The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

[Joseph Tracy]

A couple months ago I listened to Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates on  
cd, which centers around John Winthrop and the Pilgrims in New  
England. It is good and well researched with original court records,  
journals, correspondence and legal docs, but I don't remember  
anything about Winthrop's slave holdings, so  while I knew there was  
slavery in the north, I found this pretty enlightening.




On Jan 28, 2010, at 1:07 PM, Dave Monroe 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