Historic Northampton's slavery research project focused on the lives of Black and Native people in Northampton, particularly on the history of enslaved people. The project ran from 2019 to 2022.
The project team decided that the best course of action would be to undertake a systematic and comprehensive search of the available historical records. It was the purpose of this project not only to find out new information about slavery (of Native people, Africans, and Americans of African descent) in Northampton, but be a place where existing knowledge and secondary sources could be gathered.
Since Fall of 2019, a team of Historic Northampton staff, interns from area colleges, and local scholars has been combing through records. Given the long period of time the project would need to cover (1654-1783, from Northampton’s founding as an English town to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts), reading all the primary sources was a monumental job. We focused on a few major areas: church records, vital records, court records, probate records, newspapers, and family papers. To these we added a survey of contemporary and modern secondary sources.
Most of the research was carried out, from fall 2019 to spring 2021, by a remarkable team of interns from Smith College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. They were (listed in alphabetical order): India Anderson (UMass Amherst), Zubaida Bello (Hampshire College), Jess Buslewicz (UMass Amherst), Emma Lewis (UMass Amherst), Siyi Li (Amherst College), Mariah Morse (UMass Amherst), Shannen Murphy (UMass Amherst), Maria Mutka (Smith College), Emily Parker (UMass Amherst), and Abby Wing (UMass Amherst).
Additional research was done by Emma Winter Zeig, with contributions from Forbes Library Special Collections Staff Dylan Gaffney and Elise Bernier Feeley, as well as the team from the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project. As we worked more with Native American consultant Margaret Bruchac on this project, we realized how well the research we were doing fit together with other work on the overall history of Nonotuck and other Native people in the Indigenous territory that is now occupied by the towns of Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield, and surrounds. We invite you to explore more of that material on the Native Histories in Nonotuck page.
The formation of this website section was directed by a committee of Historic Northampton staff and board members: Shara Denson, Sara Lennox, Gina Nortonsmith, Elizabeth Sharpe, Christopher Sparks, and Emma Winter Zeig.
Native American Consultant: Margaret Bruchac. Additional writing by Margaret Bruchac and Katia Kiefaber (Mount Holyoke). Programming by Emmet Spencer. Copyediting by Emily Weir. Additional work on Timeline and Formatting by Sophie Combs, Koa Klose, and Nevin LaBrusciano.
We hope that this research inspires thought about the lives and experiences of Black and Native people in this area during the 1600s and 1700s, and that it also encourages more work on this important subject.
Emma Winter Zeig
Project Director
The project team decided that the best course of action would be to undertake a systematic and comprehensive search of the available historical records. It was the purpose of this project not only to find out new information about slavery (of Native people, Africans, and Americans of African descent) in Northampton, but be a place where existing knowledge and secondary sources could be gathered.
Since Fall of 2019, a team of Historic Northampton staff, interns from area colleges, and local scholars has been combing through records. Given the long period of time the project would need to cover (1654-1783, from Northampton’s founding as an English town to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts), reading all the primary sources was a monumental job. We focused on a few major areas: church records, vital records, court records, probate records, newspapers, and family papers. To these we added a survey of contemporary and modern secondary sources.
Most of the research was carried out, from fall 2019 to spring 2021, by a remarkable team of interns from Smith College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. They were (listed in alphabetical order): India Anderson (UMass Amherst), Zubaida Bello (Hampshire College), Jess Buslewicz (UMass Amherst), Emma Lewis (UMass Amherst), Siyi Li (Amherst College), Mariah Morse (UMass Amherst), Shannen Murphy (UMass Amherst), Maria Mutka (Smith College), Emily Parker (UMass Amherst), and Abby Wing (UMass Amherst).
Additional research was done by Emma Winter Zeig, with contributions from Forbes Library Special Collections Staff Dylan Gaffney and Elise Bernier Feeley, as well as the team from the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project. As we worked more with Native American consultant Margaret Bruchac on this project, we realized how well the research we were doing fit together with other work on the overall history of Nonotuck and other Native people in the Indigenous territory that is now occupied by the towns of Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield, and surrounds. We invite you to explore more of that material on the Native Histories in Nonotuck page.
The formation of this website section was directed by a committee of Historic Northampton staff and board members: Shara Denson, Sara Lennox, Gina Nortonsmith, Elizabeth Sharpe, Christopher Sparks, and Emma Winter Zeig.
Native American Consultant: Margaret Bruchac. Additional writing by Margaret Bruchac and Katia Kiefaber (Mount Holyoke). Programming by Emmet Spencer. Copyediting by Emily Weir. Additional work on Timeline and Formatting by Sophie Combs, Koa Klose, and Nevin LaBrusciano.
We hope that this research inspires thought about the lives and experiences of Black and Native people in this area during the 1600s and 1700s, and that it also encourages more work on this important subject.
Emma Winter Zeig
Project Director
Methodology
As Historic Northampton developed the project, we felt that, since this task was so large, we needed to place some limits on ourselves. All the people you will read about here are people who either, lived, worked, were enslaved, or had some significant interaction in Northampton. However, once we picked up the thread of someone’s life, we did not drop it. We tried to find as many details as possible and followed them to their deaths. If they had children, we attempted to learn what we could about them as well.
Broadly speaking, our process was as follows. We started with research into historical newspaper databases. We investigated newspapers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New York. We then progressed to systematically reading through First Churches Records, probate records, Northampton vital records, and the Hampshire Council of Governments Records. These were the longest, most significant sources, so interns either divided them up or made one of them the focus of their internship. The last phase of the research was to look into sources at Forbes Library. Some of the family papers Emma Winter Zeig examined in person, some she scanned and sent to interns working remotely, and some (like the Judd Manuscript), were read through by Dylan Gaffney and participants in the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project. Each Historic Northampton intern who combed through these larger sets of records also had another smaller research project that allowed them to learn a specific research skill. Interns read through property records and wills to map where enslaved persons had lived, contacted local historical societies, did targeted searches for individual people, and conducted Ancestry.com searches, among other projects.
One critical first step in the process was developing a list of what to look for in each source, so that it could be circulated to every researcher. This was much more difficult than simply looking for the word “slave” or “enslaved,” as references to enslaved persons in these records are often opaque. We found very few people referred to as a “slave” in the records. The term “servant” was the most common indicator of an enslaved person that we found in Northampton records, but that term itself shows the difficulties of relying on term searches, since it could easily be applied to a free person who did domestic work. Indeed, one of the earliest decisions we made with regard to these types of results was to record every person who was referred to as a servant and then later determine if they were enslaved.
Another important class of terms was references to ownership, such as a person being written about as “belonging” to another person. We also found results from focusing on terms that referred to race. Lastly, we looked at terms describing physical appearance. Here, we encountered an interesting but often frustrating category: complexion. It can be easy to presume that someone who was described as having a “dark complexion,” “black complexion,” or “brown complexion” was a person of African descent. However, the meaning of complexion has actually changed a great deal in the past few centuries. Today, it more often refers to skin color, but in the period we were studying it was more about overall appearance – having dark hair or dark eyes could mean that a person would be seen as having a “dark complexion” regardless of skin color. This has in the past led to some white residents of Northampton being referred to as being of African descent. In the end, we looked at complexion in a similar way to “servant” – it was a useful category to take note of, but required further research.
During this process, we also looked for evidence of the enslaving of Native people and documented other archival sources of Native life that did not involve slavery. The terms here were somewhat similar, but also included terms for Native people such as “Indian” as well as racist terms that were common ways of referencing Native people.
How we used these terms differed based on the source. For any that were searchable on the web, our list of terms served as a guide for how to address each new database. For any not available or not searchable on the web, the search terms were something to be kept in mind while reading.
A late-breaking development in this research project was the creation of the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project in summer 2021. This project funded interns at Forbes Library and other institutions around the Valley and their work creating a larger database of sources that cover Black residents of the Valley. This project enabled us to benefit from the scholarship available in other towns and expand some of our existing entries. The biggest consequence of this project for us was that it gave us much more from the Judd Manuscript (a multi-volume hand-written record compiled by Sylvester Judd, a 19th century local historian, which includes town records, document transcriptions, genealogies, notes, and interviews about the history of the Connecticut River Valley) than we would have had without it, largely due to the efforts of archivist Dylan Gaffney and intern Emma Lewis.
Broadly speaking, our process was as follows. We started with research into historical newspaper databases. We investigated newspapers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New York. We then progressed to systematically reading through First Churches Records, probate records, Northampton vital records, and the Hampshire Council of Governments Records. These were the longest, most significant sources, so interns either divided them up or made one of them the focus of their internship. The last phase of the research was to look into sources at Forbes Library. Some of the family papers Emma Winter Zeig examined in person, some she scanned and sent to interns working remotely, and some (like the Judd Manuscript), were read through by Dylan Gaffney and participants in the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project. Each Historic Northampton intern who combed through these larger sets of records also had another smaller research project that allowed them to learn a specific research skill. Interns read through property records and wills to map where enslaved persons had lived, contacted local historical societies, did targeted searches for individual people, and conducted Ancestry.com searches, among other projects.
One critical first step in the process was developing a list of what to look for in each source, so that it could be circulated to every researcher. This was much more difficult than simply looking for the word “slave” or “enslaved,” as references to enslaved persons in these records are often opaque. We found very few people referred to as a “slave” in the records. The term “servant” was the most common indicator of an enslaved person that we found in Northampton records, but that term itself shows the difficulties of relying on term searches, since it could easily be applied to a free person who did domestic work. Indeed, one of the earliest decisions we made with regard to these types of results was to record every person who was referred to as a servant and then later determine if they were enslaved.
Another important class of terms was references to ownership, such as a person being written about as “belonging” to another person. We also found results from focusing on terms that referred to race. Lastly, we looked at terms describing physical appearance. Here, we encountered an interesting but often frustrating category: complexion. It can be easy to presume that someone who was described as having a “dark complexion,” “black complexion,” or “brown complexion” was a person of African descent. However, the meaning of complexion has actually changed a great deal in the past few centuries. Today, it more often refers to skin color, but in the period we were studying it was more about overall appearance – having dark hair or dark eyes could mean that a person would be seen as having a “dark complexion” regardless of skin color. This has in the past led to some white residents of Northampton being referred to as being of African descent. In the end, we looked at complexion in a similar way to “servant” – it was a useful category to take note of, but required further research.
During this process, we also looked for evidence of the enslaving of Native people and documented other archival sources of Native life that did not involve slavery. The terms here were somewhat similar, but also included terms for Native people such as “Indian” as well as racist terms that were common ways of referencing Native people.
How we used these terms differed based on the source. For any that were searchable on the web, our list of terms served as a guide for how to address each new database. For any not available or not searchable on the web, the search terms were something to be kept in mind while reading.
A late-breaking development in this research project was the creation of the Documenting Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley Project in summer 2021. This project funded interns at Forbes Library and other institutions around the Valley and their work creating a larger database of sources that cover Black residents of the Valley. This project enabled us to benefit from the scholarship available in other towns and expand some of our existing entries. The biggest consequence of this project for us was that it gave us much more from the Judd Manuscript (a multi-volume hand-written record compiled by Sylvester Judd, a 19th century local historian, which includes town records, document transcriptions, genealogies, notes, and interviews about the history of the Connecticut River Valley) than we would have had without it, largely due to the efforts of archivist Dylan Gaffney and intern Emma Lewis.
Research Challenges
Through this project we have been able to assemble information that has not previously been presented in this local history context. Yet, we encountered significant roadblocks as we did our research. Some of the most extensive sources we needed to review were either not available online or were not searchable within the document. This meant that researchers had to read volumes cover to cover in order to find anything. Many family papers have been lost to time, and other families have moved out of Northampton. Newspaper research played a much less significant role in this project than it has in other projects on this subject because Northampton did not have a local paper for almost the entire period that we were examining. There were references to events and people in Northampton in Springfield papers, but not to many of the town occurrences that would normally be covered in a local paper.
References to enslaved persons in Northampton in the official record (which is most of what remains) were few and far between. For example, interns pored over the Hampshire Council of Governments records for the duration of this project, and they have read through eight volumes (each volume can be up to 700 pages long). In that time they found only one verifiable entry that refers to an enslaved person in Northampton. Northampton did not participate in the “slave census” during any of the years for which we currently have documentation, even though we know that there were enslaved persons in Northampton at those times. After going through over 100 years of probate records, we have found that there are references to only a few enslaved persons. This page will give more detail on the types of historic erasure of Black and Native people that inform these results.
Another hurdle that was referenced above is the vague terminology often used to write about Black and Native people. This terminology means that there is a possibility that we may not have counted every person who could be included in this study because we were unable to prove that they were a person of color. The research mentioned above on “complexion” was originally undertaken because of an article covering a jail break in Northampton, which described one man as a “negro” and the rest of the men (including one who had escaped “servitude”) in terms of complexion. Is it possible that more than just the one man was a person of color? Yes. However, since there was very little written about any of them, it is almost impossible to know with the information that we have right now. We created a category for people of undetermined race in our shared notes, and though we were able to move people out of it once we learned more about them, there are still several entries for which we may never find any more information.
People were often not described in terms of their race. Some of this was simply racism: if white was assumed to be the default, some chroniclers wrote down race when the person they were describing was not white. However, we cannot assume that was always the case. In fact, we know it. In the case of Philemon Lee, some records describe his race, others do not. However, it is worth noting that Lee was the exception, not the rule. It was rare for us to find records of anyone whom we knew to be Black, Native, or enslaved who was then referred to in another source without one of those descriptors. So, while there probably were people who were simply never described by their race or enslaved status, we have not yet seen evidence that there were very many of them.
One other characteristic of our results was the lack of corroboration or consistency among sources. Very often if we found a person referenced in one source, we would not find any other reference to that person. There were some exceptions. Intern Maria Mutka was able to track down references to Jack, a self-emancipated man who was executed in Boston but imprisoned in Northampton, in several different pamphlets and newspapers. Emma was able to find references to the Hull family in multiple primary sources. However, it was much more common to find multiple references within the same source (such as a baptism and a church membership in the same church record, or census results over multiple years), than to find traces of people in different types of sources. This made the research much more complicated because it meant that for most people, if you found one mention of them, that was all the information you would have to go on to attempt to track down any family papers or more personal sources. Oftentimes, that information was not nearly enough. Sometimes, this scarcity simply meant that there was, in all probability, no more information still in existence.
References to enslaved persons in Northampton in the official record (which is most of what remains) were few and far between. For example, interns pored over the Hampshire Council of Governments records for the duration of this project, and they have read through eight volumes (each volume can be up to 700 pages long). In that time they found only one verifiable entry that refers to an enslaved person in Northampton. Northampton did not participate in the “slave census” during any of the years for which we currently have documentation, even though we know that there were enslaved persons in Northampton at those times. After going through over 100 years of probate records, we have found that there are references to only a few enslaved persons. This page will give more detail on the types of historic erasure of Black and Native people that inform these results.
Another hurdle that was referenced above is the vague terminology often used to write about Black and Native people. This terminology means that there is a possibility that we may not have counted every person who could be included in this study because we were unable to prove that they were a person of color. The research mentioned above on “complexion” was originally undertaken because of an article covering a jail break in Northampton, which described one man as a “negro” and the rest of the men (including one who had escaped “servitude”) in terms of complexion. Is it possible that more than just the one man was a person of color? Yes. However, since there was very little written about any of them, it is almost impossible to know with the information that we have right now. We created a category for people of undetermined race in our shared notes, and though we were able to move people out of it once we learned more about them, there are still several entries for which we may never find any more information.
People were often not described in terms of their race. Some of this was simply racism: if white was assumed to be the default, some chroniclers wrote down race when the person they were describing was not white. However, we cannot assume that was always the case. In fact, we know it. In the case of Philemon Lee, some records describe his race, others do not. However, it is worth noting that Lee was the exception, not the rule. It was rare for us to find records of anyone whom we knew to be Black, Native, or enslaved who was then referred to in another source without one of those descriptors. So, while there probably were people who were simply never described by their race or enslaved status, we have not yet seen evidence that there were very many of them.
One other characteristic of our results was the lack of corroboration or consistency among sources. Very often if we found a person referenced in one source, we would not find any other reference to that person. There were some exceptions. Intern Maria Mutka was able to track down references to Jack, a self-emancipated man who was executed in Boston but imprisoned in Northampton, in several different pamphlets and newspapers. Emma was able to find references to the Hull family in multiple primary sources. However, it was much more common to find multiple references within the same source (such as a baptism and a church membership in the same church record, or census results over multiple years), than to find traces of people in different types of sources. This made the research much more complicated because it meant that for most people, if you found one mention of them, that was all the information you would have to go on to attempt to track down any family papers or more personal sources. Oftentimes, that information was not nearly enough. Sometimes, this scarcity simply meant that there was, in all probability, no more information still in existence.
Interpretation
This project was able to provide a glimpse at the larger picture of slavery in Northampton during the time when it was legal in Massachusetts. Following is a summary of what we can interpret about the historical period.
There was a network of Black and Native people in the area, both enslaved and free. The most Northampton-centric example of this is the Binney and Hull families. When Bathsheba Hull was being pushed out of her home, she sent her son Agrippa Hull to stay in Stockbridge with the Binneys whom she knew from Northampton. The link between the two families continued throughout the next three generations, as Joab and Rose Binney’s grandson lived out the last years of his life in a house owned by Agrippa Hull’s wife. There are sources that document this in the Valley outside of Northampton, such as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend and Robert Romer’s Slavery in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts.
As explained above, the number of enslaved persons who were not referred to as enslaved presented research challenges. This is not simply a research issue, but also a cultural one. Indeed, enslaved persons were commonly referred to as “servants” particularly in New England. As we have experienced in this research, this has the effect of obscuring the enslaved population in public-facing documents by grouping them with indentured servants and free people employed in service jobs. Since some people did refer to “slaves,” we know that it was a term in circulation, and this points to the frequent use of “servant” as a deliberate choice to rhetorically push away the reality of what enslavers were doing to their fellow humans. The choice to refer to Black and Native people without their full names serves further to deny their humanity and to erase them from the record.
The horrors of slavery and the slave trade were normalized, but that did not mean that people were comfortable advertising what they were doing, or even simply naming it. We do not have many documents by Northampton enslavers talking about the practice, but we do have statements by Jonathan Edwards, who, despite enslaving at least four people himself, indicated that he knew slavery was cruel and, on some level, wrong. As he was a spiritual leader in Northampton, it would not be surprising if some members of his flock had come to the same conclusion, but also took the same course as he did: continuing the practice.
Whether because of a deliberate desire to erase the identity of the people they were enslaving or because of an unconscious impulse to do the same, these erasures have an effect that lasts until the present day.
Northampton also fit the New England pattern of having a small population of enslaved persons in each household. In contrast to Southern plantations where there could be dozens or even hundreds of people enslaved on one site, the model in New England often leaned toward five or fewer at each site. As far as we can tell, Northampton existed toward the lower end of the spectrum. Other Massachusetts towns recorded larger enslaved populations per site on farms, but in Northampton it was more common to see enslavers making use of the labor of the people they enslaved in their homes, on their farms, and in their places of business. The largest concurrent populations of enslaved persons at one Northampton site that we saw was at the home of Jonathan Edwards, who enslaved at least four people, though it is not clear to what extent they would have been living in the same place at the same time (current best guess is that at least two, probably three, would have lived there at the same time).
One real difficulty with the small amount of evidence is that there is more than one plausible explanation. One option is that we have seen all the references to the majority of enslaved persons in Northampton and that there simply were few at any one time. This would refute what James Trumbull writes in History of Northampton Massachusetts from Its Settlement in 1654 where he says that there were between 10 and 20 enslaved persons at any one time. We don’t have an exact contemporary count, since Northampton did not participate in a “slave census” (a Massachusetts accounting of the number of enslaved persons which did not give names, but did give a number of people for each participating town and city) for any of the years for which the census is available to us. A decade-by-decade chart may give a clearer picture of how many enslaved people were living in Northampton at any one time.
The other option is that we are just scratching the surface of the enslaved community but are limited by the surviving documents. No matter where you look, this country has devalued and discarded the histories of enslaved people, and during their own time the people in charge of creating these records may not have deemed them significant enough to write about. In all probability the answer is that both of these options are true: that there was a relatively small enslaved population in Northampton, but that there are many people whose stories we may never know because racism kept them from being able to tell their own stories or have those stories saved.
One of the biggest trends observed in this study was how exclusively the enslaver population was confined to the upper class, and how widespread the practice of enslaving people was in that class. We began this project with a list of surnames of families believed to be enslavers, and that list included many of the most famous names of Northampton (Stoddard, Lyman, Pomeroy, Strong). By the end of the project, we had confirmed every one of those names and added to them the individuals within those families who had enslaved someone, as well as, wherever possible, the name of the person whom they enslaved.
This core group of enslavers were families who controlled town wealth and politics. They were selectmen and General Court representatives, from the seventeenth to at least the mid-eighteenth century. The family names were: Clapp, Clark, Dwight, Hawley, Hunt, Lyman, Mather, Parsons, Pomeroy, Stoddard, Strong, and Wright. As mentioned above, there were few enslaved persons in each home. This could imply that enslaving a person was a kind of status symbol, something only the richest could afford, and that they might place the person they enslaved in their home as opposed to in their fields in order to show off that wealth.
One area that may give a window into slavery research is manumissions, or the occasions where enslavers voluntarily freed enslaved persons (this often happened on the occasion of the enslaver's death). However, during this research we noted that, at least as far as the official records show, this was a very uncommon occurrence in Northampton. We only have three accounts of manumissions happening at all. Electa Jones wrote that Joab Binney had been manumitted by Jonathan Hunt Jr., but there is no documentation that supports it. Similarly, Rose Binney may have been freed by Jonathan Edwards, but we have not yet found any paperwork that confirms it. In both cases, the Binney family mobility suggests that they had some degree of freedom, since Joab Binney left Northampton with his wife, and Rose Binney stayed in Stockbridge even after Edwards left. However, without further documentation it is unknown whether this was a formal manumission or rather an informal agreement. It is also possible that Sylvia Church was manumitted, since we do not know the date when she was freed. The only formal manumission document that we have is the will of Joseph Bartlett that freed Dinah and Peter. It is possible that manumission documents were simply kept in family papers that were not collected by any institution, but it also seems very likely that there simply were not very many formal manumissions.
There was a network of Black and Native people in the area, both enslaved and free. The most Northampton-centric example of this is the Binney and Hull families. When Bathsheba Hull was being pushed out of her home, she sent her son Agrippa Hull to stay in Stockbridge with the Binneys whom she knew from Northampton. The link between the two families continued throughout the next three generations, as Joab and Rose Binney’s grandson lived out the last years of his life in a house owned by Agrippa Hull’s wife. There are sources that document this in the Valley outside of Northampton, such as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend and Robert Romer’s Slavery in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts.
As explained above, the number of enslaved persons who were not referred to as enslaved presented research challenges. This is not simply a research issue, but also a cultural one. Indeed, enslaved persons were commonly referred to as “servants” particularly in New England. As we have experienced in this research, this has the effect of obscuring the enslaved population in public-facing documents by grouping them with indentured servants and free people employed in service jobs. Since some people did refer to “slaves,” we know that it was a term in circulation, and this points to the frequent use of “servant” as a deliberate choice to rhetorically push away the reality of what enslavers were doing to their fellow humans. The choice to refer to Black and Native people without their full names serves further to deny their humanity and to erase them from the record.
The horrors of slavery and the slave trade were normalized, but that did not mean that people were comfortable advertising what they were doing, or even simply naming it. We do not have many documents by Northampton enslavers talking about the practice, but we do have statements by Jonathan Edwards, who, despite enslaving at least four people himself, indicated that he knew slavery was cruel and, on some level, wrong. As he was a spiritual leader in Northampton, it would not be surprising if some members of his flock had come to the same conclusion, but also took the same course as he did: continuing the practice.
Whether because of a deliberate desire to erase the identity of the people they were enslaving or because of an unconscious impulse to do the same, these erasures have an effect that lasts until the present day.
Northampton also fit the New England pattern of having a small population of enslaved persons in each household. In contrast to Southern plantations where there could be dozens or even hundreds of people enslaved on one site, the model in New England often leaned toward five or fewer at each site. As far as we can tell, Northampton existed toward the lower end of the spectrum. Other Massachusetts towns recorded larger enslaved populations per site on farms, but in Northampton it was more common to see enslavers making use of the labor of the people they enslaved in their homes, on their farms, and in their places of business. The largest concurrent populations of enslaved persons at one Northampton site that we saw was at the home of Jonathan Edwards, who enslaved at least four people, though it is not clear to what extent they would have been living in the same place at the same time (current best guess is that at least two, probably three, would have lived there at the same time).
One real difficulty with the small amount of evidence is that there is more than one plausible explanation. One option is that we have seen all the references to the majority of enslaved persons in Northampton and that there simply were few at any one time. This would refute what James Trumbull writes in History of Northampton Massachusetts from Its Settlement in 1654 where he says that there were between 10 and 20 enslaved persons at any one time. We don’t have an exact contemporary count, since Northampton did not participate in a “slave census” (a Massachusetts accounting of the number of enslaved persons which did not give names, but did give a number of people for each participating town and city) for any of the years for which the census is available to us. A decade-by-decade chart may give a clearer picture of how many enslaved people were living in Northampton at any one time.
The other option is that we are just scratching the surface of the enslaved community but are limited by the surviving documents. No matter where you look, this country has devalued and discarded the histories of enslaved people, and during their own time the people in charge of creating these records may not have deemed them significant enough to write about. In all probability the answer is that both of these options are true: that there was a relatively small enslaved population in Northampton, but that there are many people whose stories we may never know because racism kept them from being able to tell their own stories or have those stories saved.
One of the biggest trends observed in this study was how exclusively the enslaver population was confined to the upper class, and how widespread the practice of enslaving people was in that class. We began this project with a list of surnames of families believed to be enslavers, and that list included many of the most famous names of Northampton (Stoddard, Lyman, Pomeroy, Strong). By the end of the project, we had confirmed every one of those names and added to them the individuals within those families who had enslaved someone, as well as, wherever possible, the name of the person whom they enslaved.
This core group of enslavers were families who controlled town wealth and politics. They were selectmen and General Court representatives, from the seventeenth to at least the mid-eighteenth century. The family names were: Clapp, Clark, Dwight, Hawley, Hunt, Lyman, Mather, Parsons, Pomeroy, Stoddard, Strong, and Wright. As mentioned above, there were few enslaved persons in each home. This could imply that enslaving a person was a kind of status symbol, something only the richest could afford, and that they might place the person they enslaved in their home as opposed to in their fields in order to show off that wealth.
One area that may give a window into slavery research is manumissions, or the occasions where enslavers voluntarily freed enslaved persons (this often happened on the occasion of the enslaver's death). However, during this research we noted that, at least as far as the official records show, this was a very uncommon occurrence in Northampton. We only have three accounts of manumissions happening at all. Electa Jones wrote that Joab Binney had been manumitted by Jonathan Hunt Jr., but there is no documentation that supports it. Similarly, Rose Binney may have been freed by Jonathan Edwards, but we have not yet found any paperwork that confirms it. In both cases, the Binney family mobility suggests that they had some degree of freedom, since Joab Binney left Northampton with his wife, and Rose Binney stayed in Stockbridge even after Edwards left. However, without further documentation it is unknown whether this was a formal manumission or rather an informal agreement. It is also possible that Sylvia Church was manumitted, since we do not know the date when she was freed. The only formal manumission document that we have is the will of Joseph Bartlett that freed Dinah and Peter. It is possible that manumission documents were simply kept in family papers that were not collected by any institution, but it also seems very likely that there simply were not very many formal manumissions.
Bibliography
Bibliography for the Slavery Research Project
Primary Sources
Northampton, MA. First Church of Christ Records, 1661-1845.
Judd, Sylvester. Unpublished Manuscript. Forbes Library, Northampton, MA.
Hampshire County Registry of Probate. Northampton, MA
Hampshire County Superior Court Records
Northampton, MA, Registry of Deaths, City Hall, Northampton, MA.
U.S. Census, 1840, Population Schedule.
Secondary Sources
Bailey, Richard A., "From Goddess of Love to Unloved Wife: Naming Slaves and Redeeming Masters in Eighteenth-Century New England," in Slavery/Anti-slavery in New England, Annual Proceedings (Dublin Seminary for New England Folklife, 2003). Edited by Peter Benes. Boston, Mass.: Boston University, 2005.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook., Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. NY: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2009.
Hardesty, Jared., Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
Jones, Douglas Lamar., “The Transformation of the Law of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts.” In Law in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1800. Publication of The Colonial Society of Massachusetts 62. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/913
Melish, Joanne Pope., Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Miller, Marla R., Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Minkema, Kenneth P., “Jonathan Edwards’ Defense of Slavery.” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 23-59.
Minkema, Kenneth P., “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly 54 no. 4 (Oct. 1997): 823-834.
Nash, Gary, Graham Russell and Gao Hodges., Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. NY: Basic Books, 2008.
Romer, Robert H., Slavery in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. Florence, MA: Levellers Press, 2009.
Warren, Wendy., New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. NY: Liveright Publishing Co., 2017.
Online Sources for Slavery in New England
www.atlanticblackbox.com. Peruse the logbooks section, where individuals and institutions throughout New England are chronicling their journeys of historical recovery.
https://hiddenbrookline.weebly.com/slave-trading.html
Hiddenbrookline.weebly.com
Researching the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley
https://guides.library.umass.edu/c.php?g=1150390&p=8415604
Primary Sources
Northampton, MA. First Church of Christ Records, 1661-1845.
Judd, Sylvester. Unpublished Manuscript. Forbes Library, Northampton, MA.
Hampshire County Registry of Probate. Northampton, MA
Hampshire County Superior Court Records
Northampton, MA, Registry of Deaths, City Hall, Northampton, MA.
U.S. Census, 1840, Population Schedule.
Secondary Sources
Bailey, Richard A., "From Goddess of Love to Unloved Wife: Naming Slaves and Redeeming Masters in Eighteenth-Century New England," in Slavery/Anti-slavery in New England, Annual Proceedings (Dublin Seminary for New England Folklife, 2003). Edited by Peter Benes. Boston, Mass.: Boston University, 2005.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook., Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend. NY: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2009.
Hardesty, Jared., Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
Jones, Douglas Lamar., “The Transformation of the Law of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts.” In Law in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1800. Publication of The Colonial Society of Massachusetts 62. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/913
Melish, Joanne Pope., Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Miller, Marla R., Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Minkema, Kenneth P., “Jonathan Edwards’ Defense of Slavery.” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 23-59.
Minkema, Kenneth P., “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly 54 no. 4 (Oct. 1997): 823-834.
Nash, Gary, Graham Russell and Gao Hodges., Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. NY: Basic Books, 2008.
Romer, Robert H., Slavery in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. Florence, MA: Levellers Press, 2009.
Warren, Wendy., New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. NY: Liveright Publishing Co., 2017.
Online Sources for Slavery in New England
www.atlanticblackbox.com. Peruse the logbooks section, where individuals and institutions throughout New England are chronicling their journeys of historical recovery.
https://hiddenbrookline.weebly.com/slave-trading.html
Hiddenbrookline.weebly.com
Researching the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley
https://guides.library.umass.edu/c.php?g=1150390&p=8415604