Northern plantations

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tmh10

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Slave owners, slaves, and life on the plantation


Date: March 2, 2003
Byline: Mike Toner
Digs unearth slave plantations in North
Slaveholding plantations, usually thought of as uniquely Southern institutions, were deeply rooted in the fabric of "free" states of the North as well, new archaeological studies are showing.
The hidden history of Northern plantations and their slaves is emerging — one shovelful of soil at a time — from excavations in and around historic manor houses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. From bits of china, kitchen utensils, tools, buttons and personal items, archaeologists are getting glimpses of a chapter of America's past that written histories have either ignored or forgotten.

Most Northern states abolished slavery before the Civil War. But recent excavations show that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, many of what later came to be called manors and landed estates were full-fledged plantations that held African-American slaves under conditions similar to those in the South.

"Historians are stunned by some of the evidence," said Cheryl LaRoche, a historical archaeologist at the University of Maryland.

"The popular notion is that slavery in the North consisted of two or three household servants, but there is growing evidence that there were slaveholding plantations," she said. "It's hard to believe that such a significant and pervasive part of the past could be so completely erased from our history."

Near Salem, Mass., archaeologists have excavated the ruins of a 13,000-acre plantation that produced grain, horses, barrel staves and dried meat. The owner, Samuel Browne, traded those goods for molasses and rum from the Caribbean. The graveyard shows at least 100 African-Americans were enslaved there from 1718 to 1780.

At Shelter Island on New York's Long Island, archaeologists have spent several years peeling open the grounds of present-day Sylvester Manor to reveal the traces of an 8,000-acre plantation that provisioned two sugar plantations in Barbados and made heavy use of African slave labor. During the late 1600s, at least 20 slaves there served as carpenters, blacksmiths, domestics and field hands.

"America was a slaveholding country — North and South," said LaRoche. "Over the years, that reality has been lost, stolen or just strayed from the history books."

Fleshing out history
The United States banned the importation of new slaves in 1808, but that did not free the millions already in the country, or their descendants. Some states did take action, enacting bans one by one, so that by 1863 the practice was illegal in most of the North.
Because the written record of slavery from the slaves' point of view is so meager, archaeology — with its emphasis on the physical landscape and material aspects of culture — is emerging as an important means of filling in omissions and distortions.

"Artifacts can tell us how people washed their clothes, fed themselves, churned their butter and hitched their horses," said Orloff Miller of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. "That's why archaeology can tell what it was like to live as a slave."

Some of the new evidence of Northern slaveholding plantations comes from excavations on the well-manicured grounds of historic estate homes, like the elegant Van Cortlandt Manor on the banks of New York's Croton River, where slaves worked in the fields and orchards.

Other discoveries are turning up in more humble, more endangered locations. In Morris County, N.J., plans for a park-and-ride transit station for New York commuters recently prompted the state to order archaeological investigations of the site, thought to have been home to the 18th century Beverwyck estate.

Before archaeologists finished, they had found the remains of more than 20 plantation buildings, including a dairy, blacksmith shop, distillery and quarters for at least 20 slaves that were part of a 2,000-acre provisioning operation for the owners' properties in the Caribbean.
Beneath the floor of the slave quarters, archaeologists found a set of iron shackles; small caches of pins, needles and beads; and ritualistic arrangements of cooking utensils that reflect the occupants' African origins.

"For a time, Beverwyck was one of the region's finest plantations, but it could only have reached that high state of cultivation through the forced labor of enslaved workers," said archaeologist Wade Catts of John Milner Associates, a New Jersey archaeology firm engaged in the project.
"For most of history, Beverwyck has been known primarily as one of the places that George Washington slept," he said. "Now the tangible evidence we've uncovered allows us to see it in a whole new light."

Catts said there was little doubt that other plantations in New Jersey also had significant slave populations.
As a science, archaeology is more than a century old. But only in the last few decades have researchers devoted much attention to the African-American component of sites, both in the North and the South.

"For a long time, archaeologists who studied plantations were mostly interested in the people who lived in the big house," said Syracuse University anthropologist Theresa Singleton, author of "The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life." "That didn't tell us much more about slaves than we learned from the histories by the people who enslaved them. Archaeology allows us to see history through a different lens."

Digging up a past that many would rather forget has had interesting results on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
'Amnesia' recovery

Slave quarters have been reconstructed at Bulloch Hall, the Greek Revival mansion just off the town square in Roswell. Until archaeological excavations in the late 1990s helped identify the location of the structure, the only hint of the slaves who helped build the mansion in 1839 had been a simple sign pointing in the general direction of "the quarters."

In rural Mason County, Ky., archaeologists recently identified an old wooden barn as the country's only extant slave pen, one of the prisonlike compounds where slaves were kept overnight during transport from the East to the cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana in the mid-1800s.

The busloads of curiosity seekers who descended on the farm for a closer look prompted an ultimatum from the owner. Archaeologists could either remove the structure or he would tear it down. The building, disassembled one timber at a time, will soon be reconstructed at Cincinnati's Underground Railroad center.

In Philadelphia, when the new $9 million Liberty Bell Center opens this year, the grounds of the most famous icon of American independence — and later the symbol of the abolitionist movement — will now acknowledge an aspect of African-American history that almost got left out.

During excavations or the new center, archaeologists recovered thousands of artifacts from the red brick mansion where Washington stayed in Philadelphia. But it took public protests for the National Park Service to decide that the story of Washington's slaves deserved space in the pavilion, too.

"Most Philadelphians would be shocked to know that Washington had slaves with him in the city," said University of California, Los Angeles, history professor Gary Nash, who helped spur the Park Service decision.

The slave quarters, and any artifacts they hold, lie just outside the entrance to the new center. They were undisturbed by construction, and the Park Service plans to leave them in place, to be studied and interpreted at some future date.

"Written history is always subject to a kind of cultural amnesia. Some of it is deliberately forgotten and some of it is inadvertently lost," said Nash. "That's why artifacts and their context are so important. They can speak to us for the people who left no written record."
http://www.factasy.com/civil_war/2008/03/02/slave_owners_slaves_and_life_plantation
 
A lot of this is popularized "we were never told" stuff. The facts have always been there, were never hidden, never denied (by anyone with any historical understanding). And there is a great deal of literature on slavery in the North during the 18th century, and on it's disappearance in the early 19th.

In the 18th century, anywhere there was a plantation type economy (such as the Hudson Valley in N.Y., or the Connecticut Valley in Ct./Mass), you might expect to find slaves, if in smaller populations than in the south (due largely to differences in the crops grown, and the availability of free labor). But, plantation agriculture did not really catch on in the North. Later, the census figures are clear:

1790, (total number of slaves): N.H. 158, Vt. 0, Mass. 0, Ct. 2,764, R.I. 948, N.Y. 21,324, N.J. 11,423, Pa. 3,737
1800, (total slaves): N.H. 8, Vt. 0, Mass. 0, Ct. 951, R.I. 380, N.Y. 20,614, N.J. 12,422, Pa. 5,011
1810, (total slaves): N.H., Vt., Mass. 0, Ct. 310, R.I. 108, N.Y. 15,017, N.J. 10,851

Very few new slaves were imported into the Northeast after the Revolution. In many states slave-born children were automatically free, and the general reduction in numbers was due simply to slave mortality.

In Massachusetts, it was the 1780 State Constitution, written by John Adams, that made slavery de jure non-existant.

jno
 
I'm trying to figure out why actual "Historians are stunned by some of the evidence." The history of the states was there and known to us laymen. (I suspect that the statement in the article is a bit of hyperbole to get the audience's attention.)

The number of slaves mentioned on these properties are not really large, they certainly pale compared to many cotton plantations or even hemp and tobacco.

At any rate NY and NJ were more sympathetic to the period slave/Democratic parties than other northeastern states. It isn't accidental (hint: "stunned" historians, look into the obviousness of this.)
 
I'm trying to figure out why actual "Historians are stunned by some of the evidence." The history of the states was there and known to us laymen. (I suspect that the statement in the article is a bit of hyperbole to get the audience's attention.)

I wondered about that. I also suspect it could have been a misuse of a genuine reaction: historian is stunned they found so many great artifacts digging in the well-known slave quarters; journalist implies the historian is stunned there were slave quarters.

Another example of northern plantations, much closer to the war, would be those who used the loophole in the law that allowed slaves to be brought into a free state as long as they weren't permanent residents.

Robert Matson had land in Coles (now Douglas) County, Illinois, which he farmed with slave labor for years in the 1840s, by bringing slaves that he legally owned in Kentucky up each spring to do the work and taking them back each fall. He ran into trouble when he left the enslaved wife and children of the free black overseer there for two years straight. In 1847, they ran away to local abolitionists, claiming they should be free due to being permanent residents, and a trial resulted. Matson hired local lawyer Abraham Lincoln to defend his right to keep slaves in Illinois, but lost the case, gave up the enterprise in disgust and moved permanently back to Kentucky.
 
The big money in Northern slavery (especially in New England) had always been in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the often under mentioned considerable industry that supported it.

In 1770, Samuel Hopkins observed, “Rhode
Island,” said he, “has been more deeply interested in the slave trade, and has enslaved more Africans than any other colony in
New England.”
 
A lot of this is popularized "we were never told" stuff. The facts have always been there, were never hidden, never denied (by anyone with any historical understanding). And there is a great deal of literature on slavery in the North during the 18th century, and on it's disappearance in the early 19th.

Yes, the problem is that in the history courses high school students (and many college students) take, there is not much of a discussion about how the northern states transitioned from being a mixed labor society to an exclusively free labor society. This story - of the success of Revolutionary Era/Early Republic Era emancipation, along with those eras' failure to provide equality of civil rights for all - isn't talked about much. (One reason being only 10% of the African descent population lived in the North at the time.)

If anything, I think that today's Americans are very cynical in that, they believe the Founders were a bunch of absolute hypocrites who talked about the equality of all men, but failed to act on it. But in fact, the establishment of gradual emancipation policies in the original northern colonies; the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance territories; and the ban on the international slave trade (which must have caused at least some discomfort for the northern shipping industry) all led to a free labor society in the North. These events were not inevitable; men made a conscious decision to do these things, and quite often, the ideology of liberty and freedom was cited as a reason.

This does not mean that the North was a racial paradise for African Americans, but it did mean they were free. And this was better than slavery.

- Alan
 
One term in the OP that caught my eye was a reference to the manorial system. This was a common arrangement in New York where individuals and their heirs were granted large tracts of land as in England. Manorial families included the Delanceys, Heathcotes, and Livingstons. These lands were often leased to tenants for several generations. Labor in the colonies being generally in short supply owners and tenants tried indentures and slavery.

The divide between the land owners and tenants, workers became the dividing line during the revolution; the haves and the have nots. Owners and large tenants tended to remain loyal to the King and the rest supported the Revolution. In the end the manorial estates were broken up, something that contributed to the demise of slavery.

An interesting thread fully within the scope of this forum would be the factors that led to states restricting and banning slavery.
 
This is great stuff, very enlightening. It might be useful to create a new section in the Forum for "Slavery and Labor" as a topic area. This thread could be moved there as the first one. Seriously, much that I've read here was unknown to me and I suspect would be educational to many who visit the forum. If there was a new section as I suggest, people would be more likely to find it. And I think it would attract yet another group of people to the forum.
 
Actually, considering the centrality of the slavery issue to the whole sectionalism/secession mess, it's rather surprising that there is not a forum section for slavery and labor issues.
 
Interesting. For some reason I've always thought of northern slaves being in the cities, workers or domestics. For example I recall reading that early in its history New York had more slave residents than whites, and I had thought that meant primarily Manhattan - though come to think of it, most of that island was farmland back then!
 
A lot of this is popularized "we were never told" stuff. The facts have always been there, were never hidden, never denied (by anyone with any historical understanding). And there is a great deal of literature on slavery in the North during the 18th century, and on it's disappearance in the early 19th.
Exactly. Pretty much all of us bemoan the fact that most Americans don't have a very detailed or nuanced understanding of our shared history, right? So a story like this comes along (slaves in New York, Lincoln's consideration of colonization schemes, African Americans as servants and cooks in the field with the Confederate army, etc.) and it gets sensationalized as ZOMG this is what the historians won't tell you! I suppose that shtick works with folks who actually don't have a lot of contact with serious history or its practitioners. (The "heritage" folks I'm familiar with actively discourage their fellows from reading the books and blogs of "the opposition," and consider their avoidance of academic historians as a virtue.)

My experience is that the folks who complain the loudest about what professional historians "believe" or "teach" are often those who have the least exposure to what they actually say and write. All too often it's just transparent straw-manning, and it's tiresome.
 
Great post Ted and the discussion later by others.

This is great stuff, very enlightening. It might be useful to create a new section in the Forum for "Slavery and Labor" as a topic area. This thread could be moved there as the first one. Seriously, much that I've read here was unknown to me and I suspect would be educational to many who visit the forum. If there was a new section as I suggest, people would be more likely to find it. And I think it would attract yet another group of people to the forum.

To the mods, I think this is an excellent idea.
 
Some interesting posts here. It pains me to say this but I encounter so many folks who are totally ignorant of history in general and American history in particular. Worse than that some of these folks tell me they have no interest in learning and feel it is a waste of time.
 
The big money in Northern slavery (especially in New England) had always been in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the often under mentioned considerable industry that supported it.

In 1770, Samuel Hopkins observed, “Rhode
Island,” said he, “has been more deeply interested in the slave trade, and has enslaved more Africans than any other colony in
New England.”

Don't see many complaints from the New England textile mills about the cotton they used that was produced by slave labor either.
 
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