Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790–1890

2 | Peaks and Valleys on the Hill Farms, 1810s–1820s

o chapter two Peaks and Valleys on the Hill Farms, 1810s–1820s People harvesting Work together unaware of racial problems —A Japanese immigrant in the early twentieth century (quoted in Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages) Matilda Dorsey buys the “butter of Miss Clark” for 58 cents and the “Butter of Wm Langley” for 50 cents. —Nathaniel Dunham, in Hinesburgh, Vermont, General Store Day Book From statehood to 1810, Vermont was the fastest-growing state in the union, increasing from a population of 85,000 in 1791 to about 218,000. Most migrants were farmers, and many, like the Clarks and Peterses, made permanent homes in the Green Mountains. However, as the oncethick forest humus was burned, leached, and cropped off, the soil lost its fertility, and farms became less productive. As a result, Vermont became the slowest-growing state after 1810, as many farmers and entrepreneurs migrated to more productive locales. At the same time, the black population in Vermont continued to grow until the 1820s, when it dropped for the first time.¹ The people of the Hill community not only stuck it out, but also increased their numbers by birth and marriage. They seemed to have found a stable place to raise their children and safely negotiate the racism of the wider society. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, while the Clarks and Peterses were clearing, settling, and increasing their families on the 36 o Discovering Black Vermont Hill, societal racism and inferiority theories steadily increased. By the end of the 1820s, “biological theories positing the natural inferiority of persons of African descent would come to be embraced as time-honored truths by most white Americans.”² However, African Americans did not quietly acquiesce to this new image foisted upon them; they fought it at every turn with well-established lines of argument emphasizing that all humans came from the same roots and were equal under God. By the late 1820s, however, color phobia had become so ubiquitous that even many antislavery whites believed the inferiority theories. After fighting the idea of blacks and whites being of different blood and different natures for so long, some blacks began to acquiesce to the idea of differences between the races—but they questioned whether it was the whites that might be the inferior race. David Walker raised the issue in his 1829 “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” when he wrote, “The whites have always been an unjust, unmerciful, avaricious and bloodthirsty set of beings, always seeking power and authority.”³ In their fight against mounting racism, people of color in the North never stopped seeking and celebrating freedom and equality wherever they could find it, and they focused on events that proved they should be included in the “common civic identity” of the nation.4 Although their 1808 hopes for abolition after the legal slave trade ended were dashed, they discovered a significant occasion elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere to commemorate: Toussaint L’Overture’s Declaration of Independence for Haiti and the establishment of the world’s first black republic. The Hill people may have celebrated this event in their own way, since we find two January baptisms into the Hinesburgh Baptist Church—not the best time for total immersions in Vermont—but a good time to celebrate freedom and acceptance into civic and religious life. There were some, however, who preferred to abandon what they saw as a losing battle against racism and immigrated to Haiti and Upper Canada (present-day southern Ontario), preferring to stay in the hemisphere of their birth. One such migrant was Prince Saunders, originally an indentured servant born in Thetford, Vermont, about 1775. After gaining an education and teaching in Boston, he moved to Haiti at the end of the Haitian Revolution to help improve the state of education, health, and government in the republic. He became Haiti’s first attorney general and was the author of the first Haitian criminal code. In 1816, he published the papers of the new republic, explaining that he felt the Peaks and Valleys on the Hill Farms o 37 need to do this because of increasing inferiority theories. For a few individuals , he wrote, their habitual labor is the perversion, (and as far as they are able,) the absolute destruction of every object which has a tendency to show that the Blacks possess . . . that portion of natural intelligence which the Beneficent...