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How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Fourteen (with thanks to @mimicofmodes and @ancient0history)

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

The Quock Walker muddle continues. We know Walker won his personal freedom. His lawyers might have argued that the new constitution of 1780 outlawed slavery in Massachusetts, but that doesn’t seem to have decided the case in Walker’s favor. Nathaniel Jennison argued that the court ruled that the constitution had enacted a general emancipation in his…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Thirteen

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

The three legal cases involving Quock Walker, his alleged enslaver Nathaniel Jennison, and the Caldwell brothers who employed him once he fled Jennison leave us in a tangle. Walker unambiguously won his freedom and it seems that his lawyers may have argued that slavery did not square with the new Massachusetts constitution’s Declaration of Rights; Judge…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Twelve

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

We left the Walker and Freeman cases bringing us almost back to where we started. We know that Quock Walker after some travails and Elizabeth Freemen after somewhat less legal drama, won their personal freedom. We know that no enslaved people remained in Massachusetts as of the end of the 1780s, since none appear in the 1790 census. We also have a charge to…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Eleven

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Quock Walker sued Nathaniel Jennison for assault in the course of trying to take him back to slavery. A jury ruled in favor of Walker’s freedom. Jennison appealed, but his lawyer failed to show. Jennison asked the Massachusetts legislature for a do-over on that one, which the General Court seemed disposed to grant for a while. Later it let the matter drop and…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Ten

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Nathaniel Jennison believed he owned Quock Walker, fair and square. He married Walker’s owner and that made all her property his. For Walker to run off to live with the sons of his prior owner and call himself free simply would not do. As soon as Jennison found out that Walker took shelter with the Campbell boys, he went over and seized Walker. Some kind of…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #John Adams #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Nine

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Elizabeth Freeman lived with the Sedgwicks for the rest of her life and they wrote down a version of her travails. Quock Walker had no such dedicated biographer. Documents refer to him as Quok, Quarco, Quack, Quork, Quaco, and Quarko. His parents may have called him Kwaku or something similar. He first appears in our records courtesy of this document:

Rutland…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #John Adams #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Eight

John Adams

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Chief Justice Parsons of Massachusetts wrote in 1806 that some case he declined to name then held that slavery could not square with John Adams’ Declaration of Rights in the state constitution of 1780. Therefore, the Bay State had abolished it. This would have surprised Adams, as well as all the people who kept buying and selling other people after that date.…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #John Adams #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Eight

John Adams

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

We left off with the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 ratified by the voters. It began with a declaration -bill had yet to become the preferred terminology- of rights which declared every man born free and equal. One can’t get too carried away with that language, though. The Virginians used similar wording and had no intention of ending their enslavement of…

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#Antislavery #Elizabeth Freeman #John Adams #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Seven

John Adams

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The failed constitution of 1778 doesn’t seem to have done so much as slow down discussion of the slavery question in Massachusetts. Black Bay Staters kept petitioning for their rights. Whites argued against the constitution in part because it denied those rights. But continued debate did not lead to an easy or straightforward resolution. As late as 1795 whites…

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#Antislavery #Daniel Webster #John Adams #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Six

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

We left Massachusetts with the failure of the 1778 constitution, a victim more of indifference than contention over slavery. Yet whites still contended over slavery, to the point of rioting at the proposal to arm black men to fight the British. They seem to have contended rather less over the prospect of black men voting, though partisans did line up in favor of preserving the…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Five

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4

The Massachusetts legislature wrote a new constitution for the state in 1778. Therein they removed the right to vote from any free black man who met the property qualifications that applied to white, and also kicked Indians and mixed-race people out of the voter lists. This prompted outrage from antislavery whites, who saw the whole business of slavery and disenfranchisement of…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Four

Parts 1, 2, 3

We left Massachusetts with the constitution of 1778. After some debate, the legislature chose to restrict the vote to free white men and take no action against slavery in the Bay State. In other words, they proposed greater restrictions upon free black Americans than then existed and enough of the convention felt slavery should continue to overwhelm those who thought it ought to…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Three

By the summer of 1777, Massachusetts had considered bills to end slavery and opted out. Many white Bay Staters did have increasingly serious objections to slavery, understanding it as in fundamental contradiction with their revolutionary project, but that only went so far. Understanding they had a potentially explosive issue on their hands, the Massachusetts House passed the buck to the…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery, Part Two

We left Massachusetts in 1777, with white Bay Staters increasingly of the sentiment that they ought to do something to get rid of slavery. Among the writers pressing for some form of abolition, the contradiction between fighting for freedom and practicing slavery had become increasingly difficult to ignore. William Gordon expressed it well in an open letter of September 21, 1776:

The Virginians…

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#Antislavery #Massachusetts

How Massachusetts Ended Slavery

I’m sorry for the lack of posts, Gentle Readers. I felt a bit ill over the weekend and then my mother had cataract surgery on Monday. That’s put me behind on several things but has given me occasion to revisit something I meant to do more of and fell away from. Welcome back to Deep Dives, where we go back in time far past the usual late Antebellum to look at the history of American slavery.

In…

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#Antislavery #John Adams #Massachusetts #Quock Walker

"Fear & excitement"

“Fear & excitement”

John Stringfellow, Speaker of the House of Kansas

John Stringfellow’s Squatter Sovereign advised that good proslavery men must somehow silence their antislavery counterparts. John Brown’s murders proved the pointand he did not shy from connecting them to anyone who gave them aid and shelter, however uninvolved in the killing itself. That didn’t mean they should go out of their way to murder…

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#Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow #John Brown #John Stringfellow #Pottawatomie murders #Proslavery #Squatter Sovereign #Violence

"There must be no night work"

“There must be no night work”

John Stringfellow, Speaker of the House of Kansas

The Squatter Sovereign advised its reader that in response to the Pottawatomie murders,

Every pro-slavery men in Atchison county ought immediately to call at Atchison, and learn the news and course determined.

They had abolitionists to hunt. It wouldn’t take a psychic to see the solution the paper had in mind, though coordinating our of Atchison…

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#Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow #John Brown #John Stringfellow #Pottawatomie murders #Proslavery #Squatter Sovereign #Violence

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