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

3 | Life and Death on the Hill, 1830s–1840s

o chapter three Life and Death on the Hill, 1830s–1840s Ubuntu—I am because you are. —South African proverb As the nineteenth century advanced, manufacturing in Hinesburgh flourished and life gradually became easier for those who could afford to buy the expanded services and products of the industrial age. In 1832, Rufus Patrick started an iron foundry to manufacture agricultural tools, making it unnecessary to travel the dozen miles south to Vergennes to purchase such implements. In the 1840s, Clark Whitehorn added another carding factory to comb the raw wool of the abundant merino sheep grazing in Vermont meadows. And a Mr. Hull built a new mill to turn tons of locally grown potatoes into starch. Although the town was thriving , there is no record of any people of color working in the numerous mills and factories of the county; those jobs were reserved for white men, as people of color were generally funneled into service positions.¹ Andrew Harris, a graduate of the University of Vermont who had been denied acceptance to Middlebury College because of his color, described this phenomenon in an 1839 speech in New York City at the Broadway Tabernacle: “If he wishes to be useful as a professional man, a merchant or mechanic, he is prevented by the color of his skin, and driven to those menial employments which tend to bring us more and more into disrepute.”² By the 1830s racism was widespread, and people of color continued to cry out against what they saw as nonsensical attacks on their humanity . Craniologists had entered the discussion and used comparative head measurements of blacks and whites to “prove” their inferiority theories .³ The American pro-slavery argument, therefore, had become fully 60 o Discovering Black Vermont developed—complete with “scientific” data. The wave of Revolutionaryera egalitarianism that had washed over the Northern states had dried up completely and was replaced by a hardened landscape of intractable ideology of black inferiority and white dominance. Black intellectuals, who loathed the exhausting need to defend their very humanity, developed arguments refuting ideas of inferiority based on skin color and head measurements, characterizing them as “born of absurdities.”4 They instead advanced the religious ideal of the unity of the human family, emphasizing Bible passages such as Acts 17:26: “God hath made of one blood all the nations of men.”5 There were others , however, who finally accepted that blacks and whites were different —that blacks were the better race, descended from a black Adam whom God had created “from the rich and black soil” of eastern Africa.6 In the South, enslaved people used other methods, including violence, to struggle against pro-slavery advocates. In 1831, Nat Turner and others defying the slave system in Virginia killed 55 whites. In retaliation, the state executed 55 blacks, and mobs murdered 200 more people of color in revenge for the uprising. Northern blacks also joined forces but in a less violent manner. September 1830 marked the emergence of the Colored National Convention movement, which continually advanced a political agenda of full citizenship rights for black men until its last national convention in 1864. For thirty-four years, the men and women at state and national meetings fought for equal rights for freedmen, debated colonization, resisted racist laws, supported temperance, and encouraged social and educational improvement.7 These meetings were platforms for black intellectuals, and the black press reported on them, spreading their scholarly arguments far and wide, even as far away as the Hill in Vermont.8 Out of this black activism grew a stronger abolitionist movement, and by 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. To many white Americans, however, the abolitionist movement was a foreign plot to destroy America by fomenting rebellions similar to Turner’s. Such fears plagued the South in particular, but they also touched Vermont and other Northern states. Antislavery sentiment was accompanied by a stronger colonization movement that supported sending all freed blacks to colonize Liberia instead of staying in the land of their birth. In Vermont , membership in the colonizationist society was fashionable among the rich and powerful and was extremely active for over fifty years—longer than any other state society.9 Life and Death on the Hill o 61 In a speech before the Vermont Colonizationist Society in 1840, the popular speaker Rev. J. K. Converse, pastor of Burlington’s Congregational Church, urged Vermonters to reject abolitionism...