Cicely was young, Black and enslaved – her death during an epidemic in 1714 has lessons that resonate in today’s pandemic
CC BY-ND
Nicole S Maskiell, University of South Carolina
What I believe to be the oldest surviving gravestone for a Black person in the Americas memorializes an enslaved teenager named Cicely.
Cicely’s body is interred across from Harvard’s Johnston Gate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died in 1714 during a measles epidemic brought to the college by a student after the summer recess of 1713. Another tombstone in the same burial ground remembers Jane, an enslaved woman who died in 1741 during an outbreak of diphtheria, or “throat distemper.”
Nicole Maskiell, CC BY-ND
When diseases struck in the Colonial era, many city residents fled to the safety of the country. Poor and enslaved people, like Jane and Cicely – the essential frontline workers of the time – stayed behind.
Why were Cicely and Jane memorialized when so many other enslaved people were not? The archival record doesn’t provide a clear answer, but the question of who should be remembered with monuments and commemorations is timely.
Throughout the United States, as COVID-19 affects frontline workers and communities of color far more than other demographic groups, and protesters agitate for racial justice, American society is wrestling with its racial memory and judging which monuments and memorials deserve a place.
Against this backdrop, I believe it’s important to look back at how a few marginalized and oppressed people who served on the front lines of prior epidemics have been treated and remembered. After all, those whom society chooses to memorialize reflect what accomplishments – honorable or horrific – society values.
Unsung sacrifices
The lives, labor and sacrifices of women and girls of color have been overlooked for centuries. Of the 3.5 million books in Widener Library – the centerpiece of Harvard’s vast library system – I found that not one was devoted to Cicely or Jane, and few focus on women like them.
For early-American historians of Northern slavery like me, such fragmentary and untold stories are both intriguing and challenging. But this particular story was also personal, because when I first stumbled on Cicely’s tombstone, I was also a Black teen.
I was a sophomore studying history at Harvard when I came upon the headstone while wandering in the Colonial-era graveyard adjacent to campus. It had a carving of a death’s head on top and winding vines down the sides. It was both ordinary and extraordinary – it looked like other tombstones in the graveyard, but this one memorialized a young Black girl.
I wondered about Cicely. She most likely did domestic work in and around Harvard, as her enslaver was a Cambridge minister and a tutor at the college. But what else did she do during her short life, and why did her enslavers memorialize her with a tombstone? These questions and the mystery of her life inspired me to become a historian. Over the years, I have been passionate about piecing together fragments of her and Jane’s lives.
Jane’s enslaver kept a diary that provided some details about her life, but I found little written about Cicely beyond her adult baptismal record, dated just two months before her death.
Racial unrest and disease
Cicely lived and died during a time of racial unrest and disease. A slave revolt in 1712 in New York City led to several brutal executions and deportations. News of the revolt spread throughout the Colonies, stoking concerns of a wider uprising. Colonists armed themselves in fear.
Slavery existed in every Colony, including the North. At the time of the revolt, the Northern Colonies – from Nova Scotia down to Delaware – were home to around 9,000 enslaved people, representing a third of the enslaved population of the British mainland colonies. New York City had 5,841 residents, of which 975 were held as slaves. Boston had roughly 400 enslaved people.
Racial unrest was quickly followed by contagion. A measles outbreak the next year followed the same path up the coast as news of the revolt had traveled.
The epidemic started in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1713 and hit Cambridge, Massachusetts, that September. It broke out at Harvard before spreading to Boston. More than 400 Bostonians died – about 18% of them people of color – at a time when Black people were only 4% of the total population.
Racial discord and disease continued throughout the Colonial period. Between Cicely and Jane’s deaths in 1714 and 1741, a smallpox crisis gripped Boston, inflaming racial tensions. An enslaved person named Onesimus helped introduce an early form of inoculation called “variolation.” This technique was practiced on both white and Black Bostonians, to the consternation of many. On its heels, a five-year diphtheria outbreak ravaged New England, killing 5,000 people, including Jane.
History repeats
Much like today, Colonists received mixed messages during disease outbreaks, with some leaders touting the value of inoculations while others stood fast against them. As Jane toiled in the shadow of Harvard in 1740, the male landowners of Cambridge held a contentious election that saw very high voter turnout amid a diphtheria epidemic.
[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]
History can show us how diseases disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized populations; how discord and strife lead to racial antipathy; and how epidemics are managed and mismanaged.
Cicely’s and Jane’s lives mattered outside of the value they provided to their enslavers. In a time of disease and racial unrest that echoes the experiences of generations past, the lives of oppressed people like Cicely and Jane are worthy of remembrance.
Nicole S Maskiell, Assistant Professor of History Peter and Bonnie McCausland Fellow of History, University of South Carolina
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Long Island in the Black Atlantic World Roundtable
Philip’s Wet Nurse: Uncovering Race, Gender, and Community in a 1783 New Jersey Freedom Case
In 1748 a little boy named Philip arrived in Somerset County New Jersey wrapped in a blanket. [1] He was passed from the hands of James van Horne, an elite New Jersey man of Dutch heritage, into those of van Horne’s housekeeper, a woman named Margaret Wiser who resided at the Rocky Hill plantation year-round. Tasked with finding a wet nurse for the infant, Wiser decided on Jane Furman, a local woman of Welsh descent. Elite infants were sometimes suckled by such wet nurses, a practice that was hotly debated by the middle of the eighteenth century with a discourse that linked the wrong wet nurse with conveying disagreeable qualities. [2] The child in Wiser’s care added another dimension to the search: his mother was white and his father, black. Jane Furman agreed to nurse him after Wiser stressed the pedigree of Philip’s mother, that she was likely related to the van Horne’s and that (perhaps as proof) she would visit her newborn child shortly. The woman, whose name remains a mystery, did visit Philip, eighteen months later.
Thirty-five years later, Philip returned to his origin story as the son of an elite white woman in his appeal for freedom against the claim of two elite men: James van Horne, a man who might well have been Philip’s uncle and Dirk Ten Broek. [3] The elite in New Jersey counties such as Somerset and Bergen were, like the van Hornes and Ten Broeks, overwhelmingly of Dutch ancestry with roots that dated back to New Netherland and slaveholders. The testimony on Philip’s behalf was given by Gabriel Furman, his wet-nurse Jane’s nephew. The Furman’s were of Welch descent, were not members of the local elite and had arrived in the area by way of Massachusetts. This ethnic and social difference might very well have translated into differing political ideals as well, and in a state recently recovering from the trauma of the American Revolution, such political divisions were not perfunctory. Gabriel detailed Philip’s birth and early childhood, a tale that emphasized Philip’s mother’s racial and social status, as well as Margaret’s efforts to find a wet nurse and Jane’s role in nursing him. In the process, his testimony uncovered the multiethnic white network that Philip leveraged in the Rocky Hill community for his defense.
Philip’s case for freedom is undoubtedly unique, and I would not have ever stumbled upon had it not been for Ted O’Reilly, reference librarian at the New-York Historical Society who directed me to the case, which is located in the Alexander Papers. Although compelling, how can such an example shed light on a broader understanding of the place of race, kinship and gender in colonial and early national constructions of race? Philip’s case offers more than just the story of one man’s struggle for freedom but gives a unique view into the gendered aspects of how such notions changed over time and shaped ethnic communities in the North. Philip’s story also points to another dimension in the enduring legacy of New Netherland’s Dutch families.
Nicole Maskiell received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2013 Her dissertation was entitled “Bound by Bondage: Slavery Among Elites in Colonial Massachusetts and New York.” She is currently Assistant Professor of History at University of South Carolina, Columbia.
This article was featured on the New Netherland Institute’s website. Read the original here.
References:
[1] The State against Tierke Tenbroeke on habeas corpus of Negro Philip, 17 May 1783, Alexander Papers, Court Papers New Jersey Supreme Court—Criminal Cases, N.B, 1723-1777, Box # 47, New-York Historical Society.
[2] M. Michelle Jarret [Morris] points out that the Pennsylvania Gazette ran several notices for women advertising their services as wet nurses or of families looking for wet nurses. Michelle M. Jarrett, “An Act of Flagrant Rebellion against Nature,” Winterthur Portfolio 30, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 281, 281n12, 282, 282m16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618517.
[3] The State against Tierck Tenbroeck on Habeas Corpus of Negro Philip for Manumission, in Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of New-Jersey relative to the Manumission of Negroes: And Others Holden in Bondage (Burlington, NJ: Printed for The New-Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery by Isaac Neal, 1794), 13. Link