ll receive a Zoom link by email. Prof. Duane’s talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M.

“Powder Alarm” Commemorations in Somerville & Cambridge, 1–4 Sept.

I’m participating in a series of free events at the start of September to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the “Powder Alarm” and the start of Massachusetts’ political independence from Britain.

For the people of Massachusetts, that independence began to coalesce more than a year and a half before the Declaration of Independence.

On September 1, 1774, the royal governor sent soldiers to Somerville and Cambridge to seize gunpowder and other militia supplies.

In response, on September 2 thousands of Middlesex County farmers marched into Cambridge and demanded resignations from all royal appointees in town. By the end of that day, it was clear that the governor no longer commanded any authority in most of Massachusetts. In the fall, towns set up an independent legislature and started to prepare for war.

Sunday, 1 September, 9:30 A.M.
Spark of the Revolution
Nathan Tufts Park, Broadway and College Avenue, Somerville

The Somerville Museum is partnering with the City of Somerville to produce a reenactment of the 1774 events at the Powder House, with remarks by Gen. Thomas Gage and other royal appointees, followed by a living history fair. The fair will include docent tours of the Powder House, activity tables, and even a scavenger hunt of the park! More information to be posted here.

Monday, 2 September, 1:00–5:00 P.M.
Rebellion along Tory Row
Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge
History Cambridge, 159 Brattle Street, Cambridge

Two of the mansions where Loyalist families lived in 1774 are hosting a range of events, indoors and out, for different ages and interests. People could, for example, enjoy what’s happening on the Longfellow–Washington grounds, join the first leg of my walking tour, and then sit down for a talk or two at History Cambridge.

• 1:00–5:00: Family games and activities at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.
• 1:45: J. L. Bell leads a walking tour of the colonial estates along Brattle Street, starting at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.
• 2:30: Prof. Robert J. Allison lays out the political situation in Massachusetts in 1774 at History Cambridge.
• 3:30: Michele Gabrielson speaks on Revolutionary printers and 18th-century media literacy at History Cambridge.

One more enticing detail: Because this Monday is Labor Day, Cambridge parking rules will not be in force.
Wednesday, 4 September, 6:30 P.M.
The Powder Alarm and Political Change
Cambridge Public Library

In the library auditorium, four historians discuss the history and significance of the 1774 Powder Alarm, including its political context, how it affected Cambridge’s Loyalist families, and the most basic fight for liberty along Tory Row. Here are the panelists:

• Dan Breen is a professor of Legal Studies at Brandeis University. He received is Ph.D. in American History from Boston College, and is now putting the finishing touches on a book about the public monuments of Boston.
• Caitlin G. DeAngelis, Ph.D., served as the head Research Associate for the Harvard and Slavery Project and as a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. In addition to articles about individuals from eighteenth-century New England, she is the author of The Caretakers: War Graves Gardeners and the Secret Battle to Rescue Allied Airmen in World War II.
• MaryKate Smolenski is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Boston University. She studies the memory of the American Revolution through print and material culture, and is particularly interested in how descendants of Revolutionary-era Loyalists remember their ancestors.
• myself. My book The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War recounts the Powder Alarm as the launch of a month of seizing and stealing artillery.

End the summer with the start of independence!

More Detail about William Costin

Back in 2016 I wrote about William Costin, then believed to be the son of John Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s son, and Ann Dandridge, her half-sister.

A couple of years ago Mount Vernon created an entry in its Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington on “The Ancestry of William Costin,” which I came across last week.

That in turn led me to David O. Stewart’s Journal of the American Revolution article “The Mount Vernon Slave Who Made Good: The Mystery of William Costin” from 2020.

The Mount Vernon page still identifies John Parke Custis as most likely to be William Costin’s father, based on a range of contemporaneous behavior and later statements.

The Custis family said nothing about that publicly at the time, of course, but they not only freed Costin and his relatives, they kept ties with them. Costin himself followed that family’s custom in giving his own children the middle name Parke.

The newer articles point out that there are no contemporaneous sources on a woman named Ann Dandridge, particularly from Mount Vernon, where the surviving records are unusually full. The earliest mentions of William Costin’s mother appear around the turn of the century when she was known as Nancy or Ann Holmes, formerly Costin.

It’s impossible to reconcile two statements about “Ann Dandridge” published in 1871—that she was a daughter of John Dandridge, Martha Washington’s father, and that she grew up as Martha’s playmate. Nancy/Ann (Costin) Holmes had children as late as 1801. It’s therefore just possible that her father was John Dandridge, who died in 1756. But she couldn’t have been about the same age as Martha Washington, born in 1731.

The Mount Vernon article posits that this Nancy/Ann had children by three men:

• William by John Parke Custis in or around 1780. Custis died in 1781.
• Four children between 1788 and 1795 by a man named Costin, possibly an overseer documented as working on a Custis plantation on Smith’s Island. William took this stepfather’s surname.
• Two children by Joseph Holmes in 1799 and 1801.

Eventually Nancy/Ann Holmes and all her children became the property of Eliza Parke Custis Law, and her husband Thomas Law manumitted the extended family in the early 1800s.

“Newport baker Godfrey Wainwood purchased Robert”

At Small State, Big History, Robert A. Selig recently discussed slave sales in Newport, Rhode Island, during and at the end of the Revolutionary War.

As Selig notes, just before the war the small colony had started to move away from importing enslaved people. (Rhode Island merchants were still entirely free to transport captives elsewhere, though.)

In “Newport’s Last Slave Auction: Rochambeau’s Prizes,” Selig writes of cases like this:

According to court documents, the slave named Robert who initiated the legal proceedings ran away from his owner in early in 1781, leaving behind his enslaved mother and father. Robert hailed from Port Royal in Caroline County, Virginia . . . .

Perhaps Robert and the others thought that their chances of securing freedom would improve by boarding a French vessel but it is more likely that they mistook the French vessel for a British ship. Either way, boarding the French vessel did not mean freedom but rather more years in slavery. Destouches brought the slaves to Newport—where based on a 1774 Rhode Island law forbidding the importation of slaves they should have been freed.

Destouches was probably unaware of that law but Rhode Island and Newport authorities should have been and thus should have prohibited the sale. They did not. Maybe they did not want to annoy their “illustrious ally.” . . .

On 13 June the sale went ahead as planned. After trading bids with Henry Sherburne, Newport baker Godfrey Wainwood purchased Robert for 170 Spanish silver dollars . . .

In 1789 a dispute arose over the length of the contract Robert was supposed to work for Wainwood; Wainwood claimed nine years, Robert claimed seven years. After lengthy legal proceeding it was in the fall of 1791 that Robert was finally “[wrested] from the iron grasps of despotism and [restored] to the capacity of enjoying himself as a man.”

Mention of the Newport baker Godfrey Wainwood immediately caught my eye.

Wainwood was the man who turned in his ex-wife for trying to send a ciphered letter into Boston in the summer of 1775, setting off the investigation that unmasked Dr. Benjamin Church as a paid British agent.

A German-speaking immigrant, Wainwood managed to establish himself solidly in Newport. Purchasing an enslaved man reflected growing wealth.

A Dig into the Lives of Pompey and Isaac Hower

Last month Northeastern Global News published an article about an archeological excavation in what is now Saugus and historical research about a past owner of that site.

This project is a collaboration by Meghan Howey, Alyssa Moreau, and Diane Fiske of the University of New Hampshire’s Great Bay Archaeological Survey; Prof. Kabria Baumgartner of the Northeastern University history department; and their students.

That team is digging into the property and the records of a man named Pompey who lived in Lynn in the late 1700s. According to Alonzo Lewis’s 1829 History of Lynn, Pompey hosted the African-born people of the region for a one-day celebration each year. Baumgartner ties this tradition to the “Negro Election” tradition across New England in that period.

Research into real estate and town records provides some facts that both strengthen that tradition by confirming Pompey’s status as a free black property owner and complicate it with questions of dates:

For instance, research confirmed Pompey’s 1745 marriage to a woman named Phyllis or Phebe, and that he was enslaved by a man named Daniel Mansfield II.

Historians believe Pompey was manumitted, or freed, by the 1750s, but apparently not — as legend holds — in Mansfield’s 1757 will.

“It’s not in the will, and we haven’t found any manumission papers,” Baumgartner says. But she notes that manumission papers are rare to find.

Upon securing his freedom, Pompey borrowed money from another Black man named Isaac Hower to purchase two acres along the Saugus River in 1762. The deed was not recorded until 1787, however, at which time Pompey signed the property over to Hower’s widow, Flora.

But many questions remain unanswered. For instance, if not freed in Mansfield’s will, did Pompey free himself?

And then of course there’s the question of Isaac Hower. What was his story, and how did he gain enough money to be able to lend it out?

The vital records of Salem offer some hints. On 23 Jan 1754, Isaac, enslaved by Samuel Gardner, married Jane, enslaved by Richard Derby. According to the first volume of The Pickering Genealogy, in 1757 Isaac owned the covenant and joined Salem’s First Meeting; this book says he had formerly been called Cato, but the marriage record indicates he was already known as Isaac before that religious experience.

An abstract of Samuel Gardner’s will, dated 1766 and probated in 1769, stated:

As my negro slave named Isaac has generally served me with great diligence and integrity, I give to the same Isaac £10 lawful money with his apparel, and his freedom. If he is unable to support himself, my sons George, Weld, and Henry, to support him.

The Northeastern article thus says Pompey borrowed money from Hower to buy property before Hower was freed, which calls out for more research. Perhaps the purchase and mortgage were separate acts.

The vital records of Salem also record that “Isaac Hower, formerly servant to the late Samuel Gardner, Esq.,” married Mary Banister of Boston in March 1774. Later, it appears, he married a woman named Flora.

The 6 Nov 1787 Salem Mercury reported this death:

Isaac Howard (an African) aged 60——formerly a domestick of the late Samuel Gardner, Esq.---A “good and faithful servant.”
“Honour and shame from no complexion rise;
Act well your part, there all the honour lies.”

Those lines are an adaptation of a couplet in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, with the word “condition” swapped out for “complexion.” Such a notice indicated that Hower had stature in Salem.

When Daniel Smith advertised to settle the estate the following January, he used the spelling “Hower,” as did the man’s son, so that was the family’s preference. In December 1788, Flora Hower married Reuben Pernam. The vital records don’t help after that.

A City Project to Reconstruct Charlestown in June 1775

Last month, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Boston’s Archaeology Program announced the release of research on the people who lived in Charlestown at that time.

During the battle, most of the town burned to the ground. That event provided a physical marker in the ground, and also a documentary milestone as inhabitants filed claims for their losses. However, the department notes, “Despite multiple attempts over half a century, no funds were ever granted.”

Using real estate records compiled by Thomas Bellows Wyman in The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (two volumes, 1879), the City Archaeology Team produced a map of property ownership in June 1775 that can be viewed here. The announcement says, “Each property is clickable, with details including a direct link to the property deed (via free familysearch.org account).”

The next step: “property descriptions based on deeds and claims documents to better understand the layout of buildings, structures, wharves, agricultural spaces, fences, and other landscape features for a future 3D landscape reconstruction of 1775 Charlestown.”

Another product of this effort is a reconstructed “census” for Charlestown in 1775, here in spreadsheet form.

Finally, there are multiple databases about the claims themselves, now housed in the Boston Public Library. Those documents have been scanned and are being transcribed, but the index is already available.

One name that stood out for researchers and myself was Margaret Thomas, filing for the loss of a house and furnishings worth £68.9, as shown here.

Wyman listed Margaret Thomas as “Spinster,” house owner, and “negro of Bartholomew Trow,” a Charlestown militia officer. Perhaps she had been enslaved in the Trow family, and anxious authorities still recorded that link even after she was buying real estate of her own.

Was this the same Margaret Thomas who worked at Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge headquarters by February 1776, joined the general’s traveling domestic staff, and married William Lee before the end of the war? We know that other people who came to work at the commander’s headquarters in 1775–76 had been burned out of Charlestown.

The handwriting on the “Summary Accompt.” filed with the town doesn’t match the signature on a receipt Margaret Thomas signed in Valley Forge in April 1778. But it’s possible that the claim was filed by someone else on Thomas’s behalf, or that this summary was copied by someone else. It’s definitely a lead worth following up.

“A novel twist to this well-trod approach”

Later this month McFarland is due to publish Nathaniel Parry’s Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era.

Author Gene Procknow has shared his thorough early review:

Comparative founder profiles are a crowded book genre with numerous volumes depicting any combination of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin as rivals, friends, or brothers. Nathaniel Parry offers a novel twist to this well-trod approach by comparing the lives of a famous founder, Samuel Adams, with a common criminal, Henry Tufts. . . .

Their lives briefly intersected in 1794 when Massachusetts Governor Adams saved Tufts’ life by commuting the thief’s death sentence to life in prison.

While most of those dual biographies could trace a long relationship between their subjects, in this book the insights arise from the big gap between the two men.

While Adams was devoted to political action, for example, Tufts joined the Continental Army only for the enlistment bonus and then promptly deserted. He was a habitual criminal, though Parry “asserts that if he were a tea smuggler rather than a thief, Tufts would be lauded as a Revolutionary hero.” Tufts did get a certain amount of glory as a rogue from his 1807 autobiography, most likely ghostwritten, which is the main source on his life.

The similarities between the two men can also be telling in reflecting attitudes that permeated their society. Procknow highlights how they shared common sentiments about slavery and race. Even after spending years with the Abenaki, Tufts (or at least his book) refers to Native Americans as “savages,” a term Adams also used.

At times, the review says, Parry pushes too hard on its theme of socioeconomic difference:

For example, the author overplays class conflict by asserting that Continental Army officers were “motivated more by class advancement than by deeply held convictions for the revolution” and, as evidence, cites a lieutenant who fought at Bunker Hill and Benedict Arnold’s self-aggrandizement (142, 241). However, for the vast majority in the Continental Army, officer advancement did not lead to newly found post-war wealth or status. . . .

Other minor weaknesses include several technical misstatements such as mislabeling Congressional members (Roger Sherman represented Connecticut, not Massachusetts), the object of British troops on the Lexington and Concord raid (General Thomas Gage sought four missing cannons and not the capture of Samuel Adams and John Hancock) and the number of allowable lashes in the Continental Army (100 was the maximum, not 500).

In all, Procknow concludes, by “innovatively comparing the lives of Samuel Adams and Henry Tufts,” Parry does a good job showing how “the nation’s founding was the product of elites and ordinary people” both.

Preview of “The Promise of Liberty” in Charlestown

From now till Monday, coinciding with the battle anniversary, the Bunker Hill Museum is playing host to a pop-up exhibit of historic documents showing the expansion of American constitutional freedom, organized by Seth Kaller.

Pictured above are:

• 18 July 1776 New-England Chronicle printing of the Declaration of Independence.
• Newspaper printing of the proposed new U.S. Constitution, followed by George Washington’s letter to the Congress as convention chairman explaining the benefits of the new government framework.
• Newspaper reporting the first twelve proposed amendments to that constitution.
• Statement autographed by Frederick Douglass.
• Newspaper report on Abraham Lincoln’s speech in Independence Hall on his way to Washington, D.C., in 1861.
• Poster from 1913 showing the progress of woman suffrage.
• Prepared text of Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, to which he improvised the “Dream” passage.

The exhibit also includes a display dedicated to religious liberty and inclusion with a reproduction of President George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and more.

This is a prototype of a larger traveling exhibit (or series of exhibits) that Kaller envisions called The Promise of Liberty. Its website explains:

The Exhibit aims to inspire a sense of unity and pride that cuts across political divides, while encouraging gratitude for the liberties we have and igniting a collective determination to defend and expand upon the liberties promised 250 years ago.

The organization is now talking to potential sponsors, partners, and hosts in the Sestercentennial years. In the meantime, folks can get a preview in Charlestown this weekend. 

Revolution’s Edge Returns to Old North

Old North Illuminated has brought back Revolution’s Edge, its thought-provoking play set inside the church on 18 Apr 1775.

Patrick Gabridge wrote this drama to be performed in Christ Church, Boston, about actual people in that congregation in 1775, using the historical record and some dramatic imagination. It’s directed by Alexandra Smith and produced by Jess Meyer for Plays in Place.

It looks like there’s a new cast this summer. The Rev. Mather Byles, Jr., a Loyalist at odds with most of his flock, is being played by Eric McGowan and Tim Hoover. Cato, the African man enslaved by Byles and the play’s narrative voice, is played by Stetson Marshall and Joshua Lee Robinson. Captain John Pulling, Jr., a church vestryman and Patriot activist, is played by Dustin Teuber and Kevin Paquette.

I wrote about the play last summer. The approaching Sestercentennial anniversary of the day it depicts makes it even more resonant.

Revolution’s Edge lasts about forty-five minutes. It will be performed four nights a week through 10 August. For more information, a video preview, and tickets, visit Old North Illuminated.

“Our firm belief in telling a story here that is accurate and honest”

Daniel P. Jordan, director and then president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for over twenty years, died earlier this month.

Ann Lucas, Senior Historian Emerita at the site, provided a remembrance for its website that says, in part:

Jordan adhered to Jefferson’s principle to “follow the truth wherever it may lead.” As director-elect, he visited Monticello several times as a “regular tourist,” and was struck by the fact that he never once heard a reference to Jefferson owning a plantation or the enslaved labor that it required. Once in leadership, he conveyed to staff that “from January the first on, we're going to try to tell the most honest story we can about Jefferson and slavery and race and the plantation, and it's all going to be based on serious scholarship."

Toward that end, Jordan defined new academic departments (research, archaeology, restoration, education, publications, and historic plants), accelerated the publication of Jefferson’s writings with The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, and established the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He supported a new generation of Jefferson-era research, passing the torch of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation professorship from Merrill Peterson to Peter Onuf.

No event more clearly illustrates Jordan’s dedication to transparency and scholarship - and his confidence in the Monticello staff - than his response to the Sally Hemings DNA study. Steadfast in the face of opposition, Jordan, in his words, “set the tone” to support Monticello’s scholars.

Within 24 hours of the 1998 release of the study linking Jefferson to the paternity of Hemings’ son, Monticello held a press conference, posted public statements on the web site, and instructed interpreters in how to initiate conversations on the subject with visitors. The Foundation pledged to continuously evaluate all relevant evidence, advancing “our firm belief in telling a story here that is accurate and honest - and thus inclusive - about Jefferson’s remarkable life and legacy in the context of the complex and extraordinary plantation community that was Monticello.”

Those findings, bolstered by historical analysis, were convincing for the great majority of historians. There was a great outcry from a few authors, descendants, and self-appointed Jefferson “protectors,” quite like the objections we hear today to “woke” history and any effort at diversity, equity, and inclusion in institutions. In fact, some of the same people are objecting.

“Dill” Screenplay Reading in Old South, 19 Mar.

On Tuesday, 19 March, Revolutionary Spaces’s Old South Meeting House will host a live reading of a screenplay, performed by local actors and accompanied by music and sound effects.

The drama is called Dill, described as “inspired by real people and real events on the Cape Ann Shore in Massachusetts during a tumultuous time on the cusp of the American Revolutionary War.”

At the risk of spoilers, I’m guessing the central character, “an enslaved woman named Dill, short for Deliverance, who…finds herself in a love triangle between two men,” is based Deliverance Symonds. Abram English Brown wrote a chapter about Symonds in Beneath Old Hearth-Stones (1897).

After the reading, there will be a discussion of the screenplay’s historical context featuring these experts:

• Lise Breen, author of “Hidden City: Slavery and Gloucester’s Quadricentennial” in Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City 1623-2023 and coauthor of Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
• Nerissa Williams Scott, producer of Dill and other films, C.E.O. and Lead Creative Producer of That Child Got Talent Entertainment (TCGT), and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College in the Business of Creative Economy and Visual Media Art departments.
• Beth Bower, formerly staff archaeologist at the Museum of Afro American History and archaeological and historic resources program manager for the Central Artery project, now studying the 1750–1850 African American community in Salem.
• Jeanne Pickering, an independent scholar of slavery in eighteenth-century Essex County who maintains the research databases of NorthShoreSlavery.org.

The event announcement does not name the author of the screenplay.

This is a free event, but registration is requested. Doors will open at 6:30 P.M., with light refreshments available, and the performance is scheduled for 7:00.

“Volumes of dense smoak” in Liverpool

EPOCH, published by Lancaster University in Britain, just shared an eye-opening article by Dabeoc Stanley on “Liverpool’s Eighteenth-Century Second-Hand Smoke Problem.”

Liverpool had grown in size and wealth in the eighteenth century as a port for Britain’s colonial and slaving ventures.

If you were to walk Liverpool’s streets in 1784, however, you would struggle to see this material wealth, indeed you would probably be struggling to breathe. The culprit was second-hand tobacco smoke. A petition to the Commissioners of Customs signed by more than 40 ‘respectable persons’ of Liverpool, and dated to June 1784, described:

… volumes of dense smoak … [that] cloud the streets to the annoyance of all passengers and fill the rooms of every house … to a degree perfectly offensive and intolerable … Within the reach of the smoak the furniture of our houses is spoiled, life is rendered comfortless to all, many are afflicted with sore eyes and only the young and healthy at some time can breathe.

In foggy or calm conditions, the wind was not sufficient to carry off the smoke, allowing it to accumulate in Liverpool’s streets and squares, creating a smog every bit as suffocating as that of London.

Those vapors had many sources: brick kilns, salt works, an oilhouse rendering whale blubber, and of course fires for cooking and heating. Tobacco smoke added to the hazy mix.

But tobacco fires were also the result of government policies, as Stanley traces. First, merchants could get a “drawback” on tobacco duties if they claimed they were reshipping that commodity outside the British Isles. That gave them an incentive to pump up the weight of their outgoing tobacco with “sand, dirt, and all manner of rubish.” They could then smuggle that untaxed tobacco into Britain through the Isle of Man.

In response to such smuggling, Parliament beefed up its laws. After 1750, Customs officers were to burn all the tobacco they confiscated as contraband or damaged.

In Liverpool, that condemned tobacco was first burned in a seaside furnace away from the center of town. But officials discovered that tobacco sent to that relatively isolated place too often went missing. So in 1783 a new “immense chimney” was built behind the Custom House in the middle of the city’s business district.

That’s why a year later locals complained about the effects of tobacco smoke on people’s health and property values. (And some of them might have preferred the opportunities of the previous system.)

Nonetheless, the situation didn’t change until 1802. That January, “a most tremendous gale” knocked the big chimney onto the Customs House, incidentally destroying lots of paperwork. (Again, some merchants and marines in Liverpool might have been pleased with this outcome.)

Upcoming Revolutionary Events in Newport

The Newport Historical Society is hosting a couple of Revolutionary history events in the next few days.

Wednesday, 6 March, 6:30 to 7:30 P.M.
“Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence”
Shirley L. Green

William and Benjamin Frank joined the integrated Second Rhode Island Regiment in the spring of 1777. That unit saw action along the Delaware River in the defense of Fort Mercer and the battle of Red Bank before falling back with the rest of the army to Valley Forge.

After the Battle of Monmouth, the Frank brothers were transferred into the new and segregated First Rhode Island Regiment, composed of Black and Native American soldiers, including enslaved men promised freedom in exchange for service. This “Black Regiment” fought in the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778. Later the brothers’ paths diverged, and they ended up settling in different countries.

Green based her book Revolutionary Blacks on her family’s oral history, archival research, interviews, and DNA evidence. Her talk is presented by the Battle of Rhode Island Association and the Newport Historical Society. Admission is $20, $15 for society members and people serving in the military. Register through this page.

Saturday, 9 March, 11:00 A.M. to 12:15 P.M.
“Newport’s British Occupation” walking tour
Brandon Aglio

In 1777, seven thousand British and Hessian soldiers invaded Newport, starting a military occupation that lasted for nearly three years. An expert tour guide dressed in an authentic 18th-century British military uniform leads this exploration of the sites and the stories from this trying time.

This event costs $15 for adults, $10 for members of the society and U.S. military, $5 for children ages 5–12. Register through this page.