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

16 Within the Bowels of a Free Country

16 Within the Bowels of a Free Country By the time of Henry Vassall’s death in 1769, the Sons of Liberty had created an organized force intent on resisting British acts that worked against the colony’s best interests. Month by month they harried British troops and shouted their profound distaste for England’s bullying. Discontent across the colonies meant tinder scattered everywhere. All that tinder needed was a spark; and it was struck one night in March, a year after Henry’s death, when a crowd of protesters in Boston threw snowballs, rocks, and oyster shells at British soldiers; and those beleaguered soldiers fired back. A crack of muskets brought eleven protesters down. Six among the victims died. One was Crispus Attucks, a black man, a runaway slave who on that day had stirred the crowd with talk of liberty. Described two decades earlier in a notice of his escape from his Framingham master as “A Mulatto fellow, about 27 Years of Age . . . , 6 feet 2 . . . ,”Attucks, by then in his late forties, had managed to live free for twenty years by disappearing into Boston’s black community and cadging work as a sailor and rope maker as opportunity allowed. But on that night his luck ran out. Crispus Attucks’ decision to risk his own freedom to join the broader call for liberty cost him his life. “The first to defy, the first to die,” Irish journalist and poet John Boyle O’Reilly wrote approvingly a century later. Even at the time, Patriots called the man a hero and proudly buried him alongside his fellow victims in a cemetery otherwise reserved for whites.“A most horrid and inhuman massacre!” scribbled Boyle in THE BOWELS OF A FREE COUNTRY 207 his journal. Paul Revere bent to his work again, this time making an engraving of a Henry Pelham drawing showing the encounter in all its drama. The “Boston Massacre,” as that event was provocatively named, would galvanize the population. From north to south white Americans began to band together with a powerful wish—freedom from the “masters” they had known. In this growing mood of revolution, some slaves, stirred by all the rhetoric of liberty, began to think an end to bondage might be near for them as well. Freedom for the one should mean freedom for the other, they reasoned. Indeed, the idea of liberation was so sweet (and talk of it so universal), that Boston’s black community began to stir. Some free men like Prince Hall, a skilled negotiator who sought education for black children and helped establish the first black freemasonry society in Boston, would push a radical agenda. In Massachusetts at long last, the slow clock of slavery was finally ticking down. But first, whites wanted freedom for themselves. Ensconced in his quiet retreat in Medford, Isaac Royall Jr. knew of the debates but had no incentive to destroy the status quo and no moral attitude to do so either. For him these arguments were nothing but pestering distractions. What he wanted was appeasement. Freedom for the slaves? Ridiculous. Who would do the work? He loathed this air of change. He wanted peace. He wanted to be patriarch and grandfather. At Ten Hills Farm his daughter Betsy was busy with her newborn and dreaming of the new coach or chariot her husband promised to send back. Now he had a grandniece as well. And soon enough his other daughter would be married, too. In Cambridge, Penne was in no mood to free her slaves either. Instead, she found she needed them for income as she faced the piles of debt her husband left. In this period she sold her slave Cuba and Cuba’s children down the block to serve John Vassall Jr. Toby, the children’s father, would remain behind at No. 94. Penne needed him. In the halls of politics the talk of liberty grew yet more heated. Isaac Royall Jr. could feel the energy rising. Yet still he wavered. And for a moment, at least, it almost seemed the danger might still pass. In Boston, after some maneuvering, the king’s soldiers were ordered to stand down. Ministers in London repealed most taxes 208 CHAPTER 16 except for one on tea “so small,” wrote historian David Hackett Fischer, that London officials “believed even Boston might be willing to swallow it.” They were wrong. Instead, the tax on tea became...