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

9 You May Own Negroes and Negresses

9 You May Own Negroes and Negresses Slavery in Massachusetts by this time was common, so accepted, in fact, masters sometimes joked about the agonies of men they owned. One surviving letter from the Winthrop family shows Wait-Still, the Puritan’s grandson born at Ten Hills Farm, writing to his brother Fitz in Connecticut, making fun of his slave “Black Tom” whom he was sending south. In the letter, which accompanied the slave’s delivery, Wait told his older brother the man was of negligible value and had a troublesome habit of giving visitors a shock. “He used to make a show of hangeing himselfe” when strangers came to pay a call, Wait quipped, but “is not very nimble about it when he is alone.” Fitz accepted the gift and perhaps his younger brother’s advice, too: “Have an eye to him,” Wait cautioned, and “and [if] you think it not worthwhile to keep him [either], sell him or send him to Virginia or the Barbadoes” and be done with it. As more and more slaves arrived in Massachusetts, they chafed against their fate in many ways. But merchants rising on the strings of trade found it easy to ignore their pain. John Usher, for one, put his mind to other things, for after the Elizabeth came safely home his wealth increased and his schemes only grew in scope. In 1686 he was named treasurer and receiver general of New England.That same year he helped arrange the “million-acre purchase,” securing a vast New Hampshire territory for himself and a few friends and a brother who would have the right to mine for a millennium. YOU MAY OWN NEGROES AND NEGRESSES 117 Other profits ripened on a more familiar tree. Records from the late 1600s show Usher and his circle running goods between Boston , Nevis, Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Spain, and London in a nearly constant loop. An inventory on file at the Massachusetts Historical Society shows one of their ships leaving port low to her waterline, weighed down with “nails, fish, pork, makrill, boards, staves, shingles, pease, 1 horse, hay, water, Indian corn, hoops, light money and corn,” in short, anything (even water for those parched Antiguans) those men could find a buyer for, the seaborne Wal-Mart of their day. While Usher busied himself with matters of business, his wife and daughter left for England, traveling with the family slave, Sarah, whom John had bought on credit from his mother-in-law, the wealthy dowager Elizabeth Lidgett. Despite that slave’s constant attention, the Usher women were not happy on their voyage and not long after they landed they wanted to be home. They were homesick, Elisa Usher complained to her husband in New England . They were lonely and quite ill. They missed Boston and the farm. Money worries dogged their every move. Londoners seemed less than welcoming. Friends back in America did not write. Perhaps they did not care. To top things off, just as the women were packing to go home, Sarah ran away and Elisa could find nobody to help her track the woman down. “Dearest Love,” Elisa wrote to her husband back at Ten Hills Farm, “I am forced to abide here, although nothing [could be] more tedious to me.” The journey, meant to bring such pleasure, instead left her “continually labouring under continual pain, both of the body and minde.” In a rounded, graceful hand that could not have been more different than her husband’s cramped, untidy scratchings, Elisa complained that friends abandoned her and even “my nearest ones are more concerned with other matters, witness every letter I have had. . . .” Both Elisa and her daughter had contracted smallpox and suffered terribly with the disease. Betty Usher nearly died of it, and medical costs were mounting. Now the£100 advanced by the Belcher family was running thin, “not with riotous living,” Elisa hastened to explain, “but bare necessity (and scarce that), all things excessive deer, especialy for strangers.” 118 CHAPTER 9 When she tried to hire a white maid, she found those alabasterskinned girls “so difficult, and so cost[ly] to go for New England that I must be forced to keep Sarah with all her bad honors.” She informed her husband of her slave’s sudden disappearance on the eve of sailing. Sarah “should have gone on board 2 days agone,” Elisa allowed with some vexation. Instead, she...