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

1 The Land

The Land On this ground a thousand years ago, the woods embraced a people called the Massachusett. They made no books, no maps, no monuments to their achievements, no lasting record of defeats. No history of these people was described in stone or set on silk or sheepskin for posterity. No library preserved their lore. Instead, season by season, year by year, long nights around great bonfires glowed with the legends of the place, the battles won, the heroes honored. But these were only stories, as ephemeral as the flowing waters of the nearby Mystic River. With the coming of white explorers, that record started burning in the fevers of disease. Then came the crack of musket shot and the stifling language of a distant court. In a blink of geologic time, a population withered. What had been saved and shared so long was lost, the people of those legends broken. By the time the Puritans and their stern, committed few arrived to stake their claim, an eerie silence was already spread across the ground. A veil of illness lingered. More tragedy would come. Until the 1400s, literate, seafaring civilizations understood the space beyond their knowing as but a cipher and a dream, a nightmare , really, made of falling over the earth’s edge. Ancient mariners who ventured into the New World spoke of brown-skinned men and gray-blue waters full of fish. But were they to be believed? Elegant maps with whale spouts and huge monsters at their edges showed just a frightening void beyond the boundary of what they 1 4 CHAPTER 1 had explored. By the 1500s it was filled. Yet even then Europeans knew more about the Caribbean and Mexico than vast territories stretching north of Florida. The famous cartographer Sebastian Cabot in 1544 showed New England and everything to the north of it as a literal terra incognita, filled only with grasses, bears, a mountain lion, and several Indians with sticks. While royal records in their spindly hubris and self-interest described man’s greedy sweeps across the arc of Asia, Africa, and Europe, neither scholars nor explorers bothered yet to mark North America’s lush acres in dark ink or fine gold leaf. Then came fishermen, laborers, ministers, and warriors. And finally the region’s history, already well advanced upon the land itself and written in the hearts and memories of a people who had made their lives upon that ground for a millennium, began to twist into another form, a form best suited to the egos and the interests of white tellers, newcomers all, armed with the great power of the pen. Almost imperceptibly, a complex history was casually erased, as though the god of memory had simply closed his eyes. These newcomers would spin a tale of bold adventurers, men of honor and deep principle who came to settle a “new” land. Among them was a forty-two-year-old chronicler whose journals would frame and define our knowledge of this land for centuries to come. “For 350 years Governor John Winthrop’s journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts” in its first decades, wrote Richard S. Dunn in an introduction to the Harvard University Press edition of those journals printed in 1996. Sweeping as the statement is, Dunn might have minimized the impact. For it was not just Massachusetts that the leader of the Puritans helped to define, but America’s very understanding of itself. Almost inevitably, much of that understanding came from Winthrop, whom Dunn rightfully acknowledges as “both the chief actor and the chief recorder” of the Puritans’ bold experiment. He left behind a body of observations and a manifesto of intention that is quoted even now, across the span of centuries. In that sense, Winthrop’s writings were both a gift and the seed of a conundrum posed to later generations struggling for a broader view. THE LAND 5 1.1 Detail of World Map, 1544, showing North America as “Terra Incognita.” Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. 6 CHAPTER 1 Winthrop’s journal, or those parts of it that have survived the years and the vicissitudes of weather and poor treatment, opens on March 29, “Anno domini 1630,” an Easter Monday. The new governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company was aboard the 350-ton Arbella in Southampton along England’s southern coast in preparation for his sailing then. He had...