National Public Radio, Commentary
by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
All Americans Share a Complex Racial Past
All Things Considered, February 6, 2008 · As I look out my office window on the Dartmouth campus in New Hampshire, I wonder how many people in the Northern states, and particularly in New England, see themselves in this complicated history. Slave plantations, sit-ins, and civil rights marches, all seem to have occurred below the Mason-Dixon line, while Northerners think they get a pass, because they were pegged as good abolitionists. It’s time to take a harder, and perhaps less self-satisfied, look at the complex history of New England.
Black folks appeared in New Hampshire as early as the 17th century, but many of them moved on to slavery in other states. Others stayed on to work as sailors or in the ship-building trade. Just two years ago, a 300-year-old African burial ground was discovered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That makes the length of the African-American presence in New England rival that of the most Brahmin of Mayflower descendants.
Plantations have been discovered in Connecticut, where enslaved people grew the food that fed other enslaved people on the West Indian plantations, showing the complicated system that ran up and down the eastern seaboard. Most Americans today would be surprised that it was little Rhode Island that was at the heart of the American slave trade. It imported nearly 60,000 Africans into the Americas; some of its most prominent families—like the founders of Brown University—made their fortunes through the slave trade.
Slaves, and their children, were held throughout their lifetimes, bought and sold. But because they lived in colonial times of war, and also needed to hunt, slaves had guns and were called upon to use them. They also had accounts in the local shops; they bartered furs, fish, or real money and bought things like buttons, chocolate, or Bibles. Slaves were made to attend church in New England, but they had to sit in the upstairs gallery, sometimes behind a curtain. They were often baptized, and if lucky enough to find a partner, allowed to marry. If free, they could defend themselves in court, expecting—or at least hoping—to be treated fairly. Yet they were still trapped in a system of slavery that was just as accepted in Northern hamlets as on the largest of Southern plantations.
Sometimes this deeply contradictory past may exist within our own families. It did in mine. It may be our own African-American ancestors who fled the South for new lives in the North. Perhaps our white ancestors turned in their neighbors after the Fugitive Slave Act. When I was researching an early New England black family, I had no idea that my white ancestral family had owned one of them. As a mixed-race woman, I realized that that our personal histories don’t exempt us from America’s complex racial past. We can’t squeeze it into the arbitrary confines of geography. We may not recognize it, but it is American history, and all of us, South and North, share in that story.