This lecture focused on the ways that slavery shaped Hudson River Valley culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved in the region and throughout the Northeast.
This annual lecture series was established through the generosity of community leaders Shirley and Bernard Handel and Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert A. Krom, US Army, Retired, to promote knowledge of, and appreciation for, the rich history of this unique and important region of America.
On Thursday, September 28, 2023, Dr. Nicole Saffold Maskiell delivered the 2023 Handel-Krom Lecture in Hudson River Valley History, “Networks of Slavery: How Bondage Shaped Hudson River Valley Culture,” in the Nelly Goletti Theatre at Marist College. The lecture was a program of the Hudson River Valley Institute. The Handel-Krom Lecture Series was established through the generosity of community leaders Shirley and Bernard Handel and Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert A. Krom, US Army, Retired, to promote knowledge of, and appreciation for, the rich history of this unique and important region of America.
African chattel slavery, the predominant type of slavery practiced in colonial North America and the early United States, did not represent one monolithic practice of slavery. Practices of slavery varied by region, labor systems, legal codes, and empire. Slavery also wasn’t just about enslavers enslaving people for their labor. Enslavers used enslaved people to make statements about their social status, as areas of economic investment that built generational wealth, and as a form of currency.
Nicole Maskiell, an associate professor of History at the University of South Carolina and the author of Bound By Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of the Northern Gentry, joins us to investigate the practice of slavery in Dutch New Netherland and how the colony’s elite families built their wealth and power on the labor, skills, and bodies of enslaved Africans and African Americans.
Gravestones for early eighteenth-century enslaved Cambridge women, Cicely and
Jane, have sat for centuries largely unexplored by scholars despite the markers’
close proximity to Harvard University. This essay re-centers the lives and
stories of such women, using their gravestones as a fulcrum to explore gender,
race, memory, and the construction of early New England history.
A death’s head, a stylized carving of cascading vines, and twenty-four words
etched in slate attest to the life and death of a girl named Cicely. Her gravestone
sits in the Old Cambridge Burial Ground across from Harvard University’s
Johnston Gate. Dwarfed by the altar tombs erected to memorialize wealthy Cambridge
residents, Cicely’s stone is strikingly
Fig. 1.—
Grave marker for an enslaved girl named Cicely. Photo provided by the
author.
ordinary, save for the fact that it proclaims the youth buried beneath it was the
fifteen-year-old “negro servant to ye Reverend Mr. William Brattle.”
Her tombstone, which faces the oldest university in the United States, is likely the
oldest extant gravestone for an enslaved person in North America.1 Judge Samuel Sewall, a Brattle family friend and
jurist who kept a diary for thirty years, remembered the day of her death as
“exceeding dark at one Time in the morning” so much so that he had
“hardly seen such Thick Darkness. Great Rain, considerable Lightening and
Thunder.”2 But Samuel
made no mention of Cicely’s death or detailed the circumstances surrounding
William Sr.’s decision to erect the tombstone.3 The extant Brattle family papers are likewise silent on
the death of this girl they enslaved. Subsequent generations of historians have
offered only passing acknowledgment of the marker and even less of Cicely.4 In the past two decades much has
been illuminated about enslavement in the Northeast by parsing fragments and reading
documents against the grain. Scholars have painstakingly reconstructed the
narratives of people of African descent and offered a rich tapestry of experience,
uncovering the centrality of enslavement to the project of colonization in the
Northeast. New England’s archives are famously prolific repositories mined
for rendering the lives of Euro-Americans in three dimensions and have spawned our
dominant narratives about religion, trade, geography, and gender. Cicely’s
exceptional but largely unsung memorial illuminates the ways such familiar
constructions remain incomplete.
There is a poverty in the adjectives that we use to describe the lives of early
non-white Americans, but Cicely was vital and real. She felt the cold snow on her
skin every winter and knew the shores of the Charles River. She was a daughter and
an African-descended’ Christian convert in a community of Black people of various
faiths, a New Englander, and a denizen of Cambridge. She was a girl on the cusp of
womanhood with a body going through extreme change. She was a fifteen-year-old
worker who lived and died during an epidemic.
History is a process of commemoration through stories that reflect a scholar’s
own personal lens. Cicely’s story captivated me because the day that I
stumbled upon her both ordinary and extraordinary marker, I was a Black teenager
only four years older than Cicely was at her death. The questions that arose that
windswept fall day in a colonial graveyard inspired me to pursue history and have
continued to shape my intellectual pursuits. Although decades have passed and the
work has taken me thousands of miles away from Cicely, her story continues to burn
within me. The scholarly production of women of color such as Annette Gordon-Reed,
Jennifer Morgan, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Thavolia
Glymph, and Jennifer L. Morgan laid the intellectual groundwork for recovering
untold stories such as Cicely’s, offered inspiration to centralize the
narratives of diverse early American women and the power to tell an integrated
history.5 This article is an
integrated microhistory of a slaveholding community that has served to inspire so
many of Early America’s historiographies. As such, it builds upon Wendy
Warren’s work recentering slavery’s centrality to New England, the
expansive Black communities made legible by Gloria Whiting, and the multilayered
world of dependence presented by Jared Ross Hardesty.6 Silence is the common state of the archival record for
most eighteenth-century women, and ever more so for the enslaved. But the frequently
used phrase “little is known about the experience” of enslaved people
during the Colonial Era, privileges the archives as the only repository of
knowledge. Indeed, hanging trees and disappeared neighborhoods linger in the
collective memories of Black and Brown people, whose knowledge has too often been
decried as unhistorical. Even the most prolifically documented cases reinforce
social fictions. I have approached those silences, deaths, and fictions by using the
strategies deployed by scholars such as Marisa Fuentes, Carolyn Steedman, and
Natalie Zemon Davis, whose works problematize the archive and examine them as sites
where patterns of gendered and racialized violence are reinforced. Saidiya
Hartman’s critical fabulation influences my reading of these enslaved
Cambridge women, and I embrace Hartman’s challenge to compose a
“history written with and against the archive.”7
Since the time that Laurel Ulrich penned that iconic aphorism, “Well-behaved
women seldom make history,” scholars have devoted millions of words to
uncovering the lives of women—ordinary and extraordinary, enslaved and
free— exploring and sharpening our understandings of the past. Combining
familiar sources, such as colonial diaries and narratives, with archival and
material culture artifacts, I argue that Cicely’s story, and those of the
enslaved men, women, and children who surrounded her, exposes how historical
structures of race, gender, and status stand at the core of the classic scholarly
narratives that have shaped American history. Cicely’s enslavers were members
of Bernard Bailyn’s cohort of New England merchants and Sacvan
Bercovitch’s puritans. They were counted among Laurel Ulrich’s
“Well-behaved women” and birthed Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters.8 They were the elites whose wealth, generated by
enslaved workers, built the foundations of American society and whose opinions
became codified into law as well as into legends such as the “Protestant work
ethic” and American exceptionalism.9 The lives and labor of people like Cicely lie silently
behind these public legacies.
In the Old Burial Ground, lines of gray slate tombstones sit along winding footpaths,
linking generations in family plots. The Latin-inscribed altar tomb of
Cicely’s enslaver, William Sr., stands among the decorative memorials to
other eminent divines and Harvard presidents. Its weathered stone face bears the
names of Brattle’s wife, Elizabeth; his nephew, James Oliver; and
Oliver’s wife, Mercy. Cicely does not rest in close proximity to her
enslavers, but rather near a burial mound used for Cambridge residents who succumbed
to smallpox.10 No stones with the
names of her grandparents, parents, brothers, or sisters encircle her memorial. Only
the headstone of another enslaved African woman, Jane, who was the servant of
Harvard steward Andrew Bordman and died nearly thirty years after Cicely, sits
nearby. Thus, racial identification fills the gaping hole where kinship should be,
for Cicely’s marker forever declares that she was a Negro, a girl of fifteen
whose short life was spent in perpetual servitude.11
This article foregrounds not her celebrated enslavers but Cicely herself,
reconstructing what can be gleaned of her and her world through an examination of
her gravestone in context, and acknowledging in that attempt the worth and full
humanity of her story. It also integrates the family history of the Brattles within
the broader development of slavery in New England. I position William Sr.’s
role in early ecclesiastical struggles and controversies at Harvard in the context
of increased slave importation and a local debate among his network of friends over
the ethics of slavery. I piece together Cicely’s story in the context of a
wider group of baptized enslaved women and elite puritan female enslavers to examine
how intimate realities and networks of female kinship and friendship were influenced
by enslavement. Cicely’s grave marker forms one link on a chain that connects
the slaveholding world and personal actions of William Brattle Jr. to the brutal
public execution of an enslaved woman named Phillis by burning at Gallows Lot (what
is now the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Linnaean Street) less than a mile
north of Old Cambridge Burial Ground.12 Phillis’s trial offers a snapshot of the wider
enslaved community and uncovers the ways in which memory, social relationship, and
gender were central to the ways that commemoration was deployed against the
enslaved.
It is not just Cicely’s life but her labor that the Brattles
memorialized in stone. Service publicly ties her to “ye Reverend William
Brattle.” Cicely’s short English inscription contrasts William
Sr.’s long Latin memorial and would have been accessible to literate members
of the community, a population which, as Antonio Bly notes, included enslaved
people.13 Her tombstone was
meant to mark out not just the days of her life but to serve as an example for
others. She was part of the gendered labor of Black women and girls made legible by
Felicia Thomas that appeared in Boston’s early newspapers.14 That the memorialization of such labor also
appears in the material culture of early New England cemeteries highlights the
enslavers’ desire to make permanent sermons of racialized belonging and
alienation for later generations. The markers of Cicely’s family do not
surround her final resting place, but at the time of her birth a community of
enslaved people held by the Brattles and their friends had their names inscribed in
diaries, church ledgers, wills, and account books. They would have experienced the
physicality of Cicely’s life and passed the gravestone erected in her honor.
Scipio, one such person enslaved to William Sr., lived in the parsonage of
Harvard’s First Church as an unprofessed unbaptized person for at least seven
years. The house overlooked Harvard College and contained a garden and fields, a
cow, and fruit trees. Inside there were luxurious items and utilitarian pieces, as
well as an enormous library. He was not there primarily to pray or to study but to
work. Scipio’s name first appears in William Sr.’s diary on February
10, 1698.15 The Brattles also
employed a free white woman named Sarah Bradish as a domestic, whom they paid twelve
pounds a year, a figure that offers some sense of the value Cicely’s work
would have netted her had she been a free woman.16 During the spring of that year, William Sr.’s
diary contained descriptions of the construction of his garden, notations about
labor conspicuously marked by passive voice. On April 2, he recorded, “Goose
berry bushes planted and the first beans.”17 On April 4th, he wrote, “our garden was digged,
Bushes set and seed sown,” and on April 5th, he noted, “the great peas
and Boston peas were planted and also the carrots seed and parsnips sown. Oats
sown.”18 He wrote of
squashes and cucumbers planted, fields “plowed,” and a garden filled
with “red ears [of corn] and beans.” But the agent of
this work remains unacknowledged. It was likely Scipio who “planted,”
“digged,” “set,” and “sowed,” as by
December 7, William Sr. wrote that he had purchased “shoes for myself and
Scipio.”19
Scipio’s labor offered William Sr. the daily space to live the life of the
mind and mentor the next generation of Harvard men, but the minister’s wealth
was an inheritance created out of the Atlantic market of war, bondage, and merchant
capital. William Sr. was born into one of Boston’s wealthiest families on
November 22, 1662. The third child of the merchant Thomas Brattle and Elizabeth
Tyng, his family were signatory members of the Plymouth Patent. At the time of his
birth the Brattles and Tyngs owned considerable property in Boston, Maine, and Long
Island. His father Thomas Sr.’s fortune even underwrote King Philip’s
War.20 William Sr.’s
immediate family counted two older siblings, a brother named Thomas Jr. (b. 1658)
and a sister named Elizabeth (b. 1660); three younger sisters, Katherine (b. 1664),
Bethiah (b. 1666), and Mary (b. 1668); and a younger brother named Edward (b.
1670).21 They would grow up to
make alliances that would cement the elite status of their family for generations
and change the course of history. Their names and exploits would be used to shape
historical narratives of settlement, trade, and religion in the region and the
world. The Brattle houses, trading sites and merchant docks shaped the built
landscape of Boston and Cambridge—Brattle Square and Brattle
Streets—and physically inscribed their influence. Their stories were exalted
in the histories of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century, the
work of the Harvard professor Perry Miller dominated the field of colonial American
history, and, coupled with that of his student, Yale’s Edmund S. Morgan,
created a widely accepted rubric within which to understand colonial New England and
the central tropes that contributed to the decline of puritanism.22
William Sr. was a founding member of this scholarly community. Along with his best
friend and former Harvard classmate John Leverett, William Sr. ran the school during
the absentee presidency of Increase Mather, writing a Latin primer on logic that
would be translated and used in the college for over a century.23 In his student Benjamin Colman’s
remembrance, Brattle was an “Able, Faithful and tender Tutor,” but he
also “search’d out Vice, and browbeat and punisht it with the
Authority and just Anger of a Master.”24 Though Benjamin was describing the relationship
between pupil and master, Jared Hardesty has noted that such hierarchies of power
underwrote the entire system of dependence.25 Scipio experienced William Sr.’s domineering
authority for two decades of enslavement, and the intellectual and spiritual
pursuits that filled William Sr.’s days and those of Colman and his coterie
of friends and colleagues were shaped by his intimate proximity. Scipio’s
labor, and those of other bonded people, afforded the Brattle brothers the time to
found the Brattle Street Church in Boston, a monument to his and his brother
Thomas’s rejection of the Mathers’ form of congregationalism.26 Both men sought to further
liberalize standards of baptism first introduced by the Halfway Covenant in the
1660s. Cicely’s baptism and those of other enslaved people were a part of
this process, but as Gloria Whiting argues, African-descended’ congregants used such
moments to publicly profess their own families and gendered connections.27 Both the Brattles and their
rivals, the Mathers, presided over the baptisms of considerable numbers of non-white
congregants, though there was some uneasiness about the relationship between baptism
and earthly freedom at the time.28 The stakes were not merely the conversion of unreached people but a desire to
augment numbers of congregants that subscribed to their perspective.
Scipio’s long unbaptized sojourn among the Brattles, and the timing of his
ultimate decision to enter into the covenant, highlights the role of work and
enslavement in William’s and Thomas’s place in the history of puritan
thought. The Brattle brothers’ religious philosophy embodied the shift in
puritan thinking that Sacvan Bercovitch has argued characterized the second
generation of American puritanism. During this period, individualism came into
conflict with communalism when many people did not enter into the church covenant
and therefore were not considered voting members in the colony. The decision to be
baptized was made by puritan parents, but the decision to become a “visible
saint” was a personal decision. That a large number of second-generation
puritans made decisions opposed to membership illustrates the larger conflict
between freedom and individualism in puritanism. Out of this conflict emerged the
Halfway Covenant which, “while retaining the premises of visible sainthood
… granted provisional church status to the still unregenerate children on the
ground that, in their case, baptism alone conferred certain inalienable covenant
rights.”29 The
communities that surrounded theologians such as the Brattles held increasing numbers
people in bondage, and such people caused some wary white enslavers to refuse to
baptize these individuals, worried such spiritual emancipation might become
physical.
Despite William Sr.’s theological influence and although other
African-descended’ people had been baptized by William Sr. at the First Church in
Cambridge in his first years of ministry, Scipio was not among them. In January
1688, William Sr. baptized “Philip [field], negro servant of
Mr. Danforth” in First Church, indicating the first known presence of Black
people in the First Church of Cambridge, which then lay within Harvard’s
gates and served as the college chapel.30 Their lives were pulled along lines of kinship and
friendship of the white congregants who filled the most prominent places in society,
but they were a central part of the social and political fabric of English
Protestant identity. A year before Cicely’s birth in 1697, William Sr.
married Elizabeth Hayman of Charlestown, a port with a bustling business to the West
Indies.31 Cicely’s grave
marker reflects the distinctive style of Charlestown’s Lamson family,
stonecutters whose workshop was situated near the dock, where indentured and
enslaved people worked.32 Elizabeth
grew up among neighbors who held slaves. An enslaved African man named Sambo toiled
for William Stitson, a deacon of First Church in Charlestown where her grandfather
had served as tithingman; when she was a child, another enslaved man escaped to
carry out a secret liaison with his chosen paramour, an enslaved woman who lived
nearby, flouting his owner’s wishes.33 As a child attending the First Church of Charlestown
with her family, she might have known the enslaved couple noted only as “Dan
Smiths Negro Mingo” and “Mr. Soley Negro” who were married at
the church in 1687.34
Regular interactions with enslaved people shaped the thinking of at least one member
of the Brattles’ wider network. On June 19, 1700, Samuel Sewall noted that he
comforted William Sr.’s sister Katherine as she stood at the burial of her
first husband John Eyre, who was laid alongside the graves of their nine children.
He wrote:
When I parted, I pray’d God to be favourably present with her, and
comfort her in the absence of so near and dear a Relation. Having been long
and much dissatisfied with the trade of fetching Negroes from Guinea; at
last I had a strong Inclination to Write something about it; but it wore
off.35
It is possible that the diary entry reflects the happenstance confluence of two
separate ideas occurring to Sewall at separate times on the same day, but it is also
possible that the funeral within a slaveholding family guided his thoughts towards
slavery. Scipio, two African women who toiled for Katherine’s sister
Elizabeth and Jeffrey, a Black mariner enslaved in Katherine’s sister
Mary’s household, were likely among the crowd that burial day.36 Additionally, the enslaved people
of Brattle’s elite friends may have made up a significant portion of those
gathered. The presence of enslaved Africans among the Brattles and those gathered
may have turned Sewall’s mind to “the trade of fetching Negroes from
Guinea.” The sight of so many of those enslaved Africans who had been
baptized by William Sr. himself standing among their mourning owners might have
prompted in Sewall this “strong Inclination to Write something about”
the slave trade.
Although Sewall indicated that the initial feeling of indignation “wore
off,” shortly thereafter he authored The Selling of Joseph, the result of both his increasing misgivings about the morality of the slave trade
and the perpetual servitude of enslaved Africans, many of whom had converted to
Christianity, and also his racist unease with the growing numbers of Black people in
the colonies. In it, he compared the holding of African slaves to the immorality of
the Biblical Joseph’s enslavement at the hands of his brothers. After writing The Selling of Joseph, Sewall distributed it to several close
friends, which most certainly would have included William Sr., his “Fast
Friend,” and ultimately entered a heated debate with John Saffin over the
matter of the promised freedom of Saffin’s slave, Adam.37
In The Selling of Joseph, Samuel Sewall described racial difference
as primarily affecting character, but his work also showcases Samuel’s
visceral disgust at the physical difference of people categorized as
“Negro”:
All things considered, it would conduce more to the Welfare of the Province,
to have White Servants for a Term of Years, than to have Slaves for Life.
Few can endure to hear of a Negro’s being made free; and indeed they
can seldom use their freedom well; yet their continual aspiring after their
forbidden Liberty, renders them Unwilling Servants. And there is such a
disparity in their Conditions, Colour & Hair, that they can never
embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the
Land; but still remain in our Body Politick as a kind of extravasat
Blood.38
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “embody” as “to
invest or clothe (a spirit) with a body” and includes John Healey’s
1610 translation of Augustine’s City of God describing
“Devills beeing imbodyed in ayre;” an image that the former Salem
witchcraft judge would have found familiar.39 William Brattle’s older brother Thomas Jr. had
penned a scathing rebuke of spectral evidence expressing a skepticism that was
strikingly modern and instrumental to turning public opinion against the
trials.40 But the ghost of such
spectral reasoning lingered as part of early modern scientists’ intellectual
worlds. If Africans were incorporated into the general spirit of Massachusetts
society, Samuel Sewall reasoned, the result would be a sick body. Indeed, the
African part, according to Samuel, would extravasate, or “force its way
out,” like contaminated blood leaking from an infected body. Samuel was
speaking a scientifically infused language that other like-minded lay doctors like
William Brattle and Cotton Mather would have understood. It was physical and
tactile, the language of examination. Invasive bodily inspections and harsh emetics
were prescribed to root out diseased “Conditions.” Indeed, in February
of 1700, the year before The Selling of Joseph was published,
William Sr. would self-prescribe “a vomit of ye wine physic” and
“hot ear & water porrage & feaver balsam (fennel) in warm water
for 30 hours.”41 His probate
inventory was filled with other such tinctures and remedies.42 Samuel turned a medical gaze towards the bodies
of African New Englanders, categorizing their Color as “disparity,”
his words evoking eyes and hands that inspected the hair of enslaved people like
Cicely, whose texture and care would have presented a stark difference. His remedy
for the body politic was the expulsion of Blackness and a regular infusion of
whiteness in the form of “White Servants for a Term of Years.”
The racial implications of the growing feud among the Mathers, Brattles, and Sewalls
spilled out when Cotton hotly defended his father’s threatened position as
president of Harvard College by directly referencing the slavery that had come to
shape how he too encountered the world. Believing Samuel to have supported the
Brattle opposition against his father Increase’s absentee presidency of
Harvard, Cotton stormed into the Boston bookseller Richard Wilkins’s
shop.43 He complained that
Samuel had “used his father worse than a Negar” and “spake so
loud that people in the street might hear him.” Cotton turned his attention
to Samuel’s son, folding the elder Sewall’s antislavery scruples into
his racially charged diatribe: “That one pleaded much for Negros” but
had “used” Increase “worse than a Neger.”44 In remembering the public shaming
of the moment, Samuel assigned the incidents to the margins, as if extravaset from
the main body of the text. Cotton made public sentiments that the jurist had taken
pains to circulate privately as the pamphlet The Selling of Joseph among a chosen coterie of friends.45 His intention was to dishonor Samuel, using a racially
infused slang that had been in circulation across the Northeast since the
seventeenth century.46 Sam did not
share his father’s misgivings about the trade and in later years locally
traded enslaved men and women.47
By the turn of the eighteenth century, Cambridge’s and Boston’s
lawmakers passed laws prohibiting any “Indian, negro or molatto servant, or
slave” from traveling abroad after nine o’clock because of the
“great disorders, insolencies and burglaries” which troubled
“her majesty’s good subjects.”48 Enslavers were required to post a bond of £50
before manumitting any “mollato or negro slave.”49 Nonetheless, on May 20, 1705, William Sr.
witnessed the will of his parishioner Peter Town, who painstakingly provided freedom
for Mingo, Charles, and Fidella, people enslaved by himself and his wife.50 He even provided an inheritance to
his “once negro servant Jane, who lives at Boston,” to have “ye
sum of five pound paid her within six months of my decease.”
Several weeks later, on June 10th, William Sr. baptized Mingo and Charles, alongside
Jeffrey “the negro servant of Mr. Goff,” and also Scipio, who had by
then been enslaved by Brattle for at least seven years.51 Scipio’s choice to be baptized alongside
two men destined for emancipation likely linked his profession with his desire for
freedom. It would be another fourteen years before Scipio would successfully
petition for his freedom, “praying the favour” of the Massachusetts
Court “that the estate of his said late Master may be Indemnified from any
Charge that may happen by him, in case he be made free.”52 The £50 charge would have made little
difference to the Brattles, but Scipio’s logic of fiscal responsibility was
the language he used to self-emancipate, as Brattle’s will left no written
provision for his freedom. The Brattles’ massive holdings sprawling across
two communities and several colonies formed the landscape of those people enslaved
by them. Bisected by the Charles River, it was a world shaped by the water as much
as the land.
Another man named Jeffrey was a sailor enslaved by William Sr.’s sister Mary
and brother-in-law John Mico. How he first gained experience on the water is
unclear, but sources indicate that by the summer of 1704, he had travelled the
Atlantic world. On May 6, 1703, John wrote a letter to Captain Samuel White
concerning Jeffrey on his voyage from Barbados to London, “I entreat you to
provide Care of him” and noted, “I have brought him up from a Child
and have avallue for him; but I commit him to You.”53 He also entreated the captain to allow Jeffrey
the liberty to visit the Mico family in London. Despite his concern for
Jeffrey’s welfare, any emotional “avallue” that John placed
upon the enslaved man was expressed in stark financial terms.54 By the time of his writing, John had been
married to William Sr.’s sister Mary for fourteen years and the two had no
living children. The Micos lived in a large house on School Street in Boston and
attended the Brattle Street Church.55 Such a lifestyle was owing to his merchant ventures
including a fish trade between New England and the Caribbean, which provisioned the
enslaved population on the islands with fish often in a condition too rotten to be
sold in New England.56 In eight
years, their household would also include a little girl named Cicely, who was owned
by William Sr. but lived frequently enough with the Micos to be presented for
baptism by Mary.
Despite their absence in the archival record, Cicely had parents and a natal
connection to Africa that condemned her to servitude and would be noted on her
gravestone in perpetuity. Perhaps one of the two African-descended’ women who toiled
for William’s sister Katherine Oliver and were enumerated as maids were known
more intimately as mother to Cicely. At the time of Nathaniel Oliver’s death
in 1704, he bequeathed the two women’s lives as part of a large estate with
property valued at ₤5250.7.10, including a “brick warehouse,
brew-house, salt-house, one fourth of windmill on Fort Hill, goods in warehouses to
the amount of ₤1260,” and his “house, stable, etc. in
Boston.”57 Whether or
not these women were related by kinship, they were linked by bondage. We can only
imaginatively reconstruct Cicely’s daily life from our fragments of knowledge
about the cultural and labor practices of other enslaved women in Colonial
Massachusetts. William Piersen noted the persistence of the African spinning
“on a stick centered on a plate, rather than with a loom,” as part of
the technique used by an African woman named Dinah enslaved in Salem.58 African histories were thus passed
down in the hands and labor of enslaved women, as they were in the sorrow songs,
pottery, and naming practices throughout the diaspora. Such weaving skills, Felicia
Thomas observes, were part of a young enslaved girl’s instruction and
highlighted in Boston’s slave-for-sale advertisements.59 Brattle’s probate inventory offers
possible clues into Cicely’s daily life: her work likely involved handling
the “brass kettle” and “pewter quart pot” listed
there.60 Servile work was
essential to Brattle, who hosted functions such as prayer meetings and meetings of
the Harvard Corporation, which convened in his home less than one month before
Cicely’s death. Formal gatherings would have meant presenting and handling
“China earthen, ware & glasses,” to elite attendees.61 A domestic like Cicely would have
mended Brattle’s expensive wardrobe using “Sowing & sticking
silk” and served countless cups of tea sweetened with “white
sugar” or perhaps drinking “chocolate,” products of slave
production that also appeared in the lines of the Brattles’ inventory.62 The “child’s whistle
with coral in it,” would have been diverting fun for the little boy who was
only three years Cicely’s junior but would have been looked after by workers
like Cicely. Boarded domestics would have slept on “old bedstead, cord and
strawbed” in the attic of the Parsonage as if stored alongside the “7
old pillows,” “4 old Trunks,” “an old chest & old
lumber.”63 Cicely’s intimate life can never be fully reconstructed from the scraps and
ephemera of her enslavers, but revisiting the context of such material evidence
emphasizes that for fifteen years she lived, and touched, and breathed, and was
known within a community of enslaved, bonded, and free people.
On February 7, 1714, Cicely stood before the community in Boston’s Brattle
Street Church at her baptism. At that event, she was identified not primarily as a
convert but as the negro servant to William Sr.’s sister Mary Mico.64 Although her epitaph memorializes
her as the servant of “ye Reverend William Brattle,” Cicely clearly
spent at least some part (if not most) of her life with Mary across the Charles
River in Boston. Mary was just as likely as her minister brother to have taken an
active role in Cicely’s conversion. As mistress of the house, Mary would have
shouldered the responsibility of religious education to household dependents, which
included the little girl whom they held in bondage. Cicely was noted as an adult in
the church register, in keeping with local tax laws that counted enslaved girls as
adults at fourteen, but also presented as a “dependent” of Mary,
starkly illuminating her liminal position in the community. Cicely may have been the
only little girl in the Mico household, as Mary and John had no children. On the
occasion of her baptism, Cicely needed to be conversant on two levels: communicating
her salvation experience in terms deemed satisfactory in a household with highly
specific religious expectations and remaining faithful to an interpretation of the
fifth commandment, which admonished lifelong obedience to her slave owners.65 Cicely’s life would have
been spent in service to an entire community of elite white women. William Sr.
painstakingly recorded their names and inheritances in his own will. He left money,
cows, medicines, and other things to nineteen women who were not relatives. He
entrusted Sarah Leverett, “sister loving, cousin carter & Elizabeth
hicks,” with carrying out the distribution of “several petty things
which shall be left when my family breaks up” including food, goods and
clothing “to my Christian neighbors & friends & poor
people.” Elizabeth and Ruth Hicks had cared for William Sr. after his ill
health caused by his battle with measles, four years earlier.66 In the event that his son did not outlive him,
he willed that his siblings be given two hundred pounds each and specifically that
his sister, Sarah Mico, who upon her own husband’s death in 1718 did not
inherit his house or goods, would be left “all my lands lying & being
in the Town of Cambridge.”67
Such women would have embodied many of the characteristics of the group Laurel Ulrich
famously termed “well-behaved women”:
Cotton Mather called them ‘the Hidden Ones.’ They never
preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend
Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or
the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once
a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for
an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they
haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against
Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at
all.68
But what did it mean to be a well-behaved Black woman in eighteenth-century Boston
and Cambridge? Cicely lived in a world dominated by the rhythms of sermons
and Bible Study. She lived in the shadow of academia but could not attend, and like
other such “well-behaved women” her life and history have been largely
forgotten by time. Tombstones erected by puritan enslavers and directed towards the
Black and white communities should be read as texts central to New England’s
religious culture.69 Black and
Native gathering for the deceased during times of death caused ruling Boston and
Cambridge residents to alter the auditory landscape of their communities. Instead of
tolling many times as it would for white funerals, for Black and Native people, the
bell would only toll once.70 The
silence that followed should be understood as a purposeful aspect of racialization,
even of the dead.
Cicely died on a Sunday in April, but she was not alone. The 1713–1714 measles
epidemic ravaged the young population of Brattle Street Church, occasioning Benjamin
Colman to preach and ultimately publish a sermon entitled A Devout
Contemplation On the Early DEATH Of Pious and Lovely Children.71 The Sermon was given in
remembrance of “Mrs. Elizabeth Wainwright. Who departed this life, April the
8th. 1714.” Elizabeth was one year younger than Cicely and was also a
baptized member of Brattle Street Church. Rev. Colman addressed his sermon to the
youth of his flock and also named the “son of Major Fitch” as having
also died. And while he did not explicitly name Cicely, vestiges of her story can be
read in the lines of Colman’s text to his surviving flock, which would have
included Mary Mico, who had recently buried Cicely. He opined, “Again, The
Death of pious Children teaches us this also of a Principle of Grace, that where it
once is, the Soul is safe. Let Death come as soon as it will after a persons
Coversion [sic], when once a Sanctifying Change has
passed on him, be he never so young, the Soul is safe.” Cicely’s
baptism in February was quickly followed by her death in April, a pattern that
Colman called out for special mention. He ended his sermon with an allusion to the
Joseph story when he urged, “We must not repeat Jacobs Error, who supposed himself bereaved, when Joseph was only Advancing under the special Favour of Providence in Another Countrey.” Joseph had not indeed passed over the
veil of death but had been sold by his brothers to slavery in Egypt, a specificity
that Colman would have readily known as he would have also known the furor caused by
Sewall and Saffin’s public row over the antislavery interpretation of the
Joseph story in light of the enslaved African-descended population.
Cicely’s life in colonial Cambridge was filled not only with religious rites
but also death and racial violence. On February 15, 1712, Samuel Sewall recorded
that William Sr. “prayed at the place of Execution,” for an enslaved
man named Mingo who had been sentenced to death “for forcible
Buggery,” against Abigail Dowes, and another unidentified person. Mingo was
enslaved to Wait Winthrop, who was married to Katherine, William Sr.’s
sister, and lived near the Micos.72 The trial record offers the bawdy “Cocke” as an alias for Mingo, an
appellation that historian Jim Downs notes as an example of the hypersexualized
stereotype placed upon Black men and the scholarly origin story that roots
homosexuality in the colonial world with Black criminality.73 Cicely’s enslavement intersected Mingo,
and it is not unreasonable to assume that she would have had knowledge of the
uproar. She would have heard the casual appellation meant to evoke shame and may
have had to call him by the denigrating name. She might have also known Abigail, who
was the same age as she and lived in the community. Two months later news poured
into Boston of a New York slave revolt, with the News-Letter detailing,
“‘tis fear’d that most of the Negro’s here (who are very
numerous) knew of the Late Conspiracy to Murder the Christians; six of them have
been their own Executioners by Shooting and cutting their own Throats”74 Benjamin Colman himself wrote the
following to his friend Robert Woodrow:
We are serv’d here in this Town very much by blacks or Negro’s
in our Houses. Scarce a House but has one, excepting the very poor. Those
slaves grow disorderly, taking their time in the nights for diverse
wickednesses. The Town at one of their Meetings took this into
Consideration, and ordered that no Negro should be in the Street after nine
in the Evening without a ticket from his master; and if any were so found
they should be had to the House of Correction and whippt 6. or 7. lashes.
When a few of ‘em had been served so, fires were kindled about Town
every day or night; the cry of fire terrified us from time to time; one fire
only prevailed (thro’ the mercy of God) and burnt down two smal
Tenements: twenty others were discovered in their kindling. At last one or
two Negroes appear’d Guilty, and one was prov’d so and is
condemned to die. And so we sleep in peace again thro’ the favour of
God to us.75
For Benjamin, the “just anger” of a slaveholding community called for
“the House of Correction,” the punishment of being “whippt 6.
or 7. Lashes,” or even death. His was an elite world surrounded by the
enslaved, one filled with disorder, wickedness and dark designs. It was one enforced
by the lash and secured by public execution. And it was in this world that Cicely
lived and died.
By the time that Colman slept “in peace again thro’ the favour of
God,” after the policing and execution of Black people, Cicely had been dead
for a decade. Similarly deceased were Elizabeth and William Brattle, as well as
hundreds of others, felled by the measles epidemic that tore through New England and
its lingering syndromes. The week that Cicely died, the News Letter ran an advertisement for a pamphlet by Cotton Mather, entitled “A Perfect
Recovery, Being what was Exhibited at Boston–Lecture to the Inhabitants after
they had passed thro’ a very Sickly Winter. With some Remarks on the shining
Patterns of Piety, left by some very Young Persons, who Dyed in the common
calamity.”76 Mather had
lost his own wife, Maria; infant twins; and three-year-old daughter in the
“Sickly Winter.” Nearly thirty years later, a tombstone would be
erected to a Black woman, lost during another deadly epidemic.77 The epitaph reads:
Jane a Negro servnt [damaged]
Andrew Bordman
Esqr; Died March
11th, 1740 Aged 22 Years & 3 months.
Fig. 2.—
Grave marker for an enslaved girl named Jane. Photo provided by the author.
The Bordman family papers list the names, relationships, and birth dates of
Jane’s family, including her mother, Rose, who would have been
Cicely’s contemporary and whose name preceded the names and birthdates of
four children—Jane, Flora, Jeffrey, and Cesar—born between 1718 and
1733.78 Rose was a member of
the Christian community in Cambridge and was baptized in February 1730.79 In 1741, Andrew Bordman Jr. noted
Jane’s death in his journal, writing:
Jane—(after Recovering of a Throat distemper to such a measure of
health as to get down Stairs and abroad) was taken ill of a Languishing Slow
Feavour of which She Lay ill 24 days and then Expired 11 Mar 1740/1
about half an hour after Nine oClock P.M. Aged 22 years 3 months and 6 days.
Buryd 13day.80
Jane, like Cicely, died during an outbreak, and the evidence of the almanac makes the
case ironclad that she perished from diphtheria, scarlett fever, or, as it was known
in the early eighteenth century, “throat distemper.” Jane, like
Cicely, was given a marked burial in Old Cambridge Burial Ground. In the space
between their two gravestones lies a community history of disease, death, and
domestic insurrection. Between Cicely and Jane’s deaths in 1714 and 1741,
respectively, a smallpox crisis gripped Boston, inflaming racial tensions. Mather,
an amateur scientist and a member of the Royal Society, turned to his slave Onesimus
and the enslaved community for a defense against the ravages of smallpox in 1721.
Several years earlier, Onesimus reported to Mather that he had “undergone an
Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox & would forever
praeserve him from it; adding that it was often used among the Guramantese.”
When smallpox swept through the colony during the summer of 1721, Mather and William
Brattle’s former student and eulogizer Benjamin Colman interviewed enslaved
people in Boston about their experiences of smallpox inoculation in Africa. Mather
and Zabdiel Boylston submitted Boylston’s son as well as his enslaved man
servant and child as test subjects. The consultation of Black people caused a
strident debate in Boston, but the inoculation bore favorable results.81 On its heels, a five-year long
diphtheria epidemic ravaged New England, beginning in the town of Kingston, New
Hampshire in 1735 before spreading up through Maine and down through Massachusetts
and Connecticut, ultimately killing 5,000, including Jane. At the same time,
smallpox was ravaging South Carolina, killing up to a quarter of white colonists who
caught the disease, but only half as many Black people (as many had prior exposure).
In late 1739, a group of enslaved people used the opportunity presented by this
epidemic and their Angola religious cosmologies to overthrow their enslavers and try
to escape in what would come to be called the Stono Rebellion.82 Just seven days after Jane’s death and
six months after the Stono Rebellion, the first in a series of fires broke out in
New York. With the memory of Stono still fresh, these events would ultimately spark
fears of a wide-ranging slave conspiracy, planned with the help of local poor
whites, which would lead to the public execution of thirty people as well as the
mass deportation of seventy others. Less than one mile north from Cicely and
Jane’s final resting place is the execution grounds of Cambridge Common, the
location where another enslaved woman named Phillis was burned at the stake in
1754.
Cambridge and Boston’s enslaved community in midcentury had become augmented
by the arrival of Caribbean transplants. Such white and Black Barbadian emigrees
moved in alongside the Brattles in a neighborhood of mansions that ran towards
Harvard College and would come to be known as Tory Row.83 But bonded people were connected in larger
communities that stretched from Cambridge to Concord, Boston to Charlestown. The
broader world of two enslaved people—Phillis, enslaved as a child to John
Codman in Charlestown, and Robin, to the Vassalls—intersected Jane and her
family, as well as Philicia, Zilliah, and Rose.84 The familiar geographies of local life would have
included the burial ground that faced Harvard College, which already contained the
decorative memorial to Cicely’s life and death, as well as the execution area
of Boston Common, where another woman named Maria was burned to death three decades
earlier, executed alongside two enslaved Black men who were hanged.85 The social world of William Jr.,
the little boy left behind when William, Elizabeth, and Cicely died, was likewise
marked by landmarks of enslavement. He was orphaned at the age of eleven but
inherited one of the largest fortunes in the colony and attended Harvard College. In
1728, during his time at the college, Cambridge passed laws against street gambling
attributed to “young people, servants & negroes.”86 He maintained connections to his
parents’ circle of friends, people like Andrew Bordman and Elizur Holyoke. He
also deepened his social ties in New England’s regional elite by marrying
Katherine Saltonstall, daughter of Connecticut Judge Gurdon Saltonstall. Andrew
listed the births of William Jr.’s children, Thomas and Elizabeth, in his
almanac.87
The stories told by the memorials to enslaved female “servants” in the
municipal burial ground were meant to resonate with the next generation. Such
markers emphasized lifelong service to recognizable elite families and conversion to
the Christian faith. Family connections were erased, though it is likely that the
enslaved community carried some knowledge of the connection that Cicely, and later
Jane, had to their own communities. They would have inhabited the same spaces as
their ancestors, cramped attics, and tended the same gardens. But some might also
have been housed in slave quarters, as was the case of those enslaved by the Royals.
This change in the physical geography of the era termed the “Refinement of
America” is one that has been primarily told from the point of view of white
consumers and not of the Black and brown people whose lives were consumed.88 At the same time, William
Jr.’s fortunes rose during this era of opulence, and he bought a mansion
located on Brattle Street, with gardens and a mall that led to the Charles River.
His neighbor, Henry Vassall, was one of the largest slaveholders in the region, and
the two men housed enslaved people in their attics.89 William Jr. filled his home with treasures and
supplied his daughter with a lavish dowry which he placed in an iron chest.90 In April 1752, smallpox ravaged
Cambridge and, attempting to escape the outbreak, the Brattles left their mansion in
Cambridge for the countryside. They left their enslaved man Dick behind to face the
disease.91 Neighbor Henry
Vassall had likewise quit the area for the socially distanced safety his resources
could offer, creating an opportunity for his enslaved man Robin to effect his
escape. Working in concert with a white indentured servant, Robin and Dick made off
with William Jr.’s iron chest. It contained a fortune, more than enough to
finance Robin’s planned escape, first to New France and then to France. But
the splendor of his haul made it impossible to fence, and the two men were caught
and imprisoned in Concord.92
William Jr.’s attempt to flee the disease in the countryside had been
unsuccessful. His wife died of smallpox just a week after they quit the college
town. His return to Cambridge and Robin’s subsequent trial set a series of
events in motion that upended the enslaved community.93 Following the trial, William Jr. was awarded more than
just his daughter’s dowry: he was given Robin’s life to
“dispose of” as he wished.94 He sold him to his colleague Dr. William Clark, an
apothecary who lived in Boston. Three years of enslavement to Clark had furnished
Robin with a knowledge of poisons. When his friend, Mark, approached him complaining
of his recalcitrant master named John Codman, who was keeping him from visiting his
wife and child in Boston, as well as physically and sexually abusing his
bondspeople, Robin offered a deadly solution.95
But the poisoning’s domestic setting and its relationship to Black and white
women’s intimate lives, presented in stark gendered and religious terms, is
preserved in the court record. A, by then, elderly Phillis administered the poison,
after Mark had “read the Bible through” and determined that they could
guiltlessly kill John by refraining from “bloodshed.” After what must
have sounded to the elite white court as a familiar yet disordered Bible study, the
male action in the case dropped away, save for John who was acted upon. On
“the Sabbath day morning before the last Sacrament,” it was
“Phebe and Phillis” who “made a solution which they kept
secreted in a vial” and “mixed with the water-gruel and
sago.”96 Such testimony
must have been uncomfortably close to William Jr.’s own memories of his
father’s last moments being tended to by female domestics using physics and
cures. Indeed, the poison was sometimes given by the enslaved women, but also,
unknowingly, by John’s daughters.97 The dependence of the white household women on the
knowledge of enslaved women, one that ultimately led to them unknowingly committing
patricide, was a stark inversion of the funeral sermons memorializing white women
nursing ailing servants. Benjamin Colman (William Sr.’s former student) had
eulogized his daughter, Mary Colman Turell, in 1735, writing: “To her Servants she was good and kind, and took care of them,
especially of the Soul of a Slave who dy’d (in the House)
about a Month before her.”98 Indeed, according to Phillis, his daughter Molly had discovered the lead that they
had used to poison his porridge, and asked Phillis “[w]hat it
was.” When she “told her I did not know,” Mary did not press
the issue.99 Similarly, her sister
Betty noticed that the “watergruel” had “turned yellow,”
and she asked Phillis about it. Phillis “gave her no answer” but
instead threw it away and was not questioned.100
On August 29, 1755, William Jr. was subpoenaed to give witness against Mark and
Phillis, which he did on the following day. He faced a court presided over by
Stephen Sewall, Samuel Sewall’s son.101 The judgement given by the court was brutal. Mark was
ordered to be publicly hanged and after death his body gibbetted, while Phillis was
ordered to be burned at the stake. Phillis would not have been a stranger to William
Jr., as she testified that she was purchased by John Codman “when I was a
little girl” in Charlestown, where William Jr.’s mother’s
family lived.102 That Phillis was
part of the interconnected community of enslavers and enslaved people that
surrounded William Jr. is evident when she said that she knew Robin, who had grown
up next door to William and shuttled between Cambridge and Charlestown, “for
many years.”103 Mark and
Phillis’s execution was attended by a massive crowd. The Boston
Evening Post featured the execution:
The Fellow was hanged, and the Woman burned at the Stake about Ten Yards
distant from the Gallows. They both confessed themselves guilty of the Crime
for which they suffered, acknowledged the Justice of their Sentence, and
died very penitent. After Execution, the Body of Mark was
brought down to Charlestown Common, and hanged in Chains,
on a Gibbet erected there for that Purpose.”104
Was William Jr. among the massive crowd that attended the execution? If he
heard Phillis’s final “penance” followed by shrieks of agony,
did he remember the little enslaved girl named Cicely whom he had known as a boy,
who was buried just a short walk away? William Jr.’s friend John
Winthrop noted the brutality of the execution in the margins of his almanac,
writing, “a terrible spectacle in Cambridge 2 negro’s belonging to
Capt. Codman of Charleston executed for petit treason, for murdering their said
master by poison. They were drawn upon a sled to the place of execution; &
Mark, a fellow about 30, was hanged; & Phillis, an old creature, was burnt to death.”105 John’s shock at the spectacle is encapsulated
in his underlining of “burnt to death” and his use of the descriptors
“an old creature” to describe Phillis. Indeed, it was only the second
time that an enslaved person (both times a woman) was executed publicly in such a
way in Massachusetts, and at the first instance, Cotton Mather had described the
execution of Maria as “a picture of hell, too, in a negro then burnt to death
at the stake.”106 But the
public execution of an elder within the enslaved community must have been a seismic
shock to the people enslaved within close proximity to the burning. In contrast to
white antinomians and witches, infamy did not offer Phillis and other non-white
women a place in history. Her punishment was meant to consume—her life, her
body, and her memory. After execution, Mark’s body was placed in a gibbet
along the road to Charlestown as a physical public warning to the community both
enslaved and free, a gruesome memento mori. Years later in Paul Revere’s 1798
letter to Jeremy Belknap, he used Mark’s remains as a geographical landmark
to indicate the location where he came upon British regular troops in 1775:
“After I had passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was
hung in chains, I saw two men on Horseback, under a Tree. When I got near them, I
discovered they were British officers.”107 Though Mark’s remains no longer hang in
Charlestown, Cicely and Jane’s gravestones endure as physical markers to the
interconnected lives and deaths of those enslaved by Cambridge’s elite.
On February 23, 1760, Cato Hanker, a free Black man from Cambridge who served in the
Massachusetts colonial militia, requested his pension for fighting in the Seven
Years’ War. He chose then Captain William Brattle Jr. to pen his petition:
“Cato Hanker, a free negro in Cambridge humbly sheweth that March last he
enlisted himself a souldier in the Provincial Service against Canada by your
Excellency’s order went to Castle William from thence went to Crown Point
where he remained until orderly dismissed.”108 William Jr.’s family owned the land at Crown
Point where he had been stationed to command and likely knew Cato from within his
own Cambridge community. In petitioning for his pension, Cato Hanker was
participating in a form of public protest that members of the enslaved community
would use in order to petition Massachusetts’s courts for freedom.
William Jr. too was also increasingly engaged in public protest. In 1765, incensed by
the duties levied by the British government, he became a member of the Stamp Act
Congress. But by 1771, his fortunes, and political sensibilities had shifted when he
was made major general of the royal militia.109 That same year, Ebenezer Pemberton, grandson to
William Sr.’s friend and ministerial colleague, published a sermon in memory
of George Whitfield. At the end, he included a poem penned by an enslaved girl with
a genius for writing named Phillis Wheatley.110 William Jr. would have likely known this Phillis who
was feted in the homes of Boston and Cambridge elites, as he had the other Phillis
whose public burning had been the result, in part, of his testimony. In 1771,
Phillis Wheatley was baptized at Old South Church into the congregation of the
Brattle Street Church that had been founded in 1699 by William Jr.’s father
and his uncle Thomas, the same congregation where Cicely had also been
baptized.111
Circumstances for the enslaved and free community were changing rapidly. In 1772,
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s narrative describing the horrors of the
slave trade was published, and the Somerset case directly challenged enslavement in
Britain, a precedent Boston’s slaves read as an opportunity. In 1773, while
William Jr. supported Governor Gage’s notion that the judiciary be rightly
limited by the crown, engaged in a public debate with John Adams, was selected to
represent Massachusetts in a committee, and was tasked with drawing the divide with
New York, Benjamin Rush offered his own appeal against the slave trade, including
Phillis as an exemplar of the talents of the enslaved.112 The same year, Peter Bestes and other free and
enslaved people petitioned the Massachusetts Courts for freedom.113 By 1774, a private letter sent by William Jr.
warning General Thomas Gage of military supplies sent from Boston was intercepted
and published in an incident known as the Powder Alarm. Following the incident,
Brattle left Cambridge forever, retreating initially to Boston.
Unlike Cicely, William Jr. is not buried in Old Cambridge Burial Ground. The last
published mention of William Jr. in his birth country appeared in the Boston
Evening Gazette a year before his death, detailing his
“flight” from “Boston to Halifax,” and derisively
arguing that the rich scion had only “a singular talent at running
away.”114 Forced to
evacuate Boston in 1776, William Jr. left with Black loyalists like printer Boston
King. His unmarked remains lie in Halifax, far from the rest of his family.115 But while William Jr.’s
bones are not interred in Cambridge, his name graces sites across the Northeast,
from Brattle Street in Cambridge to Brattlesboro, Vermont.116
On January 13, 1798, the Providence Gazette ran a notice of the
death of “Dinah, a black woman, at the house of Thomas Brattle, Esq.
Cambridge, Mass, aged 100 years.”117 In her century of life, she might have known Cicely,
Scipio, Jane, and so many others. Indeed, she was born in 1698, a year before
Cicely, and, at her death, she was enslaved to Thomas, William Jr.’s son. On
May 6, 1782, Thomas’s daughter, Katherine Brattle Wendell, who had remained
on the Brattle property during the Revolutionary War while her father and brother
fled, petitioned to remain in the estate. She wrote of her privation at being forced
to maintain the expenses of the house alone while being compelled to host Patriot
leaders such as George Washington and added, “Besides your memorialist has
been at the expense of maintaining an aged slave left of the aforesaid estate, who
has for year been incapable of service, and who must be considered as an incumbrance
on the estate.”118 That
“aged slave” was most likely Dinah, who was eighty-four at the time of
the petition and would have been attached to the family estate in Cambridge that was
ultimately claimed by Thomas. She would have, like Cicely before her, been passed
between siblings in the Brattle family, forced to toil and to follow the
circumstances of their lives. By the time that the notice of Dinah’s death
ran in the Providence Gazette, so much had changed from when
Cicely’s own memorial was etched in slate. The colonial world had given way
to a new republic, and by 1782, enslavement had officially ended in Massachusetts,
although racial segregation, inequity, poverty, and violence endured. But some
geographies of that enslaved past, such as Cicely and Jane’s tombstones,
remained for three more centuries, as weathered tombstone memorials etched in
curlicue writing and antiquated symbology. Despite their location among divines and
elites whose histories have inspired of early America, precious little has
been written of them in nearly three centuries. In contrast, our oldest libraries
are filled with evidence and ephemera of the lives of their captors: papers and
diaries, account books and wills. Black, female, and enslaved, Cicely and Jane were
not meant to be remembered, and for three hundred years, they largely have not been.
In a world where well-behaved white women seldom make history, Cicely and
Jane’s stories, seem to have been even more fated to fade into the silence of
the past. But, perhaps, such expectations betray the assumptions of later ages.
Etched in stone, they were intended to endure, and offer memorial to the social
meanings of race, labor and memory. In the space between Cicely and Jane’s
tombstones lie the possibilities to interpret the meaning of their lives anew.
Notes
1
Considerable work is being done on excavating Black graveyards and graveyards
with markers to African and African-descended’ people in New England. As far as
I am currently aware, the oldest extant markers for enslaved people exist in
Rhode Island’s “God’s Little Acre,” but those were
erected a few years after Cicely’s memorial. Of course, the act of
marking is culturally situated, with many West and Southwest Africans choosing
very different methods to honor the memory of deceased people. Slate markers
themselves are an English tradition, contrasting the sandstone used in early
Dutch colonies which have not survived; thus, the survival of
Cicely’s’ marker must be analyzed sensitively, taking into account
different cultural modes of commemoration. For current work on African and
African American graveyards, see Glenn A. Knoblock, African American
Historical Burial Grounds and Gravesites of New England (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015). Caitlin Galante
DeAngelis Hopkins has done considerable work analyzing New England’s
graveyards historically. Of particular note to this article, she briefly
mentions Cicely and Jane’s markers in a rigorous and highly useful
discussion of New England’s slave burials. Caitlin Galante DeAngelis
Hopkins, “The Shadow of Change: Politics and Memory in New
England’s Historic Burying Grounds, 1630–1776” (PhD diss.,
Harvard University, 2014), 110–11. For work that contrasts the material
survivability of markers across cultures, see Brandon Richards, “Hier
Leydt Begraven: A Primer on Dutch Colonial Gravestones,” Northeast Historical Archaeology 43, no. 2 (2014):
1–22.
2
Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 2:752.
3
Although it remains convention to refer to historical actors by their last name
after the first full instance of their name, I consciously break with this
practice. Enslaved people were most frequently not given a family name and only
identified by “Negro,” “Mulatto” or some other
physical characteristic. I have opted to refer to everyone by their first name
where clarity permits.
Annette Gordon-Reed’s recentering of the narrative of Thomas
Jefferson’s enslaved family members ushered in a seismic shift in
widespread engagement with such non-white histories, although it also spawned a
similar degree of scholarly backlash devoted to deploying the archival records
to call into question such narratives. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham centered the
need “to bring race more prominently” into “analyses of
power.” Thavolia Glymph and Stephanie Jones-Rogers have centered a female
world within slaveholding households in the early South, an essential framework
to engage in an extended gendered and racial analysis of slavery and imagine
white female enslavers as active agents of enslavement. Jennifer Morgan’s
work offered an indispensable framework with which to engage with gender, labor,
and the physicality of enslaved women’s bodily production as crucial to
the emergence of racial notions of black inferiority and white supremacy.
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American
Family (2008; repr., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009);
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and
the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs 17 (1992): 252;
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the
Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as
Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2019); Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their
Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial
Ideology, 1500–1700,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 167–92; and Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and
Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
6
Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early
America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016); Gloria
McCahon Whiting, “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision: African American
Families Negotiate Gender and Slavery,” Journal of American
History 103 (2016): 583–605; Whiting, “Race, Slavery,
and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate
Court,” WMQ 77 (2020): 405–40; and Jared Ross
Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century
Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
7
For more on the archive as a site of power, see Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the
Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017);
Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2015). For an excellent overview of the ways
in which the continental Dutch historical narrative, which largely erases
slavery, was shaped by a conscious manipulation of the archive, see Dienke
Hondius, Blackness in Western Europe: Racial Patterns of Paternalism and
Exclusion (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014), 2; and
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe
26 12, no. 2 (2008): 2, 12.
8
Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Sacvan
Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found:
New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American
Quarterly 38 (1976): 20, 35; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women, 1750–1800 (1980; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996).
9
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of
Capitalism and Other Writing, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon
C. Wells (1905; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 14.
10
A Self-Guided Tour of The Old Burying Ground, Collections of the
Cambridge Historical Commission, 2.
11
For a wonderful reading of Elizabeth Freeman’s grave, situated among the
Sedgwick family of Sheffield, see Sari Edelstein, “‘Good Mother,
Farewell’: Elizabeth Freeman’s Silence and the Stories of
Mumbet,” New England Quarterly 94 (2019):
584–614.
Antonio T. Bly, “‘Pretends he can read’: Runaways and
Literacy in Colonial America,” Early American Studies 6
(2008): 261–94.
14
Felicia Y. Thomas, “‘Fit for Town or Country’: Black Women
and Work in Colonial Massachusetts,” Journal of African American
History (2020): 191–212.
15
Brattle’s diary entries are reprinted in William Newell, The
Pastor’s Remembrances: A Discourse Delivered Before the First Parish
in Cambridge on Sunday, May 27, 1855 (Cambridge, MA: John Bartlett,
1855), 34. The Bradish family lived in Cambridge and Boston and were neighbors
of the Brattles. Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1630–1877, with a genealogical Record, accessed October 21,
2020, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.05.0228%3Achapter%3D27&force=y.
16
Newell, The Pastor’s Remembrances, 34.
17
Newell, The Pastor’s Remembrances, 139–41, 152,
174.
18
Excerpts from William Brattle’s Diary in Records
of the Church of Christ at Cambridge in New England, 1632–1830,
comprising the ministerial records of baptisms, marriages, deaths, admission
to covenant and communion, dismissals and church proceedings (Boston: E. Putnam, 1906), 290–93.
19
Newell, The Pastor’s Remembrances, 34.
20
Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War: The
History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (1999;
repr., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 73.
21
Rick Kennedy, “William Brattle in A Compendium of
Logick,” in Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at
Harvard, ed. Rick Kennedy (Boston: The Colonial Society of
Massachusetts, 1995), 67:110.
22
Perry Miller, The New England Mind, From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); and Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963; repr.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
23
Brattle’s other published works were An Ephemeris of Celestial
Motions … , published in 1682, and Almanack of the
Coelestiall Motions, published in 1693. Harvard College used
Brattle’s Compendium Logicae Secundum principia as a
textbook until 1765. John Langdon Sibley, “William Brattle,” in Biographical Sketches of Graduate of Harvard University, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts,1678–1689 (Cambridge, MA: Charles William Sever,
University Bookstore, 1885), 3:206–7. For more on Brattle and Leverett’s
administration of Harvard College during the absentee presidency of Increase
Mather, see Rick Alan Kennedy, “Thy Patriarch’s Desire: Thomas and
William Brattle in Puritan Massachusetts” (PhD. diss., University of
California, Santa Barbara, 1987), 3–6.
24
Benjamin Colman, A Sermon at the Lecture in Boston, After the Funerals of
Those Excellent & Learned Divines and Eminent Fellows of Harvard
College The Reverend, Mr. William Brattle … (Boston: Printed
by B. Green, for Samuel Gerrish and Daniel Henchman, 1717), 32.
25
Hardesty, Unfreedom, 2.
26
Mark Valeri argues that religion and commerce were intertwined in New England and
that the visible establishment of churches by such merchant elites was central
to the process. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped
Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 20; and Kennedy, “Thy Patriarch’s Desire,”
5–6.
27
Whiting, “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision,” 598.
28
Cotton Mather’s 1706 slave catechism, included in his pamphlet The
Negro Christianized, was intended to induce slave masters to
baptize their slaves without the worry that Christianization caused
emancipation. Such an emphasis highlights that baptism’s association with
earthly freedom remained concerning enough in the opening decade of the
eighteenth century to cause many slaveholders to refrain from baptizing their
slaves. Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and
Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in
Christianity, ed. Paul Royster (1706; repr., Lincoln: Libraries at
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Electronic Texts in American Studies, 2007),
24–26.
29
Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 63.
30
Stephen Paschall Sharples, comp. and ed., Records of the Church of Christ
at Cambridge in New England, 1682–1830 (Boston: Eben Putnam,
1906), 59 (hereafter cited as Rec. First Ch. Cambridge).
31
For Charlestown’s role in New England’s burgeoning merchant
culture, see Bailyn, Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, 96.
32
For the Lamson family’s Atlantic reach, see David R. Mould and Missy
Loewe, Historic Gravestone Art of Charleston, South Carolina,
1695–1802 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.,
2006), 30, 35–36, 39, 42, 63–65, 69, 72–73, 209–12.
To date I can find no direct evidence of whether the Lamson family employed
enslaved labor in their shop, but for an example of an enslaved artisan from
Rhode Island, see Hopkins, “Pompe Stevens, Enslaved Artisan,” Common-Place 13 (2013), accessed October 21, 2020, http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-13/no-03/lessons/index2.shtml.
Glenn Knoblock theorizes that enslaved stonecutters might have been employed to
carve the markers for black burials. Knoblock, African Amer. Hist.
Burial Grounds of NE, 108–9.
33
Will of William Stitson, April 12, 1688, Middlesex County Probate File,
#21376, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston; cf. Warren, New
England Bound, 142n84. Case of Francis (aged 35 years) and Fortune
(aged 17 years) negros of Edward Collins, June 21, 1670, in Middlesex
County, MA: Abstracts of Court Files, 1649–1675,
AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2003;
unpublished abstracts by Thomas Bellows Wyman, “Abstract of Middlesex
court files from 1649,” n.d., accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.americanancestors.org/DB432/i/12381/107/138355865.
To date I have not been able to locate the court records, but details are given
in Edmund Morgan, Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in
Seventeenth-Century New England (1944; repr., New York: Harper
& Row Publishers, 1966), 129; and Warren, New England
Bound, 154n44. John Heyman was chosen by the selectmen to be a
tithingman on March 11, 1678. Richard Frothingham, The History of
Charlestown, Massachusetts (Boston: Charles C. Little and James
Brown, 1845), 182.
34
Marriage of Dan Smiths Negro Mingo and Mr Soley Negro, 1687, in Records
of the First Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts,
1632–1789, ed. J.F. Hunnewell (Boston: D. Clapp and Son,
1880), 93.
35
Sewall, Diary, 1:432–33.
36
“Two negro maids,” are mentioned as being part of
Elizabeth’s husband Nathaniel Oliver’s estate at his decease.
Inventory of Nathaniel Oliver, 1704, in An Account of Some of the
Descendants of Capt. Thomas Brattle, ed. Edward-Doubleday Harris
(Boston: Printed by D. Clapp and Son, 1867), 12. Mary’s husband John
Mico’s account book lists an enslaved man named Jeffy as “bound
from hence unto Barbbados and Lond and so hither at 55£ as appears under
[skipper] White’s hand 1 May 1703,” Mass. Archives
Coll., Colonial Period, 1622–1788.
37
Saffin’s published response to Sewall, A Brief and Candid Answer
to a Late Printed sheet, Entitled, The Selling of Joseph, opened
with a poem declaring “Cowardly and Cruel are those Blacks
Innate/Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate.” Although Saffin
opposed Sewall’s call for antislavery, he shared a similar degree of
racial unease with blacks. John Saffin, A Brief Candid Answer to a late
Printed Sheet, Entiteld the Selling of Joseph (1701) in Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason L.
Lowance (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 17.
38
Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph, ed. Sidney Kaplan (Amherst
and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), 10.
Thomas Brattle, “Letter from Thomas Brattle to an Unnamed
Clergyman,” October 8, 1692, in George L. Burr, ed., Narratives
of the Witchcraft Cases (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1914), 178.
41
Brattle, Diary, February 11, 1700, Recs. First Ch.
Cambridge, 291.
42
William Brattle, Probate Inventory, 1717.
43
Samuel Sewall had published a work on eschatology entitled Phænomena quædam apocalyptica ad aspectum novi orbis
configurata, or, Some few lines towards a description of the new heaven as
it makes to those who stand upon the new earth in 1697 with
Bartholomew Green and John Allen, which was sold by Richard Wilkins, the same
year that he apprenticed his eldest son Sam to Wilkins in order to learn the
bookseller business. Although the elder Sewall published The Selling of
Joseph three years later with the same press, he chose to
distribute that book privately to a few select friends. Judith S. Graham, Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2000), Table 2: “The ‘Sending
Out’ of the Sewall Children,” 146.
44
Sewall documented the argument with Mather in the margins of his diary on October
20, 1701. Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M.
Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 2:43.
45
Kathryn Koo interprets Mather’s agitation for the Christianization of
slaves as an early radicalism, an acknowledgement of the belief among puritan
divines of the ultimate equality of man before God. I agree with Koo that
divines such as Cotton Mather participated in the creation of a puritan
theological ethos in regards to enslaved people to emphasize a lasting spiritual
condition but assert that it was one of temporal racial inequality.
Cotton’s use of racial signifiers, his formulation of a different
Christian confession for enslaved community members, and his efforts to set up a
system of informants among such Christianized Black people to police the
enslaved community argue for a racially infused functional separation to
Mather’s theology. Koo, “Strangers in the House of God,”
157–58.
46
Diverse colonial Northeasterners linguistically equated “negro”
with an insult, a practice followed across language barriers forming a shared
regional conceptual language even as social, religious and political divisions
abounded. In 1664, during negotiations between Beverwijck (Albany) and New
Amsterdam, Jeremias van Rensselaer wrote that the opposing delegation has
treated his ideas “als oft het mÿn neeger geseijt had”(as
if my negro had said it). In negotiations between Native polities, New
France’s and New York’s diplomatic delegations used such racial
language to try to turn Native allies against the other’s cause, as in
1699 when an Onondaga man Cohensiowanne was told by the French diplomat Maricour
that New York’s diplomat Captain Philip Schuyler had disrespected the
confederacy by comparing them to “a negro he had with him.”
Jeremias to Jan Baptist van Rensselaer, April 25, 1664, Correspondence of
Jeremias van Rensselaer, NYSL_sc7079-b05-f15_p2-f16_p1_ncn. DMS ID Number
182693; Letter books of Jeremias van Rensselaer SC7079 Box 5, Folder 15. Van
Rensselaer Manor Papers, New York State Library, Albany. Robert
Livingston’s transcript of conference with French Indians, February 6,
1699, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New
York, ed. E.B. O’Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed Parsons 1854),
4:495.
47
Wendy Warren notes that Sewall’s arguments against the selling of Africans
had no effect on the life choices of his eldest son. In 1714 he placed a slave
for sale advertisement in the Boston News Letter which
included, “Four or Five likely Negro boys” for sale. Warren, New England Bound, 246n75.
48
“An Act to prevent Disorders in the Night,” October 27, 1703, in Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, 1703–4, 535–36 (hereafter cited as Acts and Resolves).
Will of Peter Town, May 20, 1705, in The New England Historical &
Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal (S.G. Drake, 1866),
20:370–71.
51
Recs. First Ch. Cambridge, 59.
52
Scipio’s Freedom Petition, December 10, 1719, Journals of the
House of Representatives of Massachusetts 1718–1720 (Boston: The
Massachusetts Historical Society, 1921) 2:224.
53
John Mico to Captain Samuel White, Boston, May 1, 1703, Mass. Archives Coll.,
Col., 1622–1788, vol. 8.
54
John Mico account book, May 1, 1703,” Mass. Archives Coll., Col.,
1622–1788.
55
Walter K. Watkins, “Boylston Hotel, School Street,” in Bostonian
Society Publication (Boston: Old State House, 1916),
1:107–8.
56
Charles Foy, “Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How Slaves Used Northern
Seaports’ Maritime Industry to Escape and Create Trans-Atlantic
Identities, 1713–1783” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2008),
72.
57
Nathaniel Oliver, Inventory, 1704.
58
William Dillon Piersen. Black Yankees: The Development of an
Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-century New England (Amherst
and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 97; and Cf, Thomas,
“Fit for Town or Country,” 207.
59
Thomas, “Fit for Town or Country,” 207.
60
William Brattle, Inventory, 1717, microform no. 2499, Middlesex County Probate
Records, Mass. State Archives.
61
William Brattle, Inventory, 1717.
62
William Brattle, Inventory, 1717.
63
William Brattle, Inventory, 1717. For the spatial geography of Northeastern
slavery, see Mac Griswold, The Manor: Thee Centuries at a Slave
Plantation on Long Island (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2013), 165; Alexandra A. Chan, Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archaeology
at a New England Farm (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press, 2007), 42–45; and Peter Benes, “Slavery in Boston
Households, 1647–1770,” in Slavery/Antislavery in
New England: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings
2003, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 2005), 21.
Wendy Warren succinctly lays out the gulf between the archival evidence and the
historiographical tradition that New England slaves lived in the same house as
their master in New England Bound, 316n71.
64
Baptism of “Seisly. Negro’ Servant of Mrs. J. Mico,”
February 7, 1714, in The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in
Brattle Square … 1699–1872, ed. Ellis Loring Motte,
et al. (Boston: The Benevolent Fraternity of Churches John Wilson and
Son, Cambridge, 1902), 134; and Act for Better Inquiry Into the Ratable Estate
of the Respective Towns of This Province, October 29, 1707, State Library of
Massachusetts, Boston.
65
For more on the interpretation of the fifth commandment and its dissemination
across the Protestant world, see Anders Ahlbäck, “The Overly
Candid Missionary Historian: C.G.A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence
over Slavery in the Danish West Indies” in Ports of
Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possession, ed.
Holger Weiss (Leiden, Neth.: Koninklijke Brill, 2016), 210–11. Samuel
Willard provided a theologically similar take on the commandment in A
Complete Body of Divinity (Boston: B. Green, S. Kneeland, B. Eliot
and D. Henchman, 1726), 597. See also Ulrich, “Vertuous Women
Found,” 29; and Bailey, Race and Redemption, 79. For
nineteenth-century slave catechisms and the fifth commandment, see Tammy K.
Byron “‘A Catechism for Their Special Use’: Slave
Catechisms in the Antebellum South” (PhD. diss., University of Arkansas,
2008), 111–14.
66
William Brattle, Will, 1717: “I give to Elizabeth Hicks thirty Pounds,
& to Ruth Hicks I Give Eight pounds & fourty shillings more in
petty things besides what my executors shall allow [damaged] of
them for Mourning, which I would have to be considered as deep
[damaged] & accordingly [illegible] to be
made to them. Furthermore of [damaged] Hicks one of my Cows which
she pleases & good lot of English Hay [damaged] to her the
Bed in the boyes Chamber with ych Red Curtains used therewith
[damaged] to her One of my grou Mortars &b a Pestle; by
mall bell mettall skillet [damaged] pint-brass skillet, also forty
shillings in Petty things as she desires [damaged] I give to said
Elizabeth Hicks as a thankful acknowledgement of her great care of me,
tenderness toward me and her faithfull service all ye time she has lived with
[damaged].”
67
William Brattle, Will, 1717.
68
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found.” 20, 35.
69
Kathryn Koo and Jared Ross Hardesty engaged the influence of enslaved Africans on
the emergence of New England Christianity using the mentions of such enslaved
people within print culture. Kathryn S. Koo, “Strangers in the House of
God: Cotton Mather, Onesimus, and an Experiment in Christian
Slaveholding,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 117, part 1 (2007):157–58; and Hardesty, “An Angry God in the
Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in
Pre-Revolutionary Boston,” Slavery & Abolition 35
(2014): 66–83.
70
Barbara Lambert and M. Sue Ladr, “Civic Announcements: The Role of Drums,
Criers and Bells in the Colonies,” in Music in Colonial
Massachusetts 1630–1820: Music in Homes and in Churches, ed.
Frederick S. Allis, Jr. (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1985),
906.
71
Benjamin Colman, A devout contemplation on … the early death of
pious and lovely children. Preached upon the sudden and lamented death of
Mrs. Elizabeth Wainwright. Who departed this life, April the 8th. 1714.
Having just compleated the fourteenth year of her age, 1714,
accessed October 21, 2020, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/N01406.0001.001, Evans Early American
Imprint Collection.
72
Sewall, Diary, 2:677–8.
73
Jim Downs, “With Only a Trace: Same-Sex Sexual Desire and Violence on
Slave Plantations, 1607–1865,” in Connexions: Histories of
Race and Sex in North America, ed. Jennifer Brier, et al.
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 30–1.
74
News, April 21, 1712, Boston News Letter.
75
Benjamin Colman to Robert Wodrow, June 11, 1723 in “Some Unpublished
Letters of Benjamin Colman, 1717–1725,” ed. Niel Caplan,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 77 (1965):
131.
76
Boston News Letter, April 12, 1714, Page [2].
77
Bordman Family Papers, HUG 1228, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA.
78
Andrew Bordman’s notebook contains Rose’s children’s
births—Jane (1718), Flora (1723), Jeffrey, (1731), Cesar (1733)—as
well as the deaths of Jeffrey (December 10, 1739) and Jane (March 11, 1741), HUB
1228, Box 3, seq. 61, Bordman Fam. Papers.
79
Baptism and covenant profession of “Rose, Negro maid Servant of Mr. A.
Bordman,” February 1, 1730, in Rec. First Ch. Cambridge, 126.
80
Rec. First Ch. Cambridge, 108.
81
George L. Kittredge, ‘Introduction’ to Increase Mather … and
Cotton Mather, Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated (Cleveland: Printed for Private Distribution, 1921), 4. For more on this, see
Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722:
An Incident in the History of Race,” WMQ, 61 (2004):
47–76; and Eugenia W. Herbert, “Smallpox Inoculation in
Africa,” Journal of African History 16 (1975):
539–59.
82
William Stanley, “Fear and rebellion in South Carolina: The 1739 Stono
Rebellion and Colonial Slave Society” (MA thesis, James Madison
University, 2020), 27.
83
Samuel Francis Batchelder, “Col. Vassall and his Wife Penelope
Vassall with some Account of his Slaves,” in Cambridge
Historical Society, Proceedings (1915), 10:61–69; and
“Henry Vassall House,” Cambridge and the American Revolution,
accessed October 21, 2020, https://cambridgehistory.org/Cambridge-Revolution/Vassall%20House.html.
84
Phillis had been purchased as a child by John Codman of Charlestown and gave
testimony in her trial that she had known Robin for a long time. Robin was
enslaved to the Vassalls, who were neighbors to William Jr. Abner Cheney Goodell,
Jr., The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis:
Slaves of Capt. John Codman, who Murdered their Master at Charlestown,
Mass., in 1755; for which the man was Hanged and Gibbeted, and the woman was
Burned to Death … (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson & Son
University Press, 1883), 10; and “Case against William Heley &
Robin, May 19, 1752,” in Batchelder, “Col. Henry Vassall,”
65–67. A year after Rose’s admission to full communion, in 1731,
Philicia, a woman enslaved to William Jr., was also admitted to full communion
at the First Church in Cambridge. In 1737, Zillah, a woman enslaved by William
Jr., joined Philicia as a full church member. Rec. First Ch.
Cambridge, 97, 109.
85
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, ed. Thomas Robbins
(1702; repr., Hartford: S. Andrus and Son, 1853), 2:409.
86
July 1, 1728 in City Document No. 137, A Report of the Record
Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Records from 1700
to 1728 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1883), 224.
87
When William Brattle Jr.’s daughter was born in 1740 and son in 1742,
Andrew Bordman noted the event in the margins, though during the month of
Jane’s death he makes no annotations. Andrew Bordman Almanac, March 1741,
HUG 1228 Box 4, Item 7, seq. 5; Andrew Bordman Almanac, March 31, 1740; Almanac,
annotated, 1740, HUG 1228 Box 4, Item 6, seq. 10; Andrew Bordman Almanac,
February 28, 1742, HUG 1228 Box 4, Item 8, seq. 4; Bordman Fam. Papers.
88
Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses,
Cities (New York: Vintage Books 1992), xii; and T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American
Independence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv.
89
Batchelder, “Col. Henry Vassall and his Wife Penelope Vassall with some
Account of his Slaves,” 61–9; Peter Benes, “Slavery in
Boston Households, 1647–1770,” in Slavery/Antislavery in New England, 21; and Joseph
McGill, “The Miseducation of a Nation,” The Slave Dwelling
Project, accessed October 21, 2020, https://slavedwellingproject.org/the-miseducation-of-a-nation/.
90
Elise Lemire, Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord,
Massachusetts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2009), 43.
91
“Case against William Heley & Robin, May 19, 1752,” in
Batchelder, “Col. Henry Vassall,” 65–67.
92
“Case against William Heley & Robin, May 19, 1752,” in
Batchelder, “Col. Henry Vassall,” 65–67.
93
Lemire, Black Walden, 41–55.
94
“Case against William Heley & Robin, May 19, 1752,” in
Batchelder, “Col. Henry Vassall,” 67.
95
Jared Hardesty rightly emphasizes that the trial record insinuates that Phoebe
was likely sexually abused by Codman. Hardesty, Unfreedom, 68.
96
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 7–8.
97
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 4–5.
98
Benjamin Colman, Reliquiae Turellae, et Lachrymae Paternae. The
Father’s Tears over his Daughter’s Remains […] (Boston: Printed by S. Kneeland & T. Green for
J. Edwards and H. Foster in Cornhill, 1735), 117.
99
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 8–9.
100
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 12.
101
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 21.
102
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 7.
103
Goodell, Jr., The Trial of Mark and Phillis, 10.
104
News, Boston Evening Post, September 22, 1733.
105
John Winthrop, Almanac, September 18, 1755,1714–1779,
Papers of John and Hannah Winthrop, 1728–1789, annotated almanac, 1755,
HUM 9 Box 4, Vol. 14, Harvard Archives. Text underlined in Winthrop’s
original notation.
106
Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2:409.
107
Paul Revere to Jeremy Belknap, c. 1798, 2, Massachusetts Historical Society.
108
Petition of Cato Hanker, written by William Brattle, in Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, Massachusetts Archives Collection,
v. 78-Military, 1758–1760, SC1/series 45X. Mass. Archives.
109
Massachusetts Spy, August 1, 1771, 87.
110
Ebenezer Pemberton and Phillis Wheatley, Heaven the residence of the
saints: a sermon occasioned by the … death of the Rev. George
Whitefield, … , To which is added, an elegiac poem on his death by
Phillis, a Negro girl (Boston: [n.p.], 1771).
111
Motte, The Manifesto Church, 187.
112
For Boston King’s importance to this history of Canada’s Maritimes,
see Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the
Maritimes (Vancouver, Can.: UBC Press, 2016), 5; and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in a Revolutionary
World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 172.
113
Peter Bestes and Others, Letter to the Representative of the Town of Thompson,
April 20, 1773, in Printed Ephemera Collection, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC.
114
News, Boston Gazette, March 17, 1776.
115
James Henry Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the other side of
the American Revolution (Boston: W.B. Clark, 1910), 295.
116
Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts, 295.
117
Providence Gazette, January 13, 1798, Page
[3].
118
Katherine [Brattle] Wendel’s Petition to Remain at
[Brattle] estate, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation
Petition, V. 237, 56–57, Mass. Archives Coll.; Petition of Katherine
Wendell (seq. 1–3), Harvard Archives.
On December 28, 1662, a woman named Mayken van Angola pursued freedom in New Amsterdam. She did not stand alone. Two other women — Susanna and Lucretia — stood with her and together, they petitioned the colonial government for their freedom. It was granted with the caveat that they must clean the Director-General Petrus Stuyvesant’s house once a week as a condition of that freedom
[Illustration 1]
The compelling story of Mayken and her friends has been featured in several accounts of New Netherland’s early life. Mayken herself was likely one of the first three enslaved black women to be brought to the Dutch colony, and her name is one of the first references we have to an enslaved person. Her first name—Mayken—connects her to the broader Dutch diaspora, and her last name Angola connects her story to West-Central Africa. She was enslaved by Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie (Dutch West India Company or WIC) for three decades of her life, a fate that links her story to generations of people pulled into the vortex of enslavement by the Dutch company’s branch located in Amsterdam.
[Illustration 2]
We know that during her life in the colony of New Netherland and, in later years, English New York, she lived within the community of African and African descended people, was married to a free Black man named Domingo Angola, and stood as a baptismal witness alongside white Dutch settlers for an African descended child in the community. She is rightly considered an important and founding early American woman who fought for and won her full freedom.
Looking at the evidence
The decision to set Mayken and her friends free with the qualification that they continue to clean Petrus Stuyvesant’s house, and the strenuous nature of that requirement, is a crucial element of the story that connects their lives as working women in New Netherland with the experiences of other laborers in the Dutch Republic and across the Dutch empire. This blog will explore various ways of uncovering the reality of these women’s lives and what we can learn about their enduring impact.
The digital explosion that occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic has brought researchers, learners, and scholars in the Netherlands and the United States virtually closer to share ideas, documents, and experiences in a joint effort to make the stories of enslaved, bonded and free African and Indigenous people a more central part of the Dutch American narrative. Now it is possible to imagine and explore the worlds of people like Mayken and her friends in new ways.
These stories take a good measure of detective work and require a bit of sleuthing: the documents offer us tantalizing hints but leave so much more unstated. They also require wrestling with uncomfortable and painful parts of the shared American Dutch past. Using different types of evidence, we will explore the daily working lives of Mayken, her friends, and their connections to the American Dutch relationships.
Uncertainties
In some ways Mayken and her friends’ experiences were exceptional: they were married, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and able to sue for their freedom. But their lives also reflected the struggles of existence within a system of bondage and unfree labor. When Mayken approached the colonial government again, Susanna and Lucrecia had died. Precious little has been reconstructed of Susanna and Lucretia’s lives and experiences, but the loss of their companionship must have been a grievous blow. They may well have succumbed to smallpox which raged during the winter and spring of 1662 and 1663. Mayken requested to be freed from the obligation of cleaning the Director General’s house because it was a much too strenuous job for her, explaining that she was elderly and suffered from an old injury presumably the result of decades in bondage. What kind of work faced Mayken and her friends at the Stuyvesants’ house?
The documents do not clarify which house the three women were tasked with cleaning. The Stuyvesants resided in two main properties in Manhattan: a two-story bowery house, and a grander stone mansion owned by the West India Company, that was ultimately confiscated by the English along with all company property as part of the colony’s capitulation. Given their status as formerly enslaved by the company, Mayken, Susanna and Lucrecia likely toiled at the WIC-owned property that was renamed Whitehall by the English. The Stuyvesant family remained in the bowery house for a century before later descendants built other properties in Manhattan, one of which was a house destroyed during a fire in New York City along with most of the Stuyvesant family papers.
[Illustration 3]
Working for Stuyvesant
The management of the household would have been the primary responsibility of Judith Stuyvesant, Petrus Stuyvesant’s wife, and she would have likely been the main person from the Stuyvesant family that Mayken, Susanna and Lucretia interacted with daily. Judith had been born in Breda, married Petrus in 1645, and arrived in New Netherland with him in 1647. Both Stuyvesant houses would have been part of the daily geography of enslaved, bonded, and free Black residents of New Amsterdam. The bowery house was surrounded by a multiethnic village of people, including free Black people, who had been settled there at the conclusion of a war with the Esopus (a local Lenape group) in 1659 and 1660. It was also a site of enslavement. When the West India Company sold the bowery to Petrus in 1651 it came with the unfree labor of two enslaved Black boys. Enslaved laborers would be a permanent feature of Petrus, Judith, and their two sons Balthazar Lazarus and Nicolaes Willem’s lives.
In the Dutch Republic, wealthy and middling white women were expected to manage a household with varying degrees of servant labor. As Diane Wolfthal has demonstrated in her research featuring Dutch golden age dollhouses and paintings of domestic scenes, this theory of rule included clothing intended to make rank clear, as well as secret passages and storage designed to mask the labor within households. Such assignments would increasingly become linked to non-white labor in the Americas, a process underway but not fully complete as Judith began to manage her American households. Enslaved and bonded laborers, like Mayken and her friends, would work alongside European and Indigenous people, but be used as domestics, filling the lowest ranks of the household hierarchy. The work that they were required to perform was arduous. Special tools were necessary to clean windows, sweep stoops, and do other dirty jobs. It was physical work that required hoisting, pulling, carrying, scrubbing, laundering, and bending.
Free from slavery
Judith Stuyvesant’s will dated 29 January 1678/9 and proved 15 March 1686 includes items Mayken, Susanna and Lucretia could have been tasked with cleaning, including furniture and dishes—“China Earthen Ware,” “Three great potts” and a “black Cabbinett of Ebbon wood with the foot or frame belonging to it,” as well as “linen,” and Judith’s “wearing apparel of Silk and woolen.” Ebony cabinets were maintained by rubbing waxes and oils into the wood. During the seventeenth century, linens were laundered by hand in waterways. Deep cleaning required urine, lye, boiling water, paddles, or washboards—a taxing process that affected the health of working women.
[Illustration 4]
Mayken’s plea, which rested on her years of service and the strenuous nature of the labor, convinced the colonial government and she was granted her full freedom. Scholars have also argued that her place in the community and physical location was a crucial part of her case’s favorable outcome. As Susanah Shaw Romney and Andrea Mosterman uncovered, Mayken and her friends were part of a community of Black people that was settled near the Stuyvesant’s bowery. That community was part of a larger multiracial village that surrounded the bowery. This village and its mixed community would remain a feature of the area well into the eighteenth century; its inhabitants would pass down the names of original settlers like Mayken.\
[Illustration 5]
Stuyvesants’ bowery
The chapel erected on Stuyvesants’ bowery became an important landmark for this community. In the decades following the fall of the Dutch colony, village couples would marry and baptize their children on the bowery. In 1672, two Black couples—Anthonij Backers and Maijken Arta, and Willem Anthonissen and Margariet Pieters—were married on the bowery. Their names reflected community memory and histories entangled with Dutch slaveholding families. Anthonissen and Pieters were free Black families who had roots in the earliest days of New Netherland. Mayken Arta’s husband Anthony had the family name Backers, which was most likely a connection to Jacobus Backer, Petrus Stuyvesant’s brother-in-law who held several enslaved people.
Though Mayken van Angola and other free Black people lived out their days in the bowery community, the village and the colony remained served by the forced labor of enslaved people. In later generations when the bowery was rented out, it was sold along with the labor of two enslaved men named John and Samson. In the middle of the eighteenth century, eight enslaved people—Gansey, Dick, Syphax, Primus, Scipio, Peg, Mary and Lucy—who lived and toiled there were passed down by Gerardus Stuyvesant to his sons Petrus and Nicolas. Three of them, Syphax, Primus and Scipio would run away only to be pursued in the local papers by Petrus Stuyvesant, the former Dutch leader’s great-grandson.
[Illustration 6]
The stories and experiences of African descended people, like Mayken, and so many others, who lived and labored in the New Netherland and across the Dutch empire, capture several central themes that have marked Dutch American history and the legacy of that relationship: friendship, bondage, and freedom. Efforts to excavate and thoughtfully tell their stories continue to link scholars, researchers, and learners on both sides of the Atlantic.
About the author
Nicole Maskiell is a historian, and scholar of slavery in Dutch and Anglo Dutch America. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2013 and is currently an Assistant Professor of History, Director of Public History, and McClausland Faculty Fellow at the University of South Carolina. http://www.nicolemaskiell.com/
About the blogseries
This blog is the second of a monthly series with stories from the rich history shared by the American and the Dutch people. Authors from both countries will present various stories of their own choosing, from a wide variety of perspectives, in order to provide the full of triumphs and heartbreaks, delights and disappointments that draw from hundreds of years of shared history. Not all stories will be ‘feel-good history’. While the relations between the Dutch and the Americans have for the most part been stable and peaceful, the shared history contains some darker moments as well. Acknowledging that errors have been made in the past does not take away from the friendship but, rather, deepens it
Illustrations
Request of Mayken van Angola, Lucretia [Albiecke] van Angola and [Susanna] Tamboer, 28 December 1662. They “humbly pray and apply to be unburdened and delivered from the slavery in which they have been until now and to be given a free station in order to seek with their labor their board and livelihood besides other free negro men and women.” The reply: “The applicants are granted the request that they made on condition that one of them three will by rotation come every week to do the housework of the Lord General.” New York State Archives. NYSA_A1809-78_V10_pt1_0296. https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/objects/55199.
A nineteenth century romantic-style rendering of “Gov. Stuyvesant’s house, erected 1658, afterwards called the Whitehall,” included in Mary Louise Booth, History of the City of New York (New York: W.R.C. Clark, 1867), 103. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-255a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Maskiell, Nicole. Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
Mosterman, Andrea, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).
Romney, Susanah Shaw, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Romney, Susanah Shaw, “Reytory Angola, Seventeenth-Century Manhattan (US),” in Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri Snyder (eds.), As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, 58–78 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Wolfthal, Diane, “Foregrounding the Background: Images of Dutch and Flemish Household Servants,” in Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin (eds.), Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 229-265.
Will of Gerardus Stuyvesant, 26 Oct 1774, Probate court records, wills and administrations, Ulster County, New York, 1662-1783, Image 67, Family Search, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G99K-R99L-8?i=66&wc=Q7PB-BZQ%3A213302401%2C221314701&cc=1920234
