This four-part lecture series will examine slavery in Northampton, Massachusetts
and place it in the context of the larger narrative of slavery and freedom in the North.
and place it in the context of the larger narrative of slavery and freedom in the North.
In Partnership with the Northampton Reparations Study Commission
Slavery and Freedom in Northampton and in the Colonial North: Lecture 4
Living and Laboring in the Business of Slavery in Rhode Island
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Thursday, April 10, 2025 at 7 pm
On Zoom
On Zoom
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara
University of Wisconsin-Madison |
On June 7, 1731, in Newport, Rhode Island, a 14-year-old girl, named Venus was sold to Northampton's minister Jonathan Edwards. Many individuals enslaved in Northampton were forcibly brought to the American colonies through Rhode Island ports.
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara began researching slavery and emancipation in Rhode Island after Ruth Simmons commissioned a report on Brown University and its connections to the institution of slavery. (The report was commissioned in 2003 and released in 2006). Clark-Pujara was surprised to find out that no one had written a history of how those economic ties to the Business of slavery had shaped the lives of the enslaved and curtailed the freedom of their descendants. |
Her resulting book, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the Business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of Black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. In the colonial period, Rhode Islanders dominated the American trade in African slaves and provided the slave-labor-dependent West Indies with basic necessities. In the post-colonial period, as slavery was legally dismantled, Rhode Islanders became the leading producers of slave clothing. Black people resisted their bondage, fought for their freedom, and strove to build a community in a racially hostile colony and state; their assertions of humanity shaped Rhode Island society, politics, and economy. The erasure of this history has allowed for a dangerous myth—that the North has no history of racism to overcome and that white northerners had no substantive investments in race-based slavery.
Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara is professor of history in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic, her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Olivia Haynes
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Moderated by Olivia Haynes
Olivia Haynes is a Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on the history of slavery in the American North with an emphasis on the visual and material culture of slavery, social reproduction theory, and Black motherhood and reproduction under enslavement and nominal freedom. |
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Venus and Leah, enslaved to Jonathan Edwards
Graphic Silhouette of by Design Division, 2025 Venus was born in West Africa and separated from her family. She was sold in Newport, Rhode Island, by a ship captain and slave trader to Northampton’s minister Jonathan Edwards. He purchased "a Negro Girle named Venus” who was “age Fourteen years or thereabout.” Leah was also enslaved by Jonathan Edwards. Some historians think that Edwards renamed Venus to Leah when she was baptized. It is also possible that Venus died and Leah was a different person who replaced her. |
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From the Introduction to Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016):
"In 2003, Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown [University in Rhode Island] and the first African American to lead an Ivy League university, commissioned a report on the institution’s early connections to slavery. The report, released in 2006, confirmed long-standing rumors: slavery had played an essential role in establishing Rhode Island’s first college. Enslaved people were among the multiracial workforce that constructed the first buildings, which were built with wood donated by a local slave-trading firm. Furthermore, slaveholders and slave traders dominated the Board of Fellows and Trustees.
I began researching slavery and emancipation in Rhode Island after Ruth Simmons commissioned the report on Brown University and its connections to the institution of slavery. After reading the report and secondary literature that highlighted Rhode Island’s overt investments in slavery, I was surprised to find out that no one had written a history of how those economic ties to the business of slavery had shaped the lives of the enslaved and curtailed the freedom of their descendants. It is my hope that by looking at both the experiences of individuals and the vast realm of economics we can understand how the business of slavery shaped the lives of the enslaved and free blacks in the colony and later the state of Rhode Island." - Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara
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Dark Work: The Business of Slavery
in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016) |