Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, Part II

The following is Politics Daily's second excerpt from "Ten Hills Farm" (Princeton University Press, January 20, 1010.)

When Massachusetts became the first colony in North America to formally endorse the ownership and sale of human property, it made legal what was already true. Black and Indian slavery, though not the norm, was well established. Now it would be sanc­tioned, too. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 defined slavery in a way that satisfied Puritan pieties; yet the language made it clear that slavery would be welcome at more than a ship's distance.

There should never be any bond slavery, item 91 declared, "unless . . ."

It be lawful captives taken in just wars.
And such strangers as willingly sell themselves.
Or are sold to us. . . .
This exempts none. . . .

Legal. Accepted. Rewarded. Desired. More than twelve hundred Native Americans were enslaved in New England before the 1600s closed. The number of blacks was not recorded, and historians struggle for an accurate count. In his 1866 study of slavery in Massachusetts, George H. Moore wrote that he believed there were at least two hundred African slaves in the colony in the 1600s, more still in the century after. Contempo­rary scholars tend to double those figures, yet they acknowledge that the work is painstaking and the end result almost certainly inaccurate. It is difficult, after a span of centuries, to make a count of a phenomenon that was prevalent but never adequately tabu­lated. The word "servant" was often substituted for "slave," as though the two conditions were the same. Records are scattered, damaged, and lost. Considering the ravages of mildew, flooding, fire, sun, negligence, ignorance, shame, acidity, insects, dry rot, simple carelessness, and the basic sense among most whites that this history did not merit preservation, the magnitude of the task of reconstruction becomes clear, and Josselyn's briefest clue more valuable.

Those few records that did survive show black and Indian slaves in settlers' homes, fields, and businesses. Some drove carriages or served as footmen. Some made bricks and some built houses. Some wore formal livery. Others were clad only in rags. Some cooked. Some farmed. Some cleaned. Some worked as carpenters, black­smiths, woodsmen, weavers. Others, deemed too unruly or too angry to be tamed, were shipped south to serve harsh masters as their punishment or sold back to the West Indies, where plantation life was ruder, days were longer. At Ten Hills Farm and his more formal residence in Boston the governor "had leave to keep . . ." and that he did. Along with land, John Winthrop in an early will made it clear that to Adam, his fourth son, "I give my Indians. . . ."

It is hard to reconstruct the total number of slaves John Win­throp may have had, or what happened to those slaves upon his death, or how he treated them in life. As a result, contemporary readers are left to analyze only the barest clues while knowing they show just a fragment of reality.

The notion of such property came easily to men already well ac­quainted with the slave system. The service of one man to another was expected and banal. Yet not all service was the same. White men like Lion Gardiner (who complained so bitterly that he was abandoned in the wild like a servant with no master) tended to work with contracts. Those contracts sometimes led to indepen­dence, property, and wealth. After his time of service was com­plete, in exchange for a black dog, a gun, powder and shot, several blankets, and a bit of rum, Gardiner bought a 3,300-acre island off the eastern tip of Long Island from the Montaukett tribe and won a King's grant for tens of thousands of acres in East Hampton. Four centuries later, impressive echoes of that wealth remained. When ninety-three-year-old Robert David Lion Gardiner, the self-described "16th lord of the manor," died in East Hampton in August of 2004, Gardiner Island was still in family hands. So was a legacy of wealth and privilege. In a half dozen obituaries, the old man was reported as having routinely dismissed the Fords, the Rockefellers, and the Du Ponts as nouveaux riches. One article put it more colorfully still, saying that to Gardiner's clan, George Washington came off as something of a parvenu.

Of course not all families were as successful. But in early Amer­ica, where economic systems were so loose the General Court could get away with minting money in direct defiance of royal or­ders for almost thirty years, land and liberty were the most reliable coins of this new realm. Even a small bit of money went quite far, and as the Gardiner example shows, the legacy of land could last through generations.

To the freemen went the spoils. And to the freemen went the servants. Writing from Barbados in 1627, young Henry Winthrop had asked his father to please send him men "and they be bound to serve me in the West Indies some three year or five." In another letter he informed his uncle that he was quite content with island life. It was his intention, he explained, "always to have a planta­tion of servants." Of course the rub came in paying those men's wages. Get them, Henry wrote his father, not for £100 a year, as Lion Gardiner was paid, or even £50, but "as reasonable as you can, promising them not above 10 pounds a year."

But why pay ten pounds when slaves worked for free? Basic economics argued against it. And in a colony still struggling for a start, how were such slaves to be obtained? In 1645, John Win­throp's brother-in-law and business wizard Emmanuel Downing presented a bold notion, championing the idea of a new war with the Indians, this time against the Narragansett tribe, those same warriors who had sided with the English against the Pequots a decade earlier. In war, he argued, the colony could obtain a fresh supply of prisoners to sell in exchange for blacks or, as he called them, "Moores," purchased in the Caribbean.

"Sir," Winthrop's brother-in-law began, "A war with the Narra­ganset is very considerable to this plantation, for I doubt whether it be not sin in us having power in our hands to suffer them to main­tain the worship of the devil, which their powwows often do."And war, he hastened to add, contained powerful business advantages the colony should not neglect."If upon a just war," he argued,"the Lord should deliver them into our hands, we might easily have men, women and children enough to exchange for Moores." That trade, he said, was "gainful pillage." Besides, how else should the colony prosper? "For I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business." Downing was a practical man in this, and he argued skillfully. "I suppose you know very well," he told the master of Ten Hills Farm, "how we shall maintain 20 Moores cheaper than one English servant."

Winthrop did not go to war. But slavery grew in any case.

And so a deep imbalance was then set. Like a poisonous snake gliding off a river rock, it laid its curse without much trace. In that first decade, the language of freedom was deformed. While Winthrop and his brethren spoke in stirring terms of liberty and godliness, what was possible for some was never within reach for others. That proved as true on John Winthrop's six hundred acres as it was anywhere across the South. Though slavery never took hold in New England on the same epic scale as in rural Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and elsewhere, the practice was just as firmly planted in the minds of northern settlers accus­tomed to white rule, and just as ravaging for those who suffered the consequences. As it was in the North, so it was in the South. Those who came in chains or were sold as bounty in a war were branded with a deficit that would last through generations. And for generations the system firmly held its grip.