The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

[alice wellintown]

Thanks for nothing, again, Monroe.  The idea is a bit silly; how could
any serious student of the "peculiar institution"   fail to remember
that enslaved persons lived on both sides of the M&D line.

Well, Roots did much to educate people about the lives of enslaved
persons in the Southern states, but for many, this is the nightmare
they "Remember" about slavery. A quick read of Frederick Douglass will
disabuse them of this mis-remembering.

Also, most Americans think only blacks were enslaved, divided from
family members, whipped, beaten, raped, lynched, sold on the blocks,
but whites were not exemmpt from these abuses. A peculiar institution,
indeed. As long as there are humans, there are some who enslave others
of their kind.

As Ishmael sez, "Who ain't a slave?"

http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>