The first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619 and soon slavery had become an established institution in the south. Africans first appeared in Portsmouth in 1641 and became servants for life, unable to work off their servitude as was the case with indentured whites. Northern ships, including some from Portsmouth, which Rye men may have helped to build and could have served on, participated in the lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade.
We do not know when the first enslaved person was brought to Rye, but by the 1700s some families owned enslaved people. The Seavey’s had Hampshire, who ran away, as well as Titus, Hannah, Bow, and Jenny. The Odiorne’s had Jack, the Wallis family had Phyllis and Caesar, the Berry’s had Peter Long and Old Black Peter. The Garlands had Black Prince, the Jenness family had Nimshi and Prince and the Libbey and Parsons family also owned people, and there may well have been others, not recorded. (See Color Me Included: The African Americans of Hampton’s First Church and its Descendant Parishes, 1670-1826 by Deborah Knowlton for more details on Rye slave owners). It was not uncommon for enslaved people to escape their owners, but it was a perilous flight into the unknown.
According to the History of Rye NH, by Langdon Parsons,1905, there were 19 enslaved people owned by Rye residents in 1773, twelve male and seven female. Because census records were unreliable at that time, the number could have been higher. Two enslaved people, Nimshi and Prince, were freed on the eve of the Revolution by their owner Job Jenness and fought and died in that conflict.
Quakers were one of the first groups to speak out against slavery. By the 1800s some Rye residents may have joined the growing abolitionist movement. Others were all too accustomed to accepting slavery as the norm, as revealed in this passage from John L. Parsons’ History of the Churches of Rye, NH:
According to the record, on March 11, 1838, the first real abolition sermon was preached in the Rye Congregational church by Minister Root of Dover. When Thomas J. Parsons walked into the entry of the church, he heard someone say at the other door: “Insurrection and destruction of the Country.” Looking around he saw Gen. Thomas Goss, Gen. Ira Brown, Richard R. Locke, Samuel Jenness, Jr., Reuel Garland, Charles Green and John A. Trefethen leaving the meeting house. Many more refused to attend the service that afternoon.
New Hampshire did not officially ban slavery until 1857, and by that time Rye and most other northern communities had ended this practice of human bondage. In 1865 Reconstruction began, but the controversial election of 1876 ended that effort, leaving Blacks at the mercy of discriminatory “Jim Crow" laws.
Despite all obstacles, Black Americans worked their way into everyday life. In the early 20th century, Rye photographer ARH Foss captured images of Afro-Americans in Rye as tourists, performing musicians for hotel guests and employees of those hotels. In the Cold War era, after the U.S. armed forces had integrated, a few Afro-American airmen serving at Pease Air Force Base realized the New Hampshire seacoast was an ideal place to call home.
Aldrich Mitchell of Rye was elected to the Select Board in 1979 and may have been the only black family in Rye at that time. Phyllis Wallis, one of the last surviving former slaves in Rye, died in 1821. Over two centuries later, the legacy of slavery remains our country’s unfinished business, awaiting further healing and reconciliation.
Image: Slave Prayer Meeting
New Hampshire’s African heritage dates back to 1645 and centers on the state’s only port at Portsmouth. The first known black person in Portsmouth came from the west coast of Africa. He was captured one Sunday when slave merchants attacked his village in Guinea, killing about a hundred persons and wounding others.
Upon arrival in Boston, the slave was bought by a Mr. Williams of Piscataqua. When the General Court of the colony learned of the raid and kidnapping, it ordered the merchants to return the African to his home. Slavery was not the issue of concern—human bondage was legal. The court was indignant that the raiders had violated the Sabbath.
African Population
The size of the black population in the 17th century New Hampshire Colony was small, but surveys of wills and inventories show that slaves were included in the estates of several prominent early Portsmouth families. Eight slaves who worked in Richard Cutts’ Kittery shipyard were among the earliest blacks in the region. Five of the eight were willed to Widow Cutts in 1675.
Additional evidence that mulattoes, Negroes, and slaves were present can be found in the Colony’s laws. They were similar to laws enacted by other colonies, and their purpose was to control the behavior of slaves. A number of laws prohibited servants from roaming through town without their master’s permission, from being abroad in the night time after nine o’clock, and from drinking in public taverns.
Census figures during the colonial period are known to be inaccurate. Free blacks sometimes were counted with slaves or not counted at all, and at other times they were included with whites. The number of black people reported in provincial New Hampshire was only 70 in 1707, but the mulatto population had grown.
In 1691, Joanna Severett’s will stated that after her death her “Negro woman” was to serve her sister “twenty years and then be free” while she gave her “two servant boys” to her brother John without conditional freedom. The will of Jacob Treadwell, tanner, specified in 1770 that his servant Caesar was to serve his wife during her lifetime, then he could be free “if he chooses it if not I give him to my son Nathanial as he has been used to his business.” Treadwell’s wife died first, and his revised will granted freedom to Caesar “after my decease.”
Newspaper advertisements are especially interesting for the physical descriptions of runaway slaves, their skin coloring, body size and markings, temperament, and clothing. The following typically displays no sentimentality for a personal loss; it merely requests assistance in retrieving valuable property:
STOP THE RUNAWAY…from his Master William Cotton of Portsmouth, tanner, a Negro man about 5 feet 10 inches high, about 25 years of age, a stout spry fellow, upon the yellow order, a stripe upon his cheeks, left hand little finger broke off; two stripes from his navel round to his navel, had on a yellow colored pea jacket… Whoever will take up said Negro and convey him to his Master shall have forty five pounds reward and necessary charges paid by me.
Legal Status
Following the legal precedent of the colony of Virginia in 1652, laws in the New Hampshire Colony provided that the status of children as slave or free would be determined by the status of the mother. On June 10, 1760, a free mulatto woman named Leisha Webb, whose husband was a slave, insisted that the town clerk record that she and her eight children were free persons.
By having one’s free status placed in the public record, free blacks hoped to avoid being kidnapped and sold as runaway slaves. For more than a century Africans and black Americans were openly bought and sold throughout the New Hampshire Colony. Some free blacks bought slaves, not to own them but to free them.
Slaves were owned by well-known and affluent Portsmouth families who benefited from a thriving economy. Owners had the ultimate authority in the lives of slaves, including the right to separate and sell family members to different owners. A slave child would be sold when the child was no longer dependent on the mother, yet still young enough to be trained to suit a new owner.
Slaves could be given secondhand clothing, but the household would have to provide food, medical care, and lodging. With a limited need for slave labor in Portsmouth, those whose maintenance became too expensive were sold, as the following advertisement demonstrates:
To be sold very cheap for cash, for want of employ. A likely healthy Negro girl of about 15 years of age, understands all kinds of housework, will suit town or country.
Some slaves were sold because of their uncooperative behavior. Captured runaways faced the possibility of being sold to the West Indies, where owners of sugar plantations were well known for their harsh treatment of slaves.
Slaves didn’t have surnames and only occasionally an African first name. The common practice was for the owner to replace an African’s name with one thought appropriate for a slave, then the master’s family name was added to identify that slave with that owner. If sold, the slave took the new master’s name. Most emancipated slaves in Portsmouth kept the surname of the owner who granted them their freedom.
Slave Religion
West Africans believed that there was a High God, who created all things, who was assisted by Lesser Gods. They prayed to different gods for rain, fertility, and crops. Slaves kept their African concepts of the sacred and the profane, of ritual, spirit possession, and supernatural intervention into mundane human affairs.
Religion was a driving force during slavery in America. Once they arrived at their destination, enslaved Africans were subjected to various processes to make them more compliant, and Christianity was part of that. African religion was ridiculed by European-Americans who encouraged Negroes to convert to Christianity.
Africans were expected to forsake their own understanding of God for the religion of their oppressors. Civil and social laws in the colonies were reinforced by Biblical lessons that emphasized obedience to their masters and to white people in general.
Limited Freedom
Emancipation for Portsmouth’s slaves came for most during the years after the adoption of the New Hampshire constitution in 1783. The constitution didn’t mention the liberation of persons held in bondage, nor did it restrict those participating in the slave trade. Portsmouth shippers and merchants continued to capitalize on the demands of the southern slave-based economy.
In 1789, the New Hampshire House and Senate passed a bill stating that “slaves cease to be known and held as property” in the state. This didn’t end the practice of slavery, but provided a compelling reason to free the Colony’s slaves. Portsmouth was experiencing a recession, and owning slaves was becoming unprofitable.
But slaves and free blacks were restricted by their social status and the attitudes of whites toward them. They were still identified as part of the slave class. Earlier laws concerning free blacks remained in force. In churches, blacks still had to sit behind the white congregation or in the balcony. Jobs for blacks were still limited to menial labor.
Housing was a serious problem – combinations of families and single people often shared households. Free blacks were unwelcome in other communities because the towns didn’t want to provide them with food and housing if they weren’t self-supporting. Some blacks left Portsmouth. The rapidly growing population of free blacks in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia offered employment and educational opportunities through black organizations.
SOURCES
The Growing New Nation
Slavery in New Hampshire
The Place Her People Made