Was your Plymouth County, MA ancestor an enslaver? Were they perhaps enslaved?

Question

"My ancestors came in the Puritan Great Migration. My ancestors were from Massachusetts. It's impossible that my ancestors were slaveholders."

Well, guess what? The current tally in the WikiTree category titled "Plymouth County, Massachusetts, Slave Owners" is 158 individual profiles. Names like Cushing, Little, Turner, Clapp, Otis, and Thomas are present. 

Last December, this list had only 11 entries. I have contributed somewhat to this list, but the dogged WikiTree researcher Karen St. Jean has read through thousands of Plymouth County probate files and attached the names of the enslaved to the profiles of their enslavers. To date, her work has identified:

• 227 enslaved African-descended and native women, children, and men (117 male/92 female, all ages)
• 131 names of enslaved individuals
• 125 slaveholders (note, "owner" is an outed term.)

And that doesn't include the 30 or so other profiles that aren't connected to Karen's probate work. There is a lot of work to do to spawn these entries into entries for the enslaved individuals, but this is a start. And many of the profiles may remain unconnected to the main tree for quite some time. 

I hope that the WikiTree community can get good use out of this amazing resource. 

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Plymouth_County%2C_Massachusetts%2C_Slave_Owners

Answer 1

Wayne,  Thank you for the acknowledgment!  Wayne has done great things with Black History in Plymouth, such as recording their stories and compiling the records to create a view of the demographics of Slavery in Plymouth County.

Some of my ancestors were also slaveholders but in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I even have a couple of beautiful cousins from the ugly history.  It is very hard to see slavery in the records that are connected to my family tree, and with every change I get I will post the records I find, both of the enslaver and the enslaved.  I hope more people who do genealogy acknowledge and record their ancestors accurately, good, bad, and ugly.  Thank you Wayne for everything you are doing!

Answer 2

Thanks for the great reminder about northern slavery. Many people are surprised when they discover slavery history in their family tree from New England states. Thank you to you and Karen for your wonderful work documenting these families in Massachuesetts. It's going to help many families connect to ancestors!

Comments

Thanks, Emma. 

I admire the USBH, and although I am not inside the project, I hope my work continues to aid the project. 

The thing that excites me about Karen's work is that it is concrete, and the evidence she surfaces is unimpeachable. It's not family lore, it's not sanitized local history—it's clear cut. And over half of these records include names. 

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I also found it interesting that one of those on the list was a Quaker.

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Shonda,

At least two people (off the top of my head) were Quakers.

Estes-454|Matthew Estes (1689-1774)
Wanton-5|Edward Wanton (1629-1716)

The Quakers, while early adopters of anti-slavery philosophies, were slaveholders. A reliable Quaker historian has told me that Quakers generally fell into three categories: some fell in line quickly and manumitted their people, some were slow to adopt an anti-slavery viewpoint, and others still left the religion. By 1770, Massachusetts Quakers were very much antislavery, but Quaker Meeting Minutes show that the question of slaveholding persisted. If anyone is interested, I can point them to Mass. Quaker Meeting Minutes archives.

Furthermore, I have written about Mathew Estes and Edward Wanton. If anyone is interested, I can provide links.

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The history of the Quakers and slavery is not a simple one nor is there a one size fits all history of their involvement in the abolitionist movement. Different regions held different viewpoints at different times. Many people are unaware that Quakers "enslaving" people in North Carolina after a point in time were actually Quakers protecting these people while educating them and giving them basic tools to live as freed men -- a practice which was outlawed with severe sanctions from the state. Later this evening I will post a couple of reading recommendations that cover this in some detail, one from a 19th century Quaker perspective and one from a late 20th century Quaker perspective and both written by historians of their era.

The overtones in some of this G2G thread are disturbing to me. We are dealing with historical facts which cannot be altered and to feel shame or feel that it is appropriate to use disparaging frames of reference about these people (rather than the institution of slavery) or being their descendant in my view serves little purpose and certainly no genealogical purpose. And, yes, I have ancestors who had slaves including Quakers, non-Quakers and Quakers who fall into the category mentioned in North Carolina.

~T Stanton, Co-Leader, Quakers Project

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Who uses disparaging frames of reference, T? I don't see one example in this thread.

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Hi T, I'm also not seeing any shaming going on. Please point it out specifically if you see it happening. The goal of USBH Project is to shame no one, but rather to connect enslaved ancestors to their descendants through the kind of work Wayne is talking about in this post. We take documents and turn them into profiles for enslaved ancestors, then connect those ancestors to their descendants in trees. The only way to make that happen is to work with slave owner documents. Those are the only documents with names. We don't judge why they owned slaves (Unless they spelled it out in writing themselves we will never know why) because that's not the purpose of this genealogical work.

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I recommend the following:

Samuel Janney History of the Religious Society of Friends from Its Rise to the Year 1828 (4 volumes, Elwood Zell, Philadelphia, 1867). He wrote numerous other works, many touching directly on slavery (mostly pre-Civil War) and his work with Native Americans.

Jay Worrall Jr The Friendly Virginians America's First Quakers (Iberia Pub, 1994) which unlike the title may suggest covers a significant portion of American Quaker history with an historians perspective in covering slavery and Quakers on several sides of the issue.

Answer 3

Sadly, yes. 

Thomas Doggett - 8th great grandfather
John Nelson - 7th great grand-uncle
Mary (Dodson) Booth - 8th great grand-aunt
John Williams - 9th great grand-uncle

And about 15 first and second cousins.

Comments

Ugh.

This research is my area of specialty, and I keep notes. I don't look for enslaving ancestors, but when I find an enslaver, I check if s/he is an ancestor. I'm up to eight direct ancestors on this list. Kudos for taking a look and acknowledging the history.

Answer 4

History should be a collection of fact, not how some want future generations to remember the past. Those who have collaborated to distort history are every bit as guilty as those who perpetuated slavery. Like Harry said," I never gave any one hell, I gave them the truth, they just thought it was hell."

Answer 5

Quakers were not only against slavery & owned slaves, but were in at least one case condemned to become slaves in the case of two of the children of my ancestors Lawrence and wife Cassandra Southwick whose son Daniel and daughter Provided were sentenced to be sold into slavery, but at the last moment this fate was averted.

Also, I did not see a mention of Samuel Fuller “the pilgrim father” who had a Native American slave. 

Answer 6

This is very cool.  

An easy way to find out if you have any slaves or slave owners is to use Wikitree + and search for this:  Ancestors=ward-21154 Slave

Of course, use your own ID.  My query shows just 1 person but I suspect if this initiative was expanded to Canada and Bermuda, there might be 1 or 2 more.

Comments

I have not really used Wikitree Plus. Could you please be more specific as to how you enter this into Wikitree plus search boxes. Thanks.

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I have this ink in my bookmarks. There are likely other places to get it.  https://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm

In the left pane, scroll down to where it says "Search" and click on it.  That will open a section called "text search".  Paste the phrase I gave earlier (changing my ID to your's) into the box named "text".  That field is pre-loaded with "Ljubljana Trtnik" but just override that.  The littlle green circles with the question marks give good information on how to use this feature.

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Hi Stu, Canada and Bermuda do have slavery categories, but more people need to process documents from those countries and add the categories to profiles for them to show up more widely in search queries. The work has definitely begun though.