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

19 City upon a Hill

19 City upon a Hill On a warm winter’s morning in January 2007, a handsome, square-faced Harvard graduate climbed the steps of Boston’s State House to deliver his inaugural address as Massachusetts’ seventyfirst governor. A native of Chicago, Deval L. Patrick was the first person of African descent to win the title since the commonwealth’s founding; and he won by a wide margin. So he was confident that day, and full of plans as he talked about John Winthrop’s centuries -old notion of a “city upon a hill” and what it meant to him, a black man, rising to the role of governor. “My journey here has been an improbable one,” the new governor declared. Raised on Chicago’s South Side near a massive housing project that was home to some of the poorest citizens in the nation, he had moved “from a place where hope withers,” as he put it on that day, “through great schools and challenging opportunities , to this solemn occasion.” A thunder of hands responded.This audience knew his story well. “America herself is an improbable journey,” Governor Patrick continued. There was the material wealth, of course, and the military might, and the blending of so many cultures into one. But there was always more than that, he said, for the land was marked forever by notions of “equality, opportunity and fair play—ideals about universal human dignity.” He laid those cherished goals directly at John Winthrop’s feet. “Massachusetts invented America ,” Governor Patrick told the crowd.“American ideals were first 240 CHAPTER 19 spoken here, first dreamed about here. . . . Our legislature is the longest continuously operating democratic body on the face of the earth. . . . Our struggle, our sacrifice, our optimism shaped the institutions and advanced the ideals of this nation.” Like others before him, Governor Patrick talked about the Mayflower and the Arbella and the building of a nation from raw wilderness . His listeners knew this story, too. A binding myth, it made them one. In the crowd a few heads bobbed. Someone said “Amen.” Then the governor spoke about another ship, the Amistad. He told his audience that when he took his oath of office he laid his hand across a Bible given by slaves from that ship to John Quincy Adams, who took their case for freedom to the nation’s highest court, and won. “I descended from a people once forbidden their most basic and fundamental freedoms,” the governor continued, “a people desperate for a reason to hope and willing to fight for it. . . . So, as an American, I am an optimist. But not a foolish one.” Ten months later, Governor Patrick donned a red tie and elegant dark suit as he prepared for an equally important passing of the wands of power. This time it would be Drew Gilpin Faust, a disarmingly unpretentious scholar of the Civil War and slavery in the American South, ascending to the presidency of Harvard University . Like the new governor before her, she crafted her installation carefully to reflect a change of season. Like him, too, she quoted the Puritan and called his “Model of Christian Charity” a source of inspiration. Even before she reached the stage, signs of a new era were already in evidence. After a thirty-five-minute bagpipe performance during which the university’s elegantly robed faculty filed through a pouring rain, the tall historian, dressed in the heavy, double-breasted robe reserved exclusively for Harvard’s president, was preceded down the aisle by two lines of students wrapped in kente cloth dancing to the thump of African drums. Religion professor Diana L. Eck (a newsmaker herself when she became the first member of a same-sex couple named master of a Harvard residential house) was charged with narrating the scene CITY UPON A HILL 241 along with a colleague from the chemistry department, James G. Anderson. Together they provided an archival record of the day, noting the long train of scholars, artists, and other luminaries winding toward the stage. Among them were some of the brightest lights in the world of African American arts and letters: Toni Morrison, John Hope Franklin, Natasha Tretheway, Henry Louis Gates Jr. As seats filled, the narrators chatted amiably about the rain and the various university icons displayed for the occasion. Here was the college charter penned in 1650; there, the president’s chair, a spiky relic used to...