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

2 Ten Hills Farm

2 Ten Hills Farm A season of bounty met John Winthrop and his shipmates. Months of green stretched lazily ahead. “Here is as good land as I have seen . . . sweet air, fair rivers, and plenty of springs, and the water better than in England,” the governor told his eldest son in a letter sealed that summer. “Here can be no want of anything.” He lost no time before exploring. Salem was chaotic, busy, and already overrun. The arrival of the Arbella and her companions made matters worse, dumping an additional four hundred men, women, and children in a wave. Six hundred other new arrivals would step off more ships in that season. Yet after a hard winter and a year of desperate want, many in the town were already fed up with the experiment. And so when the Arbella and her crew turned once again toward to the sea, scores of defeated, sad-eyed settlers were on board. Spitting on the dream, they gathered their belongings, turned their backs on Massachusetts, and went forlornly home. John Winthrop wanted nothing to do with that despair. Instead, he sought new land and a genuine new start. Three days after he stepped ashore, the Puritan and a small party of his most trusted mates scouted about the edges of the Massachusetts Bay, then turned inland to explore the course of a wide river, searching for a place to stay. Rounding a marshy bend several miles from the open sea, they came across an enchanting landscape. Painted with hills and meadows, softened by low-lying marsh, green and so fresh in 22 CHAPTER 2 those first days of June that it fairly glimmered in the sun, it epitomized John Winthrop’s notion of a welcoming ground, a place where God and man could join to do good work. “Here,” he must have thought as he stood beside the Mystic River. Here! To him it seemed a special place. No rocks disturbed the Mystic’s course. The water ran both clear and deep. The current made a highway to the sea. Eight feet to the bottom at its lowest mark, the Mystic River rose enough to float the keel of a great ship when tides ran high. Beneath the heave and gurgle of the party’s oars flashed a multitude of fish. Alewives, shad, and bass, bright sparks of perch, pickerel, and smelt lay hidden in the weed. As the tide rose, saltwater rippled over the broad wetlands, working on them like a lung, the men reported, drawing clean saltwater in, then flushing summer toxins out. In his journal, Winthrop scribbled his first note since landing in New England: “We went to mattachusettes to find out a place for our sitting down,” he said, indicating the area around the bay named after a federation of local tribes. “We went up Misticke River about six miles.” At the end of a day’s exploring, the governor and his party stopped for the night at Noddles Island (now the site of Logan Airport ), where a settler named Samuel Maverick had made his home six years before. Maverick, noted historian Edmund S. Morgan in an account of the Puritans published in the 1950s, lived there “like a king, offering hospitality to all who came.” Unlike the settlers at Salem, this man was no Puritan. He was there for profit only and “seemed to have passed his six years in the wilderness as comfortably and civilly as if he had been in London. If one man could do so well in his own cause,” observed Morgan, “how much more could a thousand do in the cause of God?” So Winthrop must have thought. The group rushed back to Salem where news of petty disputes, wolf predations, and the need to organize the leadership took up the governor’s time and pages. Cryptic as the mention of the Mystic River exploration was, centuries later Richard Dunn, James Savage, and Leititia Yaendle, the editors of John Winthrop’s famous history, would find it “among the most tantalizing in the TEN HILLS FARM 23 whole journal,” since it seemed to show the governor’s intention to settle his whole group in a single Godly enclave. Surely Medford seemed well suited to their needs. The river offered easy passage to the sea and other colonies, shelter from the worst of storms, and ample fish and fowl. On ground nearby, four gushing...