The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

[Dave Monroe]

Ten Hills Farm:
The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North
C. S. Manegold
Cloth | 2010 | $29.95 / £20.95
344 pp. | 6 x 9 | 24 halftones. 5 maps.
e-Book | 2009 | $29.95 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-3181-4


Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave
owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop,
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a
six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the
Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls--all prominent dynasties tied
to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing
narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these
families--and the fate of Ten Hills Farm--were bound to America's most
tragic and tainted legacy.

Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the
early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to
the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop,
famous for envisioning his "city on the hill" and lauded as a paragon
of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in
North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills
Farm--from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who
began as a humble carpenter's son and made his fortune in
Antigua--would depend upon slavery's profits until the 1780s, when
Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city,
its questionable past discreetly buried, until now.

Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten
Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full
circle--from concealment to recovery.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8975.html

Chapter 1

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8975.pdf

1630
(March, 29) John Winthrop, gouvernour of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
leaves England for the American east coast. In his company, William
Pynchon (1590-1662) from Springfield, Essex. Being a shareholder and
patentee, William Pynchon will become eventually treasurer of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. He is the founder of both Roxbury (1630, 2
miles south of Boston at the time) and Springfield (1636).

http://www.vheissu.name/bio/eng_tijdlijn.htm

HOW WILLIAM PYNCHON BLAZED THE BAY PATH.

About the time that William Bradford was a small boy at his English
home in Austerfleld, while John Winthrop was a small boy at his
English home in Groton, there was another small boy in a big manor
house in the pleasant hamlet of Springfield in the county of Essex,
forty miles or so from London. His name was William Pynchon, and he
was destined to play a part with those other boys, when they had all
grown to manhood, in the making of Massachusetts.

William Pynchon’s family were people of consequence in that section of
England. The boy was well educated, for the times; he was sent to
college at Cambridge, and later became an enterprising business man
who liked to interest himself in great enterprises.

Such an enterprise, he believed, was to be found in the colonization
scheme of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and as he was one of those
who stood out sturdily against the selfishness of obstinate King
Charles, he joined himself to the Puritan party, although he himself
was a warden of the established church of England.

He became interested in Governor Winthrop’s enterprise, and came
across the sea with that excellent man in one of the four ships that
led the exodus to Massa
husetts Bay. He was one of the men to whom the king granted the
charter for colonization and governing; and when the Massachusetts Bay
people were settled in their new home in and about Boston, William
Pynchon built his house in Roxbury, and, because of his integrity and
business ability, was made treasurer of the colony.

But the men of the Massachusetts Bay colony were not all such
great-hearted men as John Winthrop....

http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ma/county/plymouth/books/bay/set1/chap6.htm

"In Lot 49 he has a character named Winthrop (among other things, a
Rockefeller, one-time governor of Arkansas) Tremaine as the operator
of a 'Swastika Shoppe,' and in V. he has one Matilda Winthrop running
a whorehouse."

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm