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

8 Come Up in the Night with Them

8 Come Up in the Night withThem In Dorchester after King Philip’s War, the Royall family was a boisterous clan spanning several generations. The Immigrant did not live to see it grow. Two months before King Philip’s body was displayed along the coast, William Ryall died at the height of war on ground he hardly knew. Two years later his wife Phoebe succumbed to illness and was buried at his side. Far away in Maine the town they built lay charred and empty. North Yarmouth would remain that way—vacuum domicilium of another stripe—for another forty years as bellowing accordions of Indian rage three times drove settlers from those shores. Not until the 1720s did Casco Bay become a place where whites could live again in relative tranquility. By then, members of the Royall clan were scattered across Massachusetts and further yet, like seed. When the Immigrant fled the war in Maine (“trouble with the Indians,” so many writers called it), the Immigrant’s son Joseph had stopped in Charlestown to make a life. There he gathered all he had to buy a house and wharf and set up shop as a sailmaker not a mile from the docks of Boston. That location and his choice of a trade placed him at the hungry periphery of a world belonging to men like the Ushers and the Lidgetts, merchants with their fortunes cast upon the sea. These men were not newcomers arriving full of dreams or farmers scrabbling at the whim of seasons like his immigrant father, but second- and third-generation Americans already possessed of enviable fortunes and deep roots. “Boston Brahmins,” COME UP IN THE NIGHT WITH THEM 103 generations of their descendants would be called, members of a newly minted aristocracy that seemed forever on the rise as though suspended by transparent strings. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the great Supreme Court justice and a member of the caste himself) coined the term long after the phenomenon was well in place. In an article published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1860 he described how wellbred New England families with deep roots had “grown to be a caste, not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation.” This group he described as a “harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy. . . .” He christened them Brahmins, naming them after the highest rung in India’s caste system, and went so far as to describe a typical boy as compared to a “country boy” of his day. The Brahmin, Holmes wrote, possessed features “of a certain delicacy; his eye is bright and quick; his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist’s fingers dance over their music; and his whole air, though it may be timid and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. . . . [While a country boy] will be slow at learning; the [Brahmin] will take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his fieldwork.” Certainly, those contrasts were just as stark two hundred years before Holmes’s article appeared. In his sailmaker’s shop at the foot of Ten Hills Farm, Joseph quickly learned the deep seductions of that other life. He watched these men of privilege come and go. He knew their drivers and their housemaids, their slaves in rags and livery. He knew the mansions and the stables and the gardens strung like lights up Boston’s “Merchants Row,” and came to understand the risks and benefits, the losses and the money that they made. Sailors talk. They talked about what fleets came home with riches in their holds and who was counting profit. They gossiped of great vessels lost at sea and mourned the deaths of hands on board. They talked about the pirates and the islands of the Caribbean.They knew which colonies thrived, and why, and which were deviled by ill winds and evil luck and perhaps the Devil, too. Joseph never joined that world. A simple tradesman, he was not invited to their formal gatherings and had no footman at his beck 104 CHAPTER 8 and call. Instead, he stood forever to one side, observing every detail . Perhaps he shared his stories with his nephew Isaac. Perhaps he gave the boy advice and lay a seed. In any case, certainly the family’s...