Pulling the thread of slavery
The Eleven Names project challenges the anonymity of people such as “a girl of Mr Dudly,” the future Massachusetts Bay Colony governor’s enslaved Native young woman. She was 18 years and 2 months old old when she died - an event recorded without her name. Image: Roxbury MA: Vital records of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849, Vol. 2. Salem, Mass.: The Essex institute, 1925. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015037392159?urlappend=%3Bseq=734%3Bownerid=13510798889957638-902
If you pull on a thread, you never know what will unravel.
As a covid quarantine hobby, I returned to family genealogy. My grandmother's family has been in New England since the start, and I wanted to understand how my English Massachusetts ancestors would have interacted with enslaved African and indigenous people. After reading contemporary books on slavery in the New England colonies, I recognized that King Philip's War was the best place to start.
While researching an ancestor killed in 1675 during the conflict, I stumbled across a table of Indian captives compiled by a scholar of early Massachusetts. Looking for and finding familiar Boston Brahmin names, I was stopped by the entry noting the 1679 death of “an Indian girl of Mr Dudly.” The re-naming controversy surrounding Dudley Square due to the family's ties to slavery was fresh in collective memory, and I distinctly remembered a local professor saying that we may never find evidence that the Dudleys were slaveholders. This record couldn’t be evidence that the Dudley family held humans in slavery, could it? Surely the evidence would have already surfaced.
“If you pull on a thread, you never know what will unravel”
Well, I pulled on that thread, and the more I pulled, the more I learned. It turns out that the “Indian girl” who died in 1679 had endured slavery at the Roxbury home of future Governor Joseph Dudley. The manor stood near Guild Row across from now-Nubian Station and where the old Boys Club building stands. Governor Dudley later trafficked an enslaved boy from John Quelch’s pirate ship to his son Paul, the Massachusetts attorney general. Joseph also enslaved Brill, a well-known coachman in Roxbury and Boston; Samuel Sewell and Waitstill Winthrop, both men famous for, among other things, being judges at the Salem witch trials, noted Brill in their writing. In all, I found eleven names of people enslaved by the Dudley family. Fast forward to 2022 and the Eleven Names Project is cited four times in the recent Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report issued by the university.
I thought I was done, but as scholars were talking about their research on slavery in Boston, they were inevitably asked about locations in suburbia. Living in Plymouth County, I also wanted an answer to this question. But I also know that even if academic research were being done today, it would take years for it to trickle into public discussion. With skepticism, I looked into records that I was sure were only available at archives or big institutions.
“I found over 1000 records of slavery for plymouth colony.”
I was again surprised at how badly I had underestimated the availability of records. There are over one thousand readily available records in what was Plymouth colony. Subsequently, I’ve been fortunate to tell compelling stories through my website such as:
The story of a descendant of Massasoit and her enslaved Revolutionary War veteran husband buried in an Abington backyard.
An enslaved man who appears in both a runaway ad and in militia rolls at the Siege of Boston.
And Venus Manning: born enslaved, became an abolitionist and life member of the New England Anti-Slavery society, and one of the wealthiest single women in her town.
For most of us raised in Massachusetts, the only lesson we learned about local slavery was the story of poet Phillis Wheatley. Furthermore, viewing colonial times through the prism of 40 years of local anti-slavery activism distorts how New Englanders understand the more than 145 years the institution of slavery was practiced here.
We were taught, implicitly and explicitly, that slavery in Boston and, more widely, Massachusetts was rare. Although an honest examination of the records would never allow such a conclusion, recent scholarship has made it even more impossible to refute the integral role chattel slavery played in the economy and society of colonial Boston. And now historians and local historical organizations have an opportunity to build authentic and inclusive histories that restore the ignored narratives of these people.
“We were taught that Massachusetts slavery was rare - but an honest view of history does not allow this conclusion.”
As for me, I’m still building the Eleven Names Project. I received a grant from the Northeast Slavery Records Index at John Jay College to identify and compile vital records of enslaved people in Massachusetts and their slaveholders; I hope to add 5,000 records to their database. Readers can find my long-form work at eleven-names.com
And I’m excited to announce that I’ve launched a bi-weekly newsletter entitled Open Notebook. This free newsletter will collect and publish past and present notes of enslaved life in Massachusetts and New England that are illuminating and digestible. The newsletter will illustrate the accessibility of many of the records of slavery in Boston and Massachusetts.
I hope readers of historicbostons.org will be in touch. Find me at https://elevennames.substack.com/