Deerfield and the Poctumtuck Valley Memorial Association
Located two hours west of Boston, the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, has one of the best-documented and preserved histories in the nation. The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) was founded in 1870 with the goal of “memorializing” the past through monuments, public commemorations, and written histories. It collects and preserves the bulk of known primary sources documenting Deerfield’s past.
This information builds on research first undertaken by the PVMA African American Monument Committee, formed in 2005, to give greater visibility to Deerfield’s African American presence and experience. Representatives of Memorial Hall Museum, Historic Deerfield, Inc., schools, and the community, as well as scholar advisors, served on the Monument Committee.
Remembering the History of Slavery in Deerfield, Massachusetts
The earliest memories of venerable Deerfield resident and town historian George Sheldon (1818-1916) included Cato Cole, who had once been enslaved by the Reverend Jonathan Ashley. Realizing that slavery was part of the town’s history, Sheldon knew of “no reason…why we should not face the facts relating to it, found in church and town records, and old family manuscripts.” His 1893 “Essay on Negro Slavery” did just that, drawing on unpublished sources ranging from bills of sale, account books, and legal records, to the oral history of a woman kidnapped from her family in Africa when she was 12 years old.
After learning about the same Cato that George Sheldon knew as a boy, retired Amherst College physics professor Robert Romer continued to research the history of enslaved people in Deerfield. He dedicated his 2009 book, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, to Cato’s mother, Jenny. Romer’s passion for the topic led to the construction of the first map of Old Deerfield’s main street devoted to identifying sites where enslaved people lived and worked.
A Web of Community
Servitude took many forms in the 18th century, including Massachusetts. Indentured servants, whose contracts could be bought and sold, apprentices bound to labor for their masters for a set term, and enslaved people (sometimes referred to as “servants for life”) were common sights in fields, shops, and houses throughout British North America. Only 28% of the migrants to the North American colonies before the American Revolution were free people. By the mid-18th century, over a third of households on Deerfield’s mile-long main street included at least one enslaved person. The prominent Williams family enslaved over a dozen people in this period, several of whom were baptized by Deerfield ministers whose own households included enslaved people.
Community webs of interaction and economic relationships ensured that Deerfield’s free and enslaved residents crossed paths daily. Free men, women, and children were tended by the same physicians, shopped in the same stores, and worshipped at the same meeting house as enslaved people. Lucy Terry and Caesar became members of the Deerfield Church while enslaved by Ebenezer Wells and his wife Abigail. Meseck, enslaved by Abigail and Ebenezer Hinsdale, assisted Ebenezer in the operation of trading posts in Deerfield and Hinsdale, New Hampshire. The account book of Daniel Arms, Jr. documents the many occasions when other Deerfielders paid Arms for Titus’s labor, a man enslaved in the Arms household for 14 years. Humphry was one of many enslaved Deerfield residents who were both treated by and who labored for Dr. Thomas Williams. Dr. Williams, in common with many other professional men, was also an enslaver. ‘Umphry,’ who bought three pipes at Elijah Williams’s store, was among approximately 18 enslaved and free Blacks who had accounts there in the mid-1700s.
Control and Resistance
Enslavers, civic leaders, and ministers attempted to dictate most aspects of the lives of enslaved people’s lives. Massachusetts laws mandated curfews for enslaved people and regulated their consumption of alcohol. The Reverend Jonathan Ashley was typical of 18th-century New England ministers who linked Christian virtue to obedience when he told Deerfield’s enslaved people, “You must be faithful in the places God puts you…in vain think to be Xts [Christ’s] freemen and be slothful Servants.” In his book The Well-Ordered Family, published in 1712, the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth of Boston declared, “When your master or Mistress bids you do this or that, Christ bids you do it, because he [Christ] bids you obey them.” Despite these coercive efforts, enslaved people found a variety of ways to exercise some personal control over their lives and culture. Carrying out errands for enslavers, for example, provided opportunities to interact with others beyond the household. Such day-to-day interactions among people living in bondage were essential to retaining a sense of self and building community.
In 1749, Prince escaped from Joseph Barnard, taking with him extra clothing, a gun, and a violin that he could use or barter for his survival on the road. Prince’s freedom was short-lived; he died back in Deerfield in 1752. Jinny, abducted from Africa as a young girl, continued throughout her life to collect small objects in preparation for her spirit’s return to her homeland, maintaining her African beliefs throughout decades of servitude in a New England minister’s household.Other forms of resistance included theft and holding clandestine gatherings. As late as the 1840s, Deerfield residents still remembered that sometime in the 1760s, a man called Titus and several other enslaved residents “belonging to some of the most respectable people” stole food and rum and gathered for a frolic at a “place of resort.” The risk inherent in such activities was dramatically demonstrated when Titus and the other participants were detected and flogged.
Souls of the Enslaved
As in other early New England communities, sacred and civic life in Deerfield centered on the meeting house. Deerfield ministers baptized, admitted to membership, married, chastened, and reconciled free and enslaved residents. Ministers and enslavers in their congregations hoped to convert those enslaved in their households to Christianity and rejoiced when such conversions occurred. The Reverend Samuel Willard of Boston preached that “the Soul of a Slave, is, in its nature, of as much worth, as the Soul of his Master.” In 1742, the Deerfield church membership affirmed this “Duty of Parents & Masters,” and promised to “Send yr. children & Servants to Such Catachisings as their minister appoints until yy are 18 years old except married…. [and] to hear the explanation of the assemblies Catechism until they are 21 years old.”
What type of “catachising” did enslaved people in Deerfield receive? In an evening lecture in 1749, the Reverend Jonathan Ashley assured them that their lowly status on Earth would not dictate their place in the kingdom of God. “Servants who are at the dispose and command of others, who…are despised in the world, may be the Lord’s freemen and heirs of Glory.” “If you are Christ’s freemen,” he concluded, “you may contentedly be servants in the world.” But, he warned, “If you are not Christ’s freemen, you will be slaves of the devil.”
Slavery and the 18th-Century Family
What did it mean to be part of an 18th-century family? Today we assume that families are bound together by strong ties of affection. In contrast, the 18th-century family was bound together much more tightly by duty and mutual obligation. The family was a hierarchical unit headed by a patriarch (or his widow) who exercised authority over the entire family, including children, apprentices, servants, and the enslaved, and was accountable for their physical and spiritual well-being. Every household member was responsible for specific domestic and agricultural tasks that would ensure the well-being of the family as a whole. The head of the household had a legal right to use physical force to compel obedience from any family member.
Enslaved people in New England were considered part of the household for which they labored. They often slept in the same building with the master’s family, worked alongside family members, and were expected to participate actively in the church community. The formerly enslaved often referred to themselves as having been “raised in the family” of their enslaver.
That Daniel Arms and Titus spent a January day in 1762 working side by side for another Deerfield farmer in no way meant that they were perceived as equals. Deerfield church members made Titus’ enslaved, subordinate status clear when they rebuked him for “di[s]obedience to his master.” This fundamental inequality was again revealed when Titus was, without a trial, publicly whipped for stealing, and when Daniel Arms sold him in exchange for 19 shillings—the price of four gallons of West India rum.
“Is this where Titus lived?”
Is this the house where Titus lived? The Arms homestead where Titus was enslaved by Daniel Arms, Jr. was built around 1720 and demolished in 1853. This drawing, published in The Life of a New England Boy (1896), is based on the artist’s memory of how the property looked over 75 years after Titus walked its grounds. The renovation and rebuilding activity on the Arms house lot highlights the challenges of offering an accurate view of the places where Titus and other enslaved Deerfield residents lived. Many structures now standing on slavery sites post-date the lives of those once enslaved there. The few existing structures dating to their presence have been altered, renovated, and restored. Despite these changes in the built environment, surviving evidence in the form of account books, wills, inventories, and other sources informs and reminds us that Titus and dozens of other enslaved people lived on Deerfield’s village street in the 17th and 18th centuries.
For Further Reading
Richard A. Bailey. Race and Redemption in Puritan New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend, (New York: Harper Collins), 2008.
Jared Hardesty. Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
Joanne Melish. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Robert H. Romer, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts. Florence, Massachusetts: Levellers Press, 2009.
Gloria McCahon Whiting. Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
