Mr. Curzan
AFAM
NAME: ________________________________ DATE: ________________ PER: ____
Enslaved Africans In The Colony of Connecticut
SOURCE: (c) 2007 Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, & Abolition
Connecticut was a colony with slaves. That sentence doesn't look right, doesn't feel right.
And yet, in the Bush homestead in Greenwich and in hundreds of other households across
the colony, the slavery of Africans and African Americans was a fact of everyday life.
Within 120 years of English settlers' arrival in the 1630s, the Connecticut colony was
booming. Connecticut, says one historian, "was designed by God for trade." With 254
miles of Atlantic coastline and 60-mile-long rivers snaking inland, the colony was perfect
for marine transport and small, fast ships. Even in its earliest history, Connecticut was
part of a larger economic system that included slave labor: when the great city of
Hartford was little more than a raw fort, a ship from Wethersfield was already ferrying
onions and a horse down to Barbados, where African slaves worked the sugar plantations.
Connecticut grew crops, raised cattle and felled logs to send to the West Indies, because
many Caribbean islands, though capable of growing their own food, were busy growing
the vastly more profitable sugar cane. It would be more accurate to say that enslaved
black people, in a labor that often killed them, were growing that sugar cane. And
Connecticut was feeding them.
That sugar cane, produced by captive Africans, was brought north to the Connecticut
colony as molasses and sugar products, which were distilled into rum in such quantities
that Connectictut became the New World's leading distiller. (There were 21 distilleries in
Hartford County alone.) The fortunes of many of Connecticut's earliest leading citizens
were made through the British colony's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
With wealth coming from the food, lumber and livestock that settlers were able to wrest
from the land and send to the West Indies, there was money to develop the North
American colonies. But who would do the work? There were farms to tend, stone walls to
build, ships to manufacture, roads and wharves and houses, all to be made by human
hands...
The most pressing need in the New World was not freedom, nor tools from England nor
corn grown from seed. It was labor. To build this colony required hands to do work, and
there were not enough white hands to do it all.
Connecticut was a colony of Great Britain, the greatest slave-trading empire on Earth.
England had been buying black people from Africa and trading them for money and
goods in the rapidly expanding New World, and some colonists, like the New London
slave trader Samuel Gould, dabbled in the trade as well. Connecticut merchants became
leaders in trade with the Caribbean, built ships for trading, carried slaves from Africa to
the Caribbean and bought slaves from English ships too, in numbers that surprise us
today.
With the exception of a few plantation-style farms in the eastern part of the state, colonial
Connecticut practiced a kind of "personal" slavery: Many people owned just a single
black man or woman, or a married couple, or a small family. Prudence Punderson's
embroidery provides a rare glimpse of an African American "servant" as an integral
member of the domestic scene. Marginalized yet ubiquitous, Connecticut's slaves worked
on farms and in businesses, on ships and in households.
The idea that there were slaves in Connecticut brings us quickly to the questions of what
kinds of work they did, how many of them were there, and what their lives were like.
How much do we know about these people who were so important to our success as a
colony and who were, as a group, so often despised?
Actually, we know quite a bit...
Enslaved black men and women and even children appear in the accounts published in
old newspapers, court records, diaries and letters. One remarkable captive from Ghana, a
man named Venture Smith, left an account of his life in slavery and freedom that is rich
with detail.
From the narrative of Venture Smith, from the diary of New Londoner Joshua
Hempstead, and from the pages of the New London Summary (among other sources), we
know that enslaved people worked on farms, in shipyards, as household servants, and that
their labor was often shared among white landowners. We know that they lived in many
places throughout the colony, and that their labor was sought-after. When they tried to
run away and escape their captivity, their owners advertised for them.
Sometimes they were freed when their owners died, but there is also evidence from wills
and probate documents that slaves were passed on through generations of families.
In the mid-1770s, there were about 5,100 slaves in the Connecticut colony and they
comprised approximately three percent of the population. Three percent does not sound
like a big number, but 5,100 does. It was, then, perfectly legal to participate in the slave
trade, to buy and sell enslaved people, and to own them. Indeed, many Connecticut
ministers, farmers, and businessmen did. Slave ownership was not the province of just the
wealthiest families.
Which brings us back to labor. Throughout the eighteenth century, a new world was
being created on this soil. In the South, black people would become identified with
agricultural work, with the growing of rice, cotton, tobacco, indigo and other products.
Here in stony Connecticut, enslaved black men did work, in large numbers, on farms. But
they also built barrels, shoed horses, rolled casks across wharves, dyed cloth and raised
barns. The women made medicines, tended children, cooked, cleaned, milked cows and
made clothes.
The stories of Connecticut's captives are embedded in many records that survive from the
long ago. They have become shadowy figures to us, their lives and their labors
submerged in the narrative of a wealthy colony that later became a wealthy state and a
national powerhouse.
But they are there, and if we want to see and understand them, all we have to do is look.
QUESTIONS:
1. Why was it said that Connecticut, “was designed by God for trade”?
2. What did Wethersfield send to Barbados plantations?
3. Why did Connecticut send goods to the West Indies (Caribbean)? What were some of
these products?
4. What did Connecticut do with the sugar cane from Caribbean slave plantations?
5. With all of the new wealth and development that was gained from the Transatlantic
Slave Trade, what was needed in CT?
6. How did Connecticut merchants become involved in the in the Transatlantic Slave
Trade (Middle Passage)? Provide some examples.
7. What was “personal” slavery? How is it different from what we usually perceive as
slavery (think of what you already know or what you have seen in movies, etc.)?
8. Who was Venture Smith? What did his narrative teach us about slave labor in CT?
9. Roughly how many slaves were in CT during the 1770’s? What percentage of the
population was it?
Cont. 10. Besides the very wealthy, what other types / occupations of people, owned slaves in
Connecticut?
11. How were black people in the South (and usually America as a whole) identified?
What did they do?
12. What were some of the other things that slaves in Connecticut did besides farming?
Were there separate roles for men and women?
13. How does the study of slavery in New England change the way historians think about
Connecticut's past?
14. Why is the study of local history important in understanding the past?
FACTS ABOUT CONNECTICUI SLAVERY UNCOVERED
BY THE HARTFORD COURANT
•
Aetna (an insurance company in Hartford, CT) had
recently apologized for insuring slaves during the 19th
century. In addition, a growing number of African
Americans were calling for financial reparations for
centuries of slavery.
•
Large farms - one could call them plantations - in
southeastern Connecticut had been worked by slaves.
•
Eastern Connecticut's textile mills had depended on the
millions of pounds of slave-grown cotton they imported
from the Southern states.
•
There were slave owners in every county in Connecticut,
and at one point more than 5,000 black people were
enslaved here.
•
The Connecticut Courant, the Hartford Courant’s
newspaper predecessor, profited by publishing runaway
slave ads.
At the height of the onion trade,
Wethersfielders exported a
million to a million-and-a-half
five-pound onion ropes, called
skeins, annually to the South and
the West Indies. (In other
words… slave plantations)
15. A) What do you find most
shocking about these facts? B)
Do you think this should be
taught in CT schools?