The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom 2018047772, 9780813056364

Table of contents :
Cover
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF NORTHERN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery
1. Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology
2. The History of Slavery in the “Free” States
Part II. Bondage
3. The Archaeology of Bondage in the Northern States
4. Rose Hill: Archaeology at a Finger Lakes Plantation
Part III. Struggle
5. Archaeology and the Struggle for Freedom
6. The Parker House: An Archaeology of Armed Resistance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Part IV. Liberty
7. The Problem of Northern Freedom
8. Mrs. Smith’s House
Part V. Commemoration
Conclusion
References Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF NORTHERN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM James A. Delle Foreword by Michael S. Nassaney

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2019 by James A. Delle All rights reserved Published in the United States of America. This book may be available in an electronic edition. 24 23 22 21 20 19

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Delle, James A., author. | Nassaney, Michael S., author of foreword. Title: The archaeology of northern slavery and freedom / James A. Delle ; foreword by Michael S. Nassaney. Other titles: American experience in archaeological perspective. Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2019. | Series: The American experience in archaeological perspective | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018047772 | ISBN 9780813056364 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—United States—History. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | Antislavery movements—United States. Classification: LCC E446 .D45 2019 | DDC 306.3/620973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047772 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 2046 NE Waldo Road Suite 2100 Gainesville, FL 32609 http://upress.ufl.edu

The history of the specimens dug up cannot be properly separated from the history of those who used them. —Adelaide and Ripley Bullen, 1945

CONTENTS

List of Figures ix List of Maps xi List of Tables xiii Foreword xv Preface xix Introduction 1 Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

1. Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology 9 2. The History of Slavery in the “Free” States 31 Part II. Bondage

3. The Archaeology of Bondage in the Northern States 53 4. Rose Hill: Archaeology at a Finger Lakes Plantation 82 Part III. Struggle

5. Archaeology and the Struggle for Freedom 103 6. The Parker House: An Archaeology of Armed Resistance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania 121 Part IV. Liberty

7. The Problem of Northern Freedom 143 8. Mrs. Smith’s House 163 Part V. Commemoration

Conclusion 183 References Cited 201 Index 219

FIGURES

1.1. Betsy Thompson 20 1.2. Late-nineteenth-century depiction of the Turner-Burr House 23 1.3. The Turner-Burr House under excavation 23 3.1. The Van Cortlandt Manor house, ca. 1937 64 3.2. The Hendrick I. Lott House, ca. 1909 65 3.3. Sylvester Manor house, rendered in 1908 67 3.4. The Benjamin Thompson House 70 3.5. The Isaac Royall House at Ten Hills Farm 75 3.6. Slave quarters at Ten Hills Farm 77 4.1. The original house at Rose Hill 83 4.2. The second house built at Rose Hill 86 4.3. Foundation of slave quarters at Rose Hill 89 4.4. Exposed segment of the foundation 91 4.5. Segments of the dry-laid foundation 91 4.6. The Jean Nicholas house 92 4.7. Interior wall of the Jean Nicholas house 93 4.8. The south elevation of the Bracketts Farm Slave Quarters 95 5.1. The African Meeting House in Nantucket 113 5.2. Feature 13 at Timbuctoo, New Jersey 117 6.1. The William Parker House 124 6.2. Samuel Hopkins and Peter Wood 127 6.3. Excavation units at the William Parker House 128 6.4. Work at the William Parker House site 129

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6.5. Plan of excavated units at the William Parker House 132 6.6. Fragment of a blue sponge-decorated vessel 136 6.7. A graphite pencil 138 6.8. A gunflint 138 7.1. The Dennis farmhouse 145 7.2. The Rev. Isaac and Rebecca Gray Coleman House 149 7.3. Boston’s African Meeting House 155 7.4. A small New York City village destroyed by the construction of Central Park 159 7.5. The Hunterfly Road Houses 161 8.1. Lydia Hamilton Smith 167 8.2. The Lydia Hamilton Smith houses 168 8.3. The Thaddeus Stevens House 170 8.4. Lot 134 in Lancaster, PA, in 1843 and 1855 171 8.5. The basement floor of the Lydia Hamilton Smith House 172 8.6. Courtyard behind the Lydia Hamilton Smith houses 174 8.7. The courtyard behind the Stevens House 175 8.8. Ebony-backed domino 176 8.9. The subterranean cistern 178 8.10. Detail of interior eastern wall of the cistern 179 C.1. The President’s House in Philadelphia 189 C.2. Harriet Tubman National Historical Park 193 C.3. The W. E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite 198

MAPS

1.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part I 14 3.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part II 54 5.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part III 105 7.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part IV 144 C.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part V 185

TABLES

2.1. Enslaved people in New York State according to the 1790 and 1800 US censuses by county 40 2.2. Enslaved population of the northern states according to the US census returns, 1790–1860 44 C.1. Enslaved people resident at the President’s House, Philadelphia, 1790s 188

FOREWORD

Racism remains a blight on the American soul. The wounds inflicted on American society by the long-abolished institution of slavery continue to fester. Anthropology was complicit in these transgressions when it emerged in the nineteenth century by providing a biological justification for racial inequalities that served to assuage the conscience of those who benefited economically and politically from the presumed supremacy of whiteness. As with any ill deeds, social or otherwise, the long process of recovery requires that we move beyond denial and name the conditions that promoted racial degradation, discrimination, intolerance, and untold cruelty to humanity. Growing up in a small, predominantly white town outside Providence, Rhode Island, I failed to see the harsh realities of race, racism, and the color line. I lived among varying ethnicities (French-Canadian, Irish, Polish, and Syrian) who had emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from places that were welcome in the American melting pot. By the 1960s, these groups had long abandoned their Old World identities for the wages of whiteness that assured them respectability vis-à-vis racialized groups who could never melt into the pot. I was taught at a young age to be suspicious of the other and to maintain a comfortable distance from those who looked different than me. Even in college, people of color (predominantly blacks) were confined to the basketball team. The story of my racialized identity is common in America, where people on both sides of the color line have been socialized to believe in a racial hierarchy. These beliefs were codified through practices and policies that influenced the formation of many institutions (schools, government, churches, banks, etc.) that have been designed to serve white society since the founding of our nation. This worldview also perpetuated numerous myths and misconceptions about others that remain deeply ingrained in the American

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psyche, often manifest in the historical fallacies that we learned from our teachers, parents, peers, and media. Those dominant narratives that express the imaginings of white people in power have existed alongside alternate understandings that people of color have developed and maintained to safeguard their dignity and help them survive in a harsh and unforgiving place in which few were ever judged by the content of their character. The intellectual descendants of the anthropologists who racialized humanity are now playing a role in dismantling past misconceptions. As social scientists come to recognize their complicity in maintaining racial inequality, they can choose to shift their efforts to explore how whites misshaped institutions to achieve their own ends and how people of African descent created cultures and implemented strategies of resistance to endure in the American incubator. In The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom, James Delle summarizes the ways historical archaeologists have contributed to a better understanding of the lives of people who lived under bondage and after emancipation in the northeastern United States, where enslavement and racism were no less brutal and demeaning than in the rest of the country. He rightly notes that the realities of northern slavery have long been excised from the prevailing historical narrative of race in America. Historical archaeology, of course, is well positioned to pierce this ideological veil, because artifacts, architecture, and landscapes often express African American agency—the active choices people made to construe their material worlds, often against the dominant culture. Delle reviews a number of investigations conducted since the 1940s that illustrate how the study of northern slavery and freedom has changed and what these interrogations have contributed to our understanding of people who have too often been maligned, marginalized, and forgotten, even though they labored to build America and create its wealth. Archaeologists have analyzed the artifacts and the materiality of African American lives under slavery and freedom to interpret their labor relationships with whites, their spiritual worldviews, the material choices they made, and the meanings of the yard spaces that simultaneously connected and divided blacks and whites. They have also found that African American families sought social and spiritual fellowship to avoid racism. This often resulted in the formation of small communities centered on a church or community leader that provided social solidarity as a form of solace. In other instances, African Americans succeeded in

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establishing themselves as respectable members of society and created alternate communities where they could operate beyond the gaze of white surveillance. For example, at the Lighthouse village in northwest Connecticut, archaeologists discovered no internal boundary walls or spatial divisions, ceramics dominated by communal serving dishes rather than individual place settings, structures built as communal residences for extended family groups, and a population that relied on hunting to maintain self-sufficiency. Delle amasses evidence from sites that are small and large and that are well known and buried in the literature. These sites force us to face the extent of enslavement, even in “free” states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. He notes that prevailing assumptions about the nature of northern slavery do not accurately portray the actual conditions of slavery in the North. The data are compelling: there is no denying the documentary and archaeological records that suggest that several thousand Africans and their descendants were buried in the well-known New York African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan in the eighteenth century, clearly indicating the scope of slavery in this city. The recovery of hundreds of African American burials there nearly three decades ago shattered the long-held myth that large enslaved populations existed only in the South. Whites and others socialized into the racial hierarchy are beginning to learn that the enslaved and the disparaged used familiar objects and spaces to implement strategies that led to new identities that positioned them apart from the dominant culture. In his broad overview of the archaeology of the once bound and ambiguously free, Delle positions himself as a public scholar who aims to engage in praxis—the practical application of knowledge obtained through critical inquiry into the past—to better understand how we have all been affected by America’s primary system of oppression and what we can do about it. People are still dying and are frequently denigrated in the conflict to end the racism that slavery engendered, as police profiling, unwarranted searches, and the Black Lives Matter political movement clearly demonstrate. These struggles permeate our daily lives. Scholarly inquiry is not immune to this toxic and dystopian milieu. So long as race and racism are woven into the fabric of American society, our interpretations of the past will be tinged with attitudes that inhibit us from recognizing the full humanity of all peoples in the American mosaic. Thus, broader attention must now be focused on how our racialized identities influence the work we do—a hallmark of the

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critical community archaeology that Delle espouses. An emancipatory archaeology is needed to move us beyond old racist tropes. Delle provides an engaging synthesis of the role African American archaeology has played in our understanding of race, slavery, and freedom in the northeastern United States. Archaeology has made key contributions to our awareness of the conditions in which enslaved people lived in the north and continues to shed light on the role African Americans have always played in the American experience. The challenge is to instill these understandings into the popular consciousness. For example, one of the most common yet misunderstood themes in African American history is the Underground Railroad—the network of assistance people of African descent developed in the nineteenth century and used to help others escape bondage from the American South. Many believe that altruistic white Quakers among other abolitionists were central to this network and ignore the reality that those most likely to assist African American refugees were actually other African Americans, who were also at the greatest risk. Careful work is needed to separate fact from fiction, even as we aim to create new narratives that should empower those who liberated themselves instead of lifting up benevolent whites. When archaeologists choose which places and people to study and how to study them, they contribute directly to the shaping of the historical narrative of the American experience. Suffice it to say that America has not yet achieved a desired postracial state and the struggle for equality and freedom is long, hard, shifting, and constant for people of color and other marginalized groups in America. Perhaps that is the sad irony of a country that was built on the idea of freedom yet denies many freedoms to much of its citizenry. Archaeology is a tool that can reveal and help us confront the material realities of how African American people struggled against the racist ideology that has largely defined American culture from its inception. To ignore this is to deny an essential element of what it means to be an American. Michael S. Nassaney Series editor

PREFACE

In 1901, the trailblazing African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois published a series of articles in the New York Times that considered the issue of racism in the states of New England and the Mid-Atlantic. “It can be safely asserted,” wrote Du Bois, “that since Colonial times the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these states had slaves.” Du Bois further noted that it was “usually assumed that this group of persons . . . have had an assured social status and the same chance for rise and development as the native white American. . . . This is not true.” Du Bois was not making a simple academic argument when he pointed out the continuing existence of racial inequality in the North. He himself, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a descendant of a family that had long lived in the Northeast, was living testimony to the continuous African American presence, under both slavery and freedom, in what have long been thought to be the “free” states of the North (Du Bois 1901; Lewis 2009). The scourge of racism that still haunts American society is a direct result of the imposition of African slavery. The intentional dehumanization of millions of people, impressed into lives of violently forced labor to profit those who claimed them as property, created a social reality that justified such oppression as both necessary and beneficial for society as a whole. As the young nation prospered and expanded, the racism that had emerged with slavery was seared deeply into America’s emergent culture and society. As Frederick Douglass reflected, slavery “steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance. . . . Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side” (Douglass 1866, 762). Such racism did not fade with the ends of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, nor were Du Bois and Douglass among the last prominent African American intellectuals to experience its effects. In July 2009, Henry Louis

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Gates, a prominent Harvard University professor and well-known television personality, was arrested as he tried to enter his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Thompson 2009). Even in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, the specter of racism casts its shadow across the cities of the American North. Although halting progress toward a more racially just society continues, the wounds the institution of slavery inflicted on American society have never fully healed. In many ways, American society was forged using the elements of racial othering and labor exploitation, and that alloy has proven to be very resilient. For nearly 400 years, Americans have struggled to overcome social and economic traumas created by the institution of slavery, but extinguishing the racialist ideology that allowed for both its establishment and perpetuation has proven to be most difficult. Key sectors of the American economy, from the earliest colonial days through the end of the Civil War, depended on slave labor above the Mason-Dixon Line as well as below it. While even in its heyday American slavery had many critics, it did not end in the United States until a bloody civil war had claimed the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. As I write this in August 2018, people are still dying in the conflict to end the racism that slavery engendered. Americans have struggled over the conjoined issues of slavery and racism since the nation’s founding. As is well known to those with even a casual knowledge of the Revolutionary War period, the first draft of the Declaration of Independence defined the institution of slavery as a social ill England had imposed, but that definition was edited out of the final version. Many founding fathers spoke out against slavery, including slaveholders George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, none of whom manumitted their slaves during their lifetime. This contradiction illuminates the difficulty Americans have long had in coming to terms with slavery and racism: while it is very easy to define something as morally wrong, it remains very difficult to end that wrong, especially if one has a vested interest in its continuance. Such was the case for Jefferson and such may well be the case for all of us identified as white in a predominantly white society. We are the beneficiaries, whether we realize it or not, of the racial privilege that American slavery produced. At the beginning of my career in archaeology, it was my intention to investigate how systems of oppression are formed and perpetuated. While I initially set out to explore these questions through an investigation into

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how the modern English colonial system was established in sixteenthcentury Ireland, my path eventually, and perhaps inevitably, led me to this current attempt to understand what was perhaps the most insidious and most persistent system of oppression the Atlantic world has ever known. One cannot hope to understand the history and processes of oppression without confronting racialized slavery in America. And for centuries, slavery existed in the American Northeast, the place I have called home for the entirety of my life. My entry point into the question of slavery in the Northeast came in 1997, during a project that to my then-naïve mind had nothing whatever to do with slavery. At that time I was exploring the processes of farm failure and land abandonment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in what is now the Finger Lakes National Forest in central New York. (LouAnn Wurst ably took up this project when I moved from Ithaca to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1998.) While I was working on the Finger Lakes National Forest Project, Merrell Roenke, the curator of the Rose Hill Mansion, a local house museum located just outside the small city of Geneva, New York, approached me and asked if I would be willing to undertake an archaeological survey to identify the location of the quarters at Rose Hill known to have housed enslaved African Americans in the early nineteenth century. Having internalized the whitewashed history of slavery in the Northeast taught me during my childhood in Massachusetts, I was shocked to think that anything like a slave quarter could have existed in the Finger Lakes in the early nineteenth century. Yet within an hour of setting foot on the museum property, I could see the rubble and domestic refuse of an early nineteenth-century house scattered in a cornfield behind the mansion. There it was, right before my archaeologically trained eyes: the material evidence that plantation slavery had existed in nineteenth-century New York. I followed this initial foray into the archaeology of northern slavery with several projects in Pennsylvania, two of which are discussed at some length in this book. The first was a project conducted on the urban house lot of Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith, the former a national political figure in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, the latter his longtime associate, business partner, and housekeeper, a woman whose mother had been enslaved in Pennsylvania but who rose to share a household with a man at the center of federal power. The second Pennsylvania project I directed was conducted at the rural home of William Parker, a

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self-emancipated man who led local resistance in southern Pennsylvania against slavery, and who had been a famous antislavery hero in the late nineteenth century. All are victims of a historical excising that was a product of the early twentieth-century reconciliationist interpretation of the US Civil War that claimed it was not a conflict to end slavery, but a struggle to finally determine the relationship between federal and state power. It has been well argued (e.g., Foner 2014; Blight 2001) that while the Civil War was in fact waged to end slavery, the ensuing peace was waged to preserve white supremacy, a struggle Frederick Douglass presaged in 1866 when he opined that “in peace as in war . . . the right of the negro is the true solution to our national troubles” (Douglass 1866, 761). While the North won the war with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee in 1865, the South finally won the peace in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson, the first son of a slaveowner to attain the presidency since the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848. Shortly after taking office, Wilson purged the federal government of Black employees and imposed racial segregation and white supremacy as a matter of federal policy (Brands 2003; O’Reilly 1997; Patler 2004). Wilson’s ascendance coincided with the normalization of the Confederate cause as justifiable on some level; the peak years for the construction of monuments to the Confederacy straddled Wilson’s presidency (Southern Poverty Law Center 2017). Racial justice and equality will remain elusive until we recognize and confront the central role that slavery has played—both directly and indirectly—in the formation of every state that constitutes the United States. Having been educated as a child in Massachusetts, I have come to realize that even in the most liberal of places the question of slavery in the North has been whitewashed. I grew up in what was then a small, rural, and nearly exclusively white town. I knew of one African American family in town and assumed that they were newcomers. In the process of researching this book, I have learned that there were slaves even in my hometown of Westborough in the eighteenth century. Even though I consider myself to be a relatively well-educated person, I did not know as late as the end of the 1990s that slave-based plantations were thriving in early nineteenth-century New York State. I had not heard much about Thaddeus Stevens, other than he was a leader of the Radical Republicans in the mid-nineteenth century, a group that has long been disparaged as vengeful hatemongers bound together by their irrational hatred of southerners. I had never heard of William Parker, even though the event he led, known

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historically as the Christiana Riot, was once held to be as important an historical event as John Brown’s Raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. In recent decades, historical archaeologists have joined the chorus of voices demanding a critical reexamination of still too commonly held misunderstandings of slavery and race in the North. Many narratives constructed by a predominantly white academy have created distortions of the African American past, often based on assumptions that do little more than reify the racialist hierarchy that allowed slavery to thrive in the first place (Epperson 2004; LaRoche and Blakey 1997). An emancipatory archaeology that works to move beyond old racist tropes and assumptions is not beyond our grasp and may in fact emerge from our study of the African American experience in the North (Battle-Baptiste 2011). We cannot hope to understand the American experience without exploring how slavery and racism have impacted us all, whether on the rice plantations of South Carolina or the provisioning estates of Rhode Island. The goal of this book is to contribute to the overthrow of the whitewashed past of the American Northeast and to better understand how African American people dealt with the racist world in which they were forced to live and work. Perhaps selfishly, I undertook this work to better understand in my own mind how we have all been affected by America’s primary system of oppression. In sharing my thoughts in this book, I hope to be one of many voices contributing to a much-needed dialogue of true reconciliation, not with white supremacists who would dismiss the power that slavery and racism still hold over our society, but a broader reconciliation with our past. Without taking this first step, it will be impossible to overcome the specter of racism that continues to haunt us all. Finally, I would like to thank the many people without whose support this book would never have been written. Thanks go to the many colleagues, friends, and students who lent a hand during the excavations of the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Houses, the William Parker House, and at Rose Hill, including Mary Ann Levine, Kristen Fellows, Jill Gaieski, Jordan Pickrell, Kelly Britt, Janet Six, Christine Chen, Lily Delle-Levine, and the many archaeology field school students from Franklin and Marshall College and Kutztown University who excavated at these sites. Community partners participated in all of these excavations, and special thanks go out to the late Bud Rettew, long-time borough manager of Christiana, Pennsylvania; Darlene Colon and the members of

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the Christiana Historical Society; John Fisher and his family for allowing us access to their land to excavate the Parker House; Randy Harris and Tim Smedick of the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County; the Lancaster County Convention Center Authority; Mayor Charlie Smithgall of Lancaster City; Gene and Linda Aleci; Paul and Judy Ware; Merrill Roenke and the staffs of the Geneva Historical Society and the Rose Hill Mansion Museum; Tom Ryan and the staff of lancasterhistory.org (formerly the Lancaster County Historical Society); and the staff and administration of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, who provided us with free housing during the excavations at Rose Hill. Thanks go to the many colleagues who provided feedback on earlier drafts of this book and the ideas found within it, including Chuck Orser, Chris Matthews, Warren Perry, Cheryl LaRoche, Chris Barton, Bob Paynter, Doug Armstrong, Marley Brown, Mary Beaudry, and Mark Leone. I am grateful for the patience shown me by Michael Nassaney, series editor, and Meredith Babb of the University Press of Florida; I hope this final product was worth the wait. A final thanks goes to Kate Babbitt, my awesome copy editor, whose sympathetic but firm hand has helped rein in my sometimes obstreperous prose.

Introduction

American racism is a tenacious phenomenon that must in some significant measure be attributed to the long history of racialized slavery in North America. While it is generally understood that plantation slavery was widespread in what would become the US South, what is less widely known is that race-based slavery began in what is now the northeastern United States and persisted there for the better part of two centuries. The purpose of this book is to review the material evidence of how African American people in the northeastern United States struggled against the racist ideology that has largely defined American culture from its inception. In doing so, I will present evidence of three case studies. The first concerns the expansion of plantation slavery in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the geographical limits of American slavery were still fluid. The second concerns an act of self-emancipation and the violence that surrounded the implementation and enforcement of laws concerning racialized slavery. The third explores the life of an African American woman who was close to the center of federal power and how she used her position both to symbolically demonstrate racial equality and help those seeking refuge as they fled north to escape the oppressions of slavery. I have contextualized each of these case studies with a review of African American archaeological sites that have been excavated in similar contexts, creating the first synthesis of the contributions that African American archaeology in the Northeast has made to our understanding of race, slavery, and freedom in the United States. This book focuses on the part of the North where slavery was once legal, primarily New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, generally referred to as the Northeast. Although enslaved people did toil in parts of the Old Northwest, including the territories that would become the free states of Iowa and Minnesota, the story here focuses on the

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eastern seaboard, where slavery began and where it remained persistent. This book is organized by five themes that have emerged from the past eighty years of research in the archaeology of the African American experience: the problem of northern slavery, bondage, struggle, liberty, and commemoration. The first section of this book explores the problem of northern slavery. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of African American archaeology in the Northeast and a review of several key sites that helped shaped the archaeological discourse about the African American past in the so-called free states. This chapter also discusses several key trends in archaeological theory that informed the interpretation of some of the important African American sites excavated in the region. Chapter 2 presents a historical overview of the African American experience in the Northeast, providing context for the themes and sites explored in later chapters. The book’s second theme, bondage, is explored in Part II, which considers the condition and extent of slavery in the Northeast. Chapter 3 provides a review and consideration of the archaeological work that has been conducted on sites associated with enslaved workers in the Northeast and how this work has helped shift traditional narratives on northern slavery. Historical scholarship into the question of northern slavery traditionally held that captive labor existed on a limited scale in this region and that where it did exist, enslaved people tended to work in the households of elites (Fitts 1996). While this form of domestic servitude certainly was the experience for many, enslaved workers often did the manual labor involved in clearing forests for farmland, tilling the soil and reaping its crops, loading and unloading ships, and making wood charcoal to fire iron furnaces (Litwack 1961; Murray 2012; Osborne 2005; Wax 1967). Perhaps surprisingly to some, many people in the North were also enslaved on agricultural plantations. Chapter 4 considers a case study on the archaeology of northern bondage at a plantation located in upstate New York known as Rose Hill. While historical and archaeological scholars have increasingly recognized the scale of northern slavery over the past two decades, much of the narrative has focused on modes of labor that differed from the plantation societies of the US South. Plantation slavery was not unknown in the North, however, and was not extinguished with American independence. Archaeological projects in what were Dutch and British colonies have demonstrated that

Introduction · 3

gangs of enslaved laborers toiled on large agricultural estates that were in form and substance very little different from the contemporary tobacco and rice plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas. As counterintuitive as it may seem, plantation slavery expanded in New York State following the American Revolution. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, southern planters who had migrated to New York with scores of enslaved laborers established new slave-based plantations in upstate New York. Several of these extended households were established in and around the city of Geneva, at the northern end of Seneca Lake, and in a variety of townships located in neighboring Seneca, Ontario, and Wayne Counties. Among these planters was Robert Selden Rose, who in 1809 established Rose Hill, a slave-based plantation on the outskirts of Geneva. Part III examines how archaeologists have confronted the struggle against slavery in their work. Near the turn of the nineteenth century, people in the northern states began a slow process of bringing about an end to slavery, not only in their own states but throughout the union. As Frederick Douglass famously characterized it, the struggle to end slavery had both moral and physical dimensions. On one level, it was clearly a struggle to turn white people’s minds to abolitionism—that is, to accept the idea that slavery must be ended. On another level, the struggle manifested in a series of violent confrontations against the oppressions of slavery. The struggle to end slavery in the North was multifaceted (Delle 2015a; Douglass 1857) and was a central issue driving American political debate from the outbreak of the American Revolution to the end of the Civil War. The moral struggle was expressed in many ways, including new federal policies that largely sought to appease slaveholders, the agitation of abolitionists who demanded an immediate end to what they saw as an immoral social system, and the daily work routines of tenant farmers who labored to secure their own economic freedom. The physical struggle was expressed through the actions of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the northern states, seeking to attain and maintain their freedom from the oppressions of slavery. Others took more direct action, raising their hands—often their weapons—to strike blows against those who would enslave them. Chapter 5 examines the variety of ways the struggle against slavery was expressed and how archaeology can be used to interpret these manifestations of struggle. From the very beginning of European settlement in North America, African Americans were either transported to or born

4 · The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

into slavery in the North. In the first half of the nineteenth century, during the arduous process of emancipation in the North, numerous African American families migrated from the southern to the northeastern states. While many settled in cities, many also sought to establish their freedom in rural areas, often as tenant farmers. In many cases, rural African American communities sprang up on the edges of the white world, sometimes in segregated neighborhoods near white villages, sometimes in new villages of their own establishment, often on land they did not hold title to. Many such communities existed throughout the rural Northeast into the twentieth century, often existing only until the Ku Klux Klan and similar white supremacist groups drove out the residents through violent attacks on their communities (Craig 2015; MacLean 1994). Freedom for rural African American tenants was tenuous in the antebellum years, not only because of the widespread and often-violent racism they endured, but also through the legal limitations various northern states, townships, and municipalities placed on African Americans. The experience of northern freedom in the antebellum years existed in the shadow of slavery, particularly after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Chapter 6 explores the dynamics of struggle as residents in free African American communities experienced it through the case study of the William Parker House, the home of self-emancipated migrants who fled slavery in Virginia and Maryland to settle as tenant farmers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and who engaged in an act of armed resistance against slavery in 1851. The fourth theme addressed in this volume is liberty. From nearly the beginning of the American colonial experience, many African Americans who were not held in bondage lived in the northern states. Chapter 7 provides a review of free African American sites excavated in the Northeast and examines the strategies people adopted to overcome the difficulties free people of color faced while living in the shadow of slavery. Chapter 8 further examines the concept of liberty through an archaeological examination of the house lot of Lydia Hamilton Smith, an African American woman who is thought to have been born into slavery but who died as a free woman. Lydia Hamilton, who was born in the small borough of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was eventually employed in nearby Lancaster by Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens was a radical abolitionist who rose to political power in the federal government and eventually challenged the power and authority of the president of the United States. Lydia

Introduction · 5

Hamilton Smith, who as a Victorian housekeeper served as the hostess for social events held by Stevens, circulated among the wealthy and powerful in Pennsylvania and Washington, eventually becoming a significant landowner. Archaeological evidence suggests that she promoted the blessings of liberty not only through her example as a woman who raised herself to social and economic prominence but also by assisting others seeking refuge from the condition of slavery. The volume ends with a concluding chapter that addresses the theme of commemoration. Archaeological projects are fleeting; the very process of excavating an archaeological site destroys it. Using archaeology as a form of public commemoration requires significant effort. The conclusion reviews three cases where this has been done successfully in places associated with key moments in the African American experience: slavery at the first executive mansion in Philadelphia, known as the President’s House; the homestead of famous black abolitionist Harriet Tubman; and the boyhood homesite of one of America’s greatest anti-racist intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois. Conclusion

Northern slavery is a key part of the story of the American experience. Archaeologists have been working for over seventy years to locate, excavate, and interpret sites associated with northern slavery and freedom. For many this has been a difficult story to tell, one that requires contradicting much received wisdom about slavery in the northern states. Archaeology has made key contributions to our understanding of the conditions under which enslaved people lived in the North and continues to shed light on the African Americans who have always played a part in the story of the American experience.

I The Problem of Northern Slavery

1 Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology

In April 1992 a group of African American community activists organized and led a protest against racism in Lower Manhattan, one of New York City’s most densely populated and most affluent districts. This protest was not the first outpouring of frustration with institutionalized racism to have occurred in Manhattan, and the presence of a sizable African American community in New York was not the result of recent demographic change. There has been a large African and African American presence on Manhattan since the Dutch founded the town of New Amsterdam in what would become New York City in the seventeenth century (LaRoche and Blakey 1997). In 1655, only thirty-five years after the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, Manhattan hosted its first slave auction. In 1712, a working-class uprising that included both enslaved people of color and impoverished Europeans ripped through New York City. It ended when authorities executed nine people by burning them at the stake to simultaneously punish them and warn those who dared question New York’s emerging racialized hierarchy. A century and a half later, during the American Civil War, Manhattan was the site of one of the nation’s deadliest race riots. The so-called New York City draft riots of 1863 were an explosion of anti-black rage by a white working class that was simmering with resentment about conscription into the Union Army. Over the course of a week of uncontrolled violence, eleven black men were lynched in the street and at least 120 were killed. Dozens of black-owned businesses were destroyed, black churches were ransacked, and even a black orphanage was burned to the ground (Bernstein 1990). A few short decades later, Manhattan was the site of another violent race riot. In 1900, sparked by the death of a plainclothes policeman at the hands a black man, the Tenderloin district of Manhattan exploded in racial hatred. Angry whites randomly targeted black men, women, and children for attack. Hundreds of black people were injured

10 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

and dozens were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries (Abu-Lughod 2007). Some of those who protested in 1992 were of an age to remember more recent generations of racial unrest: Harlem, Manhattan’s largest African American neighborhood for much of the twentieth century, was the scene of racial violence in 1935, 1943, and 1964. At least four times in the century between the outbreak of the Civil War and the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the borough of Manhattan experienced outbreaks of largescale racially motivated physical violence (Abu-Lughod 2007; Berlin and Harris 2005; LaRoche and Blakey 1997). The community that stood its ground at 290 Broadway in April 1992 was protesting a violence of a different, though not lesser known, kind. Behind the wooden panel fences blocking the view of a government construction project, hundreds of African American skeletons were being quickly removed from their graves. The bones were being hastily wrapped in newspaper, packed in cardboard boxes, and shipped to the basement of a university building in the Bronx. The African American community demanded that this sacrilege against the bones of their ancestors be immediately stopped and that the concerns of the assembled community be thoroughly addressed (LaRoche and Blakey 1997). The primary concern of the African American community of New York was that they, the biological, social, and spiritual descendants of the people interred in what became known as the African Burial Ground, had a justifiable interest in determining how the remains of their ancestors were to be treated. The groundbreaking argument that they successfully made identified the modern African American community, whether lineal descent could be established or not, as the descendant community of the people who had been buried beneath the layers of pavement, rubble, and fill at 290 Broadway for 200 years. As such, they demanded the right to be consulted in the research design, field methodology, analysis, and final disposition of the biological and archaeological remains lying in the footprint of a planned federal office building in downtown New York. The intellectual and social rights they demanded were duly granted to them (LaRoche and Blakey 1997). Michael Blakey, a noted bioarchaeologist who served as an intellectual leader of the analysis of the human remains recovered from the site, has framed the inclusion of descendant communities as an ethical question. He has proposed that archaeologists of the African diaspora must consider two types of clientage: 1) the business client responsible for the funding and logistics of archaeological projects;

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 11

and 2) the ethical client; that is, the descendant community most affected by the disturbance of archaeological sites and particular burial sites that can be associated with their cultural and/or physical ancestors (Blakey 2008). Blakey has argued that the African-descent community should have the same kinds of ethical rights to participate in (or outright reject) the excavation and analysis of sites associated with their ancestors that Native American and Native Hawaiian people now have, as people whose historical and civil rights have long been dismissed in the name of “objective” science (Blakey 2008). Archaeologists dealing with sites associated with historic African American communities learned much from the African Burial Ground experience. On an existential level, archaeologists familiar with the story of the African Burial Ground have had a lesson in the depth of meaning descendant communities place on the material remains of the past, particularly on the graves of their ancestors. Those bones that archaeologists so casually removed from the ground were once living people who witnessed the birth of the United States—African American women, men, children, and infants who had been buried on what was the outskirts of the city of New York at the time of their deaths. Those archaeologists, like many in the broader community of scholars, were confronted with extensive and profound evidence that the city of New York had always been the home of a large African American community—a community that for generations had lived under the specter of slavery. The recovery of hundreds of African American burials in Manhattan shattered the long-held myth that large enslaved populations had only really existed in the South. The realities of northern slavery had long been excised from the prevailing historical narrative of race in America. Victors in wars that had established and preserved a union conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, northerners clung to the story that slavery was a rarity north of Maryland and that where it did exist, it was on a small scale, concentrated in the domestic households of wealthy and benevolent merchants who treated their slaves well. Furthermore, the narrative continued, slavery was an artifact of British and Dutch colonialism in the North and surely had been quickly abolished with the birth of the independent United States (Berlin 1998; Fitts 1998; Hodges 1999; Moore [1866] 1968; Piersen 1988). Archaeologists have now come to accept that slavery was widespread and persistent throughout what became known as the northern states,

12 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

a conclusion that may have been have stimulated by the African Burial Ground project but is based on work conducted on African American sites in the North since the early 1940s. However, although historical archaeologists have increasingly focused on sites associated with marginalized people, they have reported on relatively few African American sites in the Northeast in literature that is easily accessible. As will become clear in the successive chapters of this book, many archaeological projects conducted on African American sites have been represented only in the margins of academic literature. Many excavations have been part of larger cultural resource management projects and with a few notable exceptions have been reported on only in what is sometimes called the gray literature: consulting reports that are not easily located or accessed. Numerous projects have been led by graduate students running archaeological field schools or conducting graduate research projects, with the results of their work published only in doctoral dissertations and master’s degree theses. Other projects have been sponsored by local historical societies that have published results in local journals, newsletters, or not at all. The corpus of the literature on African American archaeology in the North is thus uneven and difficult to locate. It is also inconsistent; some reports are over-filled with specific field results but little interpretation, while others structured by grand theory report little meaningful data. Thematically, archaeological studies of slavery-period sites tend to follow contemporary trends in anthropological or archaeological theory. In broad brush strokes, the history of historical archaeological theory has followed this trajectory: before the 1960s, archaeologists were largely concerned with identifying chronological and cultural markers attributable to tightly defined ethnic or cultural groups. This has sometimes been called “the cultural-historical” period of archaeological thought (Johnson 2010; Trigger 2006; Willey and Sabloff 1993). In the 1960s, following a groundbreaking set of projects archaeologist Lewis Binford and his students conducted, American archaeology entered into what is generally known as the “processual” or “New Archaeology” phase of its history. Processual archaeologists tended to be concerned with identifying cultural processes that led to evolutionary change, which they thought was empirically demonstrable through the quantitative analysis of discernible artifact and spatial patterns found in the archaeological record. In the 1970s, some archaeologists, questioning the ecological determinism that began to emerge from processual archaeology, adapted the linguistic

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 13

theory of structuralism to archaeological work. Anthropological structuralists held that the human mind is structured by sets of existing ideas that create a cognitive framework that in turn shapes human thoughts and actions (Johnson 2010). Archaeologists posited that if every human action was structured by these sets of ideas, then these ideas should both be reflected in and created by the artifacts and spatial patterns those minds created. Both processualists and structuralists actively sought clear evidence of the retention of African cultural patterns (sometimes referred to as Africanisms), often to no avail. In the 1980s, a rising critique of both processualism and structuralism emerged that is typically known as post-processual archaeology. More a group of related approaches influenced by poststructuralist theory and postmodernism, the post-processualists argued that archaeological sites can only be understood as expressions of individual experience, whether the experience is that of the excavator or that of the person(s) who left behind the material culture being recovered. By the early 1990s, the postprocessual movement had evolved into a series of experience-based approaches to the past (Johnson 2010; Orser 2016). Another theoretical turn, critical community archaeology, impacted the practice of historical archaeology in the 1990s, fueled by the conscious efforts of archaeologists around the world to decolonize the field (Trigger 2006). For much of its history, archaeology was practiced by members of dominant or elite communities, often at sites associated with people whose lands and cultures had been appropriated by that dominant group. While much of the disciplinary discussion focused on indigenous peoples living in lands Europeans and their descendants had colonized, in North America and parts of the Caribbean and South America, this approach was extended to sites associated with slavery. Practitioners of critical community archaeology argued that the remnants of the past that come down to us are not the exclusive property of “science,” to be treated coldly by archaeologists as “specimens,” but the cultural patrimony of the descendant communities that emerged from the political and social struggles of the past. Current historical archaeological projects still tend to be informed by this critical community approach to the past. This was the approach the team who interpreted the African Burial Ground site adopted. A variety of other theoretical approaches have influenced the development of historical archaeology but have not had the same impact on African American archaeology in the Northeast. Among these are Marxism,

14 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

Map 1.1. Locations of sites mentioned in Part I. Map by James A. Delle.

which has impacted archaeological interpretation of sites associated with African American archaeology in Maryland (e.g., Leone 1988, 1995; Matthews 2001, 2005, 2010) and South Carolina (Orser 1988b, 1998, 1991). Marxist approaches tend to focus on the dynamics of power as they are created and expressed through the use of material culture (Delle 2014; McGuire 2006). Feminist approaches focus on shifting narratives away from an androcentric normalization of associating the material culture of the past with current and generally conservative definitions of heteronormative gender roles and relations (e.g., Battle-Baptiste 2011; Johnson 2010; McBride 2010; Voss 2008). Practice theory, which emerged from an adaptation of poststructuralist theory in archaeology, largely derived from the work of Bourdieu, focuses on the interrelationship between social structures and human agency and the role that material culture can play in mediating between structures and agency (e.g., Barton 2014; Delle 1998, 2011).

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 15

While no volume can hope to encompass every element of the nature of the African American experience in the antebellum North, this book hopes to shed light on the complexity of the material and social issues those living within the realities of legal enslavement faced. Men and women, both enslaved and free, experienced racism, violence, degradation, and deprivation but struggled mightily to live their lives, many rising from enslavement to relative affluence. The story of northern slavery and freedom is a complex one but one that needs telling, not only to remember those who lived it but also to remind us today about the legacies of a past that has long been whitewashed and too often forgotten completely. To help readers understand how archaeology is contributing to our understanding of the African American past in the Northeast, what follows is a review of several of the more influential projects conducted on African American archaeological sites, presented within the context of the archaeological theories and practices that influenced them. The Cultural-Historical Approach: Lucy Foster’s Garden

Historical archaeologists generally date the genesis of African American archaeology in the Northeast to the excavation of a site originally known as Black Lucy’s Garden but now more generally referred to as Lucy Foster’s Garden. In the early 1940s, Adelaide and Ripley Bullen—the latter a professional archaeologist employed by the Robert S. Peabody Museum— came across a scatter of what they called “colonial pottery” while excavating what appears to have been a Late Archaic hunting camp in the town of Andover, Massachusetts. When they completed their work on the ancient Native American materials at what would become known as the Stickney Site, the Bullens initiated a pioneering excavation project to determine if the “colonial pottery” they had encountered was intrusive or evidence of a contact period component at the site. The Bullens did not intend to excavate an African American site; they thought they had stumbled upon a very early European settler’s house, perhaps the home of someone who had been trading with the local Native American population (Bullen and Bullen 1945). What they discovered was a ruined cellar hole not of an early seventeenth-century site but of a small house dating to the early nineteenth century. As a result of their documentary research conducted during the project, the Bullens could confidently associate the ruined house with an African American woman named Lucy Foster, who had lived the

16 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

early part of her life as a slave in Massachusetts. Adopting a descriptive name for the site they found in the local history of Andover, the Bullens named the site “Black Lucy’s Garden” (Bullen and Bullen 1945). The Bullens’ project, which combined the analysis of historical documents and archaeologically recovered material culture, was a pioneering work in historical archaeology at a time when nearly all such work was conducted on sites associated with grand historical events or famous historical people (Orser 2016). Beyond demonstrating the power of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding social history, the Bullens revealed much about the life of Lucy Foster, whose experience in many ways encapsulated the African American experience in the North in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their pioneering research on the property included the analysis of many kinds of documents historical archaeologists commonly use today, including tax records, property deeds, historic maps, probate inventories, and church records. The Bullens’ work on Lucy Foster’s Garden, in accordance with the cultural-historical approach to archaeology current of the time, provided a detailed description of both the features excavated and the material culture recovered from the site. In addition to the typical descriptive narrative found in archaeological reports from the 1940s, the Bullens included a brief biography of Lucy Foster, for, as they said, “the history of the specimens dug up cannot be properly separated from the history of those who used them” (Bullen and Bullen 1945, 26; see also Battle-Baptiste 2011; Baker 1978, 1980; Martin 2018; Winter and Brown 2012). Lucy Foster apparently was born sometime around 1757 and was enslaved in Boston during her childhood (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Bullen and Bullen 1945). By at least 1770, thirteen-year-old Lucy was living as a slave on the Andover farm of Job and Hannah Ford Foster. It would seem that she came into the household with Hannah Ford. In 1771, at the age of 14, Lucy gave birth to a daughter, apparently by her 45-year-old slave master, Job Foster. When Job Foster died in 1782, Lucy was not listed as property in the inventory, suggesting either that she had attained her freedom by that point or that she remained the property of Hannah Ford Foster. Hannah Foster and Philemon Chandler, whom Hannah married in 1789, inventoried the estate following Foster’s death. Hannah’s son Joseph Foster challenged their inventory, after which additional objects and their values were added. Although such correlations are difficult to prove, there is quite a bit of similarity between the objects in the inventory addendum

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 17

and those the Bullens recovered, suggesting that while Hannah recognized Lucy’s right to ownership of moveable property, including ceramic dishes, glassware, forks, and a chest of drawers, her son did not (Bullen and Bullen 1945). Hannah died in 1812, bequeathing Lucy the right to live on a one-acre parcel of land but not granting her ownership of it. In 1815, Lucy was living in a small house erected on the site. From 1815 until her death in 1845, Lucy Foster lived in her small house in Andover, likely with her son Peter. Although impoverished and occasionally receiving public assistance, Lucy lived an independent life on the fringes of white society (Bullen and Bullen 1945). The Bullens recovered a set of eight forks that may well be the very ones that Joseph Foster quarreled with his mother about, plus five table knives, a kitchen knife, and three large and two pewter teaspoons. They also recovered twenty gunflints, suggesting that Lucy or Peter owned a firearm, although the faunal materials recovered suggest that the vast majority of meat consumed was from domesticated rather than wild animals. In can be conjectured that the firearm was used for a purpose other than hunting, perhaps as a means of protection, which certainly would not have been surprising for a woman who, as a young teenager, had in all likelihood been coerced into sexual relations with a man three times her age. The material culture recovered from the site also reveals the relative ease with which even impoverished people acquired ceramics in the early nineteenth century. Lucy apparently had ready access to ceramic dishes. The archaeological evidence suggests that she collected as many as 113 different vessels over the course of the thirty years she lived on her plot (Baker 1978, 109). The prevalence of hollow over flat ceramic forms (i.e., bowls instead of plates) combined with the evidence that most meat was chopped into stews rather than cut into steaks or other finer cuts of meat may be suggestive of an African American preference for stews or may in fact be an artifact of Lucy’s poverty (Baker 1978: 113). When the Bullens published their interpretation of Lucy Foster’s Garden, archaeological excavation on historic period sites was still something of a novelty. The Bullens’ work was pathbreaking in many ways. The methodology they used was visionary, setting a standard for future historical archaeology projects. The focus of their work, a poor black woman in rural Massachusetts, was rare at a time when overt racism was prevalent even in New England. A full generation would pass before either historical archaeology or the archaeology of the African American past would

18 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

become mainstream intellectual pursuits. The Bullens set a high bar for future projects, and Lucy Foster’s Garden remains one of the most influential historical archaeological sites ever to be explored, both in terms of setting a standard for interdisciplinary methodology and in revealing how detailed a picture of daily life of historically silent people the practice of historical archaeology can produce. Processualism: Skunk Hollow, New Jersey

In 1978, more than thirty years after the Bullens published their article on Lucy Foster’s Garden, Vernon Baker reconsidered the material culture the Bullens had recovered. Baker, who was influenced by the processual approach that dominated American archaeology in the late 1960s and 1970s, wanted to derive some definitive statements about African American culture in North America, so he compared what the Bullens had found with the objects found at two African American sites excavated in the 1970s: Cannon’s Point Plantation in Georgia and Parting Ways, in Plymouth, Massachusetts (more on this site below). Baker concluded that as of the late 1970s, archaeologists could conclude that the construction of houses using a twelve-foot standard unit of measurement and a preference for ceramic serving bowls over plates and chopped rather than cut meat “provide the clearest archaeological visibility of late 18th and 19th century Afro-Americans” (Baker 1978, 113). In reaching this conclusion, Baker was using one of the primary methods of processual archaeology: discovering artifact patterns that could be related to specific behaviors correlated with ethnicity. As Baker admitted in the same monograph, however, “affiliation of the above patterns to African cultural elements is unclear” (Baker 1978:112). What was certainly clear was that there were emancipated African Americans, including Lucy Foster, living in rural poverty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout the Northeast, some emancipated African Americans chose to create communities rather than live on isolated plots as Lucy Foster did. Many settled in rural communities, where they did their best to make a living and create social lives on the sometimes-marginal farmlands they were allowed access to. One such community established itself on a worked-out timber patch on the crest of a rocky bluff overlooking the Hudson River at a place in New Jersey known as Skunk Hollow.

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 19

In the late 1970s, archaeologist Joan Geismar conducted an investigation of the long-abandoned community at Skunk Hollow. Through a combination of intensive documentary research and archaeological field survey, Geismar, who was influenced by the processual approach, constructed a normative model to explain the social disintegration of the community of Skunk Hollow. Her research indicated that the African American community first began purchasing land and establishing small subsistence farms in 1806. Over the course of the subsequent decades, the community grew as an increasing number of emancipated people joined the community at Skunk Hollow. Closely related kin groups developed in the community. By the time of its peak population in 1880, the Skunk Hollow community consisted of thirteen households consisting of seventyfive people. Shortly afterward, the community began its decline in what Geismar describes as a process of social disintegration. By 1885, there were only six households and 28 residents left in Skunk Hollow. Within a generation the community was abandoned (Geismar 1982). In her examination of the economic and social history of Skunk Hollow, Geismar noted several interesting trends. Every taxpayer in Skunk Hollow owned land. By way of comparison, few African Americans in the nearby town of Nyack, New York, owned any real estate, a full generation after that state passed its abolition act. Furthermore, while the residents of Skunk Hollow were not affluent, they owned more land on average than any other African Americans in the township, county, or general area where they lived, suggesting there was “a singular situation existing in the community at this time” (Geismar 1982, 47). At least for the residents of Skunk Hollow, it appears that creating their own community had some economic benefits, although the land they owned was marginal farmland at best. Following a common trope in historical archaeology at the time, Geismar analyzed artifact patterns supported by documentary evidence of ceramic values as a way of exploring status differentiation among the community members at Skunk Hollow (e.g., Baugher and Venables 1987; Otto 1980, 1984; for a contemporary critique of this approach, see Orser 1988a). Using economic metrics such as personal and real estate values, occupation, and intensity of consumerism as reflected in the purchase and use of ceramics, Geismar concluded that although the community as a whole appeared to be more affluent than African American households in the

20 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

Figure 1.1. Betsy Thompson, the widow of Rev. Thompson, photographed in Skunk Hollow in 1906. Source: Leonard Cooke Collection, Nyack Library, Nyack, NY.

surrounding area, there was little to indicate status differentiation within the community, with the exception of Rev. William Thompson, the minister at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Skunk Hollow (figure 1.1). Except for Rev. Thompson, the men of Skunk Hollow were employed in nonskilled occupations such as day labor and farm work and few of the women were employed outside their homes (Geismar 1982, 48, 184). Geismar analyzed artifacts recovered from four homesite clusters to test her hypothesis that “the community’s disintegration was related to the loss of status of its ranked individual,” by which she meant the death in 1886 of Rev. Thompson (Geismar 1982, 184). To test this hypothesis, she compared artifacts between homesites and across time using two comparative methods that were current at the time of her study: the relative exchange value of ceramic vessels based on a model George Miller (1980)

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 21

developed and the relative proportion of transfer-decorated vessels, assumed to be a status item, based on a model John Otto (1975, 1977) created. Using these methods, Geismar was able to conclude that the material assemblage did indeed reflect a slightly higher status level for what she called “Cluster B,” a house site she could confirm was the residence of William Thompson and his family. Similarly, she was able to document that the community began to disintegrate in the mid-1880s, which she correlates with a possible decline in health and vigor of the community’s leader, Rev. Thompson, immediately before his death in 1886 (Geismar 1982, 191–192). Although the high processualist approach to the archaeological record that Geismar used to analyze the community at Skunk Hollow is no longer current, her study remains notable for several reasons. Geismar did not look to find any remnants of African retentions in the nineteenthcentury community but instead attempted to analyze the community in its observable context as a marginal community most likely still impacted by the long persistence of slavery in New Jersey. It was also among the first studies in African American archaeology outside the plantation South to conceptualize the community as the focus of analysis. Finally, she revealed archaeological evidence of a key feature of nineteenth-century African American communities: they often centered on a church and a church leader, which helped create and maintain community coherence under difficult social and economic conditions. In the case of Skunk Hollow, the community’s population peak coincides with the construction of an African Methodist Episcopal church in the period 1856–1860 and declined after the death of that church’s minister—and the church’s abandonment—after 1886 (Geismar 1982, 38). Structuralism: Parting Ways, Massachusetts

In the 1970s, historical archaeologist James Deetz emerged as a chief proponent of the use of structuralist theory to understand the past. In the mid-1970s, Deetz was employed at Brown University, where he directed one of the first graduate programs dedicated to historical archaeology. He had established a relationship with the owners of the land that would become the Plimouth Plantation museum while he was a graduate student at Harvard in the late 1950s, and when he returned to New England from his first stint at the University of California (Santa Barbara, 1960–1967),

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Deetz’s research into the early seventeenth-century Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth resulted in his becoming the leading authority on the material culture of early New England. While he was primarily interested in studying the development of seventeenth-century Anglo-American culture in Plymouth, the town selectmen, interested in exploring the African American history of their town, asked Deetz if he would be willing to excavate a site known to have been the residence of four African American families at the turn of the nineteenth century, a site known as Parting Ways (Deetz 1996). Although Deetz was specifically looking for evidence of African cultural retention, his work at Parting Ways implicitly asked a key question about African Americans in New England at the end of the eighteenth century: What happened to enslaved people after they were emancipated? Massachusetts was one of the first states to abolish slavery. While many of the thousands of emancipated slaves in New England likely remained in their former employments, others wished to create new lives. Many found themselves in rural contexts, as they either lacked the skills to work in the urban trades or they wished to establish some form of self-sufficiency. Many sought to make a living in the only way they knew how and, like the majority of people at the turn of the nineteenth century, worked the land on small-scale subsistence farms. Small African American agricultural communities began to appear on the landscape of the North, as through the processes of discrimination, segregation, and community building black families congregated, often at the perceived margins of white society. Parting Ways was one such community. According to Deetz, four African American families settled at Parting Ways in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. These were the families of Cato Howe, Quamany, Prince Goodwin, and Plato Turner, all of whom had served in the Patriot military during the Revolution and all of whom (with the exception of Goodwin, who remained enslaved because he had deserted) had been emancipated in 1778 as a reward for their service. In the early 1790s, well after the end of the war, the town of Plymouth granted these four men and their families permission to settle on the edge of a parcel of land known as the Sheep Pasture, which the town owned. According to Deetz, the four men built houses and proceeded to scratch out a marginal living on marginal farm land on the margins of the town of Plymouth (Deetz 1996).

Slavery, Freedom, Archaeology · 23

Above: Figure 1.2. Late-nineteenth-century depiction of the Turner-Burr House. Image in public domain. Left: Figure 1.3. The Turner-Burr House under excavation. Photo by James Deetz, in the collection of the Plimoth Plantation museum. Used by permission.

In the mid-1970s, Deetz and a group of students and volunteers excavated the site of Parting Ways in the hope of bringing increased attention to the lives of African Americans in early New England, a group that had not at that time received much archaeological attention outside of the Bullens’ pioneering work at Lucy Foster’s Garden. The project at Parting Ways discovered the remnants of several small houses, one of which local residents remembered as having been the residence of James Burr, an African American man who was the grandson of Plato Turner. Deetz concluded that the house foundation and cellar hole discovered in 1975 must be the ruin of Turner’s House. Notably, Deetz concluded that the house was built from an African mindset, using a spatial grammar based on units of twelve rather than the units of sixteen most Anglo-Americans used in eighteenth-century New England (figures 1.2, 1.3). According to

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Deetz, the small house was constructed of two 12' × 12' rooms and had much more in common with Caribbean house forms and New Orleans shotgun houses than it did with any vernacular architectural tradition common in contemporary New England (Deetz 1996, 187ff). In analyzing the artifacts recovered from Parting Ways, Deetz and his team noted the remains of an unusual form of coarse earthenware among the more commonly found domestic objects and imported ceramics. Upon closer examination, Deetz concluded that these were the remains of jars produced in the West Indies to ship Caribbean sugar and that they were unlike ceramics commonly encountered in rural New England. Deetz concluded that these vessels likely represented the retention of African traditions and were possibly reused for importing tamarinds from either the West Indies or West Africa. Furthermore, Deetz argued that the cuisine choices the Parting Ways community made differed from those of their Anglo neighbors, as the faunal assemblage was dominated by chopped rather than cut bones. While he admits that this might be an artifact of poverty rather than cultural tradition, Deetz asserts that the latter explanation should not be dismissed (Deetz 1996: 205). Deeply influenced by structuralism, Deetz argued that these unique architectural dimensions and ceramic forms were evidence that the African American residents of Parting Ways were using and recombining elements of a material grammar based on African precedents. To his great credit, Deetz accomplished his overarching goal of demonstrating that archaeology could be used to interpret the lives of African American people in New England. His work inspired several generations of archaeologists to focus on African American archaeology in the Northeast. Furthermore, he brought to the general attention of archaeologists the fact that rural African American communities existed in the North in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some three decades after Deetz conducted his research, Karen Hutchins-Keim revisited Parting Ways, with an eye informed by thirty years of archaeological literature on African American sites. HutchinsKeim was able to conduct a deep examination of the documentary record of Plymouth and reanalyze the artifact collection Deetz had collected from Parting Ways. In conducting a thorough investigation into the history of the town-owned Sheep Pasture at Plymouth she discovered that the four African American families that settled there were not the first impoverished people to live on this margin of the town. In pre-Victorian days, it

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was common for New England towns to take responsibility for maintaining the poor and indigent of their communities. It was not unusual for towns to either establish poor farms where the indigent could live and work or to allow the poor to live on public lands, provided that they improve those lands by clearing forests, construct houses and agricultural buildings, and ultimately demonstrate the capacity to support themselves (Garman and Russo 1999; Hutchins 2013; Hutchins-Keim 2015). Parting Ways was a parcel of land that had been used in Plymouth for this purpose for several generations prior to the arrival of the black veterans. Hutchins-Keim concluded that Plato Turner was likely the fourth resident of the house that Deetz assumed Turner had constructed for himself. Because the original builders and intervening residents were Anglo-Americans, the house could not have been built from a preexisting African spatial grammar based on units of twelve, as Deetz had concluded. Given this historic reality, it seems implausible that the houses at Parting Ways had any relationship whatever to Caribbean plantation quarters or to New Orleans shotgun houses (Hutchins-Keim 2015). When she examined the recovered artifacts, Hutchins-Keim concurred that the large earthenware jars Deetz recovered were likely constructed in the Caribbean and probably were molasses drip jars used in the manufacture of sugar. Hutchins-Keim is more thoughtful in her interpretation of the jars, however, suggesting that it is better to consider these objects as a reflection of the entwinement of the African American residents of Parting Ways in the Atlantic economy rather than as evidence of the kinds of Africanisms that structuralists had hoped to find. One of the residents of Parting Ways had been employed as a seaman for a time, and she proposed that he may have scavenged used and unwanted jars from the docks (Hutchins-Keim 2015). Putting this evidence together, Hutchins-Keim concluded that the conditions of freedom some emancipated people experienced in the early republic were characterized by poverty, marginalization, and racialization. Post-processual Archaeology and Slavery in Rhode Island

The presence of free African Americans in the colonial Northeast has long been a matter of common knowledge. Most schoolchildren in Massachusetts could tell you that Crispus Attucks, an African American man, died in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Nevertheless, archaeological projects

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on African American sites in the Northeast were few in number prior to the 1990s, despite the pioneering work of Deetz, Geisner, and the Bullens. This changed after the African Burial Ground project brought issues of the African American past, particularly the question of northern slavery, to the attention of historical archaeologists. Following a long tradition of plantation-based archaeology in the Chesapeake and Southeast, archaeologists began to engage with the question of whether the plantations of the Northeast were anything like their counterparts in the southern states and whether any of the received wisdom of the rarity and relative benevolence of northern slavery could withstand intense archaeological scrutiny. This expansion in interest in the African American past coincided with a theoretical movement commonly known as post-processual archaeology. This moniker is an umbrella term for a number of loosely related theoretical approaches to the past that are united by their common assertion that the normative approach to understanding the past at the heart of processual archaeology is far too limiting. Most post-processual archaeologists eschewed the cultural evolutionary approach processualists champion, arguing instead that the artifacts of the past are better imagined as texts to be read then as specimens to be analyzed in a replicable test of a scientific hypothesis. James Garman conducted a notable example of the post-processual approach to the African American past on mortuary art found on gravestones in the Common Burial Ground in Newport, Rhode Island. One corner of this cemetery contains a segregated population of African Americans who died in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some enslaved, others free. Garman examined the African American grave markers using an approach derived from hermeneutics, a theory that is generally applied to the interpretation of texts. In Garman’s use of hermeneutics, he considers grave markers to be “intersubjective texts with ranges of different meaning for different viewers” (Garman 1994, 74). From this perspective, the symbols on the markers never had a singular meaning but were interpreted differently by different people who occupied different frames of reference, notably the survivors of the African American decedents and the white population of Newport. The meanings of symbols, including epitaphs, differed depending on the frame of reference of the subject reading them (Garman 1994).

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Garman noted that the earliest grave markers in the cemetery more closely resemble European than African grave markers in form and style. He also noted that most of the gravestones related the deceased to the person who claimed ownership over them (e.g., “Hector Butcher, Negro, late Servant of Mrs. Ann Butcher of Barbadoes”), revealing the paternalistic view the whites of Newport, who purchased the grave markers, had of their enslaved workers. Garman argued that the stones would have portrayed social meaning and power to multiple audiences, including the enslaved African American community in Newport, who would be reminded of their subordinate status even in death; the poorer white community who could not afford to purchase carved headstones for themselves and their families, never mind own slaves; and white elites, who would see expensive gravestones raised over the bodies of deceased slaves as a form of conspicuous, and possibly competitive, consumption (Garman 1994). Post-processual archaeologists also generally held that archaeology did not need to be defined by a narrow definition of material culture but rather should strive to draw on as many sources of evidence as possible to pursue an interpretative approach to understanding the past. In such an archaeological project that did not entail any direct excavation, Robert K. Fitts explored the African American presence on what have been known as the Narragansett Plantations in southern Rhode Island. The colony and eventual state of Rhode Island—which is formally known to this day as the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations—is comprised of several islands and the surrounding shore of Narragansett Bay. A greater percentage of its population was enslaved in 1750 (10 percent) than any other northern colony save New York (14 percent). Home to Newport, one of North America’s major slave-trading ports, Rhode Island was home to enslaved workers employed in a variety of occupations. The southern region of the state, known alternatively as the South Country or simply as Narragansett, was an affluent agricultural region, characterized by large farms known in their day as plantations. By the middle of the eighteenth century, these farms featured a population in which nearly one out of every four people was enslaved (Clark-Pujara 2009; Fitts 1996; Piersen 1988). Fitts’s project helped establish the parameters and define several key questions for the archaeological study of northern plantations. First, he

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clearly defined what he meant by a plantation: a large-scale agricultural enterprise that produced commodities for the world market using enslaved labor (Fitts 1996). He noted that the while they did fit this definition, Narragansett Plantations differed from their southern counterparts in several key ways. While large planters in Virginia might control tens of thousands of acres and claim ownership over several hundred slaves, the Narragansett Plantations were much more modest in scale, although they still generally encompassed a significant 1,000–2,000 acres, and several were over 4,000 acres. In addition, the larger of these plantations were likely worked by dozens rather than hundreds of slaves (Fitts 1996). Given that his project did not involve the recovery of artifacts through excavation, Fitts focused his analysis on what he called the landscapes of northern bondage. His goal was to explore the commonly held—though largely untested—wisdom that the slaveholders of the North were somehow more benevolent to their captives and that this benevolence was the direct result of the more intimate relationships that emerged through sharing domestic space (see Piersen 1988, 25–36, for a summary of this perspective). It was commonly assumed that most enslaved people in the North lived in the main house with the planters and thus were considered members of the household. By analyzing probate documents, including wills and estate inventories, that often defined the spaces in which the enslaved actually lived, Fitts was able to draw a more realistic impression of the landscapes of northern slavery. While he confirmed that some enslaved people did in fact live in the main houses on the Narragansett Plantations, this often meant that people were locked in unheated attics, garrets, and cellars, which could also be cold and damp in the wet and wintry seasons, and certainly were not accepted as equal members of a household. Furthermore, Fitts established that four of the twenty planters whose slave quarters he could identify through historical documents used separate buildings to house the enslaved. The ambiguity of some of the documents led Fitts to hypothesize that as many as seven of the twenty plantations he was able to identify in the documents likely had separate quarters for the enslaved workers. Thus, nearly a third of the Narragansett Plantations featured separate quarters to house enslaved workers. This conclusion certainly contrasted with the received wisdom about the benevolence of domestic servitude in New England (Fitts 1996, 1998).

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Critical Community Archaeology: The African Burial Ground

The best archaeological evidence so far recovered that can be used to interpret the lives of the urban enslaved comes from the famous New York African Burial Ground project. The African Burial Ground was a momentous project. Although the consulting archaeologists who began the project were aware that a cemetery had once existed on the proposed site of a new federal office building in New York, they made the rather fateful assumption that few if any burials would be encountered because they must have been destroyed or removed through the centuries. The vast number of well-preserved skeletons on the site stunned the archaeologists and the city’s African American community, and significant and intentional changes to the initial research plan were put into place, including the analysis of the materials by noted African American scholars in the fields of skeletal biology, archaeology, and history (LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Statistical Research, Inc. 2009). The importance of this project lies not only in the magnitude of the scientific study but also in the incorporation of community stakeholders in every phase of the project, an approach that can be characterized as critical community archaeology. In all, the remains of over 400 people were removed from the footprint of the federal office building, analyzed, and reinterred. The analysis of the skeletal material, grave offerings, and burial artifacts provides an unprecedented view into the lives of people who were enslaved in eighteenthcentury New York. The documentary and archaeological evidence suggest that from 1712 to 1795, several thousand Africans and their descendants were buried in the cemetery, a fact that in itself reveals the scope of slavery in New York. At its peak in the late eighteenth century, nearly a quarter of New York’s population was enslaved and a greater percentage of the European-descended population in New York owned slaves than their contemporaries in Virginia or South Carolina. As much as 40 percent of New York’s households kept enslaved workers (Statistical Research, Inc. 2009, 39). As would be expected in an urban context such as New York, relatively few enslaved people performed agricultural work in the city, but the owners of outlying farms in greater New York did enslave agricultural workers. In the city, women, children, and some men were enslaved as household and domestic servants. Many were directly employed in the various trades and occupations that supported New York’s ever-expanding commercial economy in shipyards and rope walks, in lumberyards and

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breweries, as coopers and blacksmiths, as longshoremen and sailors. African-descended people were enslaved in colonial New York to complete nearly every conceivable task of labor (Medford, Brown, Heywood, and Thornton 2009a, 2009b; Statistical Research, Inc. 2009, 39). The engagement of the descendant community, who at first appeared on the scene as protestors, developed into a critical community partnership, serving both as a reminder that the subjects of archaeological investigation often hold deep meaning for communities and as a model for how to incorporate community stakeholders in our interpretations of the past. Much more about this important site will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Conclusion

The presence and prevalence of slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the imaginary border between the slave and free states that runs along the southern border of Pennsylvania, is no longer in dispute. Archaeological projects conducted in a variety of contexts, from remote rural communities such as eighteenth-century Parting Ways and nineteenth-century Skunk Hollow to densely packed urban centers such as New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, clearly demonstrate the diversity of lives lived in the shadow of slavery. Archaeological projects conducted over the decades on sites such as these have shed significant light on the conditions of northern slavery, the struggle to end racial bondage, and the strenuous efforts of many people to establish free lives within a racist society. The archaeology of African American life in the Northeast has come a long way since the Bullens first stumbled upon the ruin of Lucy Foster’s house. Before delving deeper into the insights archaeologists have contributed to our understanding of northern slavery and freedom, however, it is useful to first review the history of the insidious institution as it existed north of the line.

2 The History of Slavery in the “Free” States

In 2017, a poll jointly conducted by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago found that 73 percent of Americans believed that “a culture established by the country’s early European immigrants” was moderately to extremely important to US national identity. Thirty-three percent indicated that such a culture was either extremely or very important to contemporary American national identity (AP-NORC 2017). The historic cultures in question, which were primarily from northwestern Europe, shared a number of similarities, including the firm belief that non-Christian people could be legally and morally held in bondage and could be exploited and exchanged as chattel property. The early European cultures of North America were further convinced that the Bible condoned the kind of human bondage they exercised. Within a scant few decades of their establishment, the economies Europeans built in early America were dependent on slavery, both as a means of providing continuous labor on farms, in households, and in cities and as a profitable form of commerce. Acquiring and selling human beings was one of the most lucrative businesses a person could engage in. Raising food provisions for the expansive plantation economy of the circum-Caribbean was another. Although the elites of the southern colonies and states would eventually exploit millions of enslaved people, American slavery was not born in the tobacco fields of Virginia or the rice plantations of the Carolina Low Country but in the villages of Puritan New England and on the streets of Dutch New Amsterdam, the settlement that would eventually become New York City. Northern slavery was both an urban and rural phenomenon. In the cities, enslaved people worked at heavy labor in shipyards, warehouses, ropewalks, and mills; in households, they worked as maids and valets,

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cooks and gardeners. In rural contexts, people were enslaved to work on farms and northern plantations. It is common knowledge that slavery was prevalent in the tobacco-, rice-, and sugar-cultivating colonies of the eighteenth-century Chesapeake Tidewater, the Carolina Low Country, and the Gulf Coast. It is also well known that by the early nineteenth century, the system of captive labor had extended to cotton production throughout much of what is today known as the Deep South. Although the political border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the famous Mason-Dixon Line, has traditionally been the cognitive boundary between the so-called slave and free states, slavery existed in many states north of Maryland well into the nineteenth century and thousands of African Americans were born into slavery in those regions. Before delving deeper into the archaeology of northern slavery, it behooves us to first review the scope of the institution in the Northeast. Slavery was introduced early to the Northeast and ended there later than many might assume. The institution existed throughout New England and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. From the Gulf of Maine to Delaware Bay, Dutch merchants, Swedish farmers, and English Puritans and Quakers established economies that relied on slave labor. In each of these contexts, enslaved people developed communities and for centuries struggled to establish and maintain their right to be free. New England

The year 1619 is occasionally cited as the beginning of America’s entry into the African slave trade. In that year, a group of about eighteen Africans disembarked from a Dutch ship at Jamestown, then the ramshackle capital of the London Company of Virginia, a private joint-stock company chartered to turn a profit from colonizing the New World. While it is true that these people were transported from Africa to be enslaved, the Spanish slave ship on which they were being transported had been captured by the Dutch and the enslaved people on board were taken as prizes of war. In Jamestown, the Africans were sold into indentured servitude, which meant that they were to be freed at the end of a specified term of years. In this they were little different from the European men, women, and children who were also indentured servants in the opening years of the colonization of Virginia. Many of them had themselves been kidnapped or otherwise coerced into New World servitude (Parent 2003; Morgan

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 33

2003) and like their African counterparts were exchanged as commodities between people of wealth (Clemens 2011; Delle 2014; Morgan 2003; Galenson 1981; Shannon 2017; Watson 2014). Just a few years later, the Puritan colonies of New England began a process of systematically enslaving indigenous peoples. Although captives had been sporadically taken into slavery nearly from the beginning of English contact with the northeastern coast, race-based slavery in what would become the United States had perhaps its true beginning in the Pequot War of 1637, in which the colonists of Massachusetts and Connecticut—along with their indigenous allies—fought a devastating war against the Pequot nation (Newell 2015). A distinguishing characteristic of the Pequot War was the intentional capture, by English colonists and their Native American allies, of indigenous men, women, and children for the purpose of enslaving them, both to be bonded into labor in New England and for sale as laborers into the burgeoning English colonies of Bermuda and Providence Island (Moore [1866] 1968). A year later, in 1638, the Desire docked at Boston with a cargo that included enslaved Africans purchased in Barbados, the first recorded landing of African slaves in New England. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first of the English mainland colonies to legalize the institution of slavery. Over the course of the seventeenth century, New Englanders proceeded to capture and enslave thousands of indigenous people, setting the stage for enslaving war captives from other places, including Africa (Newell 2015; Warren 2016). The 1641 Massachusetts code establishing slavery was put to the test in 1645, presaging the legal conflicts slavery would engender for the next two centuries. In that year, the crew of a Boston ship joined with the crews of several London ships in a slave-raiding expedition on the coast of Africa. Unloading a cannon from one of the vessels, the ships’ crews attacked a village, killed a number of inhabitants, and divided the survivors between them as prisoners of war. Two survivors were carried to Boston as slaves. As war captives, these people would be considered legally enslaved. However, in Boston, a judicial review concluded that the captives had not been taken as prisoners of war but had been illegally kidnapped, on the Sabbath no less, and ordered the “owners” to return them to Africa (Moore [1866] 1968, 29–30). In the mid-1640s, colonial authorities in New England contemplated engaging in a war against the indigenous Narragansett people in order to take war captives to exchange in the Caribbean for enslaved

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Africans. The thought was that displaced Africans would be easier to control than Narragansetts, whose established kin networks and knowledge of the landscape provided ready avenues for resistance and escape (Newell 2015, 52–53). The enslavement of indigenous peoples for the purposes of deportation and sale from New England escalated during the great upheaval of 1676, commonly known in New England as King Phillip’s War (Newell 2015, 139ff). The economy of the Atlantic world changed significantly after 1654. In that year, the Portuguese reconquered their Brazilian colonies from the Dutch. When they did so, they expelled the sizeable Jewish community from Brazil. The English welcomed some of the expelled Jews to Barbados because they had the knowledge and capital needed to establish a sugar industry on that island. That industry quickly spread throughout the West Indies (Dunn 2000). The sugar revolution in the Caribbean had a deep impact on the colonies in New England, which quickly became enmeshed in the transatlantic commerce known as the triangular trade. New England merchants shipped raw materials, including foodstuffs, directly to Barbados, often in return for slaves (Dunn 2000; Higman 2000). In the early years of the sugar revolution, New England vessels sailed directly to the coast of Africa to trade for slaves, a commerce that was more difficult for them to pursue after 1660, when the British Crown granted the Royal African Company a monopoly on the British slave trade in Africa. Nonetheless, New England merchants persisted in the trade, both by smuggling captives into the many small coastal cities of the region and by trading in Barbados and elsewhere for slaves. All the while, African captives—whether they were from the Caribbean or were directly from Africa—continued to land in New England, where they were enslaved as agricultural workers, as artisans, as urban laborers, and as domestic servants (McManus 2001; Warren 2016). Historians estimate that by 1715, there were 4,150 African-descended people in New England out of a total population of 158,000 (Greene 1966, 73). In the early eighteenth century, colonists on both sides of Long Island Sound established provisioning estates; in Rhode Island these were known as plantations and on Long Island they were known as manors. By the 1750s, in the southern region of Rhode Island, nearly one out of every four people was enslaved, mostly on provisioning plantations. Similar establishments were located in Connecticut and Massachusetts (Fitts 1996; McManus 2001; Piersen 1988).

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 35

In early eighteenth-century Connecticut, slavery was a largely agricultural concern and the institution took time to take root. In 1709, the governor of the colony reported that in a total population of 4,000, there were only 110 white indentured and black enslaved servants in the colony. By 1730, the number had grown to 700 blacks and it quickly increased after that. By 1756, 3,000 enslaved people were living in Connecticut, distributed fairly evenly across the counties of the colony: 854 lived in Hartford, 829 lived in New London, 226 lived in New Haven, 711 lived in Fairfield, 345 lived in Windham, and 54 lived in Litchfield (Greene 1966, 91). By 1774, the colony’s 6,464 African and African-descended people were increasingly concentrated in the urban centers of the counties of New London (2,036), Hartford (1,215), and Fairfield (1,214) (Greene 1966, 89). Within these counties, slavery was most prevalent in the commercial towns of New London, Connecticut’s chief seaport (522), Stonington (456), Groton (360), Stratford (354), Fairfield (319), New Haven (273), Middletown (198), and Hartford (150). Colchester, primarily an agricultural town, also had significant black population (201) (Greene 1966, 93). As the trade in sugar, slaves, and provisioning commodities matured in the eighteenth century, New England merchants accumulated great wealth. Newport, Rhode Island, became the center of North America’s slave trade. From 1726 to 1750, 126 slave ships embarked from Newport and transported over 16,000 slaves to slave markets in places such as Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina. Newport merchant ships transported many enslaved people to New England and New York. They also brought large numbers of Africans directly to Newport; by 1755, African people constituted 26 percent of the city’s population (ClarkPujara 2009, 56). By the opening decades of the eighteenth century, Atlantic commerce was dominated by the triangular trade that brought sugar and its byproducts rum and molasses from the Caribbean into North America and Europe, European manufactured goods such as guns and iron work into North America and the Caribbean, and North American goods such as food and forest products into the Caribbean and Europe. Slavery was at the center of this trade. Harsh conditions on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil consumed millions of enslaved workers, whose lives were often cut short by overwork and malnutrition. Sugar plantations demanded a constant supply of enslaved workers to replace those who died so quickly, and merchants from both sides of the Atlantic were eager to

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supply Caribbean slave markets with the human commodities they so greedily demanded. New Englanders participated in the slave system in numerous ways, including by supplying food and other supplies to the West Indies and bringing enslaved people that they had received in exchange back to the Northeast. The African and African American population, of both free and enslaved people, continued to grow. By the 1770s, there were 16,000 black people in New England. Connecticut led with an estimated 6,464 in 1774, Massachusetts had an estimated 5,249 in 1776, Rhode Island had an estimated 3,761 in 1774, New Hampshire had 541 in 1775, and Vermont had eighteen in 1771 (Greene 1966, 74, 79). With the exception of Jamaica, the Caribbean sugar islands the British controlled were relatively small. Because the arable land was dominated by sugarcane fields, plantation owners on these islands had to import food to keep hundreds of thousands of workers alive long enough to realize a return on their investment. The plantations and farms of New England, on Long Island, and in the Hudson Valley of New York were crucial sources of these foodstuffs. Plantations in New England thus tended to focus on export food production. Although some tobacco was grown in the Connecticut River Valley, tobacco and other more familiar plantation crops such as sugar, rice, cotton, and indigo did not grow well in the Northeast. The plantations in Rhode Island and Connecticut focused on producing agricultural provisions to be sold on the global market, in large measure to feed the enslaved communities further south and in the Caribbean. Plantation owners in these colonies focused on producing cereal grains, preserved beef, and cheese for export. The number of people enslaved on these plantations was modest compared to the great tobacco and rice plantations of the eighteenth-century South. Fitts concludes that while on average there were four enslaved workers on these estates, larger plantations enslaved ten to twenty workers (Fitts 1996). There were exceptions to this general rule; Piersen (1988, 44) reports that at least one large Rhode Island slaveholder, Abraham Redwood, owned 238 slaves in 1766, 182 of whom were employed as field hands. Slave-based agricultural labor was also practiced in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. In the first half of the eighteenth century, what is now the inner ring of Boston suburbs was dominated by farms, many of which were worked by enslaved field hands (Chan 2007a, 138). In rural Middlesex County, which is located to the north and west of Boston, 359 enslaved

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 37

workers were dispersed throughout the towns and villages of the country by the middle of the eighteenth century (Chan 2007a, 83). Slavery was also an urban phenomenon in eighteenth-century New England. By the turn of the eighteenth century, slavery was well established in Boston, New England’s largest city. As we have seen, the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers of Boston introduced the practice of African slavery as early as 1638, a mere eight years after Boston was founded. By the end of the seventeenth century, enslaved and free African Americans constituted 6 percent of Boston’s population. One historian estimates that by 1708, some 400 enslaved people lived in the city, many of whom had been transported as slaves from the West Indies (Bower 1991, 59). By 1754, over 1,000 African Americans were living in Boston, about 600 of whom were enslaved (Akers 1975; Levesque 1994, 75; Piersen 1988). In the eighteenth century, approximately one-third of all enslaved people in Massachusetts lived in Boston, an urbanizing trend that was common throughout New England. In New Hampshire, one-third of the colony’s slaves lived in the coastal city of Portsmouth by the mid-eighteenth century; by that time, half of Rhode Island’s enslaved population lived in the city of Newport (Berlin 1998, 58). In the early stages of the Revolutionary War, the British occupied Boston. When the Patriot army forced the British to evacuate the city in March 1776, one-third of the black population went with the British because they had been promised liberty in exchange for their loyalty to the Crown. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the remaining black population of the city was augmented by the in-migration of formerly enslaved laborers from rural areas who were emancipated by a judicial decision in 1783 that ruled that slavery was inconsistent with the state constitution of 1780. The population grew again as refugees from the Haitian Revolution and self-emancipated people from slave states found their way into the city (Bower 1991; Horton and Horton 1999; Nash 1979). By 1825, over 1,900 African American people were living in Boston; by 1861, that number had grown to over 2,300 (Levesque 1994, 88). African Americans have remained a significant presence in Boston; in 2017, Blacks constituted nearly 30 percent of the city’s population (United States Census Bureau 2017).

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New York

In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, located on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, were willing to use enslaved African labor as they established their colony. Finding it difficult to keep European servants employed in agricultural work, the Dutch turned to the importation of enslaved labor early. The first enslaved people in New Amsterdam may have arrived as early as 1626 (Dewulf 2017, 41; Medford, Brown, Heywood, and Thornton 2009a, 6). By 1638, there were 100 Africans and people of African descent in New Amsterdam; they constituted nearly 30 percent of the new colony’s population (Berlin 1998, 51). After the 1640s, the Dutch West India Company began regularly supplying the colony with enslaved laborers, carrying at least 467 enslaved people into the colony before the Netherlands capitulated to the English in 1664. By that time, slaves made up 20 percent of the city’s population. While most of New York’s enslaved population lived on Manhattan Island, slavery extended throughout the colony, stretching north along the Hudson River and east on Long Island (Berlin 1998, 51). By 1698, at least 20 percent of the population of eastern Long Island was black, and many of these people were likely enslaved on agricultural estates (Berlin 1998). Slavery in seventeenth-century New York was complex. During the Dutch period (1624–1664), when the town was known as New Amsterdam, the Dutch forcibly brought hundreds of people to Manhattan to be sold into slavery from Africa and the West Indies. Many of these remained attached to the Dutch West India Company, who housed them in barracks and put them to work under the supervision of an overseer on public projects in the town and on agricultural estates on its periphery (Berlin 1998, 51; Dewulf 2017, 41). Enslaved men performed a variety of tasks, such as clearing forests, splitting logs, burning lime, harvesting crops, constructing military installations, and providing military service to protect the town against the region’s indigenous people. The records indicate that most enslaved women were employed in domestic work (Medford, Brown, Heywood, and Thornton 2009b, 15). At the same time, some free Africans lived in New Amsterdam and had most of the same civil liberties as their Dutch neighbors, including the right to own land. In between enslaved people and free black landowners were men given half freedom. The half free were granted civil liberties and access to land for their own use so long as they paid an annual tax to the Dutch West India Company

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 39

and agreed to provide services or manual labor when the company called them to (Berlin and Harris 2005). As early as the mid-seventeenth century, families of African descent congregated together, creating New York’s first African and African American neighborhoods. Many manumitted people acquired land and prospered. Even those who remained enslaved enjoyed the right to own property (Berlin 1998, 52–53). Although securing freedom was a difficult prospect, by 1664, one in five blacks in New Amsterdam had done so (Berlin 1998, 52). As the seventeenth century progressed and the economic base of New Amsterdam shifted from fur to agriculture, the owners of the enslaved population changed to individual property owners instead of the Dutch West India Company (Berlin 1998, 53). In 1664, the British seized New Amsterdam and renamed the town New York. At the time, approximately 700 blacks were living in the town (Medford, Brown, and Carrington 2009, 25). The English rescinded many of the rights of blacks, including property rights. These restrictions grew more severe after a 1712 uprising of the black and white working class precipitated the vengeful persecution of the city’s black population (Berlin 1998; Harris 2003). Restrictions were further tightened after another interracial insurrection was launched in 1741 (Harris 2003). Within a few decades of British annexation, New York was the largest of the northern slaveholding colonies. The enslaved population increased to 9,000 in 1746 and to 13,000 in 1756. Enslaved populations existed in colonial New York’s three regions: New York City and its environs, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. In Suffolk County, which included all of Long Island east of Queens County, 10 percent of the population was enslaved by the middle of the eighteenth century, some 500 people. In 1771, more than 20 percent of Queens County, at the western end of Long Island, was enslaved, accounting for 3,000 people. In neighboring Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, 30 percent of the population was enslaved; on Staten Island, 20 percent was enslaved. Albany County had nearly 4,000 slaves by the early 1770s, the largest enslaved population in the Hudson Valley. Twenty percent of the population of Ulster County and 15 percent of the population of Westchester County was enslaved by the middle of the eighteenth century (Gellman 2006, 18–21; Harris 2003). Several months after they evacuated Boston in March 1776, British forces entered and occupied New York. Encouraged by a 1775

40 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

Table 2.1. Enslaved people in New York State according to the 1790 and 1800 US censuses by county Richmond Kings Queens Suffolk New York City and County Westchester Dutchess Orange Ulster Columbia Albany Montgomery Washington Clinton Ontario Rockland Rensselaer Green Tioga Steuben Cayuga Onondaga Saratoga Otsego Delaware Herkimer Oneida Chenango Washington Schoharie

1790

1800

759 1,432 2,309 1,098 2,369 1,419 1,856 966 2,906 1,623 3,924 588 47 17 11

675 1,479 1,528 886 2,868 1,259 1,609 1,145 2,257 1,471 1,808 466 80 58 57 551 890 520 17 22 53 11 358 48 16 61 50 16 80 354

Source: United States Census Office (1793, 36–41); United States Department of State (1801, 32–33).

proclamation made by Lord Dunmore, then the colonial governor of Virginia, that granted freedom to any enslaved person who joined the British cause against the rebellious American colonies, freedom-seeking black refugees flooded into New York. The British military quickly put them to work at tasks that included raiding Patriot houses for moveable property,

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 41

performing manual and domestic labor, and even prostitution, paying the newly emancipated laborers wages equal to what their white counterparts earned. At war’s end, 4,000 African Americans left New York for England, Canada, and West Africa (Harris 2003). Despite this exodus, the African and African American population of New York continued to grow. In 1790, census takers counted over 21,000 enslaved people in the state of New York, concentrated in the city and the surrounding counties in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island. In 1799, New York passed its first gradual emancipation act. As the nineteenth century progressed, African American communities sprang up throughout the metropolitan area. Despite the attempts of some to expand slavery in central and western New York, slavery was effectively abolished in the state in 1827 (Zilversmit 1967). On the eve of the Civil War, the African American population of the state of New York, numbered just over 49,000 people (United States Census Office 1864, 325) (Table 2.1). Pennsylvania

Slavery in Pennsylvania began in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Delaware Valley was under the control of the Dutch. African slaves toiled in the Delaware Valley as early as 1639. Both Dutch and Swedish colonists used slaves on their farms that the Dutch West India Company provided (Nash and Soderlund 1991, 8–11). In the 1680s, William Penn founded his Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. Although Quakers were ambivalent about slavery, many owned Africans to provide labor on their estates, including William Penn himself, who at one point owned at least twelve slaves (Nash and Soderlund 1991, 12; Turner 1911). In November 1684, around 150 Africans disembarked from the Isabella to be sold into slavery in Philadelphia. The seller was a Quaker merchant working for the house of Charles Jones and Company of Bristol, England (Nash and Soderlund 1991, 10). Of the twenty-seven slaveholders known to have died in Philadelphia by 1701, twenty were Quakers (Nash and Soderlund 1991, 11). Slavery thus existed in Philadelphia from its founding in the late seventeenth century, and the number of enslaved people in the city grew as Philadelphia matured as a commercial seaport. By 1710, 20 percent of Philadelphia’s population was enslaved, the majority having been transported to the city from the Caribbean. Although initially the wealthiest Philadelphians owned most of the city’s slaves, probate inventories

42 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

suggest that by 1750, nearly half of the city’s property owners owned human property. By the 1760s, 40 percent of the enslaved population of the city toiled for middling tradesmen and artisans (Berlin 1998, 179; Nash and Soderland 1991). Although Philadelphia did not rely on enslaved laborers as heavily as New York did, by the 1760s, 20 percent of the working population in the city were enslaved people of African descent. At its height, the enslaved population numbered about 1,400. By the 1770s, only a handful of Philadelphians owned more than ten slaves. The majority of enslaved people in the urban center worked as dockworkers, semi-skilled or skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen, and in domestic service (Nash 1988, 8–10). Mortality rates in Philadelphia’s African American community were high and birth rates were low. Despite the fact that growing numbers of property owners were manumitting enslaved people in their wills, the free black population probably numbered fewer than 600 people by the end of the American Revolution (Nash 1988, 36). Slavery was also a rural phenomenon in Pennsylvania. By 1765, about two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s 5,500 slaves lived and toiled outside the city of Philadelphia. Like their counterparts to the north, many enslaved people in Pennsylvania toiled on agricultural estates. Others were put to work in the burgeoning iron industry of Pennsylvania, often laboring alongside European indentured servants in the difficult work of cutting down Pennsylvania’s old growth forests and rendering ancient wood into charcoal to fuel the growing number of iron furnaces (Berlin 1998, 57). Known in the eighteenth century as iron plantations, such establishments could control as much as 10,000 acres of woodland (Litwack 1961; Osborne 2005; Wax 1967). As the eighteenth century progressed, wealthy agriculturalists in Pennsylvania increasingly turned to slave labor. In rural Chester County, the number of landowners who employed slaves rose from less than 4 percent in the 1710s to nearly 20 percent by the end of the 1760s. In Lancaster County, the number of enslaved workers increased eight-fold in the period 1759–1780. These trends were common in the agricultural counties of Pennsylvania. Ira Berlin has characterized the slave population of rural Pennsylvania as “the largest element in the rural labor force” in that colony on the eve of the American Revolution (Berlin 1998, 181). Although the enslaved population of Philadelphia decreased during the chaos of the Revolution, the number increased in the colony’s rural

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 43

counties, both in the Delaware Valley and farther west. In the early 1780s, there were approximately 1,400 enslaved people in Montgomery, Delaware, Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia Counties, located in the Delaware Valley outside the city of Philadelphia (Nash and Soderland 1991, 5). In 1780, 580 people were enslaved in Bucks County alone, just north of Philadelphia (Blockson 2001, 99). Another 840 or so toiled in Lancaster County, which included what is now Dauphin County until 1785. Approximately 800 were enslaved in York and Adams Counties, 1,150 in Franklin, Perry, and Cumberland Counties, and nearly 1,150 in the far western counties, near what is now Pittsburgh (Nash and Soderland 1991, 5). During the early phase of the Revolutionary War, 15,000 British troops occupied Philadelphia. Although this lasted only from September 1777 to June 1778, the presence of the British occupation force greatly disrupted the city, including its African American population. Some African Americans fled the city in the chaotic days leading up to the occupation, many escaping slavery, others fleeing to protect their freedom. Some fled to the British, seeking protection from enslavement by joining the British cause. Some left with the British army for New York in the summer of 1778, when the occupying force left Philadelphia. By the war’s end in the early 1780s, only a few hundred people were still enslaved in the city, while hundreds of formerly enslaved Philadelphians formed the core of what would become a growing and vibrant community in the nineteenth century. By 1840, the black population of Philadelphia exceeded 10,000 (Nash 1988, 38–65). Philadelphia became a primary destination for formerly enslaved people from the South seeking to create new lives in a northern city (McCarthy 1997; Rankin-Hill 1997, 51). On the eve of the Civil War, there were nearly 57,000 African Americans in Pennsylvania, a number greater than any other of the northern states (United States Census Office 1864, xiii). New Jersey

As was the case in New York and Pennsylvania, Dutch colonists introduced slavery to New Jersey. After New Jersey became an English possession in the 1660s, land policy encouraged slavery: the Crown gave 150 acres to settlers for each male slave or indentured servant they brought into the colony and 75 acres for each female (Hodges 1999, 44). This land policy attracted a number of planters from Barbados, who settled in New Jersey with enslaved people they brought with them from the West Indies.

44 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

Table 2.2. Enslaved population of the northern states according to the US census returns, 1790–1860 1790 Vermont 16 New Hampshire 157 Maine 0 Massachusetts 0 Rhode Island 958 Connecticut 2648 New York 21,193 New Jersey 11,423 Pennsylvania 3707 TOTAL 40,370

1800

1810

1820

1830

0 0 0 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 380 108 48 951 310 97 20,613 15,017 10,088 12,442 10,851 7,557 1706 795 211 36,092 27,081 18,001

0 3 0 0 17 25 75 2,254 403 2,774

1840 1850 0 1 0 0 5 54 4 674 64 801

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 236 0 236

1860 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 18 0 18

Source: Carter (2006).

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Barbadian planters in New Jersey included John Berry, who owned thirty-two slaves in Bergen County, Lewis Morris who owned over sixty slaves in Monmouth County, and William Sandford and Nathaniel Kingsland, who purchased a 15,000acre tract near New Barbados in Bergen County (Hodges 1999, 44). By the 1720s, there were 2,500 enslaved people in New Jersey, largely centered in the city and environs of Perth Amboy, then the primary seaport of the colony. By the 1740s, the enslaved population approached 4,000, and on the eve of the Revolution, 12 percent of the colonial population of New Jersey was enslaved. In many of the rural communities of northern New Jersey, enslaved laborers outnumbered landless white laborers. By the mid-1700s, enslaved men in Monmouth County outnumbered landless working white men by 262 to 194. In Middlesex County, there were 281 enslaved men and 80 landless white men, and in Bergen County, the numbers were 306 and 8 (Berlin 1998, 181). Enslaved workers labored on a number of agricultural estates in New Jersey in the eighteenth century. Like New York, the state of New Jersey was reluctant to abolish slavery completely and multiple laws were required to finally eradicate this terrible practice. By 1830, more than twothirds of the people who were still enslaved in the North lived in New Jersey (Table 2.2). The abolition legislation New Jersey enacted had many loopholes and at least a handful of people remained enslaved through the beginning of the Civil War (Geismar 1982, 7–8). Even after the war

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 45

began, affluent residents of Bergen County, in the far northeast of the state, sympathized with a faction of the Democratic Party in the North known as Copperheads that opposed abolition and sought a diplomatic solution to the conflict between the states. It should come as no surprise that some residents of Bergen County opposed abolition. In 1800, the federal census recorded that more than 12,000 people were enslaved in New Jersey and that Bergen County was the state’s leading slaveholding county (Geismar 1982, 8). Slavery formally ended in New Jersey in 1846, but for many people this was merely a semantic trick played, for children of enslaved mothers were indentured servants for life (Hodges 1999; 2018; United States Department of State 1801, 2). The Complex Political Question of Slavery

By the turn of the nineteenth century, slavery was legal in some states but not in others, a contradiction that enflamed sectionalism and eventually led to the Civil War. As the century progressed, the number of states in the union increased, perilously complicating the question of slavery at the federal level. As the federal government made a fateful series of decisions that affected African Americans in the Northeast at this time, it is worth briefly reviewing some of the more important ones here. Slavery was a complex political question during the Revolution and its aftermath. Popular and legal attitudes toward slavery had already begun to shift before the Revolution. In 1754, Philadelphia Quakers took one of the first significant steps toward ending slavery in the North. After a period of debate, the influential Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends cautioned its members—meaning all Quakers in the colony of Pennsylvania—against trading or owning slaves, in effect prohibiting slaveholding among Pennsylvania Quakers. A similar attitude toward bondage slowly set in among Quakers in southern New Jersey, and at least one Friends’ meeting, the Salem Quarter, declared itself free of slaveowners in 1778 (Sheridan 2017). In the immediate post-revolutionary era, southern slaveowners and northern idealists alike debated whether the existence of slavery was compatible with the ideal of individual liberty of the new republic. The ratification of the Constitution of the United States in 1788 transformed the question of whether slavery would continue from a local to a federal issue. Without using the terms “slave” or “slavery,” the Constitution

46 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

tacitly recognized the existence of slavery in the infamous three-fifths rule. In a compromise designed to create a balance of power between the less populous South and more populous North, this rule allowed slaveholding states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population toward the overall state population for the purposes of determining each state’s allocation of seats in the US House of Representatives, even though those enslaved people could not vote. Although the Constitution contained a provision to end the African slave trade by 1808, it remained silent on the issue of emancipation. The question of whether slavery would be perpetuated was pushed to a future generation. The sectional division between North and South that culminated in the Civil War hinged on how the states and the federal government handled the question of slavery. Before the Constitution was ratified, each of the former colonies considered itself an independent nation that had the right to determine whether slavery would remain legal within its borders. Vermont and Massachusetts (which at the time included what is now the state of Maine) abolished slavery in 1777 and 1783, respectively. Most of the other northeastern states began to slowly end slavery following a system of gradual emancipation that typically granted freedom to enslaved people or their children who were born after a specified date, often only when a child born into slavery was well into adulthood. Under this system, people of African descent were legally enslaved in New York until 1827; in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania into the 1840s; and in New Jersey and New Hampshire until 1865, when slavery was abolished with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the entirety of the United States (Gigantino 2015; Miller and Smith 1997, 471). In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance formalized the definition of “free” North and “slave” South by prohibiting slavery northwest of the Ohio River. As each new state was organized and established, the question of whether it would allow slavery was of primary concern to politicians in Washington. Up through the 1810s, the balance between slave and free states was relatively easy to maintain: the Union comprised nine slave and nine free states. The passage of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 began the federal government’s decades-long attempt to allow slavery in territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase while simultaneously maintaining the precarious political balance of power that existed between states where slavery was legal and states where it was prohibited.

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 47

Congress resolved the debate about whether Missouri should enter the union as a slave state with a carefully constructed compromise in which Missouri was admitted as a slave state while Maine was admitted as a free state. Importantly, however, slavery would also be prohibited in any remaining territory acquired through the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern border of Missouri, which in effect extended the division of the United States into a slaveholding South and a free soil North further westward (Berlin 2015; Foner 2014). The fragile balance of power the Missouri Compromise crafted held until the late 1840s. In 1848, the Mexican War ended with the defeated Mexico ceding large territories to the United States. Political debate at the federal level once again hinged on whether slavery would be expanded into newly acquired western territories. As had been the case in 1820, Congress debated compromise legislation designed to maintain the federal balance of power. The resulting Compromise of 1850 allowed California to be admitted as a free state. Texas was annexed as a slave state and the remaining territories acquired from Mexico would be allowed to determine the legality of slavery through local legislation, a process known as popular sovereignty. In addition, slave trading was outlawed in the District of Columbia, although the institution of slavery remained legal there (Berlin 2015; Foner 2014). The final bill that passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, was perhaps the most directly relevant to African American people living in the Northeast. By the provisions of this act, any slaveholder could claim an African American person located in another state, including free states, as their legal property on the strength only of a signed affidavit attesting that the person in question was their slave. The accused “fugitive slave” had no right to a jury trial and could not even testify on their own behalf at a hearing. The law mandated stiff fines and even jail sentences for anyone caught aiding a person identified as a fugitive slave. Any federal marshal who refused to apprehend an alleged fugitive slave or allowed such a person to escape from their custody was subject to a large fine (Blackett 2018; Campbell 1970; Foner 2015; Murphy 2016). The Compromise of 1850 did much to undermine the rights of African Americans in the Northeast. As Solomon Northrup described in his famous memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, free African Americans in the Northeast were subject to kidnapping and transportation to be sold into slavery

48 · Part I. The Problem of Northern Slavery

in southern states. Kidnapping raids became commonplace in border states, and many northerners who had been somewhat ambivalent about the question of slavery opposed the draconian measures the Fugitive Slave Act dictated (Murphy 2016). The US Supreme Court further eroded African American civil rights with its Dred Scott Decision in 1857. Dred Scott, a man who had been born into slavery in Virginia, was eventually sold to an Army surgeon named John Emerson in St. Louis, who took Scott with him into the free state of Illinois and later into the Wisconsin territory, where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Years later, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that he could not be held as a slave in a free territory. After several trials, the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which decided that no person who was descended from African slaves, whether he or she had been born free or enslaved, had the right to be a citizen of the United States and thus did not have the right to sue for anything in any federal court, let alone their freedom (Finkelman 2016; Fehrenbacker 1978, 2001). On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States at the head of a Republican ticket whose platform asserted that slavery should not be expanded into the western territories the United States had acquired after the Mexican War. The election was sectionally divisive. Lincoln won all of the electoral votes from the free states of the North; the votes of the Deep South went to John C. Breckenridge, a southern Democrat; the Upper South states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia voted for John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party; and Missouri voted for northern Democrat Stephen Douglas. The election of Lincoln precipitated a constitutional crisis. By February 1861, seven slave states had seceded from the union, forming a new Confederate government at Montgomery, Alabama. Within several months, four other states seceded and joined the newly declared Confederate States of America. As this newly declared government attempted to seize federal property within the borders of member states, tensions grew to the point of war. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, a federal installation on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Four bloody years of Civil War followed, the result of which was the defeat of the Confederacy and a definitive end to slavery in the United States. In the aftermath of the war, the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery throughout the territory of the United States (Thirteenth Amendment,

The History of Slavery in the “Free” States · 49

ratified 1865), to guarantee citizenship and equal protection of the law for all people regardless of race (Fourteenth Amendment, ratified 1868), and to establish voting rights for people regardless of race or former enslavement (Fifteenth Amendment, ratified 1870). Although racism did not end with the capitulation of the Confederate States of America at the conclusion of the Civil War, the ratification of these three amendments to the Constitution ended race-based slavery in the United States and created the legal framework necessary to move American society ever closer to the elusive goal of sustained racial equality. Conclusion

Far from being a rare or scattered phenomenon, slavery existed throughout the northern states from the seventeenth century. For nearly two and half centuries, African American people in the Northeast lived in a society that permitted racially defined chattel slavery. Even where slavery was not permitted, the threat of violence and kidnapping into slavery hung over African American people in the northern states. Even under these conditions, people created full lives, some attaining measures of affluence and security, others remaining in dependent states of poverty. Whatever the situation of African Americans, whether they lived in bondage or freedom, archaeology has the power to shed light on their experiences. It is to the stories that archaeologists have been able to tell that we now turn.

II Bondage

3 The Archaeology of Bondage in the Northern States

It is common knowledge that in antebellum North America, enslaved laborers worked the great plantations of the Chesapeake Tidewater, the Carolina Low County, the Gulf Coast, and the Mississippi Valley to create profits for the landed elite of the southern states, a group sometimes called the southern plantocracy. However, like their southern counterparts, the landed elite of the North used slave labor to exploit vast estates that they called plantations. In the North, enslaved laborers worked on these rural estates and in a variety of urban and household contexts. In recent years, archaeologists have excavated a number of sites associated with enslaved people in a variety of different northern contexts, including urban house lots, large-scale agricultural enterprises, and burial grounds (Map 3.1). Archaeological projects conducted in the Northeast have interpreted much about the institution of slavery as it existed there and about the daily lives of those who were enslaved in the plantation North. The seaports of the North were integral to the success of transatlantic trade, including the African slave trade. The archaeological evidence indicates that despite the received wisdom that slavery in the North was more benevolent than in the South, the conditions of northern bondage were in fact harsh and thousands of people struggled against the racial violence in which northern slavery was rooted. The African Burial Ground

The African Burial Ground site is important not only for its archaeological significance in our day but for what it was in its day: a center of social activity under the control of New York’s African population. It was one of

54 · Part II. Bondage

Map 3.1. Map of sites mentioned in Part II. Map by James A. Delle.

the few places in New York City where enslaved and free Africans could engage in their spiritual rituals and cultural practices in relative peace. One of the research questions the African Burial Ground team tried to answer concerned the place of origin of the people interred in the burial ground. The transatlantic slave trade was exceptionally harsh. After being forced to march for days, sometimes covering hundreds of miles, captives would be held in prisons constructed on the coast of Africa, sometimes waiting in dark and unsanitary dungeons for weeks before a slave-trading vessel would anchor. Slave ships would routinely cruise the coast, stopping several times to augment their human cargo. Once on board a ship, enslaved people were often chained below decks for weeks, waiting for the ship to fill its holds and finally embark for the west. Given this historical complexity, it is often difficult to determine an enslaved person’s place of origin using documentary records (Eltis and Richardson 2015). The African Burial Ground bioarchaeological team used dental modification as one way of determining the origins of the people whose

The Archaeology of Bondage in the Northern States · 55

skeletons were recovered. The team identified twenty-six skeletons with ten types of dental modification. These modifications represented cultural practices from ethnic groups in Southeast Africa, West Africa (the Gold Coast), Southwest Africa (Angola and Namibia), and Central Africa (Congo). Chemical analysis of a sample of teeth, craniometric analysis, and some limited DNA analysis corroborated the conclusion that New York’s eighteenth-century African community came from a diversity of cultural and geographical backgrounds from throughout sub-Saharan Africa (Jackson et al. 2004; Goodman et al. 2009). A number of case studies have demonstrated that it is difficult to identify the cultural markers African Americans used in urban contexts to form, project, and negotiate identity (Fennell 2007; Ferguson 1992; Leone et al. 2005). A handful of artifacts are thought to be representative of a diasporic identity. Cowrie shells, blue glass beads, Bakongo cosmograms represented with an X carved on bowls and spoons, and some ritual caches or conjuring bundles are examples that archaeologists have examined (Leone et al. 2005). When dealing with a community that formed from such a wide range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds as New York’s enslaved population, it is well to ask whether there is evidence that a shared identity emerged from the shared experience of the deprivations of forced migration and enslavement. In the case of the African Burial Ground, the archaeologists discovered that there was a surprising uniformity of mortuary treatment and that the range of diversity in how people were buried was actually quite narrow. Nearly all of the skeletons recovered from the African Burial Ground had been buried in individual coffins with their bodies extended and heads pointed west. The evidence suggests that shrouds were commonly used; the bodies were wrapped in a burial cloth that was pinned closed. These practices suggest that the enslaved population of New York may well have been developing a collective African American identity (Perry and Howson 2006). Personal goods were rarely present in the graves and those that were recovered tended to be ornamental jewelry, including rings. Glass beads from necklaces, bracelets, and waistbands were also recovered, mostly originating from Venice, Italy, although it has been proposed that some were of West African manufacture. Several burials included what may have been hidden conjuring bundles or talismans, including at least two with copper artifacts and one with a peach pit, an item commonly found in conjuring bundles in the US South. The most famous of the

56 · Part II. Bondage

grave artifacts was a heart-shaped design that was created by hammering nearly 200 tacks into a coffin lid. Archaeologists have interpreted this as a Sankofa symbol, an Akan symbol thought to tie the living to the ancestors. The chemical analysis of the skeleton’s teeth suggested that the man buried with the Sankofa symbol may have been born in New York, although his teeth had been culturally modified. This particular burial may symbolize the connection the enslaved community had to their African traditions during their cultural transition to diasporic African Americans (Perry and Howson 2006). The skeletal remains of over 400 people provided researchers with an unparalleled opportunity to analyze questions concerning the health and well-being of the enslaved population of urban New York. Biological anthropologists can infer how the processes of malnutrition, disease, and physical stress affected a person through a close analysis of teeth and bone, even when those diseases or traumas were not the cause of death. In the case of the African Burial Ground, archaeologists analyzed enamel hypoplasia—defects in the growth of dental enamel—to learn about periods or chronic episodes of malnutrition or instances of infectious diseases or other forms of physical stress that result in the stunting of the growth of dental enamel during childhood. The study of teeth revealed that 71 percent of the children aged 6.5 years and younger suffered from enamel hypoplasia. In comparing these results with other populations, Michael Blakey and colleagues (2009) concluded that children who were born in slavery in North America suffered more developmental stress than those who were born in Africa and were enslaved later in life, either as children or adults. Children of African descent who were born in North America were also more likely to die at a younger age than those born in Africa (Blakey et al. 2009, 154). Like teeth, human bone can be analyzed to determine the relative health of individuals prior to their death. The investigators discovered that the enslaved population of New York was likely more prone to infectious disease than free populations of people of African descent in the early nineteenth century, such as the community of Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church (discussed below). The rate of disease as discernable in the bones was comparable to that of slaves on southern plantations. Yaws, an Old World disease that is similar to syphilis but is not sexually transmitted, was apparently common in the population. Exposure to yaws may have provided some measure of resistance to syphilis, which leaves discernable

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evidence in bones. Syphilis was indicated in far fewer individuals than would have been predicted for an eighteenth-century population. About half of the skeletons displayed a condition known as porotic hyperostosis, a form of bone lesion generally caused by nutritional disorders such as iron-deficient anemia, rickets, and scurvy. Stress indicators on bones, including evidence of arthritis, indicates that the enslaved people of New York began to exhibit signs of work-related bone and joint damage from an early age. Some individuals as young as 15–24 suffered from stress-induced bone and joint disorders. Although it was difficult to attribute this stress to any specific activity, the researchers concluded that the enslaved people of New York commonly carried heavy loads over uneven surfaces and possibly up and down ladders or stairs, placing significant stress on their musculoskeletal systems. Work was hard and constant for the people enslaved in New York. Enslavement was physically dangerous as well; at least one of the skeletons demonstrated the effects of violence (Null et al. 2009; Wilczak et al. 2009). The Business of Slavery in Newport, Rhode Island

For much of their history, large sectors of the economies of the Northeast were focused on the sea. The cod fishery was central to the economy of colonial Massachusetts. Much of it was exported in the triangular trade to feed the enslaved populations of the Caribbean and southeast. The history of the fishery is celebrated by a five-foot-long wooden codfish, facetiously known in the Bay State as the Sacred Cod, that has hung in the Massachusetts State House since 1780. Local lore contends that the current Sacred Cod is the third one to grace the State House, its predecessors having been lost in a series of adventures. Although a matter of some good-natured self-effacement on the part of Bostonians, it is rarely remembered that the cod fishery was entwined directly with slavery. The New England fishing captains built their fortunes by importing uncounted tons of salt cod into the Caribbean, a crucial source of protein for the enslaved West Indian population. The fisheries were not the only business the fleets of New England plied. One of the most profitable sectors in the commerce of the Atlantic world was, of course, the African slave trade. New England merchants were active in this nefarious commerce, creating vast wealth out of the misery of those sold into lives of captivity and forced labor. Of all New England’s

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seaports, none profited more from the slave trade than Newport, Rhode Island. To contextualize Newport’s importance in the American slave trade, one need only consider that from 1726 to 1750, the 126 slave ships that embarked from Newport transported over 16,000 slaves to the New World colonies. In these same years, the rest of New England combined sent out only thirty-six slave ships that transported fewer than 5,000 captives. Only three slave ships departed from New York during this time, only two from Virginia, and only three from both of the Carolinas (ClarkPujara 2009, 19–36). It thus comes as no surprise that Newport had a significant community of African American people, initially enslaved by the merchants of the city. African and African-descended people worked in homes and warehouses in the port city, accounting for 26 percent of its population by 1755 (Clark-Pujara 2009, 56). In the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery in America expanded on the mainland and in the West Indies. Colonial planters demanded workers, and those laborers required food and clothing. The merchants of Newport were happy to provide plantation owners with enslaved workers, manufactured goods, salt fish, and beef. Newport grew rich on the business of slavery (Clark-Pujara 2016, 2009). Newport’s elites exploited enslaved laborers in their households, in their warehouses, and on their docks. As was the case in several of the Caribbean islands, enslaved people had the legal right to own at least some forms of property. In many contexts planters found it more economical, and often more practical, to provide the time and land the enslaved population needed to grow their own food. They were free to sell any food or other products that they produced, creating an exchange economy that the enslaved themselves controlled (Hauser 2008). In Newport, a strong informal economy developed among the enslaved, who, like their West Indian counterparts, were free to trade land, livestock, and manufactured goods among themselves and to members of the free black community. Even while they were enslaved, some people thus achieved some measure of material prosperity (Benard 2008, 52ff). The Revolutionary War years brought significant change to Newport’s African American community. In 1778, unable to recruit enough white men to the Patriot cause, the revolutionary Rhode Island Assembly offered enslaved men their freedom in exchange for enlistment. Scores of enslaved men joined the 1st Rhode Island Regiment and fought valiantly during the Revolution. When these veterans returned to

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Rhode Island after the war, although freed from their enslavement they faced a life of struggle against racism and poverty in the early republic (Clark-Pujara 2009, 112–115). By the end of the war, the enslaved population of Newport had decreased by about half, to about 600 (Clark-Pujara 2009, 119). In 1784, the government of Rhode Island enacted a gradual abolition law, and in 1787 it abolished the slave trade in the state. By 1790, most of Rhode Island’s enslaved population had been emancipated (ClarkPujara 2009, 148). In the early nineteenth century, the African American population of Newport formed a community that existed on the edge of self-sufficiency and was targeted by episodic acts of racist violence (ClarkPujara 2016). That self-sufficiency was largely dependent on an internal market operated by enslaved men who, despite their bondage, had become small merchants. Akeia Benard has analyzed the intertwined development of race and class in Newport. She provides a vivid description of a smallscale merchant named Caesar Lyndon, who, even though he was enslaved, had money and time enough to take leisure trips by carriage, brokered land and produce deals, and received extravagant gifts from well-traveled friends (Benard 2008, 54–55). Benard demonstrates that despite severe segregation laws, some members of the post-revolution generation purchased land in Newport. The African American community coalesced in a series of enclaves in the city, one of which a newspaper advertisement referred to as “Negro Lane” (Benard 2008, 81). Benard conducted archaeological testing at a house in one of these enclaves that was once owned by Bacchus Overing, a distiller who supplemented his income by subdividing property and selling urban lots. The artifacts recovered included refined ceramics imported from England and locally produced coarse earthenwares most likely used for food preparation and storage. Bernard also recovered a number of bivalve shells, suggesting that Overing either purchased shellfish or caught local mollusks as a food source. The ceramics and shellfish recovered suggest that the occupants of the Bacchus Overing site were establishing some form of self-sufficiency and were actively engaged in the local cash economy and possibly in a barter economy. After analyzing the probate inventories of Newport landowners, Benard concluded that there was no discernable correlation between race and material wealth in Newport. Counterintuitively, it appears that while he was enslaved, Caesar Lyndon, a small merchant, controlled more personal wealth than any of the two dozen free

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black landowners in Newport in the post-revolution era (Benard 2008, 88–97). After the slave trade ended, Newport began a slow but steady economic decline that led to the outflow of many African Americans, many of whom sought employment in the growing industrial towns of the early nineteenth century. Portsmouth’s African Burial Ground

By the early nineteenth century, New England’s economy was becoming increasingly dominated by a few large cities. Boston, long known as the hub of New England, was by far the largest city in the region. The concentration of factory-based production in Massachusetts and Rhode Island led to the development of industrial centers such as Worcester, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. In addition, the growth of mercantile support networks, notably the insurance industry, stimulated the growth of Hartford, Connecticut. The industrial revolution created giant mill towns in places such as Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River in Massachusetts and Providence, Woonsocket, and Pawtucket in Rhode Island. Smaller factory towns dotted the many river courses of interior New England. Before the development of these industrial centers, the secondary settlements of New England included the many seacoast towns that stretched out from the northern shore of Long Island Sound, ranging north and east past Narragansett Bay, Cape Cod, and up into the Gulf of Maine. Like Newport, many of these smaller seaports were engaged in a variety of mercantile activities, including the slave trade. Among these seaports was New Hampshire’s colonial capital, a town formed from a cluster of settlements once known as Strawberry Bank but better known by its modern name of Portsmouth. Although the merchants of Portsmouth were never as deeply involved in the slave trade as their counterparts in Newport, slaves had been present in this coastal town since 1645 (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 16). In 1708, Governor Joseph Dudley reported that there were seventy slaves in the province, most of them likely in Portsmouth and its environs. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century at least five Portsmouthbased sea captains were engaged in the African slave trade, and while most of their cargoes were likely sold as part of the triangular trade in the West Indies and Virginia, occasionally a large number of African people

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would disembark in Portsmouth. For example, in 1756, sixty-one captives were brought to Portsmouth. In 1779, in a remarkable petition to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, twenty enslaved men petitioned for their freedom, asserting that they all had been torn from their African homes and brought to Portsmouth as small children (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 16–18). Although New Hampshire’s enslaved population was much smaller than that of Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island, by 1775 there were 656 enslaved people in New Hampshire (Piersen 1988, 15; Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 19). The majority of these people labored in the immediate environs of Portsmouth. Some were part of communities who worked on large farms. Others worked at a variety of skilled trades; they were potters, coopers, printers, and tailors. Others were engaged in domestic service. Some were part of the larger domestic staffs of wealthy families, while others worked singly or in pairs in the homes of white families of more modest means (Piersen 1988; Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 16–20). New Hampshire’s extended tolerance of slavery contrasted with the situation in the surrounding states. Vermont, as an independent republic, prohibited slavery in its initial constitution of 1777, and that prohibition stood when Vermont was admitted to the Union as the fourteenth state in 1791. Massachusetts and its dependent province of Maine declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783. Although it is thought that Portsmouth’s last captive was emancipated sometime around 1805, slavery was not formally abolished in New Hampshire until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, although no slaves were enumerated in the federal census after 1840 (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 76–77). The modern African American population of New Hampshire constitutes a very small percentage of the population of the state, something close to 2 percent, a statistic that was likely the same in the eighteenth century (Piersen 1988, 15). Despite the small size of the population, there has been a continuous African American presence in New Hampshire since the middle of the seventeenth century. As was the case in other northern cities, African Americans were challenged by limited opportunities and outright racism in the early years of the republic. Despite the many difficulties engendered by racism, numerous African and African-descended individuals and families from Portsmouth created a vibrant community. Some formerly enslaved people and their children acquired farmland,

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while others established successful small businesses. One, Richard Potter, became a nationally recognized entertainer in the early nineteenth century (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 106–109). During the lead-up to the Civil War, the white population of Portsmouth remained largely ambivalent about the question of slavery. Although it is thought there were no enslaved people living in the city after 1805, the sea captains and merchants of Portsmouth continued to profit from the African slave trade and from shipping and processing commodities produced by and for enslaved people. The Nightingale, by reputation the fastest of the clipper ships of the mid-nineteenth century, was built in Portsmouth harbor in 1851, forty-four years after Americans were prohibited by federal law from participating in the African slave trade. After a decade on the South Pacific lanes, the ship was sold in Rio de Janeiro and participated in the Africa-to-Brazil slave trade—flying the American flag—until it was boarded and seized by a US Navy patrol off the coast of Africa. The patrol liberated 971 captives, en route to a life of forced labor in Brazil (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 128–129). The legacy of Portsmouth’s engagement with slavery reentered the city’s consciousness in October 2003, when, quite by accident, the city’s African Burying Ground was uncovered during the installation of new water lines. People knew about this cemetery; its location was indicated on old maps and plans of the city. Earlier construction projects from the turn of the twentieth century had uncovered human remains from the cemetery, and the site was commemorated on a bronze historical tablet long before the backhoe hit the graves in 2003 (Sammons and Cunningham 2004, 55–60, 210–212). Nevertheless, the discovery of coffins was quite unexpected. Fortunately, a consulting archaeologist was on hand when the graves were discovered. The construction project was much more limited in scope than the government building raised on the site of New York’s African Burial Ground, and the decision was made to excavate only the graves that would be impacted by the water line project (Richards 2011). In 2011, Christine Richards of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell conducted a DNA study of the human remains recovered from the site. The archaeological mitigation of the construction trench uncovered the remains of thirteen individuals, although 200 or so people are thought to have been buried at the site. The remains of eight individuals were recovered from coffins and the remaining bone fragments were recovered from the areas around these eight coffins. Preservation conditions at the site

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were poor, and the remains were too fragmentary and fragile to conduct the kind of detailed skeletal analysis that had been completed on the remains excavated from the African Burial Ground in New York. The DNA analysis confirmed that the skeletons were indeed of African origin, but it proved difficult to pinpoint a specific region of origin. Few artifacts were recovered from the site, and those that were found were related to burial practices, including straight pins (likely from burial shrouds) and some coffin nails. The city has created a memorial park over the burial ground as a reminder of this small northern city’s participation in the African slave trade and of the experiences of the hundreds of people who were brought to New Hampshire to live a life in bondage (Richards 2011). The Manors of Greater New York

Inspired both by the discovery of the African Burial Ground and Fitts’s conclusion that plantation slavery in the North was likely far different from what was popularly assumed, a number of archaeologists began searching for material evidence of plantation slavery in the North in the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century. One likely place to find such evidence was in the hinterlands of New York City, including Long Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and northeastern New Jersey. Today this region is largely urbanized or suburbanized, but in the days of slavery, it was dominated by agricultural estates. Many of the patroons and landlords of the eighteenth century grew wealthy as they used slave labor to provide the markets of New York and much of the Northeast with agricultural commodities. Archaeological projects on six such estates are of particular interest: Van Cortlandt Manor in the Bronx; the Hendrick I. Lott House in Brooklyn; Sylvester Manor, Rock Hall, and the Thompson House on Long Island; and the Beverwyck Plantation in suburban New Jersey. Van Cortlandt Manor, large remnants of which are now one of New York City’s largest municipal parks, was the subject of an archaeological excavation directed by H. Arthur Bankoff of Brooklyn College. The Van Cortlandt family was prominent in early New York. Establishing a merchant house in New York in the late seventeenth century, the Van Cortlandts moved New World agricultural products to London. Their ships returned to New York with specie, manufactured goods, rum, and, to our point here, slaves. Jacobus Van Cortlandt purchased the estate that would become Van Cortlandt Manor in 1732, when the estate included at least six

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Figure 3.1. The Van Cortlandt Manor house, ca. 1937. Library of Congress HABS NY,3BRONX,5-2

enslaved laborers. The manor was worked by enslaved people through at least four—and possibly as many as six—generations of Van Cortlandts. Bankoff and Winter documented that Frederick Van Cortlandt, who inherited the estate from his father Jacobus in 1739, owned twelve slaves in 1749. By 1790, Frederick’s grandson Augustus owned seventeen slaves, and in 1810, fifteen enslaved and six free persons of color lived at Van Cortlandt Manor (figure 3.1). At least one enslaved woman lived on the estate as late as 1821, when it was owned by the grandson of Augustus Van Cortlandt, also named Augustus (Bankoff and Winter 2005). During four field seasons, the Brooklyn College team located the archaeological remains of a number of outbuildings associated with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century occupation of the site. The team also uncovered evidence of large-scale modifications to the landscape around the extant mansion house that most likely date to the period after the manor was transferred to New York City to become a public park. A large deposit of ceramics and other household wares discovered in a subterranean feature was interpreted as evidence for a mass clearout of the property at the time of the transfer, when old, broken, or worn-out objects were thrown away. Although the age of some of the ceramics led the archaeologists to conclude that the enslaved people at the Van Cortlandt Manor likely used handed-down objects no longer suitable for the Van Cortlandt family, H. Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter concluded

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Figure 3.2. The Hendrick I. Lott House, ca. 1909. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

that “the enslaved population that is known [to have] inhabited the plantation for seventy-five years is invisible in the archaeological record,” a confounding development they characterize as “a common conundrum” for the archaeology of northern slavery (Bankoff and Winter 2005, 306). In a similar project conducted several years later, Bankoff and his colleagues Chris Ricciardi and Alyssa Loorya explored the archaeological evidence of slavery at the Hendrick I. Lott House in Brooklyn. The Lotts owned the property beginning in the late seventeenth century, and although the farm was subdivided in the early twentieth century, a Lott descendant lived in the house through 1989. Today a curiosity surrounded by modern tract housing, the Lott House is one of a handful of early Dutch farmhouses still extant in the city of New York. It has been the locus of archaeological excavation, architectural restoration, and historical interpretation since the 1990s (figure 3.2). The Lott House was of particular interest because the documentary history of the farm suggests that the Lott family owned approximately twelve slaves near the turn of the nineteenth century. As the house sits on three-quarters of an acre—the only remnant of the farm left—in the midst of a modern suburban development, the areas subject to excavation at this site have been necessarily limited. Nevertheless, archaeologists

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have uncovered a series of evocative artifacts. Among these is a locally produced slip-decorated redware plate with an X carved into its bottom. The archaeologists have suggested that this plate may represent a Bakongo cosmogram, a symbol derived from a West African ritual tradition that has been found on numerous locally produced vessels recovered in the US South (Bankoff et al. 2001; Fennell 2007; Ferguson 1992). Perhaps the most significant find at the Lott House was a series of objects discovered under the floorboards of a second-story garret room. When the team removed floorboards in the small room, they discovered several corncobs that they argued had been placed under the floor and intentionally covered up. Although the corn had been somewhat disturbed by rodent activity, the archaeologists concluded that the cobs had been intentionally laid in a geometric pattern, possibly a five-pointed star. Also hidden beneath the floorboards were the remains of a cloth pouch, half of the pelvis of a sheep or goat, and an oyster shell. The objects taken together have been interpreted as ritual items similar to those found on known African American sites in Maryland and other southern colonies and states. They may have been related to a syncretic ritual tradition commonly known as hoodoo (Bankoff et al. 2001; Leone et al. 2005). What this assemblage of items was used for or meant is a matter of some debate, but it seems clear that the garret was likely the sleeping and living quarters for some of the enslaved African Americans at the Lott House. The interpretations the archaeology team made are thus consistent with the conclusion Fitts (1996) drew about the housing of enslaved people in garrets on northern plantations and farms. In comparison to the Lott House, which exists on a small remnant of its original estate, Sylvester Manor, located on Shelter Island at the far eastern end of Long Island, is largely intact and was occupied by the descendants of the manor’s original owners into the late twentieth century (Griswold 2013). The manor was established by Nathaniel Sylvester and his wife, Grissel, in the early 1650s (Hayes 2013). Long fascinated by the history of their family’s estate, in the 1990s Mrs. Alice Fiske, the widow of Andrew Fiske—an eighth-generation descendant of Nathaniel Sylvester—invited a team under the direction of Steve Mrozowski to explore the potential for archaeological research at Sylvester Manor. What resulted is one of the most extensive archaeological projects ever to be conducted on a northern plantation site (figure 3.3).

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Figure 3.3. Sylvester Manor house, rendered in 1908. Source: the Sylvester Manor House Museum. Used by permission.

Nathaniel Sylvester was a partner in an enterprise that profited from the exploding sugar industry of the mid- to late seventeenth century. The family, which operated two sugar estates on the island of Barbados, dispatched Nathaniel to establish an estate in North America that could provide foodstuffs to the enslaved workforce of the Barbadian plantations. His brother Constant oversaw the operations of the plantations on Barbados and another brother, Giles, managed the commercial end of the business in London (Hayes 2013, 37–38). By the time Nathaniel died in 1670, twenty-three enslaved African or African-descended people worked and lived at Sylvester Manor (Hayes 2013, 49–50). This may not have been unusual for the time and place. By 1698, at least 20 percent of the population of eastern Long Island was black, and many of these people were likely enslaved on agricultural estates like Sylvester Manor (Hayes 2013, 53). This early generation of enslaved people apparently lived in family groups that were maintained even after Nathaniel Sylvester died and people were bequeathed to his heirs as human property (Hayes 2013, 54). Brinley Sylvester, the grandson of Nathaniel Sylvester, had the extant house on the manor built in the 1730s (Hayes 2013; Griswold 2013). At this time, the original seventeenth-century plantation house was apparently destroyed and the new Georgian-style manor house was built. The

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generation between the deaths of Nathaniel and Grissel and the ascendance of their grandson Brinley was a time of relative neglect on Sylvester Manor because the primary heirs lived in Newport and Boston (Griswold 2013, 232–234). The second, absent generation leased parts of the property to tenant farmers and sold sections of the original estate. Under Brinley’s stewardship, the landscape of the manor was significantly restructured, and all that remains of the original seventeenth-century plantation are archaeological traces that include artifacts that suggest that indigenous peoples were present on the site. This evidence includes shell beads known as wampum, domestic refuse from the plantation, and an intriguing cobblestone pavement laid out in a geometric pattern that was covered during Brinley’s restructuring of the plantation into a Georgian manse. By Brinley’s time, Sylvester Manor appears to have become the country seat of a wealthy family, and although there was some agricultural activity on the site, as evidenced by the construction of a dairy building, by the turn of the nineteenth century the manor no longer functioned as a plantation for the mass production of exportable food products. After nearly a decade of archaeological research, the investigators concluded that the plantation did not have a separate structure to house the manor’s enslaved workers. Like many of their counterparts across the sound in Rhode Island, the enslaved people at Sylvester Manor most likely lived in garrets, cellars, and agricultural outbuildings (Hayes 2013). It is also possible that they had access to their own garden plots, similar to the provision ground system in the Caribbean (Hayes 2013, 77). It also would appear that by the early 1800s the nature of slave labor had changed, for the researchers have concluded that although there were still at least five enslaved workers on the estate, they were most likely domestics living in the servants’ quarters in the back of the main house. In a summary of the project, Steve Mrozowski and colleagues (2007, 145) concluded that despite the clear documentary evidence that enslaved Africans were present at Sylvester Manor “their contribution to the archaeological record is seemingly invisible.” In contrast, the archaeological presence of indigenous people was quite evident, leading the archaeologists to conclude that the manor was a place where Native American peoples would settle to trade with, and perhaps labor for, the Sylvester family in a relational pattern similar to those in Spanish colonial settlements in the New World. Sylvester Manor may thus be better compared to a colonial Spanish hacienda than a Caribbean plantation (ibid.).

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Rock Hall is located on the opposite end of Long Island in Nassau County. Now a house museum, Rock Hall was constructed in 1767 by Josiah Martin. Martin was born around 1700 into a leading plantation family from the sugar island of Antigua. In 1767, he purchased a 600acre farm on Long Island, built a Georgian-style plantation house, and rechristened the estate Rock Hall. When the elderly Martin settled on his new estate, he brought his family and seventeen enslaved workers with him. The Martin family lived on the estate until 1818. In 1824, the Hewlett family purchased the house. They conveyed it to the town of Hempstead in 1948. Since 1953, the property has been a house museum (Rava and Matthews 2017). A plan of the estate drawn in 1817 indicates that during the Martin occupation, the manor house was flanked by outbuildings on its east and west sides. Beginning in 1995, a series of small-scale archaeological projects has been conducted in the west yard of the complex (the east yard was built over by a large wing constructed in the 1880s). The archaeological evidence suggests that a slave quarter, possibly refashioned from a building that predated the Martin occupation, was used to house the enslaved people at Rock Hall. This structure may have included what would have been a newly constructed hearth and fireplace, built using a material known as tabby, a kind of concrete made from crushed seashells. This building material was rarely used in the Northeast but was common on Antigua, which led the archaeologists to conclude that the hearth was part of a kitchen-quarter complex that the enslaved people of Rock Hall inhabited (Rava and Matthews 2017). When they excavated near the cellar entry to the main house, which it is presumed slaves used to transfer cooked food from the kitchen into the main house, the archaeologists uncovered an interesting assemblage of artifacts. It included numerous brass straight pins, lead birdshot, and a number of bent iron nails. Although the team initially interpreted these as utilitarian objects lost or discarded over the years, the assemblage resembles a series of caches recovered in the Chesapeake region (e.g., Leone 2008). The revised interpretation of these artifacts is that they represent a spirit bundle placed intentionally near the doorway into the main house. The purpose of such a bundle would be to invoke spirits to either protect or harm people entering or leaving the house. The artifacts thus have been interpreted to reflect an African spiritual belief system, possibly from the Yoruba tradition. If so, these artifacts demonstrate that while enslaved,

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Figure 3.4. The Benjamin Thompson House. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS NY,52-SETA,3-3

the people of Rock Hall maintained their spiritual connections with their African ancestors (Rava and Matthews 2017). Bradley Phillippi has addressed the difficulty of identifying archaeological evidence of enslaved laborers in his analysis of the Thompson House, a structure in Setauket, on the north shore of Long Island that dates to the early decades of the eighteenth century. The Thompson family, who built the house, owned the property until 1885, when it was sold out of the family. Although it is much more modest than the houses the Sylvesters and the Van Cortlandts built, the Thompson House also housed enslaved workers. Ten slaves lived and labored for the Thompsons from at least 1745 through 1826 (Phillippi 2018). Archaeological investigations conducted at the Thompson site suggest that through the first decade of the nineteenth century, the white and enslaved occupants of the small, eight-room house lived in close contact, likely sharing objects and space with each other (figure 3.4). According to Phillippi’s analysis, it is this common usage of things and places that has muffled the voices of the enslaved in the archaeological record of the Northeast. Significantly, following the end of slavery in New York, the Thompsons continued to employ African American laborers on their farm. During this period, they constructed a new detached kitchen for

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the household and a new wing to the house. According to Phillippi, it was common in Long Island for white farmers to provide housing for their black laborers. In this case, the new wing had a separate entrance, as did the kitchen. It would thus appear that spaces become increasingly segregated following the abolition of slavery on the farms of Long Island (Phillippi 2018). In the late 1990s, a cultural resource management project was undertaken on an historically known but long disappeared estate known as Beverwyck. Located twenty-three miles northwest of Lower Manhattan in the New Jersey suburb of Parsippany, the plantation first known as Red Barracks was established in 1759 by William Kelly, an English-born New York merchant who consolidated a number of smaller properties into a large estate (Catts and Silber 2004, 5–6). Kelly operated the plantation until 1772, when Lucas Von Beverhoudt, a wealthy plantation owner from the Danish Caribbean island of St. Thomas, purchased it. Von Beverhoudt rechristened the 2,000-acre property Beverwyck when he arrived in 1778 (Silber and Catts 2004, 27). Advertisements for the sale of the property printed in 1768 and 1769 indicate that it was a substantial agricultural estate at this time, featuring a main house, several tenant or servant’s cottages, a barn, a significant number of smaller agricultural outbuildings, and a “Negro house.” At the time of its sale to Von Beverhoudt, twenty enslaved people worked at the plantation, including a blacksmith, shoemaker, and a mason (ibid.). The Von Beverhoudts had a slave labor force when Lucas died in 1796; his probate inventory notes that seven enslaved people lived at Beverwyck, at least five of whom were elderly. The only young enslaved people remaining on the estate at that time were 25-yearold Caty and her infant (Silber and Catts 2004, 29). The estate, by then reduced in size and in great disrepair, was bequeathed to Lucas’s daughter Adriana and her husband Tobias Boudinot. The cultural resource management firm’s research has revealed that at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Tobiases owned just a handful of people, most likely domestic servants (ibid). By the time the archaeological investigation took place, all of the buildings on the estate, including Von Beverhoudt’s 1778 manor house and a subsequent mansion house, had been destroyed, many by fire (Catts and Silber 2004). The investigation conducted at Beverwyck rivals that at Sylvester Manor in the scope of the work completed, albeit over a shorter period of time. The archaeological team located and recovered data from twenty

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structures and activity areas, including three mansion houses, the blacksmith shop, a variety of agricultural outbuildings, and the quarters for the enslaved plantation workers. The team concluded that the activity area directly related to the occupation of the enslaved quarters had been abandoned and landscaped by the middle of the nineteenth century, when this area was intentionally buried and transformed into a front lawn for a new mansion constructed sometime after the second house burned in 1803 (Catts and Silber 2004, 8). In its earliest years, the estate functioned both as a cider-producing orchard with several thousand trees and a provisioning estate for the West Indies (Catts and Silber 2004, 8). By 1768, separate slave quarters had been constructed to house some of the estate’s twenty or so enslaved workers. The excavations identified a structure that most likely was the slave quarters. The building was twenty feet by twenty-five feet and sat on a massive quarried-stone foundation. What appears to have been a hearth was located in the western extent of the structure, indicating an end chimney. The structure did not have a cellar, but it would have had wooden floorboards supported by footers spaced across the width of the building. The archaeologists recovered several small concentrations of artifacts, one in the northeast corner of the structure that included mostly personal objects, such as buttons, cutlery, a glass bead necklace, a perforated metal disk, and several coins. Near this concentration the team discovered several artifacts evocative of the conditions of slavery, including two shackles and two cowrie shells. In the eighteenth century, people of African descent commonly wore cowrie shells as personal adornment. They are indigenous to subtropical waters far from northern New Jersey. Near the hearth feature, the archaeologists discovered another concentration of artifacts that included an iron cooking pot, a large fragment of a creamware platter, a small Chinese-export porcelain bowl, and a large fragment of a Delft serving vessel. The latter two objects were face down and may have been placed this way intentionally beneath the long-decayed floorboards of the quarter. Archaeologists have interpreted these concentrations of artifacts as ritual bundles, similar to West African minkisi offerings, that may have been intentionally placed to offer the inhabitants of the quarter some measure of protection from the spirit world (Silber and Catts 2004, 33–34).

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New Salem Plantation, Connecticut

Plantation slavery was also present in what is now the state of Connecticut. In the late 1990s, a team from Central Connecticut University under the direction of Warren Perry and Jerry Sawyer explored several sites associated with enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Samuel Brown, a merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, established the first of these, known historically as New Salem Plantation, in the early eighteenth century. Brown’s family had made a fortune importing slaves from the Caribbean into New England. Sometime around 1729, Brown relocated sixty enslaved people to Connecticut, where he exploited their labor to produce commodities for export to the West Indies. The Brown family remained in possession of the plantation until the outbreak of the Revolution, when Loyalist William Brown, the grandson of Samuel Brown, fled to England. The government of Connecticut seized his property, including at least nine enslaved people, and sold them (Woodruff et al. 2007). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the team conducted an archaeological investigation in and around the burial ground associated with New Salem Plantation. The goal of this investigation was to discover any evidence of headstones that might have fallen and been covered up over the years. The archaeologists uncovered evidence that the African people buried in the cemetery placed clear crystals on the graves of the deceased, a practice they concluded had African antecedents. The survey of the cemetery also revealed a number of fieldstone cairns, which the archaeologists identified as grave markers similar to those found in Caribbean contexts (Woodruff et al. 2007; Delle and Fellows 2012). In subsequent years, Perry and Sawyer expanded their project to the areas surrounding the known graveyard of New Salem. One area they investigated was known as Cockle Hill, which was occupied primarily by African Americans in the late eighteenth century. Excavations recovered more quartz crystals intentionally placed with the point facing down. In association with one crystal was a bundle of iron objects tightly packed together, indicating that they were intentionally placed, possibly as a minkisi offering like those found at Beverwyck (Woodruff et al. 2007).

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Slavery at Ten Hills Farm, Massachusetts

Historical archaeologists have long recognized that there is dissonance between what we can learn from historic documents and what we can see archaeologically. In the case of the manors of greater New York, archaeologists identified sites where the documentary evidence clearly indicates the presence of enslaved people of African descent, yet in many cases enslaved people on the large plantations are invisible in the archaeological record. This may be a result of what archaeologists call depositional processes. For example, the features containing evidence of enslaved populations may have been destroyed by subsequent generations. Also, evidence may have been hidden in plain site—that is, the objects enslaved people used in the eighteenth-century North may have varied little, if at all, from those European or Native American people used, particularly after locally produced goods were replaced by mass-produced goods during the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century (Carson 1994, 2017). It is also possible, of course, that archaeologists have been looking in the wrong places for evidence of enslaved people. This last conclusion certainly cannot be drawn about the interpretation of the excavations around a small domestic structure that has been known to be a plantation slave quarter for generations. It is in the most unlikely of places: suburban Boston, Massachusetts. Although the citizens of Massachusetts might be justifiably proud that their commonwealth was the first of the states to abolish slavery, that pride must be tempered by the fact that the Massachusetts Bay Colony had previously been the first British North American colony to legalize slavery, which it did in 1641 (Chan 2007a, 7). Great fortunes were made throughout New England by merchants eager to participate in the Atlantic slave trade. Among the chief slave-owning merchants of New England was Isaac Royall Sr., the son of a Maine carpenter who through wit, guile, and the willingness to profit from the lives and labors of African people became a wealthy sugar planter and slave trader in the British West Indian colony of Antigua. In 1732, the elderly Royall invested in a 500-acre estate in what is now Medford, Massachusetts. The property had been known as Ten Hills Farm since the Crown patented the estate to Governor John Winthrop in 1637 (figure 3.5). Royall rechristened the family settlement at the core of the estate Royallville. He, his family, and thirty-eight enslaved workers moved from Antigua to Royallville in 1737, after a significant

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Figure 3.5. The Isaac Royall House at Ten Hills Farm. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS MASS,9-MED,1-6.

and costly renovation to the buildings and infrastructure on the property. Although 500 acres and thirty-eight slaves would have made Royall a rather middling planter by West Indian standards, it was enough to make the Royalls the largest slaveholding family ever to live in Massachusetts, though certainly not the only one. Governor Jonathan Belcher had warned Royall not to purchase the property. In 1732, he reported that Ten Hills Farm was dilapidated and that its buildings, fences, outbuildings, and fields were in a ruinous state (Chan 2007a, 31). Perhaps spurred by the symbolic power of owning an estate granted to a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Royall disregarded this advice and invested significantly in his new estate. By the time of his death just a few years after he arrived in Massachusetts, the house alone was valued at an astronomical £50,000 and the remaining estate an additional £37,000 (Chan 2007a, 39). The wealth that Isaac Royall Sr. acquired through selling and purchasing human workers propelled his family to prominence as exceptionally wealthy property owners in the society of colonial Massachusetts. From 1936 through 2016, the crest of Harvard

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Law School featured elements of the Royall family crest, in homage to a bequest Isaac Royall Jr. made to Harvard College, which resulted in the establishment of the first faculty of law at that institution. Royallville, the family seat at Ten Hills Farm, was not just home to Isaac Royall and his household. Having made his fortune as a slave trader and sugar planter, it should come as no surprise that he enslaved thirty-eight people on his Massachusetts property (Chan 2007a, 43). Archaeological and historical research on Royallville indicates that while some house servants would have lived in the main house with the Royall family, most of the enslaved workers lived in a three-bay structure just off the main house, alternatively referred to in the historical documents as the out kitchen and the slave quarters (figure 3.6). For several years after 1999, an archaeological team from Boston University under the direction of Ricardo Elia and Alexandra Chan conducted excavations at the Isaac Royall House and slave quarter, which now operates as an historic house museum in the town of Medford. Although the existence of the slave quarter had been known for generations and had been architecturally recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934–1935, relatively little was known about the daily lives of the enslaved people whose labor had helped make the Royall family fortune. Over three field seasons, the archaeologists recovered nearly 65,000 artifacts, most of which came from a large refuse deposit that appears to date to the Royalls’ hasty exit from Ten Hills Farm in 1778, when they were expelled from Revolutionary Massachusetts as Loyalists (Chan 2007b). The team has analyzed the artifacts to interpret the labor relationships between the Royalls and their enslaved workers, the spiritual worldview of the enslaved people of Ten Hills Farm, and the meaning of the landscape of the yard spaces that simultaneously connected and divided the black and white residents of Royallville. After examining historical documents, extant buildings, and the archaeological material recovered during excavations, Chan created a composite reconstruction of the landscape of the Royall House compound. A notable feature of the layout of the core of the estate is the relative proximity of the slave quarter to the main house. Given the size of the estate, the concentration of the enslaved population so close to the main house was clearly a choice Isaac Royall Sr. made at the time he modified and reconstructed the original house. It may have derived from his experience in Antigua, where an enslaved foreman on his estate had been executed

Figure 3.6. Architectural drawing of the slave quarters at Ten Hills Farm. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS MASS, 9-MED,1B-2.

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for his role in planning an uprising in 1737 (Chan 2007). The proximity of the slave quarter to the main house would have maximized the Royalls’ capacity for monitoring the enslaved workers on their estate. This was a departure from the settlement pattern found on most contemporary plantations in the US South and the Caribbean, where separate quarters were often situated at a visual or a physical distance from the main house (Vlach 1993). The team recovered a feature that it interpreted as the foundation of a small outbuilding located to the west of and behind the slave quarters. The high concentration of artifacts recovered from this area led the archaeologists to conclude that this was a work space used primarily by the African American residents of Ten Hills Farm. The analysis of the material culture recovered from this area sheds light on the daily life of the enslaved workers at Ten Hills Farm. Artifacts of particular note include a stone bead, which Chan (2007a, 140) characterized as “reflecting a non-European aesthetic.” It may have been used by one of the women or girls at Ten Hills Farm to express their individuality and distinctiveness from the Eurocentric world that surrounded them. Another intriguing artifact recovered from the slave-quarter deposits was a rough-shaped object resembling a Native American projectile point. The archaeologists concluded that this artifact was contemporary with the enslaved population at the site and was not an ancient Native American artifact that the people in the quarter found and kept. It was made of a material that the indigenous people in Massachusetts did not typically use for flint knapping. Most likely it was used as an amulet or pendant. After examining the names of the people enslaved at Ten Hills Farm, Chan concluded that some had names associated with the Akan language group, and thus it is likely that they or their ancestors originated from what is now Ghana. Chan argued that the amulet may be related to an Akan religious or spiritual tradition that holds that prehistoric stone tools have supernatural powers. This tradition can be seen in African Americans’ use of arrowheads as lucky charms in twentieth-century Mississippi and Louisiana (Chan 2007a, 158). Chan similarly interpreted the presence of an ancient Native American stone pestle—possibly dating to the Archaic period—as evidence of the presence of an Akan belief system at Ten Hills Farm. Chan (2007a, 159) postulated that in the context of a slave quarter this was “an unusual object with a powerful indwelling spirit. . . . The pestle might have been used to grind and mash the ingredients of magic, ritual, or medicinal

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concoctions.” However, she admits that it is possible that the pestle was used for more mundane purposes such as grinding grain and may have simply been a found object that was put into use. Other objects reflecting daily life of the enslaved at Ten Hills Farm included ceramic tiles cut into small diamond shapes and ceramic sherds cut into circles. These may have been used in various gaming activities. The team also found several marbles, both locally made and commercially produced. Because marbles was primarily a boys’ game in the eighteenth century and the Royall children young enough to play marbles were all girls, Chan concludes that these toys likely belonged to enslaved children on the estate. The archaeologists also recovered a pipe made from local red clay. The pipe contrasted with the manufactured pipes then in vogue, which were made from white clay. The team concluded that at least some members of the enslaved community made their own pipes in a tradition similar to those known to exist in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean. Others apparently used white clay pipes, as several of these were recovered, one with the initial M carved into it three times. Because both men and women smoked tobacco in clay pipes and only one person on the estate—black or white—had a name that began with that letter, Chan concluded that this pipe may have been the property of a woman named Mira (Chan 2007a, 180). Parts of a minimum of thirty-seven smoking pipes were recovered from the area around the quarters. The archaeologists also uncovered evidence of domestic activities that were likely performed by women, including objects used in sewing (scissors, thimbles, and straight pins) and cooking (Chan 2007b). Many archaeological projects on plantation sites in the US South have demonstrated that enslaved people had a diet that was often dominated by wild animal species (Ferguson 1992). A common interpretation of this phenomenon is that the enslaved people did not receive sufficient food from the planters to survive and thus took it upon themselves to hunt, fish, and trap, both as a means of subsistence and as a way of expressing some independence outside the control of the white planters. Chan discovered that this was not the case with the enslaved people at Ten Hills Farm. Of over 4,000 faunal remains the team analyzed, the vast majority represented domestic farm animals including cows, sheep, goats, and pigs. Of nondomesticated terrestrial animals, only the remains of three rats, one toad, and one rabbit were recovered, and it is possible that none of these were used for food. Some bird remains were recovered, but these

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too were largely farm animals, such as chicken, turkey, geese, and pigeon; it is known that the Royalls kept both geese and pigeons at Ten Hill Farms. The few fish remains that were recovered and identified all belong to deepwater species that would have been purchased by the estate, not caught and consumed by the people at Ten Hills Farm (Chan 2007a, 190–191). Conclusion

Although archaeological evidence of enslaved populations in the Northeast is often difficult to find and interpret, the archaeological projects conducted in greater New York and on Long Island and in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have demonstrated that prevailing assumptions about the nature of northern slavery do not accurately portray the condition of slavery in the North. The skeletal population recovered at the African Burial Ground demonstrates that enslaved people lived lives filled with hard toil, were susceptible to nutritional diseases, and experienced violence. The increasing body of archaeological work is calling into question the idea that enslaved people in the North only lived lives that were intimately connected to those who enslaved them through domestic household servitude. The picture that is emerging in the North portrays large numbers of people living in slave quarters not unlike those enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean and the South. Despite the harsh realities of enslavement, people found spiritual meaning through the religious practices of their ancestors. Ritual bundles are increasingly being identified on northern sites, indicating that African belief systems persisted in some contexts, particularly on rural estates. In cities, evidence for shared burial practices by people from disparate African origins suggests that a new African American identity was forming under the bonds of slavery. The uniform treatment of the dead at the New York African Burial Ground provides archaeological evidence for this trend. Large estates employed dozens of enslaved agricultural workers, often for generations. While it is clear that plantation slavery was not as prominent in the northern economy as it was in Virginia and the Carolinas, archaeological evidence clearly demonstrates similarities between the two regions. Thousands of people were enslaved on northern plantations, and the conditions of bondage were as real for them as for any slaves who grew tobacco or rice. Plantation labor was not solely a southern phenomenon;

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it also existed in the North, surviving in surprising places well into the nineteenth century. The archaeological evidence is clearly demonstrating that enslaved labor was used throughout the Northeast, in the cities and in the countryside, and that the conditions of bondage were far from the benevolent picture that received wisdom would have us believe.

4 Rose Hill Archaeology at a Finger Lakes Plantation

Although slaveholding Loyalists like the Royalls of Ten Hills Farm were forced to flee during the Revolutionary War, often taking their slaves with them, plantation slavery continued to exist in the North for decades after the war ended. It can no longer be assumed that slavery in the Northeast disappeared immediately after the American Revolution or that by the turn of the nineteenth century slavery was an old-fashioned idea that ran counter to the principles of the early republic. While slavery was abolished in much of New England by 1800, dozens of enslaved people lived on individual manors in the greater New York region after the turn of the nineteenth century. As the largest slaveholding state north of Maryland, New York was hesitant to abolish slavery. The legislature chose the path of gradual rather than immediate emancipation. New York’s emancipation law of 1799 was somewhat vaguely worded and generally referred only to slaves born in New York; people brought into the state would theoretically remain enslaved in what was nominally a free state. From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, it is sometimes hard to remember that as late as the opening decades of the nineteenth century the boundaries of the eastern states were still in dispute. While it was clear to many that the young nation would exploit the vast interior lands of North America, it was unclear which states would profit. It was equally unclear, at least until the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which of the Atlantic cities would become the great entrepôt of the United States. Under these circumstances, it may not be surprising that in the opening decade of the nineteenth century, southern planters seeking to capitalize on newly opened lands established new slave-based plantations in upstate New York. Several of these extended households were established in and around the city of Geneva, at the northern end of Seneca Lake,

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Figure 4.1. The original house at Rose Hill, constructed for Robert Rose in 1809. Photo by James A. Delle.

and in a variety of townships located in Seneca, Ontario, and Wayne Counties. These southerners hoped to profit from the potential in the untapped farmlands of the Finger Lakes. They also hoped that improving the Susquehanna River, which flows south from the Finger Lakes and into the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, would connect the interior of New York State to the Atlantic, through Maryland. Their ambition was to make Baltimore, not New York City, the commercial hub of the young nation. Had their plan succeeded, the products of the American interior would have been exported through the port of Baltimore. Their hope in settling around the Finger Lakes was to create a breadbasket for the Tidewater region and to create and profit from the sale of the wheat flour that was produced on vast plantations in upstate New York with the labor of enslaved African Americans. Among these ambitious southern migrants was Robert Selden Rose, who in 1809 established a plantation on the outskirts of Geneva known as Rose Hill, worked in its opening years by as many as thirty-seven enslaved African Americans (figure 4.1).

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Slavery in the Finger Lakes

Large tracts of agricultural land became available for settlement in the Finger Lakes district in the 1790s, an area known in the late eighteenth century as the Genesee Country. Short of cash in the aftermath of the Revolution, the state of New York distributed land in allotments to its veterans of the Continental Army. The state confiscated the land of the indigenous British-allied Seneca and Cayuga peoples, who were displaced during the war, and distributed it in allotments to clear its back pay debts to its veterans. Most veterans subsequently sold their land to speculators (Delle and Heaton 2003). By the mid-1790s, slaveholding immigrants from the Hudson Valley had begun to settle in the Genesee Country. This initial wave of post-revolutionary settlement developed slowly, as the swampy margins of the lakes were infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which likely spread a fatal disease known as Genesee fever. Among the early settlers was Dr. Alexander Coventry, who settled on the shores of Seneca Lake with his wife Elizabeth and two enslaved workers named Cuff and Betty (Delle and Heaton 2003; Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015; Grover 2004; Wirtz and Roenke 1984). Betty contracted the fever and died in 1793. By 1796, Coventry had abandoned the Genesee Country for greener prospects farther east (Brooks 1996; Siles 1990; Wirtz and Roenke 1984; Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). In 1802, Robert Rose and his brother-in-law John Nicholas purchased Coventry’s property on Seneca Lake. Rose and Nicholas were married to two sisters, daughters of one of Virginia’s leading families. John Nicholas, the elder of the two, was also a member of an eminent Virginia family. He was a great-grandson of Robert “King” Carter; his father, Robert Carter Nicholas, had been a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, had served as treasurer of the colony of Virginia, and had served on the Virginia Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. His brother William Cary Nicholas served in the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, and as governor of the commonwealth of Virginia. Another of his brothers, George Nicholas, was the attorney general of Kentucky. George’s son, Robert Carter Nicholas II, eventually served as a US senator from Louisiana. John’s sister Elizabeth was married to Edmund Randolph, who had been a governor of Virginia and had served in George Washington’s administration, first as attorney general and then as secretary of state (Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015).

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Robert Selden Rose was likewise descended from the first families of Virginia. Although his family was not as prominent as his brother-inlaw’s, his grandfather and namesake, Rev. Robert Rose, held patents for more than 20,000 acres of land in what is now Amherst County and Nelson County, Virginia (Rose 1985, 58–65). Robert Rose was also descended from the Cary, Armistead, and Fitzhugh families. Robert Rose married his first cousin Jane Lawson, whose mother, Susannah Rose Lawson, is the subject of a famous portrait now in the collection of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Rose 1985, 116–117). In 1803, Nicholas and Rose accompanied their in-laws Gavin Lawson and Susannah Rose Lawson, their wives Jane and Ann and the family’s children (Jane and Robert’s three sons and Ann and John’s four sons and two daughters), Susannah’s sister Margaret Rose, and their nephew George Norton to the Genesee Country. Traveling in two stagecoaches and two smaller vehicles, the party was accompanied by several enslaved domestic servants (Phillis Kenny Douglas, Susannah Dunkinson, and Alice Bowman) and five drivers and four postilions who may also have been enslaved (Grover 1994, 17; Marshall 1993). Some seventy people the Rose and Lawson households enslaved traveled by a more westerly route through Pennsylvania under the direction of Robert Rose’s cousin John Fitzhugh (Wirtz and Roenke 1984; Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). The Rose and Nicholas families first settled in the village of Geneva, quite possibly in the house that Robert Rose’s cousin Peregrine Fitzhugh had previously occupied. Fitzhugh had moved to Geneva in 1799 and through the labor of thirty enslaved workers had cleared land thirty miles north of Geneva, establishing an estate around Lake Ontario’s Sodus Bay, to which he moved in 1803 (Green 1947; Cowles 1895; Milliken 1911). After several years during which enslaved workers likely cleared forest land and began establishing agricultural production, Rose established a residence on Coventry’s old property, which he renamed Rose Hill. Nicholas settled on the western shore of the lake on a property known as White Springs (Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). Rose and Nicholas were not the only slaveholders to emigrate to the Genesee Country at the turn of the nineteenth century. Other slaveholders included Thomas and William Helms, who settled near Peregrine Fitzhugh around Sodus Bay; Daniel Dorsey, who built a plantation house complete with stand-alone slave quarters near the town of Lyons; and

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Figure 4.2. The house built at Rose Hill for William Kerley Strong in 1837. Photo by James A. Delle.

Benjamin Hance, who settled in nearby Ontario County with a group of slaves (Cowles 1895; Milliken 1911). Rose’s brother-in-law, John Nicholas, was confident that the family could make a great fortune. In a letter to his brother William Cary Nicholas informing him of the family’s imminent migration to the Genesee Country, John Nicholas noted that “the opportunity for increasing wealth is very attracting. How long this will last,” however, he could not say, “as there are many visitors from [Virginia] and Maryland,” undoubtedly people looking to make similar fortunes in the “Genesee and the military [tract] adjoining.”1 When the Rose family took up residence at Rose Hill in 1809, they joined the thirty-seven enslaved workers who were already living on the estate (figure 4.2). By 1820, that number had declined to nine. Eight free people of color were living on the estate in a household headed by Henry Douglass. This was a family that the Roses had transported in slavery from Virginia. Kathryn Grover argues that Rose manumitted the Douglass family and the remainder of the previously enslaved community and suggests that many may have moved from Rose Hill to the village of Geneva, where a segregated black community formed in the early nineteenth

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century (Grover 1994). It seems likely that the Rose family transported slaves to New York specifically to do the heavy work involved in clearing land and preparing it for cultivation and then manumitted them. The majority of the enslaved people who cleared the land at Sodus Bay for Rose’s cousin Peregrine Fitzhugh were similarly manumitted soon after the Fitzhughs had taken up residence at their newly established farm (Cowles 1895, 204). The state legislature passed New York’s gradual emancipation law in 1799 and revised it in 1817, specifically to address the newly established slaveholdings in the Genesee Country (Berlin 1998; Grover 1994). The revision stipulated that all enslaved people in the state, not just those born in New York, were to be freed by July 4, 1827, although those born in the period 1817–1827 would remain indentured servants until they turned 21. Not surprisingly, the 1830 census recorded no enslaved people at Rose Hill. However, the Henry Douglass family still lived on the estate. The twelve people in that family included two people of color older than 36, four ages 10 to 24, and six children younger than 10. In that year, the Rose household included only three people of color, likely domestic servants (Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). The Roses and at least some of the African Americans who had been transported with them lived at Rose Hill until the mid-1830s. In 1835, while attending the circuit court in the town of Waterloo, Robert Rose died of what was most likely a stroke. In the ensuing years, Rose’s sons moved farther west into New York. His widow, Jane Lawson Rose, lived the remainder of her days in the village of Geneva. Following the demise of the first generation of the Rose family in New York, Rose Hill was sold out of the family, first to William Kerley Strong, who purchased the estate and began constructing the extant Greek Revival mansion in 1837. Strong’s wife, Sarah Van Gieson Strong, died unexpectedly in the late 1840s, after which Strong returned to New York City. The estate was put under the care of Strong’s in-laws, the Van Gieson family, who sold the estate in 1850 to the family of Robert J. Swan. The Swans maintained possession of the property into the twentieth century, after which the house was used as a retirement home until it fell into disrepair. The Geneva Historical Society eventually acquired the property, and sponsored a massive renovation of the 12,000-square-foot main house in the 1960s, restoring it to its Second Empire–style grandeur (Wirtz and Roenke 1984; Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015).

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In 1850, when the Strong and Van Gieson families sold the estate, the household was composed primarily of African Americans, including R. S. and Lucretia Johnson, both aged 42, and their children: Stephen Johnson (age 20), Prince Johnson (13), William Johnson (11), Sarah Johnson (7), George Johnson (4), and a six-month-old baby boy, C. M. Johnson. Two teenagers described as mulattos were also part of the Rose Hill household: Annie E. Johnson (16), and Festus Johnson (13). By 1860, the Johnson family no longer lived at Rose Hill; the Swans had replaced them with Irish immigrant workers (Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). Archaeology of the Slave Quarter at Rose Hill

In the late 1990s I had the opportunity to initiate an archaeology project at Rose Hill, undertaken in two phases. In the first phase, conducted in 1999, a field methods team from Franklin and Marshall College under my direction conducted a pedestrian survey and a controlled surface collection of the quarters site. In one corner of a plowed field about half a mile behind the main house, my students and I discovered an artifact and debris scatter, including two US one-cent coins dated 1803 and 1835, very neatly bracketing the Rose occupation of the site. The analysis of the ceramic assemblage recovered from the 1999 investigation, which included almost 900 datable sherds, indicated a mean ceramic date of 1838 (Wille 2000; Delle and Fellows 2012, 2015). The second phase of the project, conducted in 2007, involved expanding the coverage of the initial surface collection and intensive subsurface testing to determine the location, boundaries, and condition of the slave quarter site. One of the key questions archaeologists have asked about bondage in the Northeast concerns the landscapes enslaved people occupied. As we saw with the archaeological projects at Beverwyck, Rock Hall, and Ten Hills Farm, people enslaved on large northern plantations tended to be housed in stand-alone quarters. Evidence has suggested that housing in places like these tended to be designed on antecedents found in regions where the workers were previously enslaved. This was the case at Rose Hill. Unlike the case of Ten Hills Farm, where the identification of a slave quarter had been passed down through oral histories and the building has remained standing, the location of the slave quarters was unknown at Rose Hill prior to this project. Although the surface scatter identified

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Figure 4.3. Units excavated to reveal foundation of the slave quarters at Rose Hill. Image by James A. Delle.

in 1999 provided strong evidence for the presence of a domestic structure dating to the early nineteenth century, it was not until we excavated in 2007 that we uncovered evidence for the quarters. Although the scope of the project precluded a complete excavation of the house site, the excavations revealed enough segments of the foundation to allow us to extrapolate the size of the structure and to draw solid conclusions about the construction of the house (figure 4.3). The house was a rectangular structure thirty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide. The foundation consisted of a massive mortared field stone wall approximately eighteen inches wide that was sunk at least four feet below the modern surface level. Given the amount of fieldstone ejected into the cellar hole at the time the house was demolished and the extent of nonnative fieldstone scattered on the surface surrounding the site, it is likely that the top of the original foundation stood some distance above

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modern grade. Carbonized wooden beams and a number of handmade bricks recovered from the excavations suggest that the walls of the house were constructed of timber framing in-filled with brick nogging. A lighter dry-laid stone foundation to the north of the main structure suggests that a nine-foot-wide addition abutted the north elevation of the building. Because the scatter of domestic debris recovered from the plow zone was concentrated behind this feature, it was most likely used as a kitchen. The picture that emerges from the recovery of building materials suggests that the slave quarters at Rose Hill consisted of a substantial frame building of thirty-six feet by eighteen feet. It was built on a massive stone foundation and had a cellar that was at least four feet deep and walls that were made from brick nogging. The presence of large stones and a high concentration of complete bricks was noted in roughly the center of the structure. Excavations below these elements revealed a heavy black soil, suggesting that the house may have featured a central chimney. This conclusion is supported by the absence of discreet chimney falls on either end of the house. A large boulder in the center of the house was uncovered that may have been part of the foundation for a central chimney (figures 4.4 and 4.5). Because the house featured a substantial subsurface cellar, it may be difficult to determine archaeologically whether the building had one or two bays, as any interior division of space may have been established through wooden framing. Our excavations produced a significant number of other architectural artifacts, including 1,400 nails. Although dating sites using nail typology is a tricky and imprecise task, a few general chronological trends have been established. Before the 1790s, blacksmiths made nearly all the nails used in domestic sites from wrought iron. In the 1790s, the nailmanufacturing machine was invented, and it was continuously improved over the next century. A relatively simple device that was available to most blacksmiths, the machine sliced roughly triangular nails out of a piece of rolled iron, producing what is known as a cut nail. As the nineteenth century progressed, machine-cut nails, which were cheaper to produce, slowly replaced hand-wrought nails. Wire nails, which replaced cut nails in the 1890s, are manufactured by slicing a thin piece of wire and fashioning a head. This kind of nail is still in use. It is not uncommon to find examples of all three kinds of nails at historic sites. As a general rule of thumb, the higher the proportion of wrought nails, the earlier the house was constructed.

Above: Figure 4.4. Exposed segment of the foundation of the Rose Hill slave quarter. Photo by James A. Delle. Left: Figure 4.5. Segments of the dry-laid foundation of the kitchen extension on the northwest corner of the Rose Hill slave quarter. Photo by James A. Delle.

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Figure 4.6. The Jean Nicholas house, Geneva, New York. Photo by James A. Delle.

In the structure discovered at Rose Hill, we recovered nearly an equal number of wrought (515) and cut nails (536) and a relatively smaller number of wire nails (164). There were also some nails that were too badly corroded to be identified. The nail ratio provides evidence that the house was likely constructed in the early nineteenth century, just at the time the enslaved community was brought to Rose Hill. A variety of pieces of architectural hardware, including door hinges, supports the idea that there were internal divisions of space within the house. Over 540 fragments of architectural flat glass were recovered during the excavation of the house, indicating the presence of glazed windows. A final piece of evidence concerning the architecture of the Rose Hill quarter came to light when Mrs. Jean Nicholas, the widow of one of the last of the Nicholas family members in the Geneva area, invited the team to visit her home. Mrs. Nicholas was living in a small house on a parcel of land that was once part of the estate that John Nicholas, her late husband’s ancestor, had founded. She reported that her house was once the original slave quarters of White Springs Farm. This local history is corroborated by the presence of displaced gravestones from an early nineteenth-century African American cemetery in her yard, which she stated had come from an abandoned graveyard on her property. Although it is currently clad in

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Figure 4.7. Interior wall of the Jean Nicholas house. Photo by James A. Delle.

shingles, the structure is in fact a timber-framed house with nogging that provides a likely cognate for the quarter at Rose Hill. If the slave quarters at Rose Hill was also shingled, this would explain the presence of the 1,400 nails recovered from the excavation (figures 4.6, 4.7). The overall size, form, and construction of the Nicholas house closely resemble brick slave quarters recorded by the Historic American Building Survey in the Piedmont region of Virginia, where the Roses, the Nicholases, and the enslaved people of Rose Hill had previously lived One of the most promising components of the archaeology of slave quarters in the Virginian Piedmont is the analysis of yard spaces. As Upton (2010, 127) has said, “The quarter extended beyond its walls. The space around the building was as important as the building itself.” Slaves lived much of their lives beyond the walls of their cramped cabins. Despite the disruption caused by plowing, archaeological investigations have discovered the presence of swept yard spaces by analyzing the spatial patterning of artifacts in relation to the position of the quarters and through testing soil chemicals. Excavations at sites including Poplar Forest and Monticello in the Piedmont and Utopia in the Tidewater have explored swept yards as a marker of African American ethnicity (Bon-Harper 2010; Heath 2010; Heath and Bennett 2001; Fesler 2010). Evidence for yard sweeping has

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been discovered on African American sites elsewhere in the Northeast, including in Nantucket (Beaudry and Berkland 2007) and New Jersey (Barton and Orr 2015). The soils around and above the completely buried ruin of the Rose Hill slave quarters had been deeply plowed in the early twentieth century and continue to be plowed through the present time. The plow zone is a relatively thick layer, eighteen inches deep in most places, and all indications suggest that the living surface that had surrounded the quarters was long ago destroyed. It is thus difficult to definitively state whether the slave quarters at Rose Hill featured a swept yard, which would be expected, given the population’s previous residence in Virginia and the prevalence of yard sweeping. There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest yard sweeping, however. The artifacts collected from the surface in 1999 and 2007 were spatially recorded using a laser theodolite and those data were then plotted against the maximum possible footprint of the quarter. The result was a scatter plot of sheet midden refuse collected from the surface. This spatial data suggests that the south yard—most likely the front yard of the quarter—was swept clear of debris, as the vast majority of artifacts were recovered from the north side of the building, likely behind the kitchen. This evidence suggests that the quarters had a more formal, cleaned area in front of the house, which may have served as a social space in milder seasons in central New York, extending the living area of the house beyond its walls. Behind the house was a more utilitarian area, where refuse from the kitchen would be tossed out to create a large trash pile (figure 4.8). The 1999 and 2007 projects recovered a considerable number of artifacts related to the occupation of the slave quarters. The datable ceramic sherds recovered from the 1999 survey provided a mean ceramic date of 1838 (based on a raw sherd count of refined earthenwares). In 2007, an additional 1,282 datable ceramic sherds were recovered from the surface, which produced a comparable though somewhat later mean ceramic date of 1842. The assemblage consisted primarily of whiteware and secondarily of pearlware; nominal amounts of creamware and ironstone nicely bracketed the assemblage. By raw sherd count, the ceramics recovered from the surface consisted of 55.5 percent whiteware, 21 percent pearlware, 4.9 percent creamware, 1.8 percent porcelain, 1.5 percent ironstone, and 0.4 percent mocha-decorated vessels. A relatively small percentage of utilitarian wares was recovered during both surface collections. Locally

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Figure 4.8. The south elevation of the Bracketts Farm Slave Quarters, Louisa County, Virginia. This building was constructed at virtually the same time as the slave quarters at Rose Hill. Note the kitchen addition off the southeast façade of the quarter. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS VA,55-TREV.V,1A-4.

produced redwares constituted only 5.7 percent of the overall assemblage, while locally produced stonewares constituted 7.9 percent of the overall assemblage. This seeming anomaly may be a result of our data collection technique, which involved collecting and mapping single pieces where they were encountered in the field. The refined earthenwares such as whiteware and pearlware were fractured into much smaller pieces than the more robust sherds of utilitarian stoneware and pearlware. This may have skewed the actual number of vessels these fragments represent. Alternatively, given that Rose Hill was located in a fairly remote and newly occupied landscape, at least for the first few decades of the site’s history, it is possible that the local ceramic industry lagged and it may have been easier to procure factory-produced imported earthenwares during this early phase of plantation settlement. The ceramic data indicate that the sheet midden observable on the surface of the plow zone was consistent with a nineteenth-century domestic occupation. During the course of the excavation, we recovered an additional 1,140 ceramic fragments that demonstrated a similar pattern

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and produced a mean date of 1843. Far fewer pieces of stoneware (64) or redware (168) were recovered from the excavation units, which were concentrated on the interior of the house and the surrounding foundation. When we aggregated the ceramics recovered from the excavation units into minimum vessel lots, a similar picture emerged. We identified a total of 385 discrete vessel lots. Of these, 51.4 percent were whiteware, 20.5 percent were pearlware, 3.6 percent were creamware, 3.1 percent were porcelain, and 2.9 percent were ironstone. Of the utilitarian wares, locally produced stoneware constituted 4.9 percent of the total vessel count and redware constituted 12.5 percent. This may suggest that utilitarian wares like redware and stoneware were likely confined to the kitchen behind the house, while dining on more refined earthenwares likely occurred in the main rooms of the house, presuming, as the architectural analysis suggests, that the house was a duplex divided into two living quarters that were built based on Piedmont antecedents. It is thus likely that the living quarters in the house were multipurpose spaces dedicated to social activities like eating, particularly in the cold and snowy winters of upstate New York, when socializing in the yard spaces around the house would have been uncomfortable and impractical. It may also suggest that, at least for the pearlwares, creamwares, and porcelains, vessels were brought to Rose Hill during the migration from Virginia. The presence of a single piece of coarse ceramic known as colonoware, likely made by an enslaved potter in Virginia and carried to Rose Hill by members of the enslaved community, lends at least some credence to this idea. We recovered few personal items during the excavation. We did recover two glass beads, likely used in jewelry, including one blue faceted bead, a kind of artifact frequently associated with African American sites (Stine et al. 1996). Sewing equipment, including thimbles, a pair of scissors, and several porcelain and bone buttons, are indicative of the domestic chores of making and repairing clothes that would have taken place inside the house. A small number of children’s toys, including a single clay marble and several fragments of porcelain dolls, suggest that the children of the household had access to some manufactured items. We also recovered a kerosene can near the surface. This may suggest that this fuel was used for heat and light toward the end of the house’s occupation or that the building was soaked with kerosene during its final demolition. Several carbonized, burned timbers were recovered, suggesting that the house

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was burned after it was abandoned, perhaps intentionally set afire with the kerosene accelerant. Conclusion

For a short time, immigrant planters from Maryland and Virginia established plantation slavery in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. This project has located two slave quarter sites associated with these early nineteenth-century plantations, including the Jean Nicholas house, which stands on property that was once part of White Springs Farm, and a subsurface, though largely intact, stone foundation of a similar building at Rose Hill. Analysis of the artifacts recovered at the Rose Hill quarters indicate that the structure was first occupied in the early nineteenth century, at the time the original mansion house was built and Rose Hill was cleared and prepared for large-scale agricultural production. The dimensions of the building and the evidence for the construction techniques strongly suggest that the quarter was designed and based on Piedmont slave quarter antecedents. Because known slave quarter sites are rare in upstate New York and evidence from slave quarter sites from other northern states suggest some continuity with plantation antecedents, plantation sites from the Virginia Piedmont may be the best source for comparison. Plantation archaeology has long been a dominant thread in the literature on historical archaeology in Virginia, which has been home to some of the most extensive investigations into the antebellum plantation complex (Orser 1988b, 1998; Orser and Funari 2001; Singleton 1990, 1995; Heath 2010; Deetz 2001; Neiman 1980; Samford 1999). Unfortunately, because most of the excavated slave quarter sites are located in eastern Virginia, the Piedmont region is relatively underrepresented in the plantation archaeology of the state, with the notable exceptions of the plantations US presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison owned. Archaeologists and historians interested in the Piedmont have established that living arrangements for enslaved workers changed over time. In the early seventeenth century, planters and servants (both European indentured servants and some African slaves) lived in the same structure. By the end of the seventeenth century, arrangements had shifted to separate living spaces for servants (Deetz 2001, citing Upton 1982; Epperson 1999, 2001; Heath 2010; Neiman 1980). Deetz (2001) found a correlation

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between the presence of colonoware (a locally produced ceramic type that servants and slaves often used) and the new division of living spaces. This trend toward spatial separation intensified in the 1680s, as African slaves quickly replaced European indentured servants as the main source of labor on Virginia tobacco plantations. By the early eighteenth century, larger plantations with a greater separation between slaves and planters had become the norm (Deetz 2001; Heath 2010; Neiman 1980). Historians concerned with vernacular architecture have identified a type of structure that was typical in Virginia beginning in the seventeenth century known as the Virginia house, a small cabin made up of two rooms on the first floor with a loft space above (Heath 2010). The first floor was divided into public and private spaces in its “hall and chamber” layout. The hall was where the family would entertain visitors, while the chamber was a private family space. The Virginia house form was primarily used by middling planters, and the plantocracy adopted it for housing for their slaves (Ellis 2010). It appears that the most common adaptation of the Virginia house was a duplex, housing two family units, each living in a single room with a loft above. The two rooms were of equal size and each side had an external door. Examples of these structures have been found throughout the Piedmont’s slave quarter sites. At James Madison’s home, Montpelier, a series of duplex structures were built in the South Yard to house slaves working in and near the big house (Reeves and Greer 2012). It seems likely that architectural historian Dell Upton encountered similar structures in his examination of Virginia houses. He described the slave quarters at Tuckahoe in Goochland County this way: “All are one-story frame buildings with two rooms, each with an exterior door, and separated by a central chimney” (Upton 2010, 123). James Bruce, an elite Virginian planter, built a series of slave quarters on three plantations in the period 1853–1855 in Halifax and Charlotte Counties. Architectural historian Clifton Ellis noted that seventeen of the twenty quarters Bruce had built were duplexes and concluded that these houses were comparable to the hall and chamber houses white Virginians inhabited (Ellis 2010, 151). The dimensions of slave quarters in the Piedmont seem to have had a rather limited range. Upton explains that “slave houses might be as little as twelve by eight feet in size. Dwellings larger than sixteen by twenty feet were divided . . . into two units” (2010, 123). One of the structures from Bruce’s Berry Hill was measured to be eighteen feet by twenty-eight feet

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(and then subdivided internally) and had stone walls one and a half feet thick (Ellis 2010). Local resources often determined what materials were used to build slave quarters. Although the most commonly used material seems to have been wood, some structures were built of stone and brick (Ellis 2010; Upton 2010). The archaeological evidence strongly suggests that a Piedmont-style quarter was constructed when enslaved workers were forced to migrate to the Genesee Country in the opening decade of the nineteenth century. The evidence for slavery at Rose Hill suggests that mature, Virginia-style plantations were transplanted to upstate New York. This opens a new avenue for the analysis of the material realties of slavery in the North. Note 1. John Nicholas to William Cary Nicholas, August 28, 1801, Box 2, Folder 1, Nicholas Family Papers, Geneva Historical Society, Geneva, New York.

III Struggle

5 Archaeology and the Struggle for Freedom

From the very inception of the institution of slavery, men and women struggled against its many degradations. In an 1857 speech, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously argued that the only way to end slavery in the United States was through struggle. “The whole history of the progress of human liberty,” the great orator said, “shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress.” Douglass said that the struggle against slavery “may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle” (Douglass 1857, 21–22). The moral struggle Douglass described required the collective action of people dedicated to social and political progress, the former to convince the American people that slavery was immoral, the latter to nullify the legality of slavery. It was not an easy task to change the minds of people whose ancestors had accepted—and profited from—slavery for generations. As Douglass put it, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” (Douglass 1857, 22). It was equally difficult to expunge the powerful racist ideology that had become so deeply ingrained in the minds of so many Americans. Those who supported slavery were willing to inflict violence on those who dared to question the morality of the slave system. Whites and blacks who took up the mantle of antislavery did so at their own peril. Many understood that acts of rebellion and armed resistance would be necessary to bring slavery to an end (Delle 2015a). In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, an increasingly organized movement of antislavery activists fought the moral struggle against slavery in the United States. Influenced by a wave of evangelical revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening, the growing abolitionist

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community developed deep convictions about the evils of slavery and the necessity of ending the practice immediately. Many felt that they had a moral obligation to convince their southern counterparts to take the righteous path by repenting the sin of slavery. Despite their own generally nonviolent tactics, early abolitionists were objects of scorn and targets of increasingly violent attacks. Mob violence against abolitionists broke out in cities across the north. In 1838, an angry mob of some 10,000 destroyed Pennsylvania Hall, which the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society had built in Philadelphia as a headquarters for the antislavery movement (Tomek 2013). This was not an isolated incident. In July 1834, a wave of anti-abolitionist violence known as the Tappan Riots after the abolitionist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, resulted in the destruction of several homes in New York (Whitby 1990). In October 1835, a mob seized William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the influential antislavery newspaper The Liberator, and dragged him through the streets of Boston at the end of a rope. The city’s mayor likely spared Garrison further violence when he locked him in a jail cell for his own protection (Tager 2000). On November 7, 1837, abolitionist preacher and newspaper publisher Rev. Elijah Lovejoy was killed when an angry mob attacked his printing office in Alton, Illinois (Simon 1994). In the 1830s, gangs tried to kidnap African American abolitionist David Ruggles at least twice and burned his bookstore to the ground (Zigenbein 2015). Many northerners clearly did not embrace the antislavery movement and made life for those who did most difficult. The violence of the anti-abolitionists was driven by the fear that the white-dominated social order in North America could be overthrown. In early 1794, Americans who supported slavery had been shocked to learn that the government of the revolutionary French Republic had decreed an end to slavery and the right to equal citizenship for all men, regardless of color. While this action was certainly consistent with the egalitarian ideology many French revolutionaries espoused, the decree ending slavery was strongly influenced by events then unfolding in St. Domingue (Haiti), France’s most important Caribbean possession. That colony, which for much of the eighteenth century had been Europe’s wealthiest slave colony, was in the midst of a revolution of its own, during which the enslaved population rose up against their oppressors, demanding an end to their bondage. The 1794 decree placed the revolutionary government in France squarely behind the black revolutionaries in St. Domingue. It recognized the legality of their free status, and repudiated the white aristocracy’s

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Map 5.1. Location of sites mentioned in Part III. Map by James A. Delle.

claim to human property. Counterrevolutionary interventions launched first by the British and later by Napoleon’s expeditionary forces failed to retake the colony and reimpose slavery by force. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave who had risen to the rank of general during the revolution, declared Haiti’s independence from France. Clearly understanding that Napoleon’s regime would not recognize the rights of the former slaves to citizenship, the victorious Haitians instead created the first independent black state in the New World (Blackburn 1988; James 1989; Popkin 2010). The actions of the revolutionaries in Haiti and Paris were two manifestations of a growing global struggle against slavery. To slaveholders of St. Domingue, the revolution was a nightmare come true: not only had black generals mustered an organized army against them but the government in Paris had recognized the gains that army had made in abolishing slavery. To the enslaved in the United States Haiti was a beacon of hope, an emancipated nation governed by a former slave, an example that the

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shackles of human bondage could be broken on a national scale (Du Bois [1915] 2007; Popkin 2010). Despite the dramatic success of the Haitian Revolution, the abolition of New World slavery was a lengthy, drawn-out struggle. In the years after 1802, Napoleon reimposed slavery on France’s remaining Caribbean possessions, reenslaving the populations of those unhappy colonies until 1848. Although the British abolished slavery in its New World colonies in 1834, they did so only after Jamaica, its most populous slave colony, was torn apart by a great uprising. Cuba tolerated slavery until 1886 and Brazil did so until 1888. In the United States, it took a bloody civil war to finally bring an end to slavery (Blackburn 1988; Klein and Luna 2009; Nessler 2016). Douglass was profoundly correct when he quoted from Lord Byron’s poem “Childe Harold”: “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow” (Douglass 1857, 20). Self-Emancipation, Abolition, and Archaeology

Historical archaeologists have explored the struggle against slavery in several ways. Some archaeologists have examined the material evidence of the Underground Railroad. Others have worked to understand how abolitionists worked to resolve the great struggle against slavery, while still others have examined the development of sanctuary settlements, in which groups of self-emancipated people could forge communities of their own far from the bonds of slavery. Abolitionists were not daunted by the violence of the reactionaries. One of the most famous manifestations of the antislavery struggle was the Underground Railroad, a loose association of like-minded people who provided assistance to slaves seeking refuge in the free states of the North. The Underground Railroad is perhaps the most widely known, and widely misunderstood, manifestation of the struggle against slavery. It is indisputable that thousands of refugees fled north to escape slavery and that people along the routes they traveled offered them help. What is much more difficult to discern is the archaeological signature of the Underground Railroad. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made assisting refugees illegal, those who participated in the Underground Railroad exercised extreme discretion and left few traces of their actions. Over the generations an Underground Railroad mythology has developed that contends that good people in the North went out of their way to

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help fugitives but also went to great pains to keep their assistance secret. Well-intentioned people see evidence of the Underground Railroad everywhere. Stories have been told—some of them possibly true—about how people used of a variety of secret signals to identify safe houses, from candles in windows to secret patterns in quilts (Tobin and Dobard 1999). According to many elements of the myth, people constructed secret rooms, staircases, and tunnels to hide fugitives from the eyes of slave hunters (Vlach 2004). Scholars of the Underground Railroad have been debunking these sometimes-preposterous myths surrounding the Underground Railroad for decades (e.g., Gara 1961; Blight 2001; LaRoche 2014a). Scholars and quilters alike have called into question the veracity of the so-called quilt code, suggesting that it is in fact a late invention of quilt sellers trying to stimulate a better market for specialized quilts (Fellner 2003). Archaeologists and architectural historians have looked into the issue of secret rooms and tunnels, discovering that spaces that people presume are secret chambers generally prove to be mundane elements of the original architecture of buildings. Features such as cold cellars and cisterns play on the imaginations of those who think they have discovered evidence of their ancestors’ covert antislavery activism (Fruehling and Smith 1998; Kammen 1998; Vlach 2004). To best understand the struggle that was the Underground Railroad one must discern the difference between romanticized myths and the realities of the perils of flight. Although the task is challenging, archaeology can play a role in correcting misperceptions about the Underground Railroad (Laroche 2004, 2011, 2014; Delle 2008; Delle and Shellenhamer 2008). A project that my students and I undertook in Berks County, Pennsylvania, serves as a cautionary tale about the power of myth and a means to begin identifying the archaeological signs of the Underground Railroad. In the early fall of 2000, a historic preservation group informed me that a local landowner in Berks County was looking for an archaeologist to help stop an imminent road-widening project that would destroy a series of Underground Railroad tunnels running beneath his property. According to the landowner, generations of the Parvin family, from whom he had purchased the property, had passed down stories about tunnels on the property that fugitive slaves had used to enter the house from a creek about 100 meters away (Delle 2008; Delle and Shellenhamer 2008).

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My students conducted an archaeological project to test whether any such tunnels existed on the property. Even though the project demonstrated that there were no tunnels crisscrossing the property, the local media demonstrated the power that stories of the Underground Railroad can generate (Delle 2008). Several articles about the project ran in the local newspaper, local television news reporters covered the excavation, and the local PBS channel aired a short piece about the site as an Underground Railroad “depot.” Most dramatically, the landowners organized an Underground Railroad Open House during which descendants of the Parvin family dressed in antebellum costume staged a family reunion. Leaders of the African American communities of Reading and Philadelphia were in attendance, as was a representative from the office of the governor of Pennsylvania (Delle 2008). The myth of the “tunnels to freedom” persevered for years (Herman 2008). Although we found no secret tunnels, we did uncover a nicely articulated pipe trench in which we recovered evidence for multiple generations of wood, iron, and lead piping. This trench was perfectly aligned with the “tunnel” entrances the landowner had identified in his basement and cold cellar. However, excavations in the cold cellar provided compelling evidence that some part of the Parvin family lore may have been true. Among the artifacts we recovered from the original surface of the cold cellar floor was a fragment of a faceted blue glass bead, a type of artifact that is often linked to nineteenth-century African Americans (e.g., Singleton 1999; Stine et al. 1996). We recovered food remains, fragments of a chamber pot, medicine bottles, and utilitarian and serving dishes from the floor of an alcove built into the west wall of the cold cellar. These artifacts suggested that in the mid-nineteenth century, people could have been harbored in the cold cellar, likely by the free African American workers the Parvins employed on the farm (Delle and Shellenhamer 2008). It is more likely that Underground Railroad activists would have sheltered people in features like the cold cellar instead of building expensive and complex engineering projects like a network of tunnels to hide the handful of fugitives that might cross the property in a given year or even in a given decade (Delle and Shellenhamer 2008; Shellenhamer 2001; Delle 2008). Perhaps the key part of this story is the historic evidence that free African Americans worked and lived at the Parvin Homestead. As archaeologist Cheryl LaRoche (2004, 2014b) has demonstrated in the Midwest, those most likely to assist African American refugees were other African

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Americans, not altruistic white Quakers. Those seeking freedom were unlikely to find shelter by crawling through tunnels or hiding in specially constructed secret rooms in the homes of white strangers. It is much more likely that they sought aid from friends, acquaintances, and relatives in the black community, sometimes on isolated farms like the Parvin Homestead, other times seeking sanctuary in African American settlements where they could actually hide in plain site by becoming members of an existing community (LaRoche 2014b). Because many seeking to escape slavery in the North did so by becoming members of existing communities, the archaeological footprint of the Underground Railroad is often difficult to see (Barton and Orr 2015; LaRoche 2014b). Historic preservation of sites thought to have Underground Railroad associations is thus often difficult. The myths about the Underground Railroad that lead some to look for remarkable features like tunnels can actually work against the preservation of sites. A notable example of this concerns a series of buildings in Brooklyn located on Duffield Street, which, according to oral tradition and historic records, was an active abolitionist neighborhood. In an attempt to protect several houses associated with abolitionists from being taken by eminent domain and demolished, a group of local activists sought the advice of professional archaeologists. The activists had hoped that the archaeologists could find material, tangible evidence of secret hiding places or tunnels that could be used to document Underground Railroad activity in support of their preservation efforts. Unfortunately, as was the case with the Parvin site, the evidence for any such features was lacking. The archaeologists concluded that while a series of sub-basements and subterranean vaults that were likely intended for storing coal may have been used to hide fugitives, no corroborating evidence of such use could likely be discovered. Fortunately, even in the absence of tangible evidence for the Underground Railroad, the activists were successful in preventing one of the houses, 227 Duffield Street, from being taken by eminent domain. The owners of the house remain committed to the struggle of preserving and interpreting the small building even as large-scale development consumes their neighborhood (LaRoche 2011). The family has attempted to keep the house open as a museum dedicated to telling the story of Brooklyn’s antislavery community, though they, too, remain tied to the idea that fugitives hid in tunnels on the site.

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A Social Experiment

The truth about features such as the Parvin and Duffield Street “tunnels” does not mean that antislavery activists played no role in the freedom movement. Instead, it serves to remind us that the role friendly white Quakers played has perhaps been historically overstated (Gara 1961). Events like the burning of Pennsylvania Hall and the New York Draft Riots clearly demonstrate that racism was virulently present in the North. As the nineteenth century reached its midpoint, racism was certainly not on the wane in the northern United States and in fact may have been exacerbated by the stresses of rapid social changes then unfolding. Industrialization and the expansion of commercial and transportation infrastructures were contributing to rapid change in national demographics. From 1800 to 1850, urban residents increased from 6.1 to 15.4 percent of the overall US population (United States Census Bureau 1993). Urbanization was concentrated in the Northeast. During this time, land speculation ran rampant, as wealthy investors acquired massive tracts of unimproved land that they held against future profit, either through subdivision and sale or through exploiting natural resources. The young nation also experienced the Panic of 1837, perhaps its first capitalist depression. This long depression resulted in high unemployment in the growing cities, rising interest rates, high levels of inflation and currency devaluation, and hundreds of bank failures. Both banks and the federal government hoarded gold and silver and demanded that land transactions be conducted using such specie. Credit was difficult to obtain. Hard times had come to both the cities and the countryside. Utopian communities began to appear on the landscape, as social critics began to explore collective ownership of property as an alternative to the land and commercial monopolies that had already begun their long ascent to dominance in the United States (Jennings 2016; Kozakavich 2017). Among the wealthy land barons the emerging socialist critique of the nineteenth century targeted was Gerrit Smith, one of the nation’s largest private landowners. Smith’s father, Peter, who had been an associate of John Jacob Astor in the fur trade, had accumulated in excess of 500,000 acres in New York, a legacy that passed to Gerrit in 1837. In 1844, George Henry Evans, a leading proponent of land reform and, like Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist, wrote to Smith chastising him for the size of his holdings, arguing that Smith was actively contributing to social inequality and even

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to the success and continuation of slavery by controlling so much land. In response, Smith embarked on a social experiment in which he gave away some 120,000 acres of land to African Americans, divided into 3,000 40-acre plots. He hoped to demonstrate that the republican ideals of the young nation could include all people, regardless of race and that given the opportunity, African Americans could be successful small farmers. His experiment was quickly dubbed Timbucto (Kruczek-Aaron 2015). The historical narrative of Timbucto has been dominated by the assertion that the experiment was a failure. If this indeed was so, it may come as no surprise, as it would have been difficult for anyone to operate a successful small farm on marginal land in the Adirondack highlands. Some of the tracts that Smith granted were never settled, some were confiscated for tax default, and some were sold by grantees who could not make a go of it as small farmers (Kruczek-Aaron 2015). In recent years, Hadley Kruczek-Aaron of the State University of New York at Potsdam has begun to reconsider the story of Timbucto by analyzing the archaeological stories of those who settled on the tracts Smith granted. Although still in its earliest stages as of this writing, the Timbucto Archaeology Project has already begun to shed light on the difficulties emancipated and freeborn African Americans had in establishing themselves in a racist and difficult era, particularly given the structural changes in the American economy that were already beginning to make small-scale agriculture a difficult way to make a living. Sanctuary Settlements in the Northeast

The struggle to escape the oppression of slavery took many forms, including attempts to establish communities beyond the reach of the Eurocentric world that had created and perpetuated African slavery. Archaeological work throughout the Caribbean and the southern United States has frequently uncovered evidence of maroon communities living apart from whites. Maroons are typically understood to be people who separated themselves from European society in the attempt to create independent communities and are often characterized as escaped slaves and their descendants. However, it has become increasingly clear that people of African descent who fled enslavement often lived with and married into remnant indigenous communities, blurring European stereotypes about racial identity.

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In the 1990s, archaeologist Ken Feder explored a maroon settlement known as the Lighthouse, located in the hills of northwestern Connecticut. According to local tradition, James Chaugham, a Narragansett Indian from Rhode Island, and his white wife, Molly Barbour, founded the settlement in the middle of the eighteenth century. The community they founded was a place where people of African, Native American, and European heritage seeking to live apart from European society could take refuge. Metaphorically, the Lighthouse served as a beacon for those who wanted to escape the harsh societal hierarchies Europeans and their descendants imposed in New England. In some ways it can be considered an example of marronage, of living independently apart from the racialist oppressions of European North America (Feder 1994). The residents of the Lighthouse rejected individualism. In examining the landscape of the Lighthouse, Feder recognized that the village was constructed without internal boundary walls or divisions, that the ceramic record consisted more of communal serving dishes than of individual place settings, that structures were built as communal residences for extended family groups, and that the population relied on hunting as a primary means of subsistence (Feder 1994, 51). As the population of the North grew, it was increasingly difficult for such maroon communities to form. This, however, did not stop the process of self-emancipation. Indeed, the number of self-emancipated people traveling through the North only increased as the nineteenth century progressed. As we have already seen, it was common for segregated African American communities in the rural Northeast to center on a church or meeting house. Such communities were likely places for freedom seekers to stop, either en route farther north or as a place to settle down. Because many fleeing slavery settled in established African American villages or hamlets, it may be best to think of such places as sanctuary settlements. In the 1990s, a team of archaeologists from Boston University directed by Mary Beaudry and Ellen Berkland led an investigation at the site of one such central meeting place located in a sanctuary settlement, the African Meeting House on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket (figure 5.1). Nantucket has long had a resident African American community. The first enslaved people were brought to Nantucket in the middle of the seventeenth century, long before the island became famous as a center of the whaling industry. At that time, the island’s primary economic activity was farming and sheep husbandry (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 397).

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Figure 5.1. The African Meeting House in Nantucket in the late nineteenth century. Source: Nantucket Historical Society Research Library and Archives. Used by permission.

By 1764, there were forty-four people of African descent on the island. This number steadily increased, particularly after 1770, when Nantucketers voted to abolish slavery on their island. As the nineteenth century dawned, and the whaling industry developed, Nantucket became home to an increasing population of African Americans. The descendants of the island’s original enslaved people were joined by refugees seeking to escape from slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic world, including a growing number of African American men who joined Nantucket’s whaling fleet. By 1840, the island’s population of 9,000 included 571 free people of color (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 397). In the opening decades of the eighteenth century, when sheepherding was still Nantucket’s primary economic activity, the small but growing African American population established a segregated community on the outskirts of Nantucket Town. Variously known as Guinea, New Guinea, or Newtown, the African American community was socially and spatially separated from the main European town by a sheep pasture and, more symbolically, by a physical portal known as Newtown Gate. In the 1820s, a group of benefactors known as the African Baptist Society provided the community with the means to erect a meeting house. Among the trustees of the society was Absalom Boston, a descendant of Nantucket’s enslaved

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population and its native Wampanoag community and the first black man to captain a Nantucket whaling ship (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 400). Established in 1821, the meeting house served as a central place for the African American community through the opening decade of the twentieth century. It served both as a church and as a meeting place for community discussions on issues such as abolition. Until the Nantucket schools were fully desegregated in 1847, it was the only place on the island where African American children could attend school (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 403; Bulger 2013). By the early twentieth century, the small building was being rented out as a garage. In the 1930s, Florence Higginbotham, an African American woman who lived in Absalom Boston’s childhood home in the old community of Newtown, purchased the building. After her death her son conveyed the property to an organization now known as the Museum of African American History, which invested in restoring the building to its early nineteenth-century appearance. As part of that restoration process, the team from Boston University was brought in to assist in the archaeological identification of architectural details and the recovery of artifacts that could be used to interpret the day-to-day lives of Nantucket’s African American community (Bulger 2013). The archaeologists concluded that the meeting house featured a swept yard, a surface of a hard-packed sandy soil that was swept clean of debris and kept clear of vegetation. This feature allowed the community to use the yard around the meeting house for a variety of purposes, primarily social functions of one kind or another. Swept yards are commonly found surrounding African and African American sites in the South and the Caribbean, but this was the first time one had been identified in New England (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 405). The artifacts recovered reflected the many ways the African American community used the yard, including items used by school-aged children such as toys (marbles, porcelain dolls) and school equipment (writing slates and styluses). Evidence of community feasts or “church suppers” was also recovered, including fragments of large serving dishes, Mason jars, sauce bottles, utilitarian crockery, and eating utensils (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 408). Of particular interest was a fragment of glass featuring a factory-embossed face that appears to have been intentionally modified into a cutting tool. Following interpretations of worked glass made famous by Laurie Wilkie (1996, 2000, 2003), Beaudry and Berkland suggest that this artifact may have been

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used by an African American woman on Nantucket as part of a healing kit, although they admit that there is insufficient contextual evidence on Nantucket to confidently identify it as such (Beaudry and Berkland 2007, 409). Beaudry and Berkland (2007, 411) conclude that this archaeological evidence suggests that African Nantucketers used the meeting house as “a stage upon which to form a collective identity and from which to express their solidarity in seeking the rights of full citizenship,” clearly part of the moral struggle against slavery and racism. As the example of the Nantucket meeting house demonstrates, one clear way to survive in a hostile, racist world was to congregate around a central place in a sanctuary settlement, often led by a charismatic pastor or other strong community leader. This was apparently the case for the residents of a small African American community that developed in the Hudson Valley town of Hyde Park, some ninety miles north of New York City. Known in its day as Guineatown, the settlement was established in the first decade of the nineteenth century and developed as an agricultural community for African American people, including people who were initially enslaved by the wealthy estate owners of this affluent region. Some of them reportedly kept as many as thirty enslaved people. As late as 1809, enslaved people were baptized in the St. James Church in Hyde Park (Lindner and Johnson 2015). In the early 2000s, Christopher Lindner and Trevor Johnson directed an archaeological field school through the auspices of Bard College on the homesite of Guineatown’s leading citizen, Primus Martin. Following his death, the house was inhabited by his widow Eliza, and their son, Benjamin. Lindner and Johnson’s research documented the presence of at least four African American households in Guineatown, at least one of which was headed by a self-emancipated person and all of which functioned as farmhouses for families primarily involved in merino sheep husbandry. The investigation included a systematic shovel test survey of the area around a cellar hole and areal excavations within that foundation. The archaeologists concluded that the central core of the site featured a swept yard and two refuse middens, one each to the east and west of the yard space. Discovering what they thought to be an inordinate number of ceramic vessels and smoking pipes in the middens, the archaeologists concluded that during Primus’s lifetime, the Martin house was a central location where community members would congregate, perhaps to celebrate the leadership of Martin or perhaps as a meeting place in the absence of

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a black church in Hyde Park. What is clear is that Primus Martin, and the other residents of Guineatown, were providing shelter to at least one refugee fleeing from enslavement (Lindner and Johnson 2015). In 1826, some 350 miles to the south of Timbucto, New York, another sanctuary community was established outside the Quaker village of Mount Holly, New Jersey. Like its New York cognate, this community was named after the fabled West African city of Timbuctu. This Timbuctoo was established as a place where emancipated African Americans could establish an independent settlement and livelihood, but in contrast to the freedpeople Gerrit Smith recruited, this Timbuctoo was settled largely by people who had fled captivity in the South to settle in New Jersey. This history of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, is instructive for understanding the tensions and contestation of the meaning of freedom in the North. As the nineteenth century progressed, the free black population in the northern states grew. Freedom came in a number of ways to this population. Some of them achieved freedom through the plodding process of legislated emancipation, some were born outside slavery to free parents, and some were refugees from the South. The definition of freedom was fluid, however, as the growing fear of black political power in the North resulted in many states passing legislation that limited the civil rights of African Americans. Prior to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, individual states decided who could vote in elections. In the afterglow of the American Revolution, many African Americans were at least nominally extended the same political rights as whites. However, a number of northern and border states either amended their constitutions or passed legislation that disenfranchised the black population. Free African Americans who once had the right to vote were disenfranchised in Delaware (1792), Kentucky (1799), Maryland (1809), Connecticut (1818), Pennsylvania (1838), and New Jersey (1820) (Smith 1998). As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the North, an increasing number of communities like Mount Holly encouraged or at least tolerated the establishment of free black communities at their margins. Many such communities served as destination points for men, women, and children who had escaped captivity in the South. Timbuctoo was such a community. Archaeologist Chris Barton, a founding member of the community-based Timbuctoo Discovery Project, completed a research project at Timbuctoo in the early 2010s. He has concluded that the community was established by 1826, when ten African American families

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Figure 5.2. Archaeologists uncovering Feature 13 at Timbuctoo, New Jersey. Photo by Christopher Barton.

were recorded as living there. The community served as a station on the Underground Railroad, as a haven for southern refugees through the Civil War (Barton 2014), and as a locus of African American identity and community building after the war (figure 5.2). Timbuctoo was on the front lines of the struggle for freedom in the antebellum North. At its peak at the Civil War’s end, the community had approximately 150 residents. Barton’s analysis of census data indicates that in 1860 a conservative estimate of sixteen—more than 10 percent of the community—can be confidently identified as having escaped from slavery. Forty-seven residents in the 1870 census had been born in a slaveholding state, a full 27 percent of community residents (Barton 2014, 28). The high concentration of “fugitive slaves”—at least sixteen in 1860—made Timbuctoo a likely target for slave catchers and kidnapping gangs. Following the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, there were significant financial incentives for slave catchers and kidnapping gangs to take people captive, either to collect a reward from a federal marshal for the apprehension of a fugitive slave, or more lucratively, for the covert sale of kidnapped people into slavery.

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Communities like Timbuctoo created a means of defense against apprehension or kidnapping. In several well-documented instances, the Timbuctoo community took up arms to defend community members from enslavement, most notably an incident known as “the battle of Pine Swamp.” When well-known slave catcher George Alberti arrived in Timbuctoo to apprehend a man named Perry Simmons, Simmons exchanged gunfire with Alberti. Hearing the commotion, a number of armed community members rushed to Simmons’s aid, chasing Alberti off. Perry had been party to at least one other incidence of violent resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act when he and two other residents allegedly shot into the home of William Spry, an African American resident of Timbuctoo who was thought to be an informant and a collaborator with slave-catching gangs (Barton 2014, 25; Barton and Markert 2013). Conditions for African Americans in the North did not necessarily improve in the decades following the end of the Civil War. With their goal of general emancipation achieved, white abolitionist organizations dispersed and the slave-catching gangs were soon replaced by white supremacist hate groups. The Ku Klux Klan was an active and mainstream organization in the early twentieth-century North. Klan rallies and marches were held throughout the Northeast, and acts of terrorism, including raising burning crosses and vandalizing and destroying black churches (and Catholic churches) were common throughout the North in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Lynchings were not unknown. A famous example is the 1911 public murder of Zachariah Walker, which happened in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, only 75 miles to the west of Timbuctoo (Downey and Heiser 1991). Facing economic privation, school segregation, and domestic terrorism, the community of Timbuctoo began to disperse, seeking better opportunities in the cities and elsewhere. By the middle of the twentieth century, the village had been abandoned. Barton’s archaeology project at Timbuctoo was conducted in full partnership with a community of descendants and the existing African American community of western New Jersey. In the late twentieth century, the local township purchased a four-acre parcel of the original forty-acre Timbuctoo community. Barton focused on one abandoned house site on this remnant parcel of Timbuctoo that had been identified by a remotesensing project in the late 2000s on a lot originally owned by a community leader known as David “King” Parker. This property eventually passed after his death to William Davis. Davis, a free man born in the area in 1836,

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served in the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Davis purchased the old Parker lot in 1879 and built a house where he and his wife Rebecca raised five children. Davis died in April 1914 (Barton 2014, 38–39). Based on the artifacts recovered from the site, Barton concludes that the Davis house was torn down shortly after his death and was used as a community dump until the 1940s, when the site was filled and plowed over (Barton 2014, 39). To best interpret the strategies the African American community used at Timbuctoo to overcome racialization, economic marginalization, and targeted racial violence, Barton interpreted the archaeological evidence retrieved from the Parker-Davis house through an approach he calls an improvisation theory of practice (Barton and Orr 2015). This approach conceptualizes social and economic improvisations as “learned practices used by socioeconomically marginalized individuals to navigate fields of oppression” (Barton 2014, 65). Barton examined three arenas of improvisation: landscape, architecture, and dietary practices (Barton 2014, 73–74). Barton observed that the Davis household maintained a swept yard. Following work by a number of historical archaeologists who have examined swept yards, Barton posits that the practice has spiritual (after Battle-Baptiste 2010, 2011), social (DeCunzo 2004), and economic (Shogren 1986) meaning. In the context of the Davis house, maintaining a swept yard was an act of improvisation. Impoverished and unable to purchase or construct a large comfortable home, the Davises created a living and livable space in the yard surrounding their small twelve by sixteen-foot house, making do the best they could within their limited means. Barton posits a similar explanation for the use of inferior waster bricks, likely from a local brick yard, to construct their house (Barton and Orr 2015, 210). Similarly, a long tradition of home canning as represented in canning jars recovered from the site and evidence for the purchase of commercially produced peanut butter can be interpreted as acts of improvisation, as African American people who lived on the impoverished margins of American society shifted between home-produced and inexpensive commercial products (Barton 2014, 175–178). The excavated materials paint a picture of a group of people doing their best to survive under very difficult conditions. For example, although the most commonly recovered type of ceramic was undecorated ironstone, very few pieces of matched sets were found. This suggests that the residents of the house were purchasing individual plates and bowls one piece

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at a time as they were likely unable to afford to buy matched place settings, never mind a matched set of multiple settings. However, the recovery of a fragment of a toy teapot suggests that even though they had limited means, the residents of the Davis house purchased mass-produced toys for their children. Analysis of some of the canning jars recovered from the site indicated that some of the jars were repurposed as drinking vessels, another act of improvisation (Barton et al. 2013). Conclusion

The abolition of slavery in the United States was a dramatic social change that had long been hoped for by those who lived in slavery and their white antislavery allies. When slavery was finally abolished at the conclusion of the Civil War, the antislavery networks slowly disbanded, their primary goal achieved. For those who had been enslaved or were descended from those who were, the end of slavery was not the end of their struggle; it marked the beginning of a new social reality. While slavery may have been abolished, racism, poverty, and struggle remained. For decades before slavery was finally abolished in the United States, communities formed in the rural Northeast as African American families sought social and spiritual fellowship and economic stability. Often, as we have seen, this resulted in the formation of small communities centered on a church or community leader. Undoubtedly the social solidarity that emerged in these communities helped people overcome some part of the institutional racism that was still prevalent in the United States. Often, however, peace and stability came with a social and material cost and required collective action. As Frederick Douglass said, the struggle against slavery was both moral and physical; it was fought with both ideas and blows. In the next chapter, we turn our attention to an example of armed struggle against slavery and those who would perpetuate it.

6 The Parker House An Archaeology of Armed Resistance in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

As we saw in the previous chapter, African Americans have been engaged in a struggle for freedom for centuries. The nodes of contestation have been many: disenfranchisement, the denial of citizenship after the Dred Scott decision of 1857, kidnappings of free people in the North to be transported south into slavery, collusion and violence around the attempts to apprehend and return those men and women who had escaped slavery to settle in the North. Many of these nodes of contestation came together in a small rural community in southeastern Pennsylvania near a small village called Christiana, at a rented house a man named William Parker and his family occupied. The existence of places such as Parting Ways and Newtown in Massachusetts, Skunk Hollow and Timbuctoo in New Jersey, and Guineatown in New York underscores the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, segregated rural African American enclaves, which had formed as early as the opening decades of the eighteenth century, existed throughout the Northeast (Berlin 1980), often providing sanctuary for others seeking a life of freedom. Free blacks, emancipated slaves and their descendants, and people who had fled slavery in the South populated such communities. The long-standing presence of rural African American communities is poorly understood historically, particularly given the relative visibility of well-known urban sites associated with notable African American people or communities. This is likely a result of analytical bias. For example, in launching a major initiative to identify African American sites in rural and suburban contests in Pennsylvania, the State Historic Preservation Office notes that of the some 136,000 historic properties recorded in their

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database, only 168, or 0.12 percent, are associated with African Americans. More than half of these are located in the Pittsburgh or Philadelphia metropolitan regions (Splain 2018). Although such sites are both poorly understood and largely understudied, archaeological research on the question of rural black communities has recently been shedding increasing light on their presence in the landscape. For those descended from enslaved rural workers or for those escaping from plantations, a rural life may have presented a more feasible way to make a living than moving to an urban area, where unskilled and poorly paid day labor might provide the only available employment. Urban life presented significant challenges for those hoping to hold families together. Poor urban families faced the very real threat of their adolescent children being arrested and incarcerated for vagrancy or petty theft (Span 2002). Similar threats existed in the countryside, as in the middle of the nineteenth century rural communities were vulnerable to kidnapping (Densmore 2005). As a means of community protection, African American families could choose to congregate in rural black communities, where, in Barton’s words, they “improvised” a way to make a living, often on the social and economic margins of a white community, in such a way as to provide not only community but mutual aid against racist attacks and kidnapping attempts (Field 2017, 2018; McCoy 2012). One such community developed in the middle of the nineteenth century outside the hamlet of Christiana in Sadsbury Township, Pennsylvania, where community members scratched out a living as hired farm or mill hands or worked rented land as tenant farmers. As was the case at Skunk Hollow, the Christiana community was centered on a charismatic leader, a self-emancipated man known as William Parker. Although there was (and still is) an active African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation in Christiana, Parker was not a religious leader but rather was a social advocate who helped form a mutual aid society to assist those who had fled from slavery in nearby Maryland and Virginia. Christiana, located just a few miles north of Maryland in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, was one of several communities in southeastern Pennsylvania to experience a rapid increase in the African American population in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The black population of Sadsbury Township, in which the hamlet of Christiana is located, tripled in size from 48 in 1830 to 156 in 1840, peaking in 1860 at 185 people (United States Bureau of the Census 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860). The African

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American community in Sadsbury Township welcomed self-emancipated people from Maryland and Virginia, both as permanent residents and as transients on their way farther north as they fled captivity. Many selfemancipated people who decided to settle in Pennsylvania, of course, had very limited means. Without the cash to purchase land, many, including William Parker, established themselves as tenant farmers, supplementing their income by hiring themselves out as farmhands or as laborers in gristmills and other rural occupations. Sometime around 1845, William Parker, an outspoken and active opponent of slavery, settled as a tenant farmer on land that Quaker Levi Pownall owned (Parker 1866; Rettew 2006). Rural communities like Timbuctoo and Christiana were places ripe for illegal human trafficking after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. In Lancaster County, a group known as the Gap Gang, named after the village of Gap, were reportedly quite active in the kidnapping business, terrorizing free black families throughout the region (Smith 2013). The fear of being kidnapped by ruffians like the members of the Gap Gang motivated black communities to organize vigilance committees and mutual aid societies (Horton and Horton 1992; Newman 2011; Roth 2014; Smith 2013). William Parker was the leader of one such mutual aid society. By his own account, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Parker provided shelter and assistance to other people escaping from Maryland and Virginia into Pennsylvania. Beyond providing a place of refuge for people in transit to points north, Parker was not afraid to use violence to prevent himself or others from being kidnapped and transported back into slavery. Parker reported that when he first arrived in Pennsylvania, he broke one man’s arm with a stick when the man confronted him about his legal status. He allegedly participated in a violent melee at the Lancaster Courthouse in order to free William Dorsey, who was being sent back into slavery. Parker reported that he once knocked a white intruder in his house senseless with a pair of fireplace tongs. He also participated in a violent attack on a band of kidnappers, three of whom died of their wounds. Parker also reported that he had burned down the barn of a tavern keeper who was sympathetic to the Fugitive Slave Law, engaged in a gun fight at an inn to free a captive being taking back to Maryland, and violently beat Allen Williams, who had turned a fugitive over to the authorities. His selfreported exploits also included torching the house of another man who

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Figure 6.1. The William Parker House in the late nineteenth century. Source: Christiana Resistance Collection of the Moores Memorial Library, Christiana, PA. Used by permission.

was turning fugitives in with the intention of shooting him as he ran from the flames (Parker 1866). Parker is most famous, however, because the small stone house he lived in while he was a tenant farmer on Pownall’s land was the site of an incident known as the Christiana Riot (figure 6.1). On the morning of September 11, 1851, a group from Maryland led by slaveholding farmer Edward Gorsuch, approached the Parker house, hoping to apprehend several men who had fled their captivity on Gorsuch’s Maryland farm. Accompanied by Deputy US Marshal Henry Kline, the Marylanders were empowered by the Fugitive Slave Act to apprehend these four men, who were seeking refuge with Parker and the Christiana community (Katz 1974; Rettew 2006; Robbins 1852; Slaughter 1991). At dawn on that September day, Parker and his associates were alerted that the Kline-Gorsuch party was approaching the house. Armed with what would later be called “a few old muskets,” Parker and his associates, including his wife Eliza, barricaded themselves in the stone house on the

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second floor. After a standoff that lasted several hours, the confrontation grew violent. Tensions rose when a crowd of several dozen people formed, including members of the African American community, who had been called to help when Eliza Parker sounded a horn, and several white Quaker neighbors. Despite the sizable group that was assembling in opposition to their mission, the Gorsuch party was unwilling to stand down. The Marylanders and the Parker party exchanged gunshots and the confrontation descended into bloody hand-to-hand combat, including the use of corn knives and other deadly implements. When the dust cleared, Edward Gorsuch lay dead and his son Dickinson, who had dragged himself away from the fight, lay against a tree, seriously wounded and clinging to life (Delle 2015b; Katz 1974; Rettew 2006; Robbins 1852; Slaughter 1991). Dickinson Gorsuch, who survived his serious wounds, reportedly described the events of the day to his younger brother Joshua, who published Gorsuch’s account of the incident in the Baltimore Sun. According to this account, when the Kline-Gorsuch party arrived at the Parker house: Mr. Kline asked for the owner of the house; told them he was an United States Marshal, and that he came for the purpose of arresting Mr. Gorsuch’s slaves, Nelson and Josh. He then read to them the warrants, and while doing this he heard them loading their guns upstairs. The Marshal and my father started both together to go upstairs, the latter having first called to Nelson, that he saw him, and told him that if he would come down peaceably and go home with him, he would treat him as kindly as before he ran away. Resistance, he said, would do no good, for he came with the proper officer and authority, and he would not leave the premises without his property. While they were on the steps and intending to proceed, one of the Negroes struck at them with a staff shod with sharp iron. [Edward Gorsuch] then turned and went out of the door. Just as he got out a gun was fired at his head from one of the windows, but the aim was too high. The Marshal coming out just behind him fired his pistol in the window. . . . A white man rode up to the bars in the lane. His presence inspired the blacks; they immediately raised a shout and became confirmed in their opposition. When the marshal saw the man at the bars, he went to him, and called on him in the name of

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the United States, to assist in arresting the fugitives, showing his warrant, reading his authority, and telling him the inevitable consequence of refusal. Another white man was also present during this conversation. The reply was, that he would not assist; and that they had better go home, for they could make no arrests there, or blood would be spilt. . . . The marshal and two of the young men left. . . . Just as the marshal and the two young men left, the Quaker on the horse said something to the Negroes that had assembled near him, when they set up a most hideous yell and rushed towards the house. The Negroes in the house at the same time rushing out . . . met the advancing gang around my father. They were four men, all armed with pistols, it is true, opposed to about one hundred infuriated, bloodthirsty, howling demons. As soon as these two gangs met in the narrow lane, the attack was made upon the diminished band by a Negro from behind striking [Edward Gorsuch] on the head, which caused him to fall forward on his knees, when he was shot several times and cut over the head with corn-cutters. (figure 6.2) Parker’s account of the day, published some fifteen years after the event, largely corroborates the details of the melee, although he elaborates on the fatal confrontation. After exchanging both words and gunfire, Parker and several of his men came downstairs to continue their defense of the house, at a moment when the Gorsuch party was conversing with Castner Hanway and Elijah Lewis, the two white men mentioned in Dickinson Gorsuch’s account. According to Parker’s account neither side showed any quarter: “What do you intend to do?” said Kline to me. “I intend to fight,” said I. “I intend to try your strength.” “If you will withdraw your men,” he replied, “I will withdraw mine.” While I was talking to Gorsuch, his son said, “Father, will you take all this from a nigger?” I answered him by saying that I respected old age; but that, if he would repeat that, I should knock his teeth down his throat. At this he fired upon me, and I ran up to him and knocked the pistol out of his hand, when he let the other one fall and ran in the field . . . I returned to my men, and found Samuel Thompson talking to old Mr. Gorsuch, his master. They were both angry . . .

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Figure 6.2. Samuel Hopkins and Peter Wood, veterans of the Christiana incident, at the ruins of the William Parker House. Hopkins is holding the corn cutter reputedly used to strike the blow that killed Edward Gorsuch. Source: Christiana Resistance Collection of the Moores Memorial Library, Christiana, PA. Used by permission.

Thompson took Pinckney’s gun and struck Gorsuch, and brought him to his knees. Gorsuch rose and signaled to his men. Thompson then knocked him down again, and he again rose. At this time all the white men opened fire, and we rushed upon them; when they turned, threw down their guns, and ran away. We, being closely engaged[,] clubbed our rifles. We were too closely pressed to fire, but we found a good deal could be done with empty guns . . . The riot, so called, was now entirely ended. The elder Gorsuch was dead; his son and nephew were both wounded, and I have reason to believe others were,—how many, it would be difficult to say. Of our party, only two were wounded . . . A story was afterwards circulated that Mr. Gorsuch shot his own slave, and in retaliation his slave shot him; but it was without foundation. His slave struck him the first and second blows; then three or four sprang upon him, and, when he became helpless, left him to

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pursue others. The women put an end to him. His slaves, so far from meeting death at his hands, are all still living. (Parker 1866, Parker’s italics) In the days that followed, although Parker and the active participants in the action had fled north, dozens of African Americans in the surrounding county were arrested, as were the Quaker neighbors who had attempted to talk the Marylanders into retreating. After a brief investigation and arraignment, three white men who had been at the scene, Castner Hanway, Elijah Lewis, and Joseph Scarlett, and more than two dozen black men were remanded to prison in Philadelphia, where they were to be tried in a US circuit court for treason. The treason trial of the first defendant, Castner Hanway, resulted in an acquittal. US Attorney John Ashmead, who was in charge of the prosecution, subsequently moved to drop the federal charges against the remaining defendants (Katz 1974; Rettew 2006; Robbins 1852; Slaughter 1991). Parker fled north to Rochester, New York, where he became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and where Eliza Parker joined him. The Parkers eventually settled north of the border in North Buxton, Ontario, a settlement for African American refugees that Rev. William King had established with the assistance of Canada’s governor general, Lord Elgin. It is unclear at this point whether the stone house

Figure 6.3. Excavation units at the William Parker House. Photo by James A. Delle.

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Figure 6.4. Members of the Christiana Historical Society working alongside Kutztown University students at the William Parker House site. Photo by James A. Delle.

in Christiana was reoccupied after the Parker’s flight. The house was soon abandoned (figure 6.3). It was demolished and the ground was plowed over in the 1890s (Rettew 2006). Community Archaeology at the Parker House Site

In 2007, members of the descendant communities associated with the 1851 events at the Parker House expressed interest in conducting an archaeological investigation at the site to determine whether it might be feasible to rebuild the house on its original foundations. The ensuing excavation project was conceived as a community archaeology project whose explicit research goal was to locate any remnants of the Parker House and to consult with a masonry contractor to determine the feasibility of reconstructing a replica of the Parker House on its original foundation (figure 6.4). Because the approximate location of the site was known and was situated in what is today a plowed field a local Amish family owns, the initial phase of the Parker House project consisted of a controlled surface collection of the site. A total of 511 artifacts, including 231 datable pieces of refined earthenware with a mean ceramic date (MCD) of 1858.4 were recovered. The parcel on which the house was located remains part of the

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same farm, which suggests that if there were residents living in the house either before or after the Parker occupation, they were likely tenant farmers. The artifacts recovered from the surface indicate that the house likely was the home of at least one more tenant family prior to its abandonment and demolition. The surface collection was followed by systematic subsurface testing, which resulted in the recovery of an additional 6,605 artifacts. At the northern edge of the artifact concentration, a series of ten one-metersquare units were placed at two-meter intervals. This strategy was designed to reconnoiter for evidence of the house and any related features, to determine the depth of the plow zone, and to examine the composition of sub–plow zone soil layers. A standard shovel test pit survey was simultaneously conducted along one perpendicular and three parallel transects across the presumed location of the cellar hole based on the heaviest distribution of surface artifacts. Twenty-three shovel test pits were excavated along the four transects; two additional test pits (TP# 24 and TP# 25) were later placed to explore the possible location of a gate into the house yard. This reconnaissance strategy successfully located the foundation and cellar hole of the Parker House. Once the foundation was identified, the remaining test pits were placed north and west of the house. During the next two field seasons, sixty-six one-meter-square units were excavated around the foundation and the cellar hole, exposing the entirety of the east, west, and north foundation walls and approximately half of the southern foundation wall. Testing in the surrounding yard spaces produced no significant evidence of outbuildings or other features. Description of the Farmstead and House

Historical photographs and descriptions of the property recorded in the transcripts of Castner Hanway’s trial provide some evidence for the layout of the farmstead and the design and structure of the Parker House. The house was a two-story, rubble-constructed stone building located upslope from the main farmhouse Levi Pownall owned in the mid-nineteenth century. Excavation results indicate that the house measured approximately twenty-four feet wide by twenty-eight feet long and had an excavated cellar at least five feet deep. However, the amount of rubble deposited in the cellar hole restricted our ability to excavate to the cellar floor. Both the front and back doors of the house were aligned slightly off the center of

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the north and south elevations, suggesting a central hall or breezeway. Alternatively, these doors may have opened directly to the kitchen. The front (north) and back (south) doors were flanked by glazed six-over-six sash windows with identical second story windows above each of the four first-story windows. There was a ninth window on the west gable elevation. A massive interior stone chimney dominated the east gable end of the building. It, too, was constructed of stone, although bricks recovered during excavation suggest that the fireplace featured a brick hearth. The north door was protected by an overhanging wooden awning and the first story of the northern façade was coated in whitewash. The pitched gable roof was clad in wooden shingles or shakes. Descriptions of the house made during testimony at Castner Hanway’s trial indicate that there were interior room partitions and that an interior staircase wound around the kitchen fireplace, leading to the second story (Robbins 1852; see figure 6.2, above). It is likely that the first floor was divided into two rooms, possibly with a central hall, and that the east room served as the kitchen. Excavations recovered a segment of plaster approximately 5.0 by 2.5 feet that had adhered to an interior wall of the first-story western room, which suggests that at least one of the interior rooms was finished with plaster. The southwestern corner of the house featured a wooden bulkhead cellar door. Excavations confirmed that a set of at least two stone steps led into the cellar. The house was built into a slope, with a fall of nearly two feet between the north and south walls. Parker was a tenant of the man he referred to as Squire Pownall, to whom he paid rent for the use of the small farmstead. The Parker house was situated approximately 2,000 feet south of the main Pownall house; the front door was situated south, or away from, the Pownall house. The Pownall’s view of the Parker house would have been obscured by a row of trees lining the boundary of the small tenant farm. These trees are visible in photographs of the house and were mentioned in testimony given at the Hanway trial (Delle 2015a). It is likely that the Parkers worked a small, diversified farm and that William Parker supplemented his income by working for neighboring farmers and millers. Descriptions of the 1851 “riot” indicate that corn cutters and scythes were located in the house, suggesting that Parker grew maize and either wheat, barley, or rye. The small farmstead also featured an orchard that included at least one peach tree that grew quite close to the home’s eastern elevation. A split-rail fence bounded the outline of

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Figure 6.5. Plan of excavated units at the William Parker House, revealing the foundation of the house. Image by James A. Delle.

the farmyard; photographic evidence suggests that a smaller picket fence enclosed what was likely a poultry yard and a small chicken house west of the home (figure 6.5). Parker’s account suggests that an external oven shared a flue with the main hearth, but no evidence of this feature was uncovered during the excavations. The excavation recovered 550 nails, most of which were likely deposited at the time the house was demolished in the late 1890s. Wrought (32.4 percent), cut (49.8 percent), and wire (7.1 percent) nails were all represented. The presence of the wire nails indicates that some of the wooden elements of the house had been repaired or repurposed late in the century. Given the probable 1830s–1840s construction date for the house, it is impossible

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to state at this point whether the wrought and cut nails were used for different purposes when the house was constructed, whether the cut nails were used to make repairs and renovations to the house, or whether the builders of the house used wrought and cut nails indiscriminately based on what was available when the house was initially built. Although the exterior of the house was made of stone, the nails would have been used to secure floorboards, roof shingles, and the interior partitions and stairway that existed in 1851 (Delle 2015a). Architectural flat glass was recovered from multiple excavation units; 24 percent of the 1,168 glass fragments of glass were recovered from a single unit (41) below the apparent location of the eastern window of the north elevation, which suggests that glass from this window was broken at or near the time the house was demolished. The Material Culture of Tenancy

The ceramic assemblage recovered from the Parker House site sheds light on the availability of ceramic vessels and how African American tenant farmers such as the Parkers may have used them. The majority of ceramic objects recovered were fragmentary, having likely been broken before they were deposited. Those recovered from the plow zone had been subject to considerable fracturing, likely from the repeated action of plowing through the rubble-filled topsoil that emerged from the demolition of the building. Although most of the recovered fragments were too small to determine the form and function of the original vessels, following received wisdom, it can be said with some measure of confidence that the majority of stoneware and unrefined earthenwares were utilitarian in function. Refined earthenwares were primarily used for food service. The utilitarian earthenware assemblage was dominated by locally produced, lead-glazed redwares. In the surface collection, 34 percent of all ceramics recovered consisted of locally produced redware; stoneware constituted only 2.2 percent. The 1,286 redware sherds recovered during unit excavation were grouped into 485 vessel lots. These lots represent 34.9 percent of all ceramic sherds and 35 percent of identified vessel lots. In contrast, only 50 stoneware sherds, grouped into 44 vessel lots, were recovered. This represents only 1.4 percent of all ceramic sherds and 3.2 percent of vessel lots recovered from the Parker House site. The disparity in the frequency of redware and stoneware vessels is likely a function of both depositional and economic factors. Stoneware

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was typically used for food storage, while redware vessels would have been used for food preparation and would have been handled on a daily basis. Given the variety of redware forms available in southeastern Pennsylvania (Gibble 2005, 38; Delle 2015a) and their many uses, it is likely that the Parkers used redware vessels in their daily lives. Because redware was fired at lower temperatures than stoneware, redware vessels tended to be more brittle and more subject to breakage, disposal, and replacement. Lancaster County was home to a thriving redware industry well into the nineteenth century and these vessels could be purchased from local potters at a low cost. In contrast, in much of Pennsylvania, local stoneware production was not established until after the mid-nineteenth century (Lasansky 1979). Refined earthenwares, which unlike the coarser utilitarian wares were often imported, can also be used to interpret daily life in several ways. Archaeologists often use these kinds of ceramics to establish temporal parameters for site occupation. Although those who purchased and used ceramics did so on unpredictable schedules, we can use well-established manufacturing date ranges for English and American refined earthenwares to calculate an MCD to estimate approximate site occupation periods (Adams 2003). At the Parker House, four classes of refined earthenwares were recovered from the excavation units. Like the coarse wares, these ceramics were analyzed both by sherd count and vessel lot assembled by unit. Not surprising for a mid-nineteenth-century site, the overall ceramic assemblage consisted of a small amount of creamware (0.72 percent by vessel lot [BVL]/0.54 percent by sherd count [BSC]), followed by pearlware (19.75 percent BVL/21.45 percent BSC), whiteware (40.16 percent BVL/41.24 percent BSC), and only two small fragments of ironstone (0.14 percent BVL/0.05 percent BSC). A few pieces of imported porcelain were also recovered (.94 percent BVL/.43 percent BSC). Dating the recovered ceramics by type and variety produced a mean ceramic date for the site of 1841.72 by vessel lot and 1841.10 by raw sherd count. If we consider the fifteen- to twenty-year lag time for the deposition of ceramics that Adams (2003) has proposed, the mean date range of the site would be 1856–1861. This date range nicely corroborates local wisdom that the Parker House was first occupied circa 1840 and was abandoned before 1890 (Rettew 2006). It also suggests that the house may have been abandoned immediately after the Parkers fled to Canada.

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The typology of refined ceramics archaeologists commonly use is likely more a reflection of our own need to distinguish, quantify, and analyze artifactual data in a way that makes sense to us intellectually than an expression of the way these objects were understood and used in the past. The distinction between transfer-printed pearlware and transfer-printed whiteware, for example, which we distinguish primarily by the refinement of manufacturing techniques used to process white clay and to manufacture clear glaze, was likely indistinguishable and possibly even irrelevant to those who purchased and used the vessels (Ness 2015). However, if we analyze decorative motifs that transcended the formal typology historical archaeologists typically use, we may get a better idea of the parameters of consumer choice the people who occupied the Parker House exhibited. This approach may be particularly useful for assemblages like the one under consideration here, where the small size of most of the fragments recovered makes it difficult to establish the degree to which matched sets of plates and dishes were purchased or even to establish which images appeared on transfer-printed plates. To get a sense of the kinds of ceramics the Parkers and the other tenants who lived in this house purchased, we analyzed the refined earthenware assemblage by decorative motif. A considerable portion of the assemblage consisted of undecorated sherds (36.79 percent BVL/57.83 percent BSC). This may be because the Parkers purchased undecorated ceramics or because of the processes by which some undecorated parts of decorated vessels were deposited and then archaeologically recovered. Seven types of decorative motifs were recovered from the Parker House site. The largest subset consisted of transfer-printed wares, which account for 25.0 percent of vessel lots and 17.63 percent of all sherds recovered. The transfer-print group can be further broken down by color. Most of the transfer-printed vessels were blue (16.31 percent of all refined earthenwares), followed in frequency by mulberry (3.1 percent), black (2.02 percent), red (2.02 percent), green (1.19 percent), and polychrome (0.36 percent). The second most common decorative motif found at the Parker House was hand-painted floral, including both blue and polychrome (15.12 percent). Sponge/spatter-, annular/mocha-, and edge-decorated wares (including shell- and feather-edged wares) followed at 7.62 percent, 6.79 percent and 5.83 percent, respectively, of the refined earthenware vessel lots (figure 6.6). A small number of flow blue (2.38 percent) and embossed vessels (.48 percent) were also recovered.

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Figure 6.6. Fragment of a blue sponge-decorated teacup recovered from the William Parker House. Photo by James A. Delle.

The vast majority of utilitarian wares at the Parker House site were redware vessels. Composing just over a third of the entire ceramic assemblage, these kinds of vessels were easily and inexpensively procured from local artisans, some of whom may have been African Americans themselves. Table wares, vessels in which food would have been served, were primarily imported refined earthenware vessels, most likely purchased by the Parkers and the other tenants at the house from local merchants, possibly even from Elijah Lewis, a local storekeeper who participated in the events of September 11, 1851, and, like Castner Hanway, was arrested and held for treason. The Parkers apparently preferred blue transfer-printed dishes above all others but also purchased floral, sponged, mocha, and edge-decorated vessels. The variety of decorative motifs recovered likely reflects a combination of a family and personal preference for brightly colored decorative ceramics and the local availability of specific kinds of plates and dishes. Because their tenure at a given site is often transient, it is often difficult to trace tenant farmers through the US census returns, deeds, and tax

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records. However, because William Parker wrote and published a short autobiography, we know that he married Eliza Ann Elizabeth Howard before he settled in Christiana, likely in the mid-1840s. The Parker household appears in the US census in Sadsbury Township in 1850, when it consisted of William (age 28), Eliza (20), and their three children: John (born 1848), Mariah (born 1846), and Catherine (born 1849). The household also included Eliza Parker’s sister Hannah (17) and her husband Alexander Pickney (27). In the aftermath of the incident, Parker reported that Eliza hid the children with her mother and relied on the charity of neighbors to ensure their well-being (Parker 1886; United States Bureau of the Census 1850, 11–12). It is unclear whether Eliza’s mother lived in Sadsbury Township or farther away. By 1850, Hannah and Alexander Pickney apparently had not had any children. It seems most likely that there were four adults and three small children living in the house during the last years of the Parker occupation. Very few personal objects were recovered from the Parker House. The only clothing elements recovered were two brass buttons, four motherof-pearl buttons, and one porcelain button. Two small fragments of silver that may have been ornamental pins or parts of brooches and a single glass bead were the only other evidence of personal ornamentation recovered. A single thimble was also found. A graphite pencil and fragment of a slate were also among the assemblage. Mariah Parker may have used the latter for lessons; she would have been five years old at the time the Parkers abandoned the site (figure 6.7). The pencil and slate provide evidence that at least some members of the household were literate. A single clay marble was the only toy recovered. Finally, at least one member of the Parker/Pickney household was a smoker; two pipe bowl fragments and thirteen broken kaolin pipe stems were found. Both William Parker and Alexander Pickney were identified in the 1850 census as farmers. Parker also worked for wages threshing grain at Joseph Scarlett’s mill, suggesting that he was using a diversified economic strategy to survive, a common practice for agricultural laborers of the mid-nineteenth century. Several artifacts related to farming activities were recovered, including two hoes and a file. The latter object would have been used to hone edges on the corn cutters and other sharp instruments that members of the Parker household used. Finally, a single gunflint was recovered from the cellar steps. Although it is impossible to determine if the flint was broken or lost during the melee of September 11, 1851, it

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Figure 6.7. A graphite pencil recovered from the William Parker House. Photo by James A. Delle.

provides material evidence that the Parkers and Pickneys had firearms in their house (figure 6.8). In many ways, William Parker and his family lived extraordinary lives. They fled from the tyranny of slavery, as thousands of others of their contemporaries had done. The events and aftermath of the violent confrontation of September 11, 1851, including the death of Edward Gorsuch, the trial of Castner Hanway, the flight of the Parker and Pickney families to Canada, and the eventual publication of Parker’s story in the Atlantic

Figure 6.8. A gunflint recovered from the William Parker House site. Photo by James A. Delle.

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Monthly, were all extraordinary events. When we think deeply about why the Parkers were in Christiana in September 1851, we can see that what they had hoped to do was not to become extraordinary but rather to live ordinary lives. The Parkers and Pickneys rented a small house and a farm lot from a wealthy landlord and proceeded to work for a living. The material culture recovered during the excavation demonstrates that these extraordinary people, at least until the morning of September 11, 1851, were fashioning ordinary lives. Food was stored and prepared in locally produced redware vessels. Food was served in fancier white decorated plates and cups. The Parkers used iron hoes and edged tools to work in the fields and the orchard they leased to produce food for themselves and their children. William Parker supplemented the family income by working at Joseph Scarlett’s mill to obtain cash and credit to purchase the necessities and luxuries of life: sewing tools, cloth, buttons, tobacco, smoking pipes. They likely hoped to educate their children and had writing implements in their house. Like many farmers of their day, they owned guns, which they likely used to supplement their diet with meat from wild animals and to shoot predators and herbivores that threatened their livestock and damaged their crops. On that fateful day in 1851, those guns were turned on a group of slave catchers intending to return at least two men who were staying with the Parkers to slavery in Maryland. William Parker’s name is known to us because he participated in an extraordinary event, an event that precipitated the archaeological investigation into his house. The evidence recovered from the Parker House project reminds us that even the most extraordinary of people live ordinary lives in many ways. For the Parkers, this was a life of farm tenancy, a transient lifestyle that many rural working-class people, both black and white, followed in the middle of the nineteenth century. Conclusion

Like many African American families in the years between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War, the Parkers lived in a community of people, some that were born free in Pennsylvania, others that escaped slavery and sought freedom in the North. Although African Americans did find allies willing to support them and some patrons like Gerrit Smith who were willing to fund projects to

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provide opportunities for African American people, life was often difficult for people living in marginal rural communities. Even in the North, lives like those the Parkers led were marked by struggles, both the ordinary struggle of making a living as part of a marginalized group and the extraordinary struggles of remaining free in the face of racist US laws, and those, like Edward Gorsuch, would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they exerted control over the lives and bodies of those they claimed as property. Their goal, perhaps revolutionary in its day, was to enjoy the blessings of liberty promised by the US Constitution that were so often and so violently denied them by the persisting twin curses of slavery and racism.

IV Liberty

7 The Problem of Northern Freedom

William Parker’s story is revelatory of a central problem in the history of African Americans in the Northeast. Once emancipated, whether by law, private manumission, or self-emancipation, African Americans were faced with the difficulties of living in a highly racialized society. The worldview of most European Americans placed themselves at the top of a racialized hierarchy and blacks at or near the bottom. Federal law seemed to support this view. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 determined that descendants of African slaves could not attain the status of US citizen and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied accused fugitives their basic legal rights. In 1883, in Pace v. Alabama, the US Supreme Court declared that state laws against interracial marriage were constitutional, paving the way for several attempts to amend the Constitution to ban interracial marriage. In reflecting on his time in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Parker noted that “the whites of that region were generally . . . negro-haters” (Parker 1866). Liberation required more than simply struggling against slavery; it required free blacks to overcome the social and economic obstacles American racism created. While slavery ended with the conclusion of the Civil War, the struggles against racism and for equal rights continues through our own day. Over the past several decades, archaeologists have investigated a number of sites associated with African American people seeking to live independent lives, sometimes in rural enclaves, other times in ethnic neighborhoods in the cities of the Northeast. It is to the stories of those people living outside of slavery, but nevertheless seeking liberty, to which we now turn.

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Map 7.1. Location of sites mentioned in Part IV. Map by James A. Delle.

Liberty through Independence

As we have seen in previous chapters, some African American veterans of the Revolution were relegated to a life of dependent poverty at places such as Parting Ways. However, it is important when considering the archaeology of the African American past not to essentialize the experiences of those we study based on assumptions about the relationship between race and class (Mullins 1999). In 1793, Prince Perkins, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, emigrated with his family from Connecticut to northeastern Pennsylvania, where he established a 150-acre farm that his descendants still own. Historical and archaeological evidence from the site demonstrates that in many ways the residents of this site were ordinary farmers for their time and place, even though they were one of just a handful of African American families that settled in northeastern Pennsylvania. From 1820 to 1920, African Americans never made up even 1 percent of the population of Susquehanna County, where the farmstead

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is located. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, John Roby of Binghamton University conducted an archaeological investigation at this important site (figure 7.1). Prince Perkins was one of a number of people from Connecticut who settled along the upper Susquehanna River in the far northeastern corner of what is now the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, sovereignty over this region, which Iroquoian people had controlled for the better part of a millennium, was in dispute, as both Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimed control of the territory. Land companies from both states were involved in selling title to tracts in what would become Susquehanna County, often with overlapping claims. Perkins served throughout the Revolutionary War as a private in a Connecticut regiment and was emancipated after the war. By 1793, he was among a group of Connecticuters that emigrated to the newly opened lands along the Susquehanna, and by 1814 he held clear title to seventy acres near Hop Bottom (Roby 2011, 50). By 1810, a fellow black veteran from Connecticut, Bristol Budd Sampson, had joined Perkins. Sampson had married Phoebe Perkins, Prince’s daughter. Blind by 1814, Sampson used his veteran’s pension to purchase

Figure 7.1. The Dennis farmhouse. Photo courtesy of the Dennis Farm Charitable Trust. Used by permission.

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fifty acres near the Perkins farm. After Perkins died in 1839, the farm passed to his son William and then to his granddaughter Angeline. In 1852, Angeline Perkins married Henry Dennis, an African American man who had relocated with his family from Vermont to Pennsylvania when he was a small child. Angeline and Henry expanded their farm with a 100acre purchase in 1859. When Henry died in 1882, the farm passed to their sons Sumner and Napoleon Dennis, and after a brief hiatus from 1921 to 1939, the farm has remained in the family through the present day (Roby 2011, 50–53). During the nineteenth century, the Perkins-Dennis property was an average mixed-subsistence or diversified farm. The family grew wheat, rye, and maize (the latter two likely for home consumption, the wheat for export), raised sheep for sale and cows to produce dairy products for both home consumption and sale, and produced maple sugar for sale. The farm was somewhat large compared to its neighbors, but the family invested somewhat less in farm machinery than most of their local contemporaries (Roby 2011). Of all these facts, Roby points to the production of maple sugar as being particularly interesting. For most of the nineteenth century, nearly all cane sugar consumed in the United States was produced using slave labor, either from the circum-Caribbean region or from Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Maple sugar was widely seen in the nineteenth century as an alternative to cane sugar and contrasted with cane sugar in a number of significant ways that Roby suggests may have influenced several generations of the Perkins-Dennis family. He points out that before the Civil War, the Perkins-Dennis family produced nearly four times the amount of maple sugar than an average farm in the region and that very few farms produced any maple sugar at all. During the nineteenth century there was a phenomenon known as the free sugar movement, which encouraged the production and consumption of maple sugar produced on small farms in the Northeast. Unlike cane sugar, maple sugar can be produced with relatively small investments in labor and equipment and can be produced in the late winter, a time when many other farm activities (haying, planting, harvesting) cannot be done in northeastern Pennsylvania. In producing maple sugar, the Perkins-Dennis family, descendants of an emancipated slave, were actively participating in the free sugar movement and thus resisting plantation slavery (Roby 2011, 72).

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After two seasons of excavation, Roby was able to identify three consecutive phases of occupation at the site, the earliest of which correlated with a cellar hole that is likely the ruin of original Prince Perkins house. Given the paucity of iron nails recovered from this site and the overall cultural trends for the region, Roby concluded that this original house was likely a log cabin constructed in the early nineteenth century that was later replaced as the main residence on the site by a frame building that still stands on the property. The faunal remains found there suggest that the residents consumed both domesticated animals raised on the farm and wild game from the surrounding forests. Prince Perkins was known as an accomplished fiddler and pieces of several musical instruments recovered from the site such as jaw harps and harmonicas suggest that music was passed down through the generations. Finally, perhaps the most interesting object Roby and his team recovered was a Lincoln penny struck in 1910—the first year the Lincoln penny was in general circulation. Somewhere during the history of this object, someone took the time and effort to incise thin speech lines radiating out of Lincoln’s mouth. Roby has suggested that this may represent the act of someone on the farm to intentionally commemorate Lincoln and the power of his speech in what Roby characterizes as a memory practice, but he has been hesitant to assign this or any particular meaning to the speech lines. Roby feels that the modified Lincoln penny may have had some symbolic importance to whoever kept it and may represent “a material practice of inclusion” given the symbolic significance of Lincoln, emancipation, and speech in the context of an African American farm. However, Denise Dennis, a descendant of Prince Perkins and the director of the nonprofit Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust, the current steward of the property, imagined that her father, who would have been a boy on the farm in 1910, could have made the scratchings on a lark (Roby 2011, 214). Denise Dennis’s interpretation of the penny reflects her perspective that although her family farmed in a largely European American community and therefore the question of race cannot be ignored, African American farmers should not be essentialized as “others.” As Roby puts it, on the one hand, “the Perkins-Dennis family was doing quite ordinary things for people in their social and temporal setting . . . [but] on the other, they were remarkable because of their social and temporal setting” (Roby 2011, 220). The Perkins-Dennis family, as evidenced by the multigenerational farm they

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operated, were successful in creating average, independent lives in the shadow of slavery and racism. Sandy Ground, Staten Island, New York

Seeking independence through agricultural pursuits was not the only option open to African American people in the rural Northeast. One early and influential archaeological project conducted at Sandy Ground in what is now Staten Island explored the experience of African American oysterers, often referred to in the literature as oystermen. Robert Schuyler, then working for the City University of New York, began the project in the early 1970s and one of his students, William Askins, later took it up. Askins completed a dissertation in 1988 on the materials Schuyler had excavated in the preceding decade (Askins 1988; Schuyler 1974, 1980). In the nineteenth century, the landscape of Staten Island was characterized by rural agricultural and maritime communities. Sandy Ground, which never incorporated as a municipality, is located on the southern end of Staten Island. The African American community of Sandy Ground can be traced to 1828, when John Jackson, who may have once been enslaved, purchased land in the district. Jackson owned a sloop that he operated as a ferry between Staten Island, New Jersey, and Manhattan. Although the community grew slowly over the next two decades, in-migration spiked in the 1850s. In that decade an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church was established in Sandy Ground (Askins 1988, 66–70). In the mid-1850s, Sandy Ground experienced an inflow of African American people migrating to Staten Island from the Chesapeake. By the middle of the decade, at least ten families from Virginia and Maryland had moved to Sandy Ground. By 1860, 114 African Americans and 150 whites were living in Sandy Ground. In 1880, the African American population was 149 and in 1910 it was 196. Several of these families owned sloops and were independently involved in the oyster fishery. Despite some disruption during the Draft Riots of 1863, the community of Sandy Ground seems to have thrived, as African American oysterers were successful in New York’s burgeoning oyster-planting industry. In 1900, 74 percent of African American men in Sandy Ground were identified as oystermen in the US census; only one was identified as a laborer (Askins 1988, 84). By the end of the nineteenth century, this success had resulted in material change. The African American community moved its residential

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Figure 7.2. The Rev. Isaac and Rebecca Gray Coleman House. Image in public domain.

center from the back streets to Bloomingdale Road, one of the region’s main streets (figure 7.2). Askins estimates that many African American families in Sandy Ground were on equal economic footing with all but the wealthiest white landowners (Askins 1988, 71–76; 87–88). By the 1920s, the relative affluence of the independent oystermen had begun to wane. Several factors contributed to the decline of the independent oysterers of Sandy Ground. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the mechanization of oystering, including the use of steam- and then gasoline-powered boats and dredges, contributed to the industrialization of the oyster fishery. Large oyster-fishing operations began to purchase and control access to oyster beds. Limited access to a smaller number of beds led to a decline in return for oystermen, who began to fall from affluence to relative poverty. The growth of industrial factory production in greater New York also contributed to the decline of the oystermen through wage labor jobs, which provided some greater measure of security than the declining oyster trade. By the mid-1920s, the outflow of industrial and human waste had so polluted the oyster beds of greater New York that outbreaks of typhoid were traced to oyster consumption. In 1927, the last of New York’s oyster beds was closed (Askins 2008, 101–105).

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Both Schuyler (1974) and Askins (1988) argue that the success of the oyster industry in the second half of the nineteenth century fostered a racial tolerance between the white and black residents of Sandy Ground. They maintain that the industrialization of the oyster industry in the late nineteenth century began a slow growth of racial intolerance brought on by a wider participation in wage labor work in New York’s expanding manufacturing sectors which featured established patterns of racial segregation and discrimination (Schuyler 1974). Askins’s dissertation project reexamined the artifacts Schuyler and his team collected in the 1970s. During two field seasons in the early 1970s, a field school conducted a surface survey over a part of Sandy Ground that appeared to have been the location of a series of small community dumps. Schuyler and his students collected diagnostic artifacts from nearly 100 of these small dumps, most of which bottle collectors had previously looted (Schuyler 1974). Robert Schuyler’s team excavated several dumps that appeared to have not been heavily disturbed by looters. In his later treatment, Askins was able to associate the recovered archaeological materials with six specific households, only one of which, Feature 4, can be tentatively identified as one of Sandy Ground’s African American oystering families. Based on the data recovered, Askins compared changes in architectural style of houses with changes in ceramic styles. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Askins argues, the adoption of specific architectural styles of houses in Sandy Ground shifted from “ethnic identification to class expression, whereas ceramics continue to correlate with ethnic identity” (Askins 1988, 272). It would appear that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the African American community of Sandy Ground used their house façades to present a class-based identity to demonstrate their membership in Staten Island’s middle class. Those who migrated from the Chesapeake to Sandy Ground initially constructed houses similar to those they had known in Maryland, a vernacular house form commonly known as the I-house. After establishing themselves as relatively affluent members of the Sandy Ground community, African American families changed the form of their houses to Greek Revival or Temple House (Askins 1988). The choices these families made regarding ceramics, however, may have been based more on communicating their identity as African Americans in greater New York. Askins’s analysis concludes that style, not cost, was a more important determinant of which ceramics

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people purchased; the Anglo-American, German American, and African American assemblages were different based on style, but not on cost. Created Communities on Eastern Long Island

Long Island was home to a number of enslaved Africans and African Americans prior to the abolition of slavery in New York State. During the transition away from slavery, African Americans were often left with little choice but to live in segregated communities that wealthy white landowners constructed to keep African American, Native American, and mixedrace people at hand as ready laborers. In East Hampton, located near the eastern tip of Long Island, a settlement known as Freetown was created when John Lyon Gardiner, a white landowner, exchanged a land grant with two laborers of African descent, Plato and Prince, although it seems that no legal deed to the land was signed over to the men. Archaeologists Chris Matthews and Allison McGovern have argued that this was one step in the creation of segregated communities in the post-emancipation North. In 1790, they propose, nearly all African Americans lived in white households, either as enslaved workers or wage laborers. By 1800, eleven black households had been established in Freetown whose members constituted 45 percent of the free people of color in the township. Matthews and McGovern have documented that Gardiner was one of several white landowners who began to concentrate the population of African American laborers on parcels of land contiguous to their own in and around Freetown. While this settlement pattern may have facilitated the development of a community, Matthews and McGovern argue that the underlying logic of land use was a result of a white power dynamic that sought to keep laborers of color in convenient, racially segregated communities. This trend intensified in the post–Civil War era, when in some Long Island communities 75 percent of neighborhoods were exclusively white (Matthews and McGovern 2018). First Baptist Church, Philadelphia

Despite the racism that underlay the development of segregated communities, free blacks pursued social and economic liberty in the cities of the Northeast, including Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s African American community coalesced around several churches. As had been the case in New

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York, racially based social and economic segregation impacted the lives of Philadelphia’s African American community. Faced with sometimesviolent racism, the African American community gathered in churches to collectivize their strength (McCarthy 1997). One of these was the First African Baptist Church, founded in 1809. By 1816, an offshoot of the church had been established as a result of a local schism, possibly between native Philadelphians and newly arrived African Americans from the southern states (Yamin 2008, 102). The new church was located just a few blocks away (Rankin-Hill 1997, 1–5). Both churches established burial grounds and both cemeteries were the focus of archaeological investigations before development projects in the 1980s and 1990s. For convenience, and following convention, I refer to the earlier burial ground as the Tenth Street Cemetery and the later one as the Eighth Street Cemetery (Yamin 2008, 100–101). The Eighth Street Cemetery was associated with the later dissident group, who buried the dead of their congregation at the corner of Eighth and Vine Streets from 1822 to 1843, when the city condemned the burial ground because of overcrowding. The church seems to have become defunct sometime after 1842. The cemetery was covered over by a factory and housing in the 1850s, then those structures were demolished and paved over into a parking lot in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the burial ground was rediscovered during the planning phase of a large infrastructure project. The consulting archaeologists were sensitive to the importance of the burial ground to the city’s African American community and worked closely with the community on the excavation project as it unfolded. The excavation at the site uncovered the remains of 146 burials, some stacked as high as nine deep, reflecting the overcrowding that led to the cemetery’s eventual closure. Of these, only 135 were in a condition to be studied. The skeletal population consisted of 75 adults over the age of 16 (36 male and 39 female), and 60 children below the age of 16, whose sex could not be determined (Rankin-Hill 1997, 25). The analysis of the skeletal remains indicates that the population experienced periodic episodes of nutritional stress, including prenatal stress. The bones of 60 percent of women of childbearing age showed evidence of adult nutritional disorders, reinforcing a conclusion that young women may not have had access to the amount and kind of food they needed to remain healthy during their reproductive years. In contrast, similar signs of malnutrition did not appear in most male skeletons until the individuals had reached ages

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greater than 40 (Rankin-Hill 1997, 157). Evidence of trauma was rare; only 17.3 percent of the skeletons presented evidence of broken bones and most of those were likely associated with occupational accidents. It is possible that some nutritional stress was caused by diarrheal diseases like cholera and dysentery, both of which are known to have impacted Philadelphians in the early nineteenth century (Rankin-Hill 1997, 156–161). The skeletal evidence recovered from the Tenth Street Cemetery dates to about a decade or so earlier than the Eighth Street Cemetery remains. The skeletons from this cemetery, which were recovered during excavations in the early 1990s, suggest that this earlier population may have been healthier than the later population. This information may suggest that the growing anti-black sentiment that emerged in Philadelphia in the decades after 1830 affected the health of the city’s black residents or it may be a reflection of the physical and nutritional stresses those who had been enslaved in the South prior to their immigration to Philadelphia had experienced. The earlier population seemed to live to an older age and childhood mortality seemed to be lower in the older cemetery. However, trauma resulting from personal violence was more common and one skeleton had evidence of a gunshot wound (Yamin 2008). The burials recovered from the Eighth Street Cemetery contained a number of artifacts that archaeologist John McCarthy has argued may reflect African American cultural practices in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. One such practice was burying the dead with a single coin, which may have been given to the deceased to pay the fare for crossing over into the afterlife. While only two of the Tenth Street Cemetery burials contained such coins, eight of the coffins at the Eighth Street Cemetery contained them. Similarly, single shoes were recovered from the lids of six coffins from the later cemetery, while only one shoe was found from the earlier cemetery. However, the owner may have accidentally lost that latter shoe during the burial process because it was not directly associated with a coffin. Placing shoes on a coffin lid may represent a practice that provided the deceased with a necessary item for their journey to the land of the dead. Two of the coffins recovered from the Eighth Street Cemetery also contained ceramic vessels placed on the abdomen on the deceased. While the recovery of ceramics from historic period burials is rare, this may represent the remains of food offerings left for the deceased. McCarthy posits these artifacts suggest that a distinct African American ethnic identity may have been forming in Philadelphia, influenced by the arrival

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of large numbers of formerly enslaved people coming into the city from the South (McCarthy 1997; Yamin 2008). First African Meeting House, Boston

As was the case in the larger communities of New York and Philadelphia, Boston’s African American community centered on churches. On the North Side of Beacon Hill, in a district known alternatively as the West End or Ward 6, the African American community of Boston worshipped in five black churches located within a quarter-mile radius, including the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, the Revere Street Methodist Episcopal, and the Twelfth Baptist churches and the First African Meeting House (Horton and Horton 1999, 1). Established in 1806, the still-extant First African Meeting House in Boston has been at the center of the city’s African American community for two centuries. Now a National Historic Landmark, the African meeting house is a centerpiece of the Museum of African American History in Boston (figure 7.3). The three-story brick structure sits on the north side of Beacon Hill, now one of Boston’s most affluent neighborhoods. In the early nineteenth century, the north side of the hill was relatively unsettled given its poor exposure to the sun, high water table, and difficult slopes. As the nineteenth century progressed, the north side of the hill became a significant African American neighborhood. By 1840, 44 percent of Boston’s black population lived in Ward 6, which included this neighborhood; by 1855, 65 percent of the city’s African American community lived in the ward (1,400 of 2,100) (Levesque 1994, 14–16). Ward 6 was Boston’s primary black neighborhood until the early twentieth century, when early phases of gentrification around Beacon Hill pushed the community out of the neighborhood (Landon and Bulger 2013). The African Meeting House was designed and constructed to meet many community needs, both spiritual and secular. The sanctuary occupies the first and second floors of the building and in the nineteenth century was the scene of numerous important addresses to the community by the likes of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other members of Boston’s abolitionist community. The basement contained a schoolroom and an apartment that was rented out to a variety of African American tenants (Landon and Bulger 2013).

Figure 7.3. Boston’s African Meeting House as photographed by the Historic American Building Survey in 1937, when the building was being used as a synagogue. Photo by Arthur Haskell. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS MASS, 13-BOST,42-3.

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Although Boston was a hotbed of abolitionism in the early nineteenth century, it was a racially segregated city and even affluent members of the black community were excluded from many of the city’s institutions, including entertainment halls, hospitals, and social societies. As the century progressed, a larger percentage of the city’s African population was concentrated into the so-called black wards. Although Boston’s free blacks had greater legal rights than their counterparts in New York or Philadelphia, their economic segregation and exclusion from skilled employment was greater than it was in Philadelphia or even Charleston, South Carolina (Levesque 1994, 112–114). Compared to the entire city, the African American community was largely impoverished. By 1860, the mean per capita wealth of the entire population of the city of Boston was $872. For the city’s Irish population, which was just a decade removed from the crisis of the Great Potato Famine, the mean per capita wealth was $131. In contrast, the mean per capita wealth of the African American population was $91, just over 10 percent of the mean capital wealth of the entire population of the city (Horton and Horton 1999, 11). Churches like the First African Meeting House served as both religious institutions and community centers where people could engage in community activities despite the customary racism they faced in the city at large (Landon and Bulger 2013; Levesque 1994, 113–114). The First African Meeting House has been the subject of a number of archaeological investigations dating back to the 1970s. Some of the initial work on the site was focused on recovering evidence of the building’s original appearance as part of a renovation project by the Museum of African American History (Bower and Rushing 1980). Other investigations focused on the community activities that took place in and around the building. In 2005, a team from the Andrew Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts at Boston initiated an investigation before a planned renovation of the meeting house. The project tested areas that had previously been unexcavated and reopened features that had been discovered and recorded in previous excavations but not thoroughly investigated. The 2005 project recovered data from two important features, a privy located on an adjoining property that African American tenants inhabited during the early nineteenth century and a midden behind the meeting house. Archaeologists have interpreted the artifact assemblages from these two features as evidence of identity negotiation. Compared

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to features from other urban sites of this time period, these two features contained very few smoking pipes or artifacts related to alcohol consumption. This has been interpreted as evidence for temperance and moral behavior, both important elements of the public identities the leaders of Boston’s nineteenth-century African American community espoused. A large number of ceramic vessels, fragments of close to 2,000 different vessels, were recovered from the midden behind the meeting house. Initially thought to be evidence of community dinners held at the church, these may also be evidence for a successful catering business run by Domingo Williams, an African American man who lived in the basement apartment at the meeting house in the 1810s and 1820s. As he lived at the church, it is of course also possible that he catered church dinners, and thus the ceramics might be evidence of both his profession and his service to the church. A complete shoe and a variety of other well-preserved leather artifacts from the privy may be related to the occupation of Cyrus Barret, a cordwainer (shoemaker) who lived next door at 44 Joy Street in the late 1820s. The ceramic and leather artifacts are indicative of the cottage industries that would have been at the heart of the community (Landon 2007; Landon and Bulger 2013). The African meeting house and the Abiel Smith School, built in 1835, are strong evidence of the aspirations of Boston’s African American community. Although its members lived in a racist and segregated city, the community was able to pool its resources to create a visible public building at the center of the community. The Abiel Smith School, built when the growing number of scholars could no longer be serviced in the basement of the church, provided educational opportunities for the children of the community that were not always open to them even in the city of Boston (Landon and Bulger 2013). Even beyond the reach of slavery, the racialist ideology at its foundation limited social and economic opportunities for African Americans in Boston. They created their own opportunities through acts of social solidarity and community building in segregated neighborhoods, like that surrounding the First African Meeting House. Seneca Village and Weeksville, New York

As was the case in Boston, the freed African American community in New York continued to experience high degrees of racial inequality in the nineteenth century. These ranged from the quotidian humiliations

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of being barred from certain businesses and restaurants and from freely riding on public transportation to life-threatening racially targeted violence, as people experienced during the anti-abolitionist Tappan Riots of 1834 and the Draft Riots of 1863. African American men and women found it difficult to secure skilled employment because native-born and immigrant whites often refused to work alongside them (Wall et al. 2008). Diana Wall and Nan Rothschild conducted a long-term project on African American communities in New York that has demonstrated that African American New Yorkers developed several residence strategies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to cope with the tensions of racial discrimination (Wall et al. 2008). According to their work, some African Americans clustered into primarily black enclaves, while others dispersed into the city’s poorer mixed-race communities. Two of New York’s free black enclaves that have been examined archaeologically are Seneca Village, established in the 1820s in what is now Central Park, and Weeksville, established about two miles east of downtown Brooklyn, which was an independent city until it was absorbed as a borough of New York City in 1898. Seneca Village was established when slavery was still legal in New York but nearing its end. In the mid-1820s, a number of free African Americans purchased lots from a subdivided farm in what would become Seneca Village. An African Methodist Episcopal church purchased several lots as well. The population of Seneca Village, which was mostly free African Americans, grew in the 1830s when people from the nearby community of York Hill were displaced by the construction of the Croton Distributing Reservoir, a massive four-story holding tank that provided New York with fresh water in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By the mid1850s, the population of Seneca Village had reached about 250, two-thirds of whom were African Americans (figure 7.4). The residents of Seneca Village lost their houses, churches, and community in that decade when the city acquired the properties in the village through eminent domain and razed them to make way for the construction of Central Park (Wall et al. 2008). Wall and colleagues (2008) characterize the residents of Seneca Village as members of an established black middle class, defined as such by their ability to acquire property, although many worked as unskilled laborers. In 1850, fourteen of the twenty-two identified heads of households owned real estate, constituting nearly 20 percent of the African American

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Figure 7.4. A nineteenth-century depiction of a small New York City village destroyed by the construction of Central Park. It is unknown if this represents Seneca Village, but it may well. Image in public domain.

property owners in Manhattan. Nearly all these individuals lived in singlefamily homes. At least three churches were present in the village by the 1850s, including the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church Branch Militant, the African Union Methodist Church (which had relocated with the displaced residents from York Hill in the 1830s), and the All Angels’ Church, an Episcopal mission. By the 1840s, a primary school was operating out of the basement of the African Union Church. Three-quarters of the older children in the community attended upper (secondary) school. In the late 2000s, after a long and difficult negotiation with the Central Park Conservancy and the New York City Parks Department, an archaeological team led by Wall and Rothschild began a series of archaeological investigations at the site of Seneca Village. The initial investigation consisted of a series of remote-sensing and soil-core studies, the results of which indicated that much of the site remained intact despite the heavy landscaping that had been done in the nineteenth century when the community was razed and Central Park was constructed. In 2011, the team initiated an excavation project, the focus of which was to ground-truth features identified in the remote-sensing project and to establish whether

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those features were related to the occupation of Seneca Village. The excavations uncovered two features that the archaeologists could confidently associate with the village: the house site of William Godfrey Wilson and a feature that appears to be a backyard surface in a different part of the village (Wall et al. 2008; Wall and Rothschild 2011). Weeksville, located in what is now the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was contemporary with Seneca Village. Weeksville was established when African Americans purchased lots in the antebellum years, but unlike Seneca Village, Weeksville persisted as a black community into the twentieth century. Although urban middle-class African American entrepreneurs initially established Weeksville as a social and economic experiment, it soon evolved, albeit briefly, into a multiethnic neighborhood before it became a working-class African American enclave. The first known African American property owner in the neighborhood, James Weeks, purchased several lots in what would become known as Weeksville in 1838. The African American population of Weeksville grew steadily in the antebellum years and may have witnessed a spike in in-migration immediately after the 1863 Draft Riots, when many African American families fled Manhattan for more remote and presumably safer settlements such as Weeksville. Over time, a “colored school” was established in the neighborhood, as were several churches (Geismar 2015). A small cluster of Weeksville buildings that are collectively known as the Hunterfly Road Houses and date to the later part of the nineteenth century have been renovated and now serve as a museum and education complex known as the Weeksville Heritage Center (figure 7.5). This small cluster of houses has been the focus of periodic archaeological investigation since the 1970s (Geismar 2015; Salwen and Bridges 1974; Bridges and Salwen 1980; Geismar 2009, 2015). The long history of archaeology at the site reflects both the difficulties of conducting archaeological excavations in urban contexts and the valuable information that historical archaeological projects can reveal about the African American past. Several generations of archaeologists and historical preservationists had hoped to establish that the standing structures dated to the early occupation of Weeksville. Even though the site features architectural elements that were more common in the 1830s, all the archaeological evidence points to an initial occupation of the Hunterfly Road Houses in the Civil War period. This dating is corroborated by the absence of any historical documentation that refers to structures on these lots before 1863. It is still unclear

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Figure 7.5. The Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville following restoration. Photo by Anonitect. Source: Wikimedia.

whether the houses were constructed on an older plan in the 1860s by an African American carpenter known to have lived in the neighborhood or whether older houses were moved to the location in the 1860s (Geismar 2009, 2015). Because many of the occupants of these houses were tenants and there was significant turnover in occupation over the decades, it is difficult to ascribe the artifacts recovered to individual households. Nevertheless, Geismar argues that several key artifacts recovered from the several excavation projects are indicative of the African American experience at Weeksville. For example, a clear glass-handled mug was embossed with “Myrtle Ave. Park,” which may suggest it was a souvenir of a post–Civil War Emancipation Day celebration that was held at Myrtle Avenue Park in the 1870s. A fragment of a Hoyt’s Cologne bottle, a commodity favored by and marketed to African American consumers, was also recovered from the site. Also recovered from the same shaft context as the cologne bottle was a porcelain figure with exaggerated physical traits and in formal dress, assumed to represent a smiling house slave. The meaning of this later object, while clearly associated with race, is ambiguous and it is not known if it was used as a toy or whether it was considered “ironic, charming, or inflammatory” (Geismar 2015, 192–193).

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Conclusion

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, slavery had been abolished in most of the northern states. In the post–Revolutionary War days, many of the formerly enslaved people of the urban North were emancipated but faced quotidian and institutional racism and segregation that limited their social and economic mobility. African Americans fleeing captivity in the southern states sought refuge in the North, hoping to create independent lives under the banner of northern liberty. Communities coalesced around churches that served as community centers for both spiritual and civic life. Even though they experienced poverty and hardship, the communities served as a beacon to those who remained enslaved in the South. Nevertheless, the realities for many, both in rural and urban areas, were far from ideal. Although slavery was on the wane in most of the Northeast during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, racism was not. More than a set of ideas of white supremacists, racism was a system that denied economic and social opportunities to African Americans. In some instances, individual enterprise could allow African American families, like the Perkins-Dennis family, to create comfortable, independent lives and to pass on that prosperity to future generations. In places like Sandy Ground, communities that coalesced around a shared economic activity, in this case oystering, could create a social and economic world in which people could find some sense of social and economic security—at least until their access to a prosperous means of living was taken away. In cities, African American communities banded together around shared institutions, primarily churches. By creating urban communities, the people of the emancipated North could create opportunities for themselves and enjoy some measure of liberty. However, racism in cities like Boston and Philadelphia created obstacles for African Americans, who were among the poorest people in the cities and were susceptible to nutritional diseases. True liberation from the shackles of institutional racism has been difficult to achieve—difficult but not impossible. Many African American men and women set examples that inspired others to achieve greatness, even under the shadows of slavery and racism. It is to the story of such a woman that we now turn.

8 Mrs. Smith’s House

In 1848, Lydia Hamilton Smith, a free African American woman who was most likely born into slavery, relocated from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to nearby Lancaster. In that year, Lancaster was a small but growing city and, like most of the small cities of the North, no stranger to slavery. Long the seat of a wealthy agricultural county, Lancaster was developing an industrial base through the production of a variety of manufactured goods, including textiles. Factories began to spring up between the tobacco warehouses of the city, transforming what was once a bucolic agricultural seat into a vibrant urban landscape. Prior to the industrialization of its county seat, Lancaster County, which bordered on Maryland, had long been familiar with slavery. Tobacco and other export produce had occasionally been grown using enslaved labor in this corner of Pennsylvania. In the early eighteenth century, the commonwealth’s nascent iron industry expanded through Lancaster and the surrounding counties, devouring the forests of southeastern Pennsylvania to feed the charcoal-fired blast furnaces that spread across the countryside. So-called iron plantations controlled tens of thousands of acres of forest, relying on the labor of enslaved Africans to render millions of trees into charcoal. Although a gradual abolition law had been in effect in Pennsylvania since the 1780s, in 1848 the populace was largely ambivalent on the question of slavery. Conservative and quite content with the status quo, most Lancastrians were pragmatically neutral on slavery before 1848. That position began to change with the arrival of a new and powerful political voice that was vehemently opposed to the very existence of slavery. In 1843, just a few years prior to Lydia Hamilton Smith’s arrival in Lancaster, Thaddeus Stevens had settled in the city, using his increasingly powerful voice to place the question of slavery at the center of political discourse in

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the city and surrounding county. When Lydia Hamilton Smith moved to Lancaster, Stevens hired her as the housekeeper and head of his bachelor household, a position she would hold until his death twenty years later. In no small part due to their collaboration, Lancaster became the center of political debate on the future of slavery in the United States. Both Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Smith were active proponents of abolition and liberty for all regardless of race. When he employed an African American woman as his housekeeper, Stevens was making both a social and political statement. Dedicating the closing decades of his political career to the antislavery cause, Stevens firmly held that true liberation could come only if African American people were granted economic and social opportunities that were equal to those available to whites. Mrs. Smith lived those ideals, both as a public face of the antislavery movement and as a private businesswoman and citizen. An archaeological project conducted behind the house that she shared with Stevens and would own after his death sheds significant light on the meaning of liberation in the context of a slave society. Lancaster, the Crucible of the Slavery Debate

Thaddeus Stevens was one of two prominent Lancastrians who embodied distinct and contrasting views on the great question of slavery. Opposite Stevens was the Democrat James Buchanan, a US senator when Thaddeus Stevens moved to town. A lifelong politician, Buchanan had been elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly at the young age of 23. Buchanan served several terms in the US House of Representatives and served in the Senate in 1834 and 1845. Buchanan served in the administrations of several Democratic presidents. He was minister to Russia during the administration of Andrew Jackson and served as James Polk’s secretary of state. After he declined a nomination to the Supreme Court, Franklin Pierce appointed him as minister to the Court of St James’s, the chief American diplomat in the United Kingdom (Baker 2004). While Buchanan’s star was still rising when Stevens first came to Lancaster, the slavery question would be his historical and political undoing. Buchanan lived to see his reputation sullied by his presidency, which many consider to have been the worst in American history. Buchanan, who was elected president in 1856, believed that holding other humans in bondage was a constitutional right. He supported compromise between

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the North and the South as the best way to maintain the Union. To ensure peace, he went so far as to support an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to admit Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Despite his best efforts—or perhaps the lack thereof—he could not slow the march toward civil war. Likely recognizing that the time for compromise had passed, Buchanan did not accept his party’s nomination for the presidency in 1860. Abraham Lincoln, of course, carried that election, as a moderate who had called for limiting the extension of slavery in the western territories. Enflamed by the prospect of a Lincoln presidency, southern politicians began their break from the Union. Judged harshly by history, the lame-duck president James Buchanan was the unfortunate resident of the White House when the southern states began their final push toward secession. When he is remembered at all, Buchanan is widely condemned for leaving office with the United States on the brink of civil war (Baker 2004). On the other end of Lancaster’s political spectrum was Thaddeus Stevens, a vehemently outspoken opponent of slavery. Born into poverty in 1791 and educated in his home state of Vermont, in 1815 Stevens relocated to York, Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Gettysburg to practice law. He was elected to the Gettysburg Borough Council in 1822 and represented Adams County in the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1833 to 1836 and again from 1838 to 1843. Stevens gained a reputation as a champion of the common people and is credited with organizing the defeat of a bill that would have abolished public education in Pennsylvania. Between his terms in the General Assembly, Stevens was a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1837, during which he unsuccessfully proposed that regardless of race, all children should be guaranteed access to public education and all men should have the right to vote at age 21 (Palmer and Ochoa 1997, 19–30; Brodie 1959, 59; Current 1942, 22–23; Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County 2002; Trefousse 1997, 21, 39–43, 49–51). In July 1843, at the end of his final term in the state legislature, Stevens moved from Gettysburg to Lancaster. Rising quickly in the legal community there, Stevens represented Lancaster in the US House of Representatives from 1848 to 1853, bringing Mrs. Smith to Washington as his companion and as the hostess of his residence. As a member of Congress, Stevens spoke against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and, like Lincoln, opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. As a lawyer, Stevens served as counsel for Castner Hanway and the other defendants

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in the Christiana treason trial. Outraged that a sitting congressman would take such a controversial and public stand against the Fugitive Slave Law by his participation in the trial, his party, the Whigs, refused to nominate Stevens for reelection in 1852. Six years later, in 1858, Stevens stood for election again, this time as a Republican, winning back his old congressional seat, which he held until his death ten years later (Current 1942, 108–111; Trefousse 1997, 95–97). During his last decade in the House, Stevens was recognized as the leader of a faction known as the Radical Republicans, pushed an aggressive emancipation agenda in the House, and served as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War, a powerful committee responsible for approving all wartime appropriations. After the war, Stevens pushed for a land redistribution program that would have confiscated and subdivided Confederate plantations and redistributed the land to emancipated African Americans as compensation for their years of enslavement. President Andrew Johnson opposed the idea and rendered it moot by proclaiming a general amnesty that preserved prewar property rights, save for chattel slaves, for all Confederate participants in the war. Stevens is credited with drafting the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, which ended slavery, secured citizenship for African Americans, and established the principle of equal protection under the law regardless of race. In his final months in office, a frail Stevens served as one of the managers of the impeachment of President Johnson. Like his political rival Buchanan, Stevens died in 1868 (Brodie 1959, 32–33, 38; Current 1942, 8–9; Trefousse 1997, 10–23). Lydia Hamilton Smith

Stevens never married. He did, however, have Lydia Hamilton Smith as a companion of twenty years. When he died, he left her $5,000, enough capital to purchase his house from his estate. In his will, Stevens stipulated that Lydia Hamilton Smith could take possession of any household furnishings she desired, as “Mrs. Smith has some furniture of her own, used in common, with mine, some bought with her own money as well as others which it would be difficult to distinguish” (Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County 2002). Mrs. Smith was much more than a domestic servant; she managed the Stevens household and served as hostess to guests Stevens entertained. Her obituary in the Lancaster Daily Examiner

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Figure 8.1. Lydia Hamilton Smith, ca. 1870. Source: Wikimedia.

stated that she “managed [Stevens’s] household affairs. . . . He placed the most implicit confidence in her and up to the day of his death. . . . She directed the affairs of his bachelor establishment and ministered to his personal wants” (Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County 2002). She also had charge of Stevens’s young teenaged nephews, Thaddeus and Alanson Joshua Stevens, until they became adults. Mrs. Smith cared for Alanson until he was old enough to work at the Caledonia Iron Furnace, which Stevens owned. Alanson, who was an artillery captain during the Civil War, died at the battle of Chickamauga in 1863. The younger Thaddeus, also a veteran of the Civil War, was an alcoholic who was expelled from Dartmouth but served as provost marshal (tax collector) of Lancaster following the war, likely through his uncle’s patronage (Trefousse 1997, 240–242). Stevens insisted that all who entered his house treat her respectfully and address her as Mrs. Smith. Rumors flew in the opposition press that Mr. Stevens and Mrs. Smith were romantic partners, which was scandalous in its day not just because they were unmarried and shared a household but also because Mrs. Smith was black (figure 8.1).

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Figure 8.2. The Lydia Hamilton Smith houses. Photo by James A. Delle.

Lydia Hamilton Smith was born, likely in Gettysburg, on February 14, 1813, the child of an African American woman and a white man. Lydia’s early life is shrouded in mystery. It has been suggested that she was raised in the household of Enoch Hamilton, a sometime slave trader, leaving open the possibility that Lydia and her mother were both slaves (Singmaster 1947). If Lydia Hamilton was born into slavery in Pennsylvania, she would have been freed by statute when she turned 28, in 1841, in accordance with Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law. She married Jacob Smith, a barber and musician, in 1836 or 1837. The couple had two sons, William, born in 1835, and Isaac, born in 1847. Within a year of Isaac’s birth, Lydia left her husband and Gettysburg behind, taking her two young sons with her to Lancaster (Brodie 1959, 87). In 1848, she began her employment with Thaddeus Stevens, taking up residence in a small house on the southeastern corner of his urban home lot, a house she would soon come to own (figure 8.2). As a member of Congress, Stevens divided his residence between Washington and Lancaster (Brodie 1959, 53; Korngold 1955, 72). Mrs. Smith was reputed to have been fastidious about her appearance and to have been a woman of grace and poise (Singmaster 1947). She was

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an important person in her own right. She was one of only three African American women known to hold title to property in Lancaster County during the middle of the nineteenth century. Using her own resources, in 1860, she purchased a house from Stevens on the back of Lot 134, the house now identified as 23 East Vine Street, known as the Lydia Hamilton Smith House (Delle and Levine 2010; Delle and Levine 2004; Rottner 2003). The deed indicates that the transfer of property included a house on the lot “which the said Lydia Smith has erected” (Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County 2002). After Stevens died in 1868, Mrs. Smith purchased his former residence and law office. It seems likely that with this action she became the legal owner of a house in which she had lived with Stevens for some time. Over the course of the next fifteen years, Mrs. Smith purchased several other properties in the city as rental properties. In addition, she purchased a four-story, six-bay boarding house in Washington, DC, and a boarding house in Philadelphia. When she died in 1884, in addition to her various properties, Mrs. Smith bequeathed $4,150 in cash to various friends and relations. She was a woman of significant means (Rottner 2003; Delle and Levine 2010; Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County 2002). The Stevens and Smith Houses at the Corner of Queen and Vine

When he was denied his congressional seat in the election of 1852, Thaddeus Stevens took up what he likely expected to be permanent residence with Mrs. Smith. Resuming private life as a lawyer in Lancaster, Stevens renovated his property at the corner of Queen and Vine Streets, just a block from the county courthouse. The renovation included a significant expansion of the house, from a small two-story structure of approximately 1,100 square feet to an urban town house exceeding 5,700 square feet. At that point, Mrs. Smith most likely moved from her small house on the back corner of that same property to live in and manage Thaddeus Stevens’s new urban mansion (figure 8.3). Mrs. Smith lived at a time when the nature of male and female spaces changed dramatically, at least for members of elite households like the one in which she lived. As hostess in an important Washington household and in Stevens’s local residence in Lancaster Mrs. Smith had the opportunity to interact with people of the highest social rank. For example, she entertained Stevens’s political rival, James Buchanan, and other political

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Figure 8.3. The Thaddeus Stevens House (left) and Kleiss Saloon (right) following restoration to their ca. 1860 appearance. Photo by James A. Delle.

and social luminaries in the house in Lancaster (Delle and Levine 2010; Trefousse 1997). Mrs. Smith also lived at a time when the physical and social landscape of Lancaster was dramatically changing. When Thaddeus Stevens purchased Lot 134, the property contained a blacksmith shop and a brewery, two traditional crafts that were practiced on home lots in the early nineteenth century. By the time of her death, such cottage industries were rare in the city. While small-scale craft production did not completely die out, many cottage industries had given way to centralized production in factories. The exterior spaces of house lots were more focused on domestic chores than domestic production by the end of the 1880s (figure 8.4a and 8.4b). Mrs. Smith was managing the household when Stevens expanded his house on Lot 134. The expansion included the bounding of much of the previously open space of Lot 134 by extending the walls of neighboring buildings and infilling it with the new constructed addition to the house. At this same time, Mrs. Smith expanded her own house on the southeast corner of the lot to two stories and added a second, connected house. This

(a)

(b)

Figure 8.4. Lot 134 in Lancaster, PA, in 1843 (a) and 1855 (b). Image by James A. Delle.

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Figure 8.5. Lydia Hamilton Smith House, rendering of basement floor plan. Source: Community Heritage Partners, Project Architects, copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

construction included rear extensions that enclosed a courtyard behind the two houses (Delle and Levine 2010). While an open paved yard that connected 23 East Vine Street to a back carriage house remained open, new courtyards became a focal point of domestic space. One courtyard was created between the back extension of the Stevens house and the Daisz Grocery immediately to the north; a similar courtyard was created to the south. The new housing complex Mrs. Smith owned enclosed a courtyard bounded on the north by a narrow

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alley leading between Christian Street and the paved yard between the Stevens carriage house and the main house. This courtyard would have been a private space, unseen from the street (figure 8.5). Following the death of Mrs. Smith, the properties she and Thaddeus Stevens had owned experienced a number of transformations that reflected the changing nature of urban life in Lancaster. Over the decades, the ground floor of the Stevens house was the location of a barbershop, an agricultural implements store, a hardware store, and an auto body shop. The upstairs domestic space served as a boarding house for a number of years before being divided into a series of small apartments that eventually were transformed into single-room occupancy units that housed the working poor of the city. The Smith houses similarly were transformed over time. While these smaller houses remained largely intact after Mrs. Smith’s expansion of the buildings in the 1850s and served primarily as residential housing units, at one point a funeral parlor operated in her old house at 23 East Vine. By the 1990s, the house at 21 East Vine had been transformed into a botanica that served the spiritual needs of the city’s growing Latino community. Archaeology at the Stevens and Smith Houses

An archaeological project was conducted at the Stevens and Smith Houses in the opening years of the twenty-first century before a large-scale urban renewal project demolished most of the city block that included Lot 134. Although neither state nor federal law required developers to conduct an archaeological investigation or a cultural resource impact study the local preservation community mobilized to save the Stevens and Smith houses from demolition and to conduct a salvage archaeology program behind their houses (Delle et al. 2005, Delle and Levine 2011; Delle and Levine 2015). Hoping to find sealed pit features relating to Stevens and Smith, the archaeological project focused on the small courtyards located behind the Thaddeus Stevens house and the Lydia Hamilton Smith house (figure 8.6). Excavations soon revealed that the Smith courtyard was significantly disturbed in the opening decades of the twentieth century and that little evidence of the Lydia Hamilton Smith occupation could be recovered (Levine and Delle 2009; Delle and Levine 2010; Rottner 2003). The northernmost courtyard at the Stevens house appears to have been filled

Figure 8.6. Courtyard behind the Lydia Hamilton Smith houses. Photo by James A. Delle.

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Figure 8.7. The courtyard behind the Stevens House under excavation. The excavator in the foreground is squatting in the gutter. Photo by James A. Delle.

and paved during the renovation project Stevens conducted in the 1850s. It revealed much about urban life at the turn of the nineteenth century, but the archaeologists recovered little that dated to the Stevens and Smith occupation. Excavations of the southern courtyard were much more productive. Prior to excavation, a concrete-slab pavement covering the courtyard was removed, exposing a layer of mixed fill composed primarily of coal ash, discarded bricks, and similar demolition debris. Artifacts recovered from the fill dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and included a Hoyt’s Cologne bottle, which originated from the F. Hoyt & Co. perfumers of Philadelphia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hoyt’s Dime Cologne was a popular fragrance, particularly in the African American community. The bottle recovered here was one of many knockoffs being marketed in the late nineteenth century (Mallon and Baer 2002). Beneath this fill was a brick-paved surface bisected by a clay-lined gutter that ran through the courtyard (figure 8.7). The gutter channeled water into a subterranean cistern, which was also uncovered during the

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Figure 8.8. Ebony-backed domino recovered from the Stevens courtyard. Photo by James A. Delle.

excavations. Below the brick pavement was an orange-brown sand layer that served as the paving bed for the bricks. A small assortment of ceramic fragments recovered from the sand bed provided a mean ceramic date of 1805 (Moyer and Rush 2002). A more substantial ceramic assemblage was recovered from a clay layer immediately below the sand, including a minimum of forty-seven creamware vessels and fifty-nine pearlware vessels (sixteen transfer-printed vessels, ten hand-painted vessels, eleven edge-decorated vessels, and twenty-one undecorated vessels). The mean ceramic date derived from the vessels recovered from this layer is 1804, virtually identical to the overlying sand layer, suggesting that both were deposited at the same time, most likely in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Levine and Delle 2009; Moyer and Rush 2002). The gutter was filled sometime after the cistern ceased functioning as a water supply, quite possibly during the 1850s renovation of the house. This feature was interesting because it trapped artifacts from several eras: circa 1855, when the Stevens house was expanded, and the early 1920s, when the courtyard was filled and repaved. In the late 1850s, this courtyard

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would likely have been a place for young Isaac Smith to play; in 1855 he would have been 8 years old, and his brother William would have been 20. Among the interesting artifacts that Mrs. Smith and her two boys may have used were fragments of graphite pencils, several locally made clay marbles, and an ebony and ivory domino (figure 8.8). Also recovered from the courtyard was a fragment of an alphabet plate with a maxim by Benjamin Franklin. These instructional objects were popular in the 1850s and 1860s, suggesting that young Isaac may have been eating from a dish with an instructive saying which was likely broken and lost in the courtyard behind the house. A Landscape of Liberation

Enclosed urban courtyards like the one on the Stevens and Smith lot served as private domestic spaces where people raised their children in relative peace. In many ways they were secret spaces; they were enclosed on three or four sides and were invisible from the street. This intentional privacy also made them a place where one could hide in plain sight and the evidence suggests that people did just that. By reputation, both Mrs. Smith and Mr. Stevens were engaged in assisting people on their flight north from slavery (see Trefousse 1997). Their property was home to an African American family and contained the Kleiss Saloon business, a tavern complex on Lot 143 that Stevens leased to the widow of the previous owner of the lot. This would have been a site where African Americans would not have been out of place. The excavations behind the Stevens and Smith houses revealed a number of landscape features, none as interesting as a modified cistern uncovered beneath the courtyard between the Kleiss Saloon and the Stevens house. The archaeological evidence suggests that the cistern was constructed before the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Delle and Levine 2004; Levine and Delle 2009; Moyer and Rush 2002). Artifacts recovered from features surrounding the cistern suggest that it was out of use by the 1850s, by which time public water was available in the city, but that it was not filled until the 1920s. Thus, a hidden, abandoned cistern was under the pavement of the courtyard for several decades (figure 8.9). Evidence suggests that the eastern wall of the cistern was rebuilt at the time the Stevens house was expanded. This reconfiguration of the cistern included the construction of a small penetration into the cistern that was

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Figure 8.9. The subterranean cistern discovered behind the Stevens House during excavation. Photo by James A. Delle.

bricked in at some later point. A trench feature dug into the sandy soil under the brick pavement and the heavy clay on top of the vaulted cistern was apparently dug to connect the basement of the Kleiss Saloon to the abandoned cistern through a tight crawlway (figure 8.10). When the cistern was opened during excavation, it was evident that this wall had been modified sometime after its initial construction. Of particular interest is a roughly square “window” that penetrates the eastern wall. The entire upper half of the eastern wall appears to have been modified, as the loosely laid limestone masonry and brick construction do not match the western wall of the cistern in material or quality of workmanship. At some point the “window,” which is just large enough for a man of medium build to fit through, was roughly bricked in and the trench connecting the cistern to the Kleiss Saloon basement was filled. Artifacts recovered from this fill suggest that it was put in place sometime before 1880, probably when Mrs. Smith was the owner of the property. Near this window, resting upright on the floor of the cistern, we recovered an intact, though corroded, spittoon. This artifact, found upright in situ on the floor of the cistern, was most likely used by at least one person

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Figure 8.10. Detail of interior eastern wall of the cistern, showing the roughly brickedin “window.” A small crawlway leading into the basement of the Kleiss Saloon was discovered behind the bricks. Photo by James A. Delle.

hiding in the cistern, either for its intended purpose or as an emergency chamber pot. The modification of the wall suggests that the cistern could have been used as a hiding place. During the investigation of the site the archaeological team discovered a patch in the foundation wall of the Kleiss Saloon immediately behind the filled-in crawlway. Taken together, the penetration through the foundation, the crawlway, and the rebuilt eastern wall of the cistern suggest that modifications were made to the Kleiss Saloon and the cistern that would have allowed a person to crawl from the basement of the building into the cistern. The artifacts recovered from the trench feature indicate that it was filled sometime before 1885, suggesting that access into the cistern from the Kleiss basement was available in the 1850s, the time that Stevens and Smith moved into their newly expanded house. It is possible that the abandoned cistern was a hiding place for fugitive slaves escaping through Lancaster (Delle 2008; Delle and Levine 2004; Levine and Delle 2009). The fact that the tavern building was owned by Stevens and likely monitored by Smith strongly support this

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interpretation. The archaeological evidence clearly suggests that the cistern was no longer used for water storage after 1850 and was filled by 1920. Mrs. Smith’s landscape was more than a simple urban courtyard where she raised her sons. Conclusion

In the context of mid-nineteenth century Lancaster, Mrs. Smith’s house had multivalent meanings. She served as hostess for one of the nation’s most powerful politicians in the Civil War era. She thus was among the most visible women of color in both Lancaster and Washington. This social position gave her the liberty to move freely in Lancaster and to hold a position as a symbol of hope and prosperity. In the intervening period between Stevens’s terms in the US Congress, Mrs. Smith worked with him to expand his house and became the manager of a significant urban household. The renovation of the house included the creation of a hiding place below the pavement connected to the cellar of a brewery and tavern complex Stevens owned. The archaeological evidence suggests that this woman—who may well have been born into slavery—rose to live a life that was both liberated and liberating during the great American struggle for freedom and racial equality.

V Commemoration

Conclusion

Many archaeologists have come to the realization that at its essence, archaeology is a form of commemoration (Delle and Levine 2011; Shackel 2003). When an archaeologist chooses to investigate a certain site, the very act of excavation is a process by which some element of the past is remembered. Archaeologists choose which places and people to study and thus contribute to shaping the historical narrative of the American experience. Many have chosen to examine the material evidence of slavery and its many legacies in what are often thought of as the free states of the North. Slavery and its racist aftermath existed throughout the northeastern states, and our understanding of the American experience is incomplete without a consideration of the lives and struggles of the black men and women who resided north of the Mason-Dixon Line (LaRoche 2014a). The scope and impact of archaeological commemoration varies from site to site and project to project. Some of the sites I have discussed in this volume are famous and have received a great deal of attention. The African Burial Ground in New York, for example, is now a national monument that attracts thousands of visitors each year. However, most of the sites I have reviewed here are poorly known and are described only in difficult-to-find journal articles, unpublished reports, and doctoral dissertations. Far too often once archaeological projects are completed, they themselves become the stuff of memory as artifacts are holed away in back rooms of museums and laboratories, photographs and drawings are placed on hard drives of computers whose life cycles are perilously short, and field notes and notebooks are stashed in filing cabinets and rarely see the light of day once the report, article, or dissertation is completed. Despite the importance of the archaeological sites, few outside of archaeology have likely heard of Lucy Foster’s Garden, Sylvester Manor,

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Parting Ways, or the William Parker House. Most, however, have heard of George Washington, Harriet Tubman, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Archaeological projects have been conducted on sites associated with these remarkable Americans and resources have been dedicated to commemorating the struggle against slavery and injustice at these sites. It is well for us to remember their legacies not just for the sake of commemorating the individual achievements of the people who once lived at these places but also as part of the process of remembering why and how racial inequality in the United States continues to exist. Despite long odds and the deep entrenchment of racialist ideology, great advances have been made against racial injustice, but we are far from living in a postracial society. In generations past, African American men took up arms during the American Revolution with the promise of freedom and equality before them. Others, unconvinced that the slaveholding Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all men were created equal would ever apply to them, joined the British cause against the American Revolution or sought liberation in British Canada. For well over a century before the American Civil War erupted, enslaved people fought for their freedom and defended the rights of their communities, taking up arms when necessary to prevent their friends and loved ones from being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Those with the skills and opportunities were able to create some measure of material affluence, albeit often excluded from the mainstream of urban society. It is important to remember these events in our day, as collectively they have shaped our current social reality. While it is true that slavery and the slave trade were eventually brought to an end, racism has not yet been eliminated from American culture. Individually and collectively, despite struggle, loss, and often tragedy, African American men and women have continued to struggle to overcome the power of racial bigotry, economic segmentation, and social segregation. While these struggles are fought today on different terms, they are as real in the early twenty-first century as they were in the early nineteenth. In excavating at the site of the first presidential residence in Philadelphia, the home of Harriet Tubman, in Auburn, New York, and the boyhood home of W. E. B. Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, archaeologists have been able use the power of historical celebrity to call attention to the great struggles of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Archaeological work has contributed to making these places national

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Map C.1. Location of sites mentioned in Part V. Map by James A. Delle.

landmarks. It is possible that as visitors see the houses, landscapes, and artifacts of these famous people, they will come to know and better understand the causes they championed and the struggles they led. The President’s House

Occasionally, important archaeological sites are discovered quite by accident. This is often true in urban contexts. Urban archaeology is a particularly difficult pursuit. The complexities are many. The logistics of fieldwork are often very difficult. Active electrical, gas, water, sewer, fiberoptic, and other lines often constrain where excavations can be conducted. Excavation sites are often constrained by the existence of roads, sidewalks, and buildings built on top of the original structures being investigated. The ever-changing nature of the urban landscape has left behind millions of tons of sometimes-toxic fill, as coal ash and other waste products of urban industrialization were often dumped to fill abandoned cellar holes,

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wells, and outhouse shafts or were used to level sloping lots. Sometimes it is difficult for archaeologists to know the scale of what lies preserved beneath the ground in these kinds of contexts. Many cities also have multiple stakeholders involved in projects, including city managers, planning boards, historical societies, and community groups. Archaeologists need to consider the interests of all these stakeholders when conducting urban excavations. Such stakeholders are often the key to making archaeological sites significant to people other than archaeologists because they constitute the community that is seeking to commemorate events and people directly connected to the pasts archaeologists explore. Finally, the transitory nature of urban residence and the ever-changing composition of city neighborhoods have left behind a very complex archaeological record and the evidence is often difficult to associate with a specific resident or community. A famous and important case of how both depositional processes and the social negotiation of the past impacted the preservation and interpretation of an important urban African American site played out in the early 2000s in Philadelphia at a site known as the President’s House. At that time, the National Park Service was renovating a museum and pavilion to house the Liberty Bell. As the required archaeological impact study unfolded, the consulting archaeologists discovered the remains of an icehouse on a lot associated with the house that the government rented for Presidents George Washington and John Adams during the brief period when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital, a long-demolished structure now known as the President’s House. Washington, a Virginia planter in civilian life, had brought enslaved workers with him from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia, some of whom lived in a back room attached to the executive mansion. Because of urban development, little of the President’s House survived to be analyzed by archaeologists. During the initial excavation, the archaeologists concluded that the remnant of the icehouse was the only feature from the federal period to survive, as the later construction of several large commercial buildings with deep basements had stripped away nine feet of soil that were presumed to include the entire foundation and any other shallow features associated with the President’s House. A remnant of the icehouse survived only because it had initially been excavated down to about eighteen feet below grade in the late eighteenth century. The National Park Service, which wanted the museum to focus only on the Liberty Bell, proved reluctant to exhibit the icehouse,

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eventually filling it with gravel and burying the ruin below the Liberty Bell pavilion. The park service was initially also reluctant to interpret the histories of the enslaved African Americans who had lived and worked with Washington, claiming that interpretations of slavery in Philadelphia would confuse visitors coming to see the Liberty Bell (Yamin 2008; Levin 2011). Spurred by an opinion expressed by a prominent historian on a local radio talk show, a narrative emerged that claimed that the National Park Service and the consulting archaeologists had conspired to suppress the archaeological investigation of Washington’s slave quarters in an attempt to whitewash the past. After considerable public outcry, Congress directed the park service to incorporate the interpretation of both the President’s House and the African American past into the new museum (Salisbury 2010; Yamin 2008, 39–58; LaRoche 2014a). In response to continuing debate over how to represent the African American past at the Liberty Bell Pavilion, a second excavation was conducted at the site in 2007. The results of this project contradicted earlier assumptions that the house foundation had been completely destroyed (Pogue 2005; Yamin 2008; LaRoche 2014). The 2007 excavation discovered remnants of the foundation of the house, including evidence of a bow window that Washington installed in the house, a cellar located below the kitchen of the house, and a subterranean passageway through which enslaved servants likely carried food from the kitchen to the various dinners and entertainments President and Mrs. Washington hosted (Levin 2011). The excavation was a public event; a wooden viewing platform was installed during the archaeological project so curious visitors could watch the archaeological investigation as it unfolded. It has been estimated that as many as 300,000 people stopped to view the excavation of the President’s House foundation (Salisbury 2010; Levin 2011). At the conclusion of the investigation, the park service decided to create an exhibit space that included a stylized architectural echo of the house, a “ghost” house similar to that constructed on the site of Benjamin Franklin’s house not far away. Significantly, the President’s House exhibition also includes a commemoration highlighting the roles that the nine people known to have been enslaved by Washington played not only in his household (table C.1) but as representatives of the millions of enslaved workers whose lives and liberties were spent during the process of building the young nation (Levin 2011). The current museum includes

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Table C.1. Enslaved people resident at the President’s House, Philadelphia, 1790s Austin Paris Hercules Christopher Sheels Richmond Giles Oney Judge Moll Joe Note: For more about these individuals, see National Park Service (2017).

interactive exhibits discussing the complex relationships that Washington had with the enslaved individuals in his household and their personal histories, including stories of escape from Washington’s enslavement. The remnants of the house foundations have been preserved under glass, incorporating the archaeological story directly into the interpretation of slavery at the nation’s birth (figure C.1). The Harriet Tubman Homesite, Auburn, New York

One story about the struggle over slavery that has long been commemorated is that of Harriet Tubman. Born into slavery as Araminta Ross on Maryland’s eastern shore, she experienced many of the deprivations of the slave system. As a girl she saw three of her sisters sold away to distant plantations. She was reputed to carry the scars of lashings she received as a girl and was partially disabled by a head injury that an angry overseer inflicted. In 1849, by then a married woman in her mid-20s, Araminta, then known by her married name of Harriet Tubman, fled captivity. Leaving her husband behind, Harriet found refuge with the abolitionist community of Philadelphia. Over the next several years, she used Philadelphia as a base of operations for periodic missions back into Maryland to lead her family and friends to freedom in Pennsylvania. It has been estimated that over the course of a few short years, she led seventy people out of slavery. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made residence in Pennsylvania too dangerous, Harriet shifted her base of operations to central New York and

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Figure C.1. The President’s House in Philadelphia. Photo by James A. Delle.

began guiding refugees to the Canadian border. In 1859, she purchased a house from US senator William Seward in Auburn, New York, which she made her permanent home (Armstrong 2015). During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman served as a nurse, a spy, and a guide for Union raiders. Her most famous wartime accomplishment was the intelligence she gathered before the Combahee River Raid. Likely with the assistance of local informants, Harriet helped guide three small gunboats carrying several companies of black Union troops up a small river in the South Carolina Low Country. The troops succeeded in destroying several rice plantations, confiscating or destroying stores, and burning down every plantation building they encountered. The raid concluded with the liberation of approximately 750 enslaved people, who left on the gunboats with the black troops (Armstrong 2015). At the end of the war, Harriet Tubman returned to Auburn, where she spent the remainder of her life; she died there in 1913. During this 40-year residence in Auburn, Harriet Tubman carried on the postbellum struggle for liberated African Americans. She eventually established a home for the aged on her property and attempted to establish a school to provide young African American women with marketable skills (Armstrong 2015).

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In the late 1990s, Doug Armstrong of Syracuse University used an archaeological investigation on Harriet Tubman’s property in Auburn as a way of commemorating her remarkable life. Armstrong’s analysis of the material remains of Tubman’s property was informed by landscape archaeology, particularly the principle that individual buildings cannot be understood in isolation but must be examined in their sociospatial context. Armstrong specifically discussed how the few extant structures on Tubman’s farmstead could not be understood without understanding the totality of the farm complex. This perspective could quite easily be extended to the life of Tubman herself, who can only be understood within the context of her time and social position as a African American woman who actively engaged in the struggles for freedom and dignity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Armstrong 2015). Armstrong’s work demonstrates that while she lived in Auburn, Tubman maintained an open household, providing shelter and support for refugees fleeing north into Canada. After the war, she worked to provide shelter to those displaced persons who had difficulty becoming economically self-sufficient when they arrived in New York. This was not an easy task for Tubman, particularly after the war, when the abolitionist movement began to wane. As we have seen, in the aftermath of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, African Americans who attained their liberty often were faced with the difficult challenge of making a living in a racist society. Tubman made her living primarily as a small-scale subsistence farmer, selling surplus produce and canned fruit on the street in Auburn (Armstrong 2015, 157). This activity provided a marginal living. Her farmstead was small and she lacked the capital to invest in the developing agricultural technology that was revolutionizing farm production in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Tubman welcomed people into her household with the expectation that their collective work on her land would sustain all who would come to live with her. As Tubman aged, she became increasingly concerned about the welfare of elderly people who had escaped slavery to settle in Auburn. At the turn of the twentieth century, the care of the elderly in the United States was generally provided by family members. By 1900, most of those who had escaped slavery were elderly, but having uprooted themselves from the South, lacked the family safety net that others depended upon. As part of her lifelong dedication to protecting the rights and dignity of African

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American people, Tubman took it upon herself to create a home for the aged. In the early twentieth century, supported by the local African Methodist Episcopal church and some wealthy white benefactors, she founded the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, which served as a final refuge for elderly men and women who had struggled for freedom in decades past. Her plan was to use the profits from her farm to pay the expenses of residents in the home, but this proved untenable because the small farm could not provide enough income to support an increasingly frail population of elderly people. Tubman, herself a resident in the home for the last few years of her life, died in 1913. The local African Methodist Episcopal church supported the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged until the last of the people Tubman had taken into the home had passed away. By the 1920s, the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged had passed from memory and its buildings had fallen into disuse and disrepair, becoming part of the archaeological record of the African American past (Armstrong 2015). Armstrong’s project at the Tubman site was designed partly to commemorate the achievements of Harriet Tubman and partly to serve as a reminder that the struggle for freedom and equality did not end with Lee’s surrender in 1865. Armstrong demonstrated that the original woodframe house Tubman purchased likely burned down in 1880. The repair and reconstruction of the house created a more substantial brick building in which Tubman could support the increasing number of elderly people coming to her for help. One particularly interesting archaeological feature was related to the house fire. A builder’s trench associated with the reconstructed house produced a wide array of domestic objects, including medicine bottles, dessert glasses, and porcelain dolls and miniature tea cups. This array of objects reveals that children as well as the elderly were sheltered in Tubman’s home long before it became a home for the aged (Armstrong 2015). The archaeological project at Tubman’s Homesite is revelatory of the struggles African Americans faced in the postbellum years. It was one thing to be liberated from slavery, it was something altogether different to make a living, create a community, and live with dignity in an increasingly racist world. While Tubman’s homesite commemorates the life and legacy of this remarkable woman, it also reminds us that the struggle continued for many. In 2016, ownership of her residence was transferred from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to the National Park Service. Along with the extant Home for the Aged and the Thompson African

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Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Tubman’s home is part of a National Historical Park dedicated to her life and the development of the African American community in upstate New York, where her life and the struggles for emancipation and equality will be commemorated (Armstrong 2015). Although the National Park Service is still in the process of developing the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, the site is open and is dedicated to interpreting Harriet’s life as an example of the struggle African Americans faced both before and after the Civil War. The commemoration of Harriet Tubman is presented in three ways: as an interactive lecture on her life and its meaning that a National Park Service ranger presents in a small visitors’ center; as a guided tour of the exteriors of Tubman’s house and the Home for the Aged, both of which have been stabilized and are on the property owned by the National Park Service; and as a self-guided tour of sites in Auburn related to Tubman, including her gravesite and the exterior of the African Methodist Episcopal church in the village, which is currently undergoing renovations and will eventually be opened as part of the park experience. One June 1, 2018, I had the opportunity to visit the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, accompanied by a tour group from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of Nyack, New York. The interactive presentation the park service ranger made to the mostly African American audience pulled no punches in its analysis of the racist state of the American republic during the antebellum years. The ranger discussed several well-known themes about the expansion of slavery in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, touching upon the importance of the rise of industrial textile production, including the invention of the cotton gin. The presentation clearly stated that the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century exacerbated racism in the United States, including the expulsion of Native Americans in the Southeast through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which opened lands in Georgia and the Carolinas for large-scale, slave-based cotton production. The presentation notes that an overproduction crisis resulted in depressed prices for cotton cloth, which drove factories and cotton plantations to expand production, resulting in the further expansion of slavery, including an expanding internal market for enslaved laborers to work on plantations farther south and west (figure C.2).

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Figure C.2. A ranger presentation at the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park. Photo by James A. Delle.

The National Park Service commemorates Harriet Tubman’s life within this social and economic context. The presentation discusses Tubman as an example of a woman growing up under the oppressions of slavery. It discusses violence against families, including young Harriet’s experience of seeing her family broken apart when her sisters were sold into the Deep South. It also discusses violence against individuals, using the example of the head injury Harriet incurred when a white overseer threw a twopound weight that hit her on the temple, fracturing her skull. It explores the harsh realities of slave work. The park ranger noted that Harriet was required to work with her head injury, despite her inability to staunch the bleeding from her skull fracture. The presentation commemorates Harriet’s work on the Underground Railroad, including the story of her own self-emancipation in Philadelphia and her thirteen known trips to rescue her friends and family still held in bondage, her work as a guide for Union troops during the war, and her eventual friendship with US secretary of state William Seward, who helped her acquire the property in Auburn that is now the national historical park. After discussing her arrival in Auburn, the presentation moved its focus to the postbellum period. The ranger quite adroitly discussed the expansion of racism in the North following the end of the Civil War,

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discussing her struggles to help previously enslaved people acculturate to life after slavery and to help African Americans in need. What is sometimes forgotten is that self-emancipated people did not always have the means or the ability to become self-sufficient when their bondage was ended. Those with some means and abilities, like Harriet Tubman, continued the struggle for racial justice by raising funds to assist impoverished African Americans, to develop educational services so the children and grandchildren of formerly enslaved people could develop marketable skills, and to provide some means of end-of-life dignity for elderly former slaves living far away from family and other social networks. These struggles for basic human rights continued after the war. The National Park Service commemorates the harsh realities of life in a racist world and the work that is continually needed to overcome racism through its presentation of the life of Harriet Tubman. The W. E. B. Du Bois Homesite

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was arguably the greatest African American scholar of the twentieth century. Du Bois was born in 1868, the year that the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing equal protection under the law and citizenship for African Americans. He died in Ghana in 1963, one day before Martin Luther King presented his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Through his long life, Du Bois physically, intellectually, and spiritually connected the struggles of the Reconstruction Era with those of the Civil Rights Movement. A prolific author, Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, which challenged both the stereotypical view that African Americans were the cause of the failures of Reconstruction and the reconciliationalist assertion that slavery was only a tangential cause of the Civil War. He wrote several academic monographs that are still considered classics, including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which many consider to be the first urban ethnography and the first in-depth social scientific study of an African American community. His Souls of Black Folk (1903) is still considered a classic in African American literature. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small rural community not far from the state’s western border with New York. Raised in the household of his maternal relations, known locally as the Black Burghardts, Du Bois grew up on a small rural homestead in an extended

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family whose members were part of a significant African American community in western Massachusetts. W. E. B. Du Bois showed great promise as a young scholar. After he graduated from high school in Great Barrington, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington sponsored Du Bois’s education at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. After he completed his studies at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard College, where he was awarded his bachelor’s degree in history in 1890. He then enrolled in the graduate program in sociology at Harvard. In 1895, after studying at the University of Berlin, Du Bois became the first African American to be awarded a PhD from Harvard (Lewis 2009). In the opening decade of the twentieth century, Du Bois became a vocal champion of African American civil rights. He and a small group of activists founded the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization that fought for full political and social enfranchisement for African Americans. The Niagara Movement formed largely in opposition to the policies Booker T. Washington proposed in his famous Atlanta Compromise. Washington, who lived in the racially segregated South, where lynchings were terrifyingly common, advocated for a social compromise in which African Americans would not fight for political equality so long as economic opportunity and access to the justice system remained open them. Du Bois and the other members of the Niagara Movement agitated for fully equal rights. Their agenda was more radical than Washington’s, and it did not gain wide support. The Niagara Movement disbanded after just a few years. Du Bois and several of his Niagara colleagues proceeded to form a more comprehensive organization just a few years later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which has remained a stalwart defender of the rights of African American people to this day (Lewis 1993, 2009). Du Bois was appointed as the director of publicity and research for the NAACP in 1910. In November of that year he left his teaching post at Atlanta University and moved to New York to take up the editorial duties of the NAACP’s monthly publication, The Crisis. He served as editor of this influential journal until 1934, when, as a result of a power struggle within the NAACP, Du Bois resigned as editor and returned to his position at Atlanta University. During his second stint at Atlanta, Du Bois became an increasingly controversial figure, supporting socialism (he later joined the Communist Party in 1961, at the age of 93) and speaking against American

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militarism as an extension of imperialism. He was relieved of his position at Atlanta in 1943. He returned to work for the NAACP, and in the later years of his life Du Bois remained an energetic voice for economic and social equality, an outspoken critic of nuclear armament, and a strident anticolonialist. Persecuted in the United States for his increasingly radical stances, Du Bois moved to Ghana in 1961 to commence work on a proposed Encyclopedia Africana. When the US State Department refused to renew his passport, Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died there in 1963 (Lewis 2009). In the early 1980s, Robert Paynter of the University of Massachusetts directed an archaeological investigation of the Du Bois boyhood homesite in Great Barrington. Du Bois had lived in the house in the 1870s. After passing out of the family for a while, the house was purchased as a gift for Du Bois in 1928, when he was living in New York and editing The Crisis. Du Bois retained ownership of the house until 1954, occasionally using it as a summer home. Although he made plans to renovate the house, it appears that either through lack of funds or lack of interest, the renovations were never completed and he sold the property in 1954. In 1967, a group of admirers purchased the homesite and created the Du Bois Memorial Foundation. Their goal was to construct and manage a commemorative site dedicated to the life and work of Du Bois. In 1969, the site was dedicated in a controversial ceremony. Many in the community did not want to commemorate Du Bois, given his radical socialist views and his affiliation with the Communist Party. In 1987, the homesite was gifted to the University of Massachusetts, which retains stewardship of the property (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Paynter et al. 1994; Muller 2001). The archaeological project Paynter led was conducted over three seasons in 1983, 1984, and 2003 (Paynter et al. 1994; Paynter et al. 2008). The stated goals of the project were to assess the extent and integrity of the archaeological remains at the house and to use the results of the survey excavations to interpret the landscape of the homesite as it existed at the time that the family of Du Bois’s mother, the Burghardts, occupied it in the late nineteenth century. The initial project conducted in the 1980s revealed that the integrity of the site was quite good. Although there was some slight evidence of disturbance by bottle hunters, the archaeologists were able to identify several features likely related to the Burghardt-Du Bois occupation, including several trash middens and the cellar hole of the original house.

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Remote-sensing studies undertaken in 1983 indicated the possible presence of additional features, which were tested in 1984. The hope was to identify outbuildings that had existed on the property, which could be used to reconstruct and interpret the internal landscape of the property. While no discernable outbuildings were identified, the archaeologists located two trash pits, one of which likely dates to the Burghardt occupation of the site, and a privy pit, which they identified but did not excavate (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Paynter et al. 2008). The 2003 field project was designed to build on the work conducted in the 1980s and correct several assumptions that had defined the parameters of that initial project. By 2003, enough documentary research had been conducted to conclude that the original homesite was likely less than one acre in size and thus much smaller that the five-acre parcel that currently constitutes the National Historical Landmark property. This revised interpretation of the homesite forced Paynter and colleagues to rethink a previous landscape study that concluded that the Burghardts owned a small farm complex of which the house site was a component. When they reexamined a feature initially thought to be a barn, the archaeologists concluded that a raised mound of earth was actually associated with the property boundary of the house site. The 0.3-acre house site was large enough to contain a house and a small kitchen garden but not to sustain a subsistence farm (Paynter et al. 2008). The 2003 investigations paint a portrait of an African American family living on a small parcel of land not large enough to provide subsistence. Using tax records as a source of information, the Paynter team concluded that the Burghardts likely cooperated with their extended family, sharing access to a larger parcel of land containing five to seven acres and agricultural outbuildings. It is likely that the Burghardts pooled their limited resources in order to survive (Battle-Baptiste 2011; Paynter et al. 2008). While understanding the material realities of the childhood of Du Bois is instructive about how African Americans lived in the postbellum North, the site is particularly important as a place to commemorate the achievements and struggles of W. E. B. Du Bois. Now a National Historical Landmark, the homesite reminds us not only about how far Du Bois was able to rise but also of the economic and social struggles that continued to exist for African American families after the Civil War, even in a place like Massachusetts (Battle-Baptiste 2011). The homesite experience for the visitor today commemorates the life of Du Bois through a

198 · Part V. Commemoration

Figure C.3. The W. E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite. Photo by James A. Delle.

contemplative, quiet experience. A path through the pine woods where the Du Bois home once stood carries the visitor past a number of interpretive kiosks outlining the highlights of the remarkable life and career of Du Bois. The trail culminates at the now-overgrown foundation of the house (figure C.3). Conclusion

My look at the archaeological interpretation of African American life in the Northeast began with the small homesite of a humble African American woman, Lucy Foster, who lived in rural Massachusetts. We now end with the story of a famous African American man, who also lived in rural Massachusetts. Lucy Foster, born into slavery, died in 1845, a decade and a half before the outbreak of the Civil War (Baker 1980). W. E. B. Du Bois was born just a generation later, in 1868, and grew up in a time when the nation was struggling with the meaning of postwar Reconstruction. Historical archaeology has been interpreting the lives of African American women and men in the North, both humble and famous, for nearly three-quarters of a century. Through their work, archaeologists have attempted to understand the material realities of those who were enslaved on northern plantations, those who struggled to make an independent living in rural areas, and those both enslaved and free who lived in urban centers. By examining the lives of people such as Henry Douglass, William

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Parker, and Lydia Hamilton Smith, we better understand the communities of which they were a part. Enslaved African Americans lived in the North before an independent United States was even a dream. We cannot understand the American experience without considering their stories. As is often the case with those who lived in relatively historical obscurity, their stories may best be told through archaeology. It is my hope that this volume has demonstrated how archaeology can be used to understand that experience.

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INDEX

Abiel Smith School, 157 abolition, 19, 106, 114, 151, 164 abolitionists, 3, 104, 106, 109–110 Africa, 32–34, 38, 56 African Americans continuous, 61 emancipated, 18, 116, 166 families, xvi, 4, 22, 24, 116, 120, 122, 139, 144, 149–150, 160, 162, 177, 197 free, 25, 37, 47, 108, 116, 158 struggles, 191–192 in Boston, 157 in greater New York, 150 in New England, 22 in Pennsylvania, 43 African Burial Ground, 10–12, 26, 29, 53–56, 63, 80, 183 African Meeting House, 112, 113, 154, 157 African slave trade, 32, 46, 53, 57, 60, 62–63, 74 agricultural estates, 38, 42, 44, 63, 67, 71 Akan belief system, 78 Albany, city of, 40 American Revolution, 3, 42, 82, 116, 139, 184 Andover, town of, 15–17 Antigua, 69, 74, 76 antislavery activists, 103, 110. See also abolitionists antislavery movement, 104, 164 archaeological record, 12, 21, 65, 68, 70, 74, 191

archaeology critical community, 13, 29 Marxist, 13 plantation, 97 post-processual, 26–27 Armstrong, Douglas, 189–192 Askins, William, 148–150 Atlantic Monthly, 123 Attucks, Crispus, 25 Auburn, town of, 184, 188–190, 192–193 Baltimore, city of, 83 Barbados, 27, 33–34, 43, 67 Bard College, 115 Barton, Christopher, 14, 94, 109, 117–120 Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, 14, 16, 119, 196–197 Beacon Hill, 154 Beaudry, Mary, 112 Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, 160 Benard, Akeia, 58–60 Bergen County, 44–45 Berks County, 107 Berlin, Ira, 10–11, 37–39, 42, 44, 47, 87, 121, 195 Beverwyck, 71, 63, 73, 88 Black Lucy’s Garden, 15–16 blacksmiths, 30, 71, 90 Blakey, Michael L., 9–11, 29, 56 boarding house, 169, 173 bondage, 2, 4, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 79–81, 193–194

220 · Index

Boston, Absalom, 113–114 Boston, city of, 16, 33, 36–37, 60, 68, 104, 154, 156–157, 162 Boston Massacre, 25 Boston’s African Meeting House, 154–157 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14 Bower, Beth Ann, 37, 156 Bracketts Farm Slave Quarters, 95 Brazil, 34–35, 62, 106 Brinley, Sylvester, 67 Bronx, the, 10, 63 Brooklyn, 39, 63, 65, 109, 160 Brown, Samuel, 73 Buchanan, James, 164–165 Bucks County, 43 buildings, 69, 71–72, 75, 88, 90, 93–97, 107–109, 114, 131, 133, 154–156, 173, 185, 187, 190–191 Bullen, Adelaide, 15–18, 26, 30 Bullen, Ripley, 15–18, 26, 30 Burghardt family, 194, 196–197 burials, 29, 55–56, 152–153 Canada, 41, 134, 138, 190 Cannon’s Point Plantation, 18 Cape Cod, 60 Carolina Low Country, 32, 53 Carolinas, 3, 31, 58, 80, 192 Cayuga County, 40 Cayuga people, 84 Central Park, New York, 158–159 Chan, Alexandra, 36–37, 74–76, 78–80 Chesapeake region, 26, 53, 69, 79, 148, 150 Christiana, PA, 121–124, 127, 129, 137, 139 Christiana Riot, 124 Christiana treason trial, 166 cistern, abandoned, 177–179 citizenship, 105, 115, 121, 194 Civil Rights Act, 10 Civil Rights Movement, 194

Civil War, 9, 41, 43–46, 48–49, 117–120, 122, 139, 143, 146, 151, 165–167, 184, 189–190, 192–194, 197–198 coffins, 55, 62, 153 commemoration, 2, 5, 181, 183, 187, 192 communities descendant, 10–11, 13, 30, 118, 129 enslaved, 36, 56, 79, 86, 92, 96 segregated, 113, 151 Confederate States of America, 48–49 Congress, US, 4, 47, 70, 75, 77, 95, 155, 165, 168, 187 Connecticut, 33–36, 44, 46, 60–61, 73, 80, 116, 144–145 Constitution, US, 45–46, 48–49, 116, 143, 166 cowrie shells, 55, 72 Davis House, 118–119 Deetz, James, 21–26, 97–98 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 103, 106 Dred Scott Decision, 48, 121, 143 Du Bois, W. E. B., 106, 184, 194–198 Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, 196, 198 Duffield Street, 109–110 duplexes, 96, 98 Dutch West India Company, 38–39, 41 Eighth Street Cemetery, 152–153 emancipation, 22, 121, 146 England, 41, 59, 73 ethical client, 11 farms, 25, 27, 31–32, 36, 41, 65–66, 70–71, 108, 130, 139, 146–147, 190–191 Fellows, Kristen, 73, 84–85, 87–88, 145 Finger Lakes, NY, 83–84, 97 firearms, 17, 138 First African Meeting House, Boston, 154, 156–157 Fiske, Alice, 66 Fitts, Robert K., 2, 11, 27–28, 34, 36 Foster, Hannah, 16

Index · 221

Foster, Joseph, 17 Foster, Lucy, 15–18, 23, 30, 183, 198 France, 104–106 free black communities, 58, 116 free sugar movement, 146 Freetown, 151 Fugitive Slave Law, 4, 47–48, 106, 117, 118, 123–124, 143, 165, 188 fugitive slaves, 47, 107, 117 Garman, James, 25–27 Geismar, Joan, 19–21, 44–45, 160–161 Genesee Country, NY, 84–87, 99 Genesee fever, 84 Geneva, city of, 3, 82–83, 85–87, 92, 99 Gettysburg, borough of, 4, 163, 165, 168 Ghana, 78, 194, 196 glass beads, 55, 96 Gold Coast, 55 Goodwin, Prince, 22 Gorsuch, Edward, 126–127, 138, 140 Great Barrington, MA, 184, 194–196 Grover, Mark, 84–85, 87 Guineatown, 115–116, 121 gunflints, 17, 138 Hanway, Castner, 126, 128, 130–131, 136, 138, 165 Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, 191–193 Hartford, city and county of, 35, 60 hermeneutics, 26 Historic American Building Survey, 76, 93, 155 Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County, 165–167, 169 Hop Bottom, PA, 145 Hopkins, Samuel, 127 households, 16, 19, 28–29, 31, 71, 76, 86–88, 137, 158, 161, 167–168, 170, 187–188, 190, 194 Hoyt’s Cologne, 161, 175 Hudson Valley, 36, 39, 41, 84, 115

Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville, 160–161 Hutchins-Keim, Karen, 24–25 Hyde Park, NY, 115–116 icehouse, 186 I-house, 150 improvisation, practice theory of, 119–120 iron furnaces, 2, 42 Isaac Royall House, 76 Jackson, Andrew, 164 Jamaica, 35–36, 106 Jamestown, 32 Johnson, Andrew, 12–14, 88, 115–116 Judge, Oney, 188 Kansas, 165 Kline, Henry, 125–126 Kruczek-Aaron, Hadley, 111 Ku Klux Klan, 4, 118 labor, enslaved, 28, 38, 81, 163 Lancaster County, 42–43, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133–135, 137, 139, 163, 165–167, 169 Lancaster Daily Examiner, 166 Landon, 154, 156–157 landscapes, 22, 28, 34, 64, 68, 76, 110, 112, 119, 122 LaRoche, Cheryl, 9–10, 29, 107, 109, 183, 187 Lawson, Jane Rose, 85 Lawson, Susannah Rose, 85 Leone, Mark, 14, 55, 66, 69 Lighthouse, archaeological site, 112 Lincoln, Abraham, 48, 165 Long Island, 34, 36, 38–39, 41, 63, 66, 69–71, 80, 151 Lott House, 63, 65–66 Louisiana Purchase, 46–47 Lovejoy, Elijah, 104

222 · Index

Lydia Hamilton Smith House, 169, 172 lynchings, 118, 195 Manhattan, 9–11, 38, 148, 159 manors, 34, 64, 66–68, 74, 82 Martin, Primus, 115–116 Maryland, 4, 11, 14, 32, 66, 82–83, 86, 97, 116, 122–124, 139, 148, 150, 163 Mason-Dixon Line, 30, 32, 183 Massachusetts, 15–16, 18, 21–22, 33–34, 36–37, 44, 46, 60–62, 73–75, 78, 80, 196–197 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 33, 74–75 Massachusetts State House, 57 Matthews, Christopher, 14, 69–70, 151 MCD. See mean ceramic date mean ceramic date (MCD), 88, 94, 129, 134, 176 Medford, MA, 30, 38–39, 74, 76 meeting house, 112–151, 156–157 Mexico, 47 Mississippi Valley, 53 Missouri Compromise, 47–48 Monmouth County, 44 Monticello, 93 Montpelier, 98 Mount Holly, NJ, 116 Mount Vernon, 186 Museum of African American History in Boston, 154 mutual aid societies, 122–123 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 195–196 Namibia, 55 Nantucket, 94, 112–113, 115 Narragansett Bay, 27 Narragansett Plantations, 28 Narragansetts, 27, 34 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. See NAACP National Park Service, 186–188, 191–194 Netherlands, 38

New Amsterdam, 9, 38–39 New England, 17, 21–22, 24–25, 28, 32–37, 57–58, 60, 73–74, 82, 112, 114 New Hampshire, 36–37, 44, 46, 60–61, 63, 80 New Jersey, 18, 21, 32, 43–46, 71, 94, 116–117, 121, 148 Newport, RI, 26–27, 30, 35, 37, 57–60, 68 New Salem, 73 New York, colony or state of, 9–11, 29, 35–36, 38–44, 55–58, 63, 82, 87, 110–111, 148–150, 156–158, 183–184, 189–190, 194–196 plantations in upstate, 83 slavery in, 70 New York City, 9, 11, 31, 39, 54, 63–65, 83, 87, 115, 158 New York Draft Riots, 110 Niagara Movement, 195 Nicholas, Jean, 92–93, 97 Nicholas, John, 84, 86, 92, 99 Nicholas house, 93 Nyack, NY, 19–20, 192 Oneida County, 40 Onondaga County, 40 Ontario County, 86 Orser, Charles E., Jr., 13–14 Otsego County, 40 oystering, 149, 162 Parker, William, 122–123, 131, 137–139, 143 Parker House Site, 129, 133, 135–136 Parting Ways, 18, 21–25, 144, 184 eighteenth-century, 30 residents of, 24–25 Parvin Homestead, 108–109 Paynter, Robert, 196–197 Penn, William, 41 Pennsylvania, 4–5, 30, 32, 41–46, 107–108, 116, 121–123, 145–146, 163, 165, 188; northeastern, 144, 146 slavery in, 41, 168 Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 104

Index · 223

Pennsylvania Assembly, 164–165 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, 165 Pennsylvania Hall, 110 destroyed, 104 Pequot nation, 33 Pequot War, 33 Perkins, Angeline, 146 Perkins, Prince, 144–145, 147 Perkins-Dennis family, 146–147, 162 Perkins farm, 146 Philadelphia, city of, 41–43, 104, 108, 151, 153–154, 156, 162, 184, 186–189, 193 Phillippi, 70–71 plantations, 21, 26–28, 34, 36, 53, 65, 67–68, 71, 73, 80, 83, 98 sugar, 35 plantation slavery, 2–3, 63, 73, 80, 82 Plimoth Plantation, 21, 23 plow zone, 90, 94–95, 130, 133 Plymouth, town of, 18, 22, 24–25 Polk, James, 164 Poplar Forest, 93 Portsmouth, NH, 37, 60–62 Portsmouth’s African Burial Ground, 60 post-processual movement, 13 President’s House, 5, 185–189 Providence, RI, 60 Providence Island, 33 quarters, 29, 60, 68, 72, 78–79, 88–89, 93–95, 97, 126 Queens County, 39 race, 11, 49, 59, 111, 144, 147, 161, 164–166 racism, 9, 15, 59, 61, 110, 115, 120, 140, 143, 148, 151, 162, 184, 193–194 Rankin-Hill, Lesley M., 43, 152–153 Revere Street Methodist Episcopal Church, 154 Rhode Island, 25–27, 30, 34–37, 44, 46, 57–61, 68, 80, 112 rights, civil, 11, 48, 116, 195 Roby, John, 145–147

Rock Hall, 63, 69–70, 88 Rockland, 40 Roenke, Merrill, 84–85, 87 Rose, Robert S., 3, 83–85, 87 Rose Hill, 2–3, 82–83, 85–90, 92–97, 99, 112, 154 Rothschild, Nan, 159–160 Royal African Company, 34 Royall family, 74–76, 80, 82 Royall House, 76 Sadsbury Township, PA, 122–123, 137 Salwen, Bert, 160 sanctuary settlement, 106, 111–112, 115 Sandy Ground, NY, 148–150, 162 Scarlett, Joseph, 128, 137, 139 Schuyler, Robert, 148, 150 Seneca Lake, 3, 82, 84 Seneca Village, 158–160 Shellenhamer, Jason, 107–108 Skunk Hollow, 18–21, 30, 122 slave catchers, 117, 139 slave quarters, 28, 69, 72, 76–78, 80, 85, 88–90, 93–95, 98–99 slavery, 2–5, 11, 21–23, 29–33, 35, 37–39, 41–49, 56–58, 61–63, 103–106, 120–123, 162–166, 183–184, 187–188 abolition of, 71, 120 bonds of, 80, 106 conditions of, 5, 72, 80 expansion of, 192 extension of, 165 institution of, 33, 47, 53, 103 legality of, 47, 103 race-based, 33, 49 scope of, 29 and racism, 115, 140 slave ships, 35, 54, 58 slave trade, 58–60, 184 Smith, Gerrit, 110, 139 Smith, Lydia Hamilton, 4, 163–164, 166, 168, 173–174, 199 South Carolina Low Country, 189 Staten Island, 39, 148

224 · Index

St. Domingue, 104–105 Stevens, Thaddeus, 4, 164–165, 168–170, 173 Stevens House, 172–173, 175–178 Strong, Sarah Van Gieson, 87 structuralism, 13, 21, 24 Susquehanna River, 83 Sylvester, Nathaniel, 66–67 Sylvester family, 68 Sylvester Manor, 63, 66–68, 71, 183 tenant farmers, 3–4, 68, 122–124 Ten Hills Farm, 74–80, 82, 88 Thompson, Betsy, 20 Thompson, Samuel, 126 Thompson House, 70 Tidewater, 83, 93 Timbucto, 111, 116 Timbuctoo, 116–119, 121, 123 Timbuctu, 116 Tubman, Harriet, 184, 188–192, 194 tunnels, 107–110 Turner, Plato, 22–23, 25 Turner-Burr House, 23

Underground Railroad, 106–109, 117, 193 Upton, Dell, 93, 97–99 Van Cortlandt Manor, 63–64 Van Gieson families, 87–88 Vermont, 36, 44, 46, 61, 146, 165 Virginia, 3–4, 28–29, 31–32, 48, 58, 60, 80, 84–86, 93–98, 122–123 Virginia houses, 98 Washington, George, 5, 40, 46, 165, 168–169, 180, 186–188, 194–195 Washington’s slave quarters, 187 Weeksville, 157–158, 160–161 Weeksville Heritage Center, 160 Westchester County, 39 West Indies, 24, 34, 36–38, 43, 58, 72–73 White Springs Farm, 92, 97 William Parker House, 4, 124, 127–128, 132, 136, 138, 184 Wilson, Woodrow, xxii Yamin, Rebecca, 152–154, 187

James A. Delle is associate provost for academic administration at Millersville University. He is the author of The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in the Plantation System and An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains.

The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective Edited by Michael S. Nassaney The Archaeology of Collective Action, by Dean J. Saitta (2007) The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement, by Eleanor Conlin Casella (2007) The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America, by Charles E. Orser Jr. (2007) The Archaeology of North American Farmsteads, by Mark D. Groover (2008) The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking, by Frederick H. Smith (2008) The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life, by Paul A. Shackel (2009; first paperback edition, 2011) The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America, by Diana DiPaolo Loren (2010; first paperback edition, 2011) The Archaeology of American Capitalism, by Christopher N. Matthews (2010; first paperback edition, 2012) The Archaeology of Forts and Battlefields, by David R. Starbuck (2011; first paperback edition, 2012) The Archaeology of Consumer Culture, by Paul R. Mullins (2011; first paperback edition, 2012) The Archaeology of Antislavery Resistance, by Terrance M. Weik (2012; first paperback edition, 2013) The Archaeology of Citizenship, by Stacey Lynn Camp (2013) The Archaeology of American Cities, by Nan A. Rothschild and Diana diZerega Wall (2014; first paperback edition, 2015) The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers, by Sherene Baugher and Richard F. Veit (2014; first paperback edition, 2015) The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco, by Georgia L. Fox (2015; first paperback edition, 2016) The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America, by Deborah L. Rotman (2015; first paperback edition, 2018) The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade, by Michael S. Nassaney (2015; first paperback edition, 2017) The Archaeology of the Cold War, by Todd A. Hanson (2016) The Archaeology of American Mining, by Paul J. White (2017) The Archaeology of Utopian and Intentional Communities, by Stacy C. Kozakavich (2017) The Archaeology of Childhood and Adolescence in the American Experience, by Jane Eva Baxter (2019) The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom, by James A. Delle (2019)