First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality In Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862–1900 (review)

The historiography of African American migration has taken several leaps in the past decade as scholars from a variety of fields have intensified their collaborations, presenting a textured approach to understanding mobility and community building as methods of resistance and survival. Janette Thomas Greenwood’s meticulously researched First Fruits of Freedom reveals these traits among black migrants and their descendants in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1862 to 1900. First arriving as fugitives, escaped slaves received a warm welcome in the town, and soon others arrived in larger numbers, fleeing from slavery, from the Civil War, and eventually from the disappointing racial conditions of the New South. Greenwood’s research reveals the disappointing reactions in Worcester as the black community there expanded and developed.

When the first family of African Americans left New Bern, North Carolina, they had the support of influential Union officials whom they had helped in 1862 as the Civil War raged. Worcester, Massachusetts, a town of seventeen thousand, had a strong and vocal abolitionist faction and was home to about five hundred free people of color by 1850. When the first runaway southerners arrived from North Carolina, the local paper made pleas with townspeople to employ and welcome them, touting their value as patriots and their rights to freedom. Worcester quickly became a destination point for fleeing enslaved families. Missionary teachers, soldiers, and the Freedman’s Bureau endorsed and arranged relocation and employment there for black southerners, as did the African Americans who made their home in New Bern.

In the years during and after the Civil War, at least 330 freed people moved to Worcester and Worcester County, almost doubling the town’s black population. As these southerners moved into the area, they brought with them a well-established sense of community and culture. As Reconstruction passed with numerous unfulfilled promises for black Americans, racial attitudes in Worcester took a turn for the worse. Greenwood eloquently relays the pain of these migrants and their descendants who found that white Worcester attitudes were not as altruistic as their abolitionist efforts had appeared a few decades before.

Worcester employment agencies and white middle-class residents found the influx of black southerners a pleasant event as they were happy to advertise and employ “colored help.” As black Worcester families sought work in the town, they found their opportunities were quickly channeled into subordinate roles of service. Greenwood describes an “insatiable appetite for employing black in domestic service” among many whites in Worcester who took delight in hiring black cooks, housekeepers, porters, and coachmen as a symbol of status and novelty (p. 119). This power dynamic between the white employers and the black workers defined the trajectory of race and labor relations in the town.

In addition to the overly racialized problems with the black Worcester residents, other cultural problems developed as well. While northern abolitionist sentiment for the black southerners was strong during the Civil War and Reconstruction, their continuance of southern traditions among the generations that followed was mired in distaste for the regional differences. For example, the African Americans in Worcester overwhelmingly chose to worship in the manner that their families had before them, and they maintained their loyalty and affiliation to their Southern Baptist roots. Black Worcester residents cooked, spoke, and worshiped like southerners, and many white townspeople found their customs repulsive.

Generational differences in attitudes and experiences were most evident in what Greenwood describes as “a rising generation of Gilded Age go-getters, unmindful of Worcester’s abolitionist heritage and its role in emancipating and settling former slaves.” (p. 133) Residents in earlier eras had seen African Americans as their co-patriots in the Civil War, standing next to them as saviors and fellow statesmen. However, most of the children of these well-meaning Worcester whites saw their...