And here are some advertisements from Boston newspapers. This one, from 1759: “A Negro woman about 24 years of age, fit for town or country business, and a Negro girl about 7 years of age, both healthy and have had the smallpox – to be sold, together or apart. (I still find it difficult to read those words.) Remember, this is Boston, Mass., not Charleston, S.C.

And another ad, this one from 1780: “A Negro child, soon expected, of a good breed, may be owned by any person inclining to take it, and money with it.

Another one (from 1756): “To Be Given Away, two Negro Children, one a boy, the other a girl, neither of them a fortnight old.”

            It really was slavery, there’s no getting around that fact. We’re talking about slaves, captured in Africa and brought here against their will, or children of slaves captured in Africa.

            For a couple of years, I was just learning wherever I could, accumulating scraps of information about slavery (here) in the Valley. Then, I had what turned out, I think, to be an inspiration. I decided to focus on a particular time and a particular place and to make what I call a “snapshot” of slavery.

            Vugraf here.

            I chose a date of 1752, 250 years ago. And the place I chose was the main street of old Deerfield. Why Deerfield? Simply because, of all the towns in the area, there are probably more surviving documents and letters from Deerfield than from any of the others. Even for Deerfield, though, there is so much that has been lost.

            The result was the map I have passed out, which of course I hope you’ll keep, think about what it means, make copies for your friends, whatever you wish. As far as I know, no one has ever done this to a New England street before. Take this map with you next time you visit Deerfield. As a tourist, you won’t be offered this kind of guide to the town – (at least not yet – maybe that will change).

            It wasn’t easy to put this map together. There is no single source for this information. I really wish there were something like a 1752 “street list”. I’m sure you all know about the wonderful document that every town now produces, the annual street list, in which you can look up not only the names of your neighbors but also their occupations and ages (unless, of course, they lie). (I never lie about my age, but I sometimes get a bit creative about my occupation.)

            There are no “street lists”. (If there were, they wouldn’t include the slaves anyhow, who were legally treated just like the livestock and the furniture.) My slavery snapshot is based on many sources – probate inventories, church records, a few surviving tax lists, wills, store account books, an ad for a runaway, bills of sale, the extremely rare family letter that mentions a slave, and – some educated guesswork. By that I mean, for instance, that if “Ishmael, servant to Thomas Dickinson” bought a pair of knee buckles at Elijah Williams’s store in 1749, then I’ll put him on my 1752 map – unless I then learn that he was sold in 1751. But a similar entry for, say, 1744, is a bit too early and wouldn’t qualify him for my map. I had to make several judgment calls like that.

\          My map shows 21 black slaves, belonging to 12 different owners, living on that street in 1752. (I also show Abijah Prince, Deerfield’s one free black.) 21 slaves, 7% of the total population of about 300. Especially because of my scientific training, I feel obliged to estimate the uncertainty in that number. In physics talk, I would say 21 + 3. By that I mean that if we could somehow have revealed to us “the truth”, it would not surprise me to learn that the true number was as low as 18 or as high as 24, but much beyond that range, I would begin to wonder how I could have gone wrong.

            My number could be too high because my evidence for a particular person might come from 1748, say, and in fact that person, unbeknownst to me, might have died or been sold in 1750. But my number is even more likely to be too low, because in quite a few cases my knowledge of an individual comes from a single surviving piece of paper. If that piece of paper hadn’t come down to us, we wouldn’t know that he or she had ever existed, and so – obviously – there may well be others of whom no record has survived.

            One lesson from all this, by the way, is something I knew a long time ago – physics is easier than history. (I’m serious.) In physics, if the data are missing or ambiguous, we repeat the experiment. As historians, we don’t have that option.

            Looking at this map, this 1752 snapshot, has completely changed what goes through my head when I drive up that street. When I see those handsome houses that have survived from colonial times, I realize that it is highly probable that some of them were built, in part, by slaves. And now I can’t help imagining myself back in 1752, and I find myself thinking: This is where Titus lives, a few houses up is the home of “Negro wench and two children”, over there is where Phyllis and Humphrey and Cesar live. Real people, even if in many cases we do not even know the names assigned to them by their white owners.

            Let me point out just a few highlights from this map. First, the numbers. As I said before, it shows 21 slaves on this mile-long street – at one time! Not just 1 or 2, but 21. That’s a lot. Surprising even to my historian friends. Enough so that there must have been a real black community embedded in the majority white community. A Deerfield tourist these days may never hear a word about the enslaved black population, or may hear about just one, Lucy Terry (about whom much has been written), and that is in some ways even more misleading than no mention at all. (“Picking on Deerfield”? No, I just happen to know more....) I maintain that the enslaved blacks were an important part of many western Massachusetts towns, (not just Deerfield, of course, but Hatfield and Hadley and Springfield and Northampton,), and that any discussion of colonial times in western Massachusetts that does not include the slaves is misleading, incomplete, and simply wrong – just as wrong as if there were no mention of women and Native Americans.

            Second, what is not on my map? My map gives a pretty good idea of the raw data – numbers, names, owners, a few birth and death dates. But what is not here because neither I nor anyone else has practically any information at all is anything about their life. What did they do, did any of them have a chance to become literate, what was the nature of their interaction with their owners, with their owners’ families, with each other? What did they do for recreation? Where did they sleep? What about sex?

            Well, what about sex? I’d like to tell you about a Greenfield case that I rarely mention in public – because, especially for those for whom the mere existence of slavery here is a brand new idea, this is just too upsetting. Lucy & Caesar ... (Summarize the documents in the handouts.) I don’t mean to present this a frequent occurrence – this is one that made it into the court records, and so we know about it, whereas for the most part we know very little about sex or any other aspect of their daily lives.

            Back to the Deerfield slaves. I’d like to illustrate how little we know about their lives with a few extreme examples. Take Cesar, for instance, the one who belonged to Samuel Childs, down near the lower righthand corner of your map. He served in the French & Indian war in the 1750s. That’s it. That is all I know about Cesar. I can make a rough guess from that about his age. Maybe I will come across an entry in a store account book sometime, but for now, there is nothing else I can tell you about him.

            On the other hand, as slaves about whom we know a good deal more – but still not very much – let’s look at the Reverend Ashley’s 3 slaves: Jenny, Cato, and Titus.

            Ashley probably bought Jenny, along with her baby Cato, in Boston, about 1739, but there is no documentary evidence of that. As far as I know, there are just three contemporary pieces of paper that mention Jenny. One is Ashley’s 1780 will, in which there occurs the memorable sentence: “ I give, devise, and bequeath to my beloved wife Dorothy Ashley my grey mare, two cows & ten sheep, also my easy chair and my Negro servant woman Jenny”. (There’s Jenny, right in with the cows and the sheep and the furniture.) The second one is an account book in which Elihu Ashley, the reverend’s son, recorded an expense for fixing Jenny’s shoes. The third mention of Jenny is in the church death records. In the 1700s, slave deaths were not even recorded, but Jenny lived until 1808 -- by which time slavery was really over in Massachusetts -- and her death was recorded as (quote) “Jenny, a black woman, age 90, killed by a fall”.

            As for Jenny’s baby Cato, we know that Cato was baptized by the Rev. Ashley in 1739 and died in 1825, with his death being listed simply as “Cato, a man of colour, 87, died of old age.” But who was Cato’s father? And who was Jenny’s previous owner? Perhaps Jenny’s previous owner was Cato’s father?

             And then there was a third Ashley slave, Titus. Ashley bought Titus in 1750, from one Samuel Kendall of New Salem (the minister – no surprise there), and sold him in 1760. (Those documents turned up, of all places, in the Norman Rockwell museum (!) out in Stockbridge.)

            Because an account book of Ashley’s has miraculously survived, we know something about how Cato and Titus spent their time. There are many pages in Ashley’s account book (like this one – note Vugraf) in which he recorded how he rented out Cato and Titus to various Deerfield farmers, showing how much they owe him for “Titus & Cato, ½ a day ‘houghing’ “, or “Titus, two days sugaring”, and so on. One of the local farmers to whom Ashley rented Cato and Titus was listed as “Abijah Negro”. That was Abijah Prince, Deerfield’s one free black, who was himself formerly the property of the Northfield minister. (Note new Gerzina biography, next September.)

            But in spite of the fact that we know more about Jenny, Cato, and Titus than we do about many of the enslaved blacks of Deerfield, there is so much we don’t know. Deerfield tradition says that Jenny was born in Africa, but we really can’t be certain of that. What did Jenny do in the Ashley household? We can guess, but we don’t know. How was she treated by the good Reverend? What was her interaction with the Ashley family? With the other Deerfield slaves? Did Jenny have a love life during her long years in Deerfield? Did Cato? Did Cato have friends among the other slaves with whom, perhaps, he went fishing on an occasional day off? Cato was baptized as a baby – Did he go to church? Was he required to go to church? Where did they all sleep and eat? We don’t even know that.

            I keep hoping to find an Ashley family letter in which there is even the briefest mention of any of the slaves. In fact, the almost total absence of letters mentioning any of the Deerfield slaves is itself revealing of their place in this society. The lack of surnames and the frequent use of the same classical names – you’ll find 5 “Cesars” on my 1752 map – adds to the difficulty of finding out even who was who on the Deerfield street. (Note list of names in handouts, and show Vugraf.) And there are a number of cases where we have no names at all. Part of Samuel Dickinson’s inventory, for instance, reads: “ pair of Saddle Bags 12 shillings, Horse Collar 3 and 6, Negro Wench & 2 Children 30 pounds, 2 Bushels & 3 pecks Wheat 11 shillings”, etc.

            We don’t even know where they were buried. Very possibly in a corner of the old Deerfield cemetery, but we don’t know. Jenny died in 1808, still living with the Ashley family. Deerfield tradition says that Jenny collected buttons and shells to take back to Africa with her; she never made it, of course, at least not in this life. I wonder what happened to those buttons and shells. Dorothy Ashley, Jonathan’s widow, outlived Jonathan by 28 years and died in 1808, in the same month as Jenny. (I sometimes say to visitors that, knowing Jonathan as well as I do, those were probably the happiest 28 years of their lives, for both Jenny and Dorothy.) Dorothy has a nice big gravestone, you can easily find it in the cemetery, but if there ever was a marker for Jenny, it was an impermanent one of wood, long since gone. I confess that I have become emotionally involved with Jenny (Betty, my wife, knows about this and she’s OK with it), and – though I know it’s not rational – it still makes me angry that the Ashley family, with whom Jenny had lived for 70 years (most of that time as a slave) wouldn’t put up the money for even a small gravestone. (Well, they did fix her shoes, give them credit for that.)

             At tourist places like Monticello and Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, slavery is a subject that is now (unlike 20 years ago) talked about. It was so obviously important there that they can’t avoid it any more. Even at Phillipsburg Manor in New York state. ( But not at Deerfield – not yet. ) QUIZ: (I am a professor, after all.) – There are a vast number of markers and monuments and tablets and old gravestones in Deerfield. How many of them mention the enslaved African-Americans who lived there in the 1700s? None. To borrow a term from Ralph Ellison, our enslaved African-Americans are the “invisible men (& women)” of colonial times in the valley. ( Ralph Ellison’s famous 1952 book: “The Invisible Man”. )

            And – on a positive note. When I’ve given talks on this subject, I have often mentioned this lack of public recognition. And a while back, some PVMA staff members who came to a talk of mine picked up on this idea, Tim Neumann called me up, and just within the past few months, we have had some meetings at PVMA, a bunch of us (some black, some white), to talk about how to fix this. We will start with a plaque on the wall at the PVMA museum, (Shamek’s sketch - explain drum ), later probably an outdoor sculpture, a walking tour brochure, and this being the 21^st century, some sort of interactive computer display. I am excited about our belatedly recognizing in a public way this important part of the Deerfield community. 

            Dorothy Cormody surprised me a while back by reminding me that you were offering me a $75 honorarium (about $75 more than what I usually get), and she and I have agreed that instead of giving it to me, the check will go to PVMA, to support this venture, in honor of the enslaved African-Americans who lived in the valley in the 1700s. Now, I did not come here to ask for money. BUT – just in case any of you (like Betty and me) would like to participate in this project, I have included – as the last item in the package of handouts – a copy of our “Vision Statement”, together with instructions as to where to send the check if you feel so moved.

            One final comment. WHY am I spending so much time looking into 18^th century history? It is sort of fun looking, through old documents (usually in vain), just as physics is fun, but beyond that – As I’ve grown up, I’ve realized more and more how little I learned in school, how so much of what I learned was wrong, and how large a role the terrible institution of slavery has played in our country. Its after-effects didn’t miraculously go away in 1865 or in 1954. I think it’s important to know as much about it as we can, to realize how widespread it was, that it wasn’t just a regional phenomenon that we can blame on the southerners, but that it was just as much accepted out here in western Massachusetts as it was in South Carolina or Mississippi. 

            Of course there were regional differences. But once one understands that the basic obscenity of one human being owning another human being was not only legal but almost universally acceptable here, and that husbands and wives, parents and children, could be and were separated by sale, one begins to appreciate how embedded slavery is in our history. Knowing the history may give us a slightly better chance of dealing with its legacy.

            Remember - the next time you visit Deerfield, please take my map with you.                      Thank you for listening. 

Note extra copies of map and the Vision Statement.

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If there are questions about ending of slavery in Mass, tell them about “deliberate amnesia” in the 1800s, and in particular, my discovery of what Carpenter & Morehouse did. Here’s a paragraph about it from a talk I gave to the Amherst Historical Society -

            And after the end of slavery here, it seems that we in Massachusetts set about “forgetting” as rapidly as possible that the slavery had ever existed here. We like to remember the “good things”, such as the “Underground Railroad”. I discovered a striking example of New Englanders’ deliberate amnesia on the subject of slavery by comparing a passage in Carpenter and Morehouse’s 1896 History of Amherst with the original document on which it is supposedly based. Carpenter and Morehouse print what purports to be a portion of a 1759 Amherst tax valuation list. It shows columns for “Polls [i.e., adult white males], Horses, Oxen, Cows, Hogs, Sheep, Personal Estate, Houses and Lands, and Real Estate”. Because of what I had seen of other tax lists from the 1700s, it seemed to me that there was something missing from the Carpenter and Morehouse version. Sure enough, when I finally discovered the original document (at Jones Library – thanks, Tevis Kimball & Kate Boyle), it was just what had been reproduced in the 1896 book except that the original contained one additional column, between “Sheep” and “Personal Estate”: “Negro”. The omission of that one column cannot possibly have been an accident! There are many histories of towns from this area that were published in the late 1800s. In most cases, little or no mention is made of the existence of slavery in colonial times. (George Sheldon’s 1895 History of Deerfield is an honorable exception, with an 18-page section on “Negro Slavery”.) But the Amherst history is the only one I have found that contains an apparently deliberate falsification of an historical document.            

Here’s the cover sheet for the stack of handouts for the WMLC talk –

Western Mass. Library Club

Whately, 4/27/05 Handouts .

1. Map - “Slavery on the Main Street of Deerfield - 1752". As revised, August, 2004. This map is a work in progress, but the central conclusion is clear. – At this time (around 1750) the population of what is now the main street of old Deerfield included approximately 7% enslaved African-Americans.

2. List of known slave-owning ministers from the Connecticut Valley of western Massachusetts.

3. Excerpts from Jonathan Ashley’s 1749 sermon to the Deerfield slaves. (The full text is on my website.)

4. Was it “really slavery?” A bill of sale and some advertisements.

5. Lucy Billing and Caesar (Greenfield, 1760-1762)

6. The three known documents from Jenny’s time that refer to her by name: (1) Ashley’s 1780 will; (2) Elihu Ashley’s payment in 1788 for fixing her shoes; (3) Deerfield death records (1808).

7. Excerpt from Jonathan Ashley’s account book. (Showing income he received by renting his two male slaves, Cato and Titus, to Abijah Prince, Deerfield’s one free black – to whom Ashley refers as “Abijah Negro”. This is just one page; Ashley also rented Cato and Titus to many other Deerfield farmers.)

8. Collected “given names” of Deerfield slaves, from the 1690s to ca 1780.

9. An excerpt from the probate inventory of Samuel Dickinson (1761). (Transcribed from the original.)

10. An editorial (!) from the Hampshire Gazette (2/28/05), with mention of “my Jenny”!

11. “Vision Statement” of the PVMA African-American Monument Committee & Information for Interested Contributors. This is an exciting new PVMA project, to begin to rectify the fact that none of the monuments, etc. in Deerfield now recognize the African-Americans. No one is under any obligation, of course - But should you or anyone you know wish to participate with a contribution, this tells you where to send the (tax-deductible) check.

   Some of these items are on my own website, and others will be soon. Go to

    www.amherst.edu/~rhromer and click on the “Connecticut Valley Slavery” link. And please feel free to copy any of these items that you wish, as often as you wish.

  Comments, corrections, and additions are always welcome. Thank you.

Robert H. Romer Amherst College rhromer@amherst.edu

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Some omitted stuff - (??? some of the ways in which the history of slavery and its aftermath that most of us had been taught was often incomplete and misleading (that is, wrong), in important ways.)

  If I can’t deal with all your questions, my email address is on the map, and you can always find me at the Amherst College physics department

” (And maybe the infamous “Sambo” passage from my famously liberal Amherst colleague, Henry Steele Commager (1937): “As for Sambo, ...”)

Reliable day care. If you own the day care, they won’t be leaving all the time.

S. Dickinson’s probate - horses’ names.

For WMLC, leave out the rumors about Ashley’s having castrated Cato!

Xxx could skip this (At Amherst College, we get a lot of comments about Lord Jeffrey Amherst – who may have sent smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians. At any rate, there is no reason to believe that Amherst was a slave owner. Besides, he had nothing to do with the founding of the college and never set foot in Amherst.)

” Think about that. Your female slave is pregnant, and you’re offering money to anyone willing to take the baby off your hands as soon as it is born!

Any system in which human beings could be and were sold away from their spouses or from their parents or their children – well, it’s not what we like to think of in the picturesque “Pioneer Valley” .